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Biofuels, Soaring Food Prices and Iowa

By ROBERT BRYCE | CounterPunch | February 25, 2011

When the chairman of the world’s largest food company says that using  food crops to make biofuels is “absolute madness,” sensible people should take heed.

Alas, President Obama, along with a Congress that is dominated by Big Ag interests, just doesn’t seem to care that Peter Brabeck, the chairman of the Swiss food giant, Nestle, made that very declaration last month. And that blithe ignorance of the madness of biofuels is resulting in some truly horrifying results. Here are the numbers: This year, the US corn ethanol sector will consume 40 percent of all US corn – that’s about 15 percent of global corn production or 5 percent of all global grain – in order to produce a volume of motor fuel with the energy equivalent of about 0.6 percent of global oil needs.

Congress not only lavishes subsidies on the corn ethanol scam, it has mandated the use of corn ethanol, and provided tariff protections to an industry that is helping push global food prices to all-time highs and shrink grain reserves at the very same time that global grain production is faltering and protests over food prices are commonplace.

The quantity of grain to be consumed this year for US ethanol production – 4.9 billion bushels – boggles the mind. That’s more than twice as much as all the corn produced in Brazil and more than six times as much as is grown in India. Put another way, that’s more corn than the output of the European Union, Mexico, Argentina, and India combined.

Despite these facts, last month, President Obama, in his State of the Union speech, said “we can break our dependence on oil with biofuels.” Meanwhile, the Iowa Caucus, the nation’s first presidential primary is now less than one year away. And Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the US House, who’s dearly hoping that he can be a viable candidate for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, was recently in Iowa cravenly wooing the ethanol producers and slamming “big city” critics of the ethanol industry. Alas, there’s little reason to expect much bravery out of Gingrich’s fellow Republicans on Capitol Hill. Speaker of the House John Boehner recently told reporters not to expect cuts to the ethanol subsidies because they are “not in the discretionary spending pot.”

While Obama prevaricates and Congress dithers, ethanol boosters are once again claiming that their sector has negligible effect on grain prices. Instead, they blame surging grain prices on, well, everything but their industry. To be sure, bad weather in Russia and Australia has cut grain harvest in those countries. In addition, rising demand for grain in the developing world is affecting prices.

But the events of the last few weeks — corn futures at near-record highs and social unrest related to food prices – are nearly identical to the mayhem that occurred in 2007 and 2008. Back then, at least 15 studies, including ones by Purdue University, the World Bank and the Congressional Research Service, exposed the link between increasing ethanol production and higher food prices. Soaring food prices led to violent protests in Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Haiti, Mauritania, Ethiopia, Madagascar, the Philippines and Indonesia. And worries about adequate food stocks led several countries to ban food exports.

New studies are, once again, finding a direct link between the corn ethanol scam and higher food prices. In December, a study by two US agriculture economists, Thomas Elam and Steve Meyer, found that corn prices are being pushed dramatically higher by demand from the ethanol sector. Elam and Meyer, who have done consulting work for the meat industry, found that without the ethanol mandates, the average price of corn would now be lower by more than $2 per bushel. And they conclude that “biofuels policy has caused significant cost increases for all users of feedgrains.”

There are many unfortunate aspects to America’s corn ethanol insanity. But among the most unfortunate is that US policymakers were warned, and they were warned by the Rand Corporation, one of the most conservative defense-oriented think tanks in America. In May 2008, Rand Corporation issued a report which said that diverting corn to the ethanol sector was not only bad economics, but a security threat: “Using corn for ethanol is economically inefficient and has harmed US national security. Diverting corn from food to ethanol production has pushed up world market prices for grains and other foods, which, in 2008, resulted in riots in a number of developing countries.”

In recent weeks, we’ve seen food-price hikes and protests that are reminiscent of 2008. There have been food riots in Algeria and Mozambique. Last month, some 8,000 Jordanians protested in the streets of Amman and other cities to protest rising food prices. In Egypt, the world’s biggest wheat importer, wheat prices are up by 30 percent over the past 12 months. This week, protesters took to the streets in India to protest surging food costs.

The surging price of wheat is being stoked by rising corn prices, which have doubled over the past six months and are now at about $7 per bushel. “Higher corn prices always means higher wheat prices,” says Bill Lapp, president of Advanced Economic Solutions, an Omaha-based commodity consulting firm.

David Orden, a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, told me that surging corn prices is “a continuation of what happened in 2008.” The push for biofuels, he said, “has clearly tightened up agricultural commodity markets. That’s good for farmers, but it is not good for poor people around the world.”

Many of those poor live in the US. Some 43.6 million Americans, about 14 percent of the population, are now receiving federal food stamps. Since October 2008, the number of Americans relying on food stamps jumped by 41.5 percent and enrollment in the program has increased for 26 consecutive months. And thanks to the ethanol scam, those many millions are being priced out of the meat aisle. Over the past year, beef prices have risen more than 6 percent and pork prices are up 11 percent. Economists are expecting overall grocery prices in the US to rise by about 5 percent this year.

But the real – and likely more dangerous – food-price increases will happen  outside the US. Last year, the OECD projected that global grain prices are likely to be as much as 40 percent higher by 2020,  and a London-based non-profit entity, ActionAid, predicted that some 600 million more people could be left hungry by 2020 due to increased production of biofuels.

Brabeck, the chairman of Nestle, the world’s biggest food company, has rightly put the spotlight on the biofuels madness. As the head of a company with $100 billion in annual food-related revenues, Brabeck clearly has a keen understanding of the global food industry. And last month during the World Economic Forum in Davos, he identified the stunningly obvious solution to the ongoing insanity. “No food for fuel,” he said.

“No food for fuel” should be the rallying cry on Capitol Hill and at the United Nations. It should be a required oath for all of the candidates (and Gingrich in particular) who are planning to campaign in Iowa for the 2012 presidential contest. As the biggest ethanol-producing state, Iowa has long had a stranglehold on America’s presidential selection process because it holds the first primary. And because it holds the first primary, the state’s powerful agriculture interests have, for decades, prevented viable candidates from speaking out against the corn ethanol madness.

It’s time – no, it’s long past time — to heed Brabeck’s advice. Stop the madness.

February 25, 2011 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Progressive Hypocrite | Leave a comment

AIPAC Vetos U.N. Resolution on Israeli Settlements U.S. Casts the Actual Ballot

By Philip Giraldi | Council for the National Interest | February 22, 2011

Last Friday’s American veto of the United Nations Security Council resolution that would have called Israeli settlement activity on the West Bank illegal was not only shameful, it was possibly the low point of the already foundering Obama presidency.  To be sure, United States UN Ambassador Susan Rice accompanied the veto with a stirring rendition of “I’ll cry tomorrow” as she described how the Obama White House really is opposed to the settlements.

Really.

It’s just that supporting or even abstaining on a resolution criticizing Israel, however mildly framed, might setback the peace process, which, as Rice well knows, died completely over six months ago.  But let’s not get hung up on the details.  Rice should have said instead that her boss in the White House is so afraid of the Israel Lobby that he has to ask permission when he goes to the bathroom.  At least that would have been completely credible, something you can believe in from an Administration that has otherwise delivered squat to the many voters who supported Obama in hopes that he might actually be interested in peace in our times.

And Obama has a lot to be afraid of, mostly from the old knife in the back trick from the Israel boosters in his own party.  “This is too clever by half,” said Representative Anthony Weiner.  “Instead of doing the correct and principled thing and vetoing an inappropriate and wrong resolution, they now have opened the door to more and more anti-Israeli efforts coming to the floor of the UN.” Representative Nita Lowey agreed, “Compromising our support for Israel at the UN is not an option.”

And over at the GOP side of the House, shortly before the veto, the new Chair of the Foreign Affairs committee, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen criticized the resolution: “Support for this anti-Israel statement is a major concession to enemies of the Jewish State and other free democracies.  Offering to criticize our closest ally at the UN isn’t leadership, it’s unacceptable.”  Last Wednesday sixty-seven freshmen Republican House members sent a letter to their party’s leadership supporting full funding of aid to Israel.  The letter cited the lawmakers’ “recognition that the national security of the United States is directly tied to the strength and security of the State of Israel.”

Nice one, Anthony, Nita, Ileana and all those new congressmen who were elected because they promised to do some budget cutting, but I don’t detect anything about what the American national interest might be, just a bit of nonsense about “support for Israel,” “our closest ally” and even more ridiculous bleating about how arming Israel makes America safer.  In fact, none of you even mentioned the United States.

Excuse me, I thought you dudes were serving in the US Congress, not the Knesset, but I might be wrong about that.

And lest anyone go wobbly on support of Israel there was the usual media claque screaming outrage because Rice had dared to criticize the settlements policy even though she was casting the veto.  Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post put it nicely “The US representative, while reluctantly casting a veto, joined the pack of jackals that seek to make Israel the culprit for all that ills (sic) the Middle East.”

The 1600 Pound Gorilla

For those who have been asleep a la Rip van Winkle for the past twenty years, let us recap what has been going on in this country.

There is an extremely dangerous domestic enemy out there, and it isn’t the naturalized Muslims that the redoubtable Congressman Peter King is investigating.  It is an organization that calls itself the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, better known as AIPAC.

AIPAC is the most powerful foreign policy lobby in Washington, by far.  It was founded in the 1950s with the support of the Israeli Foreign Ministry to create an organization that would lobby for sustained American financial, diplomatic, and military support of Israel, but, curiously, it has never been required to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act or FARA, which would require full public disclosure of finances – details of income and expenditures – as well as periodic reports on the nature of the relationship between the organization and the foreign government in question.

AIPAC is the focal point of the Israel Lobby in the United States.

On its website it describes itself as “America’s pro-Israel lobby.”  It is located in Washington DC but has branches nationwide, has a budget of $70 million a year, and has several hundred full time employees.  It hosts an annual conference, this year in May, which attracts 6000 supporters and is a required stop for politicians and civic leaders from both parties, all attending to pledge their support for Israel.  Presidents, Vice Presidents, Secretaries of State, and congressional leaders all have spoken at the AIPAC conference.  Hundreds of congressmen regularly attend its sessions.  During the past two years the conference was focused on the issue of Iran as a threat to Israel and the world.

AIPAC wants the United States to have only one true friend in the world and that friend will be Israel.  That means that uncritically supporting Israeli interests has sidelined American foreign policy objectives and led to at least one war, against Iraq, in which thousands of Americans and some hundreds of thousands of foreigners have died.

If AIPAC is successful in its desire to convince Washington to solve the Iran nuclear problem by force if necessary, it could lead to another war that almost certainly would have catastrophic global consequences.

The point of all this is that AIPAC is why the UN veto took place.  AIPAC and its friends (including the powerful Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which also pressured Obama to veto the resolution, own congress, the White House, and the mainstream media in its reporting on the Middle East. They are also powerful enough to set policy or overturn initiatives that they disapprove of.

AIPAC takes the Hill

AIPAC operates by forcing all American politicians at a national level to respond to various positions supported by the Israel Lobby.  Congressional candidates are carefully screened for their views on the Middle East and are coached to modify positions that are regarded as unacceptable.  Those who pass the test are then vetted on their degree of reliability and, if approved, become recipients of good press from AIPAC’s friends in the media and cash contributions from the numerous PACs that have been set up to support the pro-Israel agenda.

Once in office, the politicians are bombarded with AIPAC position papers, with visits from AIPAC representatives, and are expected to conform completely to the positions taken by the organization.  That is why resolutions in congress relating to Israel generally receive nearly unanimous approval no matter how frivolous or injurious to the US national interest.  AIPAC lobbyist Steve Rosen once bragged that he could get the signatures of seventy senators on a napkin if he chose to do so.

AIPAC’s influence over congress and the White House is such that the centerpiece policy of successive US administrations, the so-called peace process with the Palestinians, has been essentially fraudulent.  Even though it is undeniably in the US national interest to broker some kind of peace agreement, Washington has instead never failed to lean heavily towards the Israeli point of view.  The recent discussion of developments in Egypt has frequently been framed in terms of what it means for Israel even though the proper line of inquiry for the US media and politicians should be what does it mean for the United States.

Other instances of AIPAC supported policies that have damaged US interests have been the acceptance of occupations of and attacks on Lebanon, the acquiescence in the January 2009 bombing of Gaza, opposition to the Goldstone Report, and silence over last year’s Mavi Marmara incident in which a US citizen was killed.

By taking positions that are lopsided and ultimately untenable, Washington’s hypocrisy has been visible to the entire world and has rightfully done much to fuel mistrust of American policies in general.

Why do office seekers and congressmen put up with the pressure?  It is because they know that crossing AIPAC frequently means that the media will turn sour, funding will dry up, and a well resourced candidate will suddenly appear in opposition at the next election.  Ask congressmen Paul Findley and Pete McCloskey or Senators William Fulbright and Chuck Percy, all of whom were perceived as critics of Israel and all of whom were forced from office in exactly that fashion.

Opposing AIPAC can be a political death wish.

Even the appointment of senior government officials to positions that in any way deal with the Middle East is subject to the AIPAC veto.  The blackballing of the highly qualified and outspoken Chas Freeman as chairman of the National Intelligence Council was orchestrated by AIPAC and its friends in congress because Freeman had been critical of Israeli policies.  Candidates for Director of Central Intelligence and Director of National Intelligence regularly have their resumes examined to determine how they stand on the Middle East.

So if we Americans are ever to regain control over our destinies we have to start by removing the poison from our body politic.  A good start would be by first registering and then marginalizing AIPAC and any other organizations like it that represent pernicious foreign interests.

It would also be nice to send Weiner, Lowey, Ros-Lehtinen and the 67 GOP freshmen representatives who want to keep shoveling money to Israel packing in the next election.

And also Obama and Susan Rice since they don’t appear to know what country they live in.  We really don’t need their kind of hyphenated patriotism anymore and we certainly don’t need vetoes at the UN that demonstrate to everyone that we are a nation of amoral hypocrites.

Philip Giraldi is a recognized authority on international security and counterterrorism issues. He is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer who served 18 years overseas in Turkey, Italy, Germany, and Spain. He was Chief of Base in Barcelona from 1989 to 1992 designated as the Agency’s senior officer for Olympic Games support. He is a contributing editor to The American Conservative, a columnist with AntiWar.com, and his frequent media appearances include 60 Minutes, al-Jazeera TV, National Public Radio, and the British Broadcasting Corporation.

February 23, 2011 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

The Security Budget vs. the Necessities of Americans

By Kevin Zeese | The People’s Voice | February 22nd, 2011

President Obama and the Congress have taken 66% of discretionary spending in the federal budget off the table – the Security Budget – while proposing a freeze to the rest of the budget and deep cuts to some programs that provide necessities for the American people. His budget crystalizes a choice that U.S. presidents have been making since President Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial complex – investment in the military vs. investment in the civilian economy.

The bloated and sacrosanct security budget – the military, domestic security and intelligence budgets –all saw rapid growth under President Bush when the DoD doubled its budget. Under President Obama the trend has continued with record military, intelligence and domestic security budgets. And, while the so-called recovery has only been a recovery for Wall Street and big business, the administration and congress are focused more on the deficit than on re-starting the economy for the rest of us. But there is more talk of cutting Social Security and Medicare than cutting the security budget. In fact, these two items are called entitlements because they are a contract with working Americans who pay for them in every paycheck. For this reason they should not even be considered part of the deficit. Payroll taxes fund these two programs that are essential for older Americans in their retirement years. Both face budget challenges but can be fixed, indeed Social Security has more than $2.5 trillion in Treasury Notes in reserve.

President Obama has proposed the largest DoD budget since World War II, $553 billion (not including war funding or nuclear weapons funding in the Department of Energy). Much attention has been shined on Secretary of Defense Gates’ proposal to “cut” $78 billion in the Pentagon budget. Those “cuts” take place over five years with reductions taking place after the 2012 election in 2014 and 2015. And, the “cuts” do not include the cost of wars. The Afghanistan war alone could eat up projected “savings” and if the CIA’s war in Pakistan escalates that will be an even bigger budget item. Further, we have not seen what the continuing U.S. military footprint in Iraq will cost. These projected cuts are more image than reality.

How does military spending impact Americans? President Reagan’s former assistant secretary of defense Lawrence Korb describes the military budget as “an annual tax of more than $7,000 on every household in the country.” While increasing the security budget, Obama and the Democrats have proposed widespread cuts to critical programs from a 50% cut in low-income heating assistance to nearly a 30% cut to the clean drinking water fund. They have also proposed a 25% cut ($1.3 billion) to the community development block grants used to fund local community development including affordable housing, anti-poverty programs, and infrastructure development. These are essential services needed for Americans health, safety and economic security. Of course, Republican cuts in the House budget are even more extreme but Obama set the table for them by making the debate about deficits and both parties will not touch the security budget. Military analyst, William Hartung, writes “These cuts will be painful, and they will be felt in every middle- and lower-income household in America.”

Cities and states are cutting essential services to balance their budgets. U.S. taxpayers will spend $737 billion for Pentagon spending for FY2011 including war funding). To get a sense of what this means, for the same amount of money tax payers could provide funding for 11.3 million elementary school teachers for one year or 93.5 million scholarships for university students for one year… Instead all these programs face cutbacks, while military spending grows. […]

Cutting $1 trillion from the federal budget is the goal of the Obama administration deficit plan. All of these cuts could come from military spending and still leave the U.S. militarily dominant. In fact, since the administration has projected an increase in spending of $6.5 trillion from 2011 to 2020, even a trillion would be a slowing of growth more than a real cut. Lawrence Korb lays out a five point plan to reduce military spending by $1 trillion without jeopardizing national security and thereby protecting U.S. economic security.

He is not alone, the Sustainable Defense Task Force provides specific cuts without harming U.S. national security including:

•The $238 billion Joint Strike Fighter program: Canceling the program and relying instead on upgraded versions of current aircraft would save almost $50 billion over ten years.

•The MV-22 Osprey: Replacing this dangerous, overpriced, and under-performing aircraft with cheaper alternatives would save over $10 billion over ten years.

•Reducing the number of U.S. troops in Europe and Asia to 100,000 from current levels of 150,000 would save $80 billion over a decade.

•Reforming Pentagon health care systems so that retirees pay modest, reasonable premiums could save $60 billion over a decade.

•Scaling back missile defense and space weapons programs could save over $50 billion over a decade.

•Further reductions in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, including deployment of fewer ballistic-missile launching submarines, could save over $100 billion in a ten year period, much of it in operating costs

•Reducing the size of the Navy from 286 to 230 ships would save over $125 billion over ten years.

If you combine these recommendations of the five point plan of Lawrence Korb, which includes items like bringing home 50,000 of the 150,000 troops stationed in Asia and Europe, reducing the size of the Army and Marine Corps to their pre-Iraq invasion level and reducing nuclear weapons from 1,968 to the 311 the Military War College says is needed for defense, the U.S. would save another $200 billion.

For many, these would only be the starting points of correctly prioritizing military spending. President Eisenhower warned about the military industrial complex 50 year ago. During that time, U.S. spending on the military adjusted for inflation has more than doubled and we have moved to a permanent war state. Columbia University’s Seymour Melman, a professor of industrial engineering, pointed out that “Industrial productivity, the foundation of every nation’s economic growth, is eroded by the relentlessly predatory effects of the military economy.” In fact, we have seen – as we see in the Obama budget – a constant conflict between the military economy and the civilian economy. The civilian economy is losing that battle.

Thomas Woods, Jr. recently wrote in the American Conservative that military spending is parasitic as it feeds off the economy rather than grows it. The scale of resources used by the military is exorbitant, Woods writes: “To train a single combat pilot, for instance, costs between $5 million and $7 million. Over a period of two years, the average U.S. motorist uses about as much fuel as does a single F-16 training jet in less than an hour. The Abrams tank uses up 3.8 gallons of fuel in traveling one mile. Between 2 and 11 percent of the world’s use of 14 important minerals, from copper to aluminum to zinc, is consumed by the U.S. military, as is about 6 percent of the world’s consumption of petroleum. The Pentagon’s energy use in a single year could power all U.S. mass transit systems for nearly 14 years.”

To get a sense of the competition between the civilian and military economy, the Department of Commerce estimated the value of the nation’s plants, equipment, and infrastructure (capital stock) at just over $7.29 trillion in 1985; and from 1947 to 1987 the military spent the equivalent, $7.62 trillion in capital resources.

With the long record of the ascendency of military spending it is not surprising to see the U.S. economy in collapse, industry disappearing and the infrastructure crumbling. Not only has the U.S. failed to win a major war since World War II, but the cost of the standing army has become a burden on all of us and a drag on the economy. Some describe the U.S. Empire in decline and others see a collapse as possible at any moment.

The failure of President Obama to confront military spending in this time of economic collapse and perceived deficit crisis, when tax dollars are needed to restart the domestic economy, is not only a short term budget failure but does not face up to the long-term damaging economic impact of the American military empire.

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Kevin Zeese is executive director of Prosperity Agenda (www.ProsperityAgenda.US) and Voters for Peace (www.VotersForPeace.US) and an editor of the book ComeHomeAmerica.US (visit ComeHomeAmerica.US for more information and to purchase the book).

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February 22, 2011 Posted by | Economics, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Egyptian Uprising Overthrows its Zionist Master

By Bob Finch | The Mundi Club | February 21, 2011

Global Strategic Factors

During the cold war period no liberation movement in any third world country was left to its own devices to fulfill the will of the people through the creation of democratic institutions and a more just society. They were continually corrupted by the superpowers seeking to enhance their global strategic interests in pursuit of global political dominion. The soviets generally tended to support secretive revolutionary movements which invariably aimed at creating one party states that would be sympathetic to their interests whilst the Americans, aiming to take over from former colonial powers, sought to install dictators who would promote their interests. It might have been thought that, with the end of the cold war, the days when overarching global strategic factors were able to corrupt domestic struggles for a better society would be long gone but the January 15, 2011 uprising in Egypt confirmed the existence of a new strategic factor. This threatened to stymie Egyptians’ liberation struggle. Although this struggle was eventually successful, the new strategic factor could still end up deterring or delaying the completion of this struggle i.e. the creation of a new constitution and democratic institutions.

Since the second world war, most Arab countries have been run by tyrants who have either been installed by America or have aligned themselves with American interests – even Nasser made overtures to the Americans but was rebuffed. Most of these dictators have enriched themselves, their families and friends, whilst ruthlessly suppressing domestic demands for political reforms and independent foreign policies. Like bank robbers they have stolen whatever riches their economies generated. As a consequence Arab societies have ossified preventing indigenous economic development thereby locking tens of millions into poverty. Since 1979, one of the great turning points in middle eastern history, these dictators have increasingly implemented American/Zionist friendly foreign policies.

At the start of the Egyptian uprising western public opinion responded positively to the mostly young, middle class, people who took to the streets demanding greater political freedoms which many westerners interpreted as western style political institutions.[i] But western politicians and the western media quickly began to oppose Egyptians’ prospects for liberation and their right to bring about a revolutionary foundation of democratic institutions. This opposition was couched in what seemed to be straightforward nationalist terms. ‘Mubarak has ensured stability in Egypt and the middle east and has deterred the rise of both Arab nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism.’ ‘He may be a dictator but he’s our ‘son of a bitch’.’ The suggestion here was that it was in the west’s national interests to continue protecting this dictator. In order create doubts about the consequences of the Egyptian protestors’ uprising, western politicians/commentators sought to popularize the fear that it would lead to the rise of an extreme Islamic government hostile to the west. Egypt’s Muslim brotherhood were touted as a major threat to western interests even though it was nothing of the kind.[ii]

The proposition that the Egyptian uprising was against western interests, however, ran counter to the commonly held belief in western states that democracy is important not merely to protect political freedoms, guarantee property rights, and ensure justice, but to give people the opportunity to run and develop their own businesses and thus enhance national economic growth. So, if this belief is valid domestically then it must also be valid globally. It is therefore in the national interests of western states to encourage the widest possible democratic reforms in Egypt, and in all other countries, not merely because this would narcissistically imitate western political principles but because, more mundanely, it would promote Egyptian, and thus global, economic growth. Western companies would have another growing consumer market which would enable them to increase output and profits and thereby boost their own countries’ economy. A comparison between the economies of democratic turkey and dictatorial Egypt suggests that democracy makes a critical difference to the economic development. “… its (Egypt’s) economy is today a quarter the size of Turkey’s (though both countries have populations of similar size).” (Daniel Levy ‘After Mubarak – What Does Israel Do?’ Feb 11, 2011).

It is said that ‘imitation is the greatest form of flattery’ and so the west should have been proud that Egyptian protestors wanted to emulate its humanitarian values, political principles, and prosperity. Surely what westerners want is a thriving Egyptian democracy leading to a thriving economy with which they could freely do business? Surely westerners should have been exhilarated at the prospects of Egypt becoming more westernized?

The Zionist State’s support for Mubarak

The question then is why so many western politicians/commentators insisted that it was in western interests to protect Mubarak and thereby try so intensely to discourage democratic reforms? The critical strategic factor that, once again, was exposed by their attitude was the primary importance they attached to the security of the Jews-only state in Palestine. The all too obvious implication was that it didn’t matter to them what their country’s interests were: all that mattered was protecting the Zionist colonial state.

The Zionist state was virtually the only country in the world, outside of the world of Arab dictators, who disapproved of what the Egyptians were doing. It adamantly insisted that its security interests would be best served by the west continuing to support Mubarak, and other Arab dictators, no matter how much they crushed the will of their people for democratic reforms and nationalistic foreign policies.[iii] This was not unexpected since it has always helped to install and sustain Arab dictators who have pledged their allegiance to Zionist expansionism rather than the welfare of their own people.

Mubarak was a Zionist puppet. He’d helped to establish the Camp David accord which in effect gave the Zionist state the freedom to wage war against the Palestinians and surrounding Arab states. He denounced Hezbollah[iv]; urged the Zionist state to crush Hamas[v]; accused Iran of fomenting an arc of Shi’ite interests in the middle east[vi]; and even encouraged the Jews-only state to bomb Iran[vii]. It has also been alleged that he sold subsidized gas to the Zionist state.[viii] Egypt had once been self sufficient in oil and food but such was the corruption and incompetence of the Mubarak regime that the country was having to import both.[ix] Here was a leader of country which could no longer feed itself and in which tens of millions of people were living in poverty, who was exporting gas at subsidized rates to a far richer country. Quite revealingly, during the uprising, Mubarak poured out his Zionist heart to a Zionist confidante, “a member of the Israeli Knesset, one Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, a former cabinet minister who dealt with the Egyptian tyrant during the negotiations that set up the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty.” [x]

In the western world, Zionist politicians and Jewish lobbies echoed the Jews-only state’s stance and went into over-drive pressuring western governments into propping up Mubarak and his fellow Arab dictators.[xi] The Zionist owned western media put even more pressure on western politicians to stop sympathizing with Egyptian protestors. No sooner had Netanyahu raised the spectre that ‘Egypt is Iran’ than his minions were diligently spreading the message around the west. “We are watching these events, said Netanyahu, with “vigilance and worry.” The worry is rooted, he said, in the possibility that “in a situation of chaos, an organized Islamist body can seize control of a country. It happened in Iran. It happened in other instances.” No sooner had these words escaped his mouth than Israel’s amen corner in the US and around the world echoed the “Egypt is Iran” meme until it had found its way into nearly every news report, and virtually every public statement by a major politician on the Egyptian events.” (Justin Raimondo ‘It’s Always About Israel. Even when it isn’t…’ February 14, 2011).

It was shocking that in the western world Jewish lobbies and Zionist politicians/commentators were simply regurgitating the Zionist state’s line. It was more shocking to hear supposedly democratic politicians/commentators defending a brutal and corrupt dictator. But what was even more shocking was that they were promoting the interests of a foreign state rather than their own country’s national interests. They were sacrificing their democratic principles and the interests of the country they were living in for the sake of a colonial state that was perpetuating dictators throughout the Arab world. Most shockingly of all, however, was that they seemed entirely comfortable arguing that it was in the interests of democratic states to sustain dictators because they knew that nobody, not even those on the left, would challenge such nonsense and highlight their treachery. Zionist politicians/commentators in America were promoting blatantly un-American policies whilst, similarly, Zionist politicians/commentators throughout the rest of the western world were promoting blatantly anti-western policies, and nobody was challenging them about why they were giving priority to the interests of a foreign state.

There is very little difference between the cold war bogey of ‘reds under the bed’ and Zionists’ transformation of the moderate Muslim Brotherhood into an Islamic bogeyman. Since the formation of the Zionist state, Zionists have fabricated a long list of Islamic bogeymen from Nasser to Saddam Hussein. They have become specialists at conjuring up nightmarish Islamic threats to frighten the west into supporting Zionist interests and it was easy for them to demonize the Muslim Brotherhood given that most westerners knew little about the group. Contrary to Zionists’ accusations, the group was not run by Islamic extremists. It had not triggered the uprising.[xii] And it had not orchestrated the protests.[xiii] What do facts matter to Zionists when they can churn out lies to an ignorant western public which is usually disinterested in anything beyond their Zionist inspired prejudices? Zionist propagandists invented, and popularized, a fear and loathing for the ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ to pressure western states into supporting Mubarak solely in order to protect the security of the Zionist state. Western citizens who regurgitated this new strategic bogey were gullible for not understanding that they were undermining their own country’s national interests for the sake of promoting the security of the warmongering colonial state in Palestine.

The Dominance of Zionist Propaganda

This wouldn’t be the first time, however, that extreme Zionist propagandists have managed to manipulate western states into pursuing policies supposedly promoting western interests when in reality all they were doing was undermining such interests for the sake of boosting the security of the Zionist state. This was their great propaganda achievement in provoking the first and second gulf wars. If the Zionist state could invent and then popularize amongst western politicians/media the gigantic fiction that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction then it could easily dupe the west into believing the smaller lie that if it didn’t continue supporting Mubarak then it wouldn’t be long before Egypt was being run by an extreme Islamic government intent on developing nuclear weapons aimed at the western world. After all, the Zionist state had already succeeded in conning the west into believing that Iran poses the same nuclear threat to the west as Saddam was supposed to have done. “Beyond the Arab world, U.S. policy on Iran is dictated more or less totally by Israel.” (Kathleen Christison ‘The US as Israel’s Enabler in the Middle East’ February 16, 2011).

There are, of course, those who would scoff at the idea of Jewish lobbies in the west corrupting western political principles, values, and national interests by trying to turn western public opinion against young, middle class, Egyptian protestors in order to promote the strategic interests of the Jews-only state. There are those who would be scornful of the idea of western Zionist politicians pretending to pursue their country’s national interests whilst in reality undermining such interests for the sake of protecting the Zionist state in Palestine. And there are those who would dismiss the idea that much of the western media is owned, managed, or manned by Zionists whose primary political goal is protecting a foreign state even if this is at the expense of the country in which they are living and working.[xiv] Surely the west cannot be dominated to such an extent by Zionists putting the interests of a foreign state above that of the countries they are supposedly protecting?

The truth of these accusations is all too easy to appreciate when it is considered that the ruling elites throughout the western world have never mentioned that the Jews-only state developed nuclear weapons in the 1960s. It is easy to measure the scale of Zionist domination over the western world by the fact that no politician/commentator has been willing to mention Zionists’ nukes. Even though this has been the most critical factor in middle eastern politics, western politicians/commentators ignore their existence and assiduously formulate policies on the grounds of their non-existence. They prefer to promote fantasies about Saddam’s nuclear weapons, and more recently Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons, rather than telling the truth about Zionists all too real nuclear weapons.[xv] What could be further from the west’s national interests than ignoring the threat that Zionists’ nukes pose to the west?

Any visitor from outer space analyzing the views of the west’s mainstream politicians/commentators would be astounded to discover they were promoting foreign policies in the middle east that ran counter to western humanitarian values, political principles, and economic interests. That the west could support the Zionists’ hideous oppression of Palestinians shows that its humanitarian values are vacuous, that its political principles are a sham, and that its economic interests are being undermined because the Palestinians, just like all Arab people being oppressed by Arab dictators, are being denied the right to establish businesses that would promote economic growth both nationally and globally. The west’s support for Zionist colonialism and Zionist domination over the middle east is shameful, grossly undemocratic, and counter to its economic interests.[xvi]

Hypothetically speaking, it was a fortunate that in 1948 Zionists didn’t create a Zionist state in the centre of Europe, perhaps in place of Switzerland. If they had they would have inflicted on westerners the same miseries they have inflicted on Arabs. They would have created Zionist quisling dictatorships across the continent to defend their interests. European countries would have found themselves as impoverished as those in the Arab world. America would also be poorer without its current vast trade with Europe. Zionist politicians would have spent the next half century undermining the idea of neighbouring countries establishing democracies because of the threat they would supposedly pose to the security of the Zionist state. They would have denounced European patriots seeking to liberate their country from Zionist dictators as terrorists. Of course, on the bright side, if the Zionist state had been founded in central Europe, then the Islamic world from Morocco through to Tajikistan would now be almost totally democratic and economically booming.[xvii] But, then again, Zionist lobbies would have doubtlessly infiltrated these wealthy Arab democracies and sought to develop an ideological alliance with them, based on a pseudo Judeo-Arabic civilization, invoking Europhobia in order to win their support for propping up quisling Zionist dictatorships across the European continent. It has to be suspected, however, that these rich Arab democracies wouldn’t have been so gullible as to believe that it was in their economic and political interests to perpetuate fabulously wealthy, European dictators ransacking their impoverished economies. The Zionist state is a black hole decimating democratic aspirations and economic opportunities in surrounding countries in order to preserve its economic and military supremacy.

What was so marvelous about the Egyptians’ uprising was not merely the overthrow of a tyrant, but the overthrow of a Zionist puppet who’d been imposed upon them by the Zionist state and its gigantic American satellite. It was also the western public’s refusal to be manipulated by Zionists’ propaganda onslaught against the uprising. Many ordinary people continued to sympathize with the Egyptian protestors despite Zionist politicians/editors/commentators and Jewish lobbies doing their best to provoke yet another wave of Islamophobia. The efforts of the west’s Zionist leaders to insist that western governments should continue propping up Mubarak, and thereby keep sacrificing the lives of tens of millions of Egyptians, was a revolting example of naked Zionist self-interest. Fortunately, the more determined that protestors in Egypt became to rid themselves of a Zionist tyrant, the more the western public sympathized with their aspirations, the more revolting these reactionary Zionists politicians/commentators/lobbyists appeared to become.

Yet again the Zionists in the western world showed themselves to be a bunch of reactionary traitors who not merely supported a tyrant at the expense of people wanting democratic institutions but who were willing to sacrifice the interests of the countries they were living and working in for the sake of their beloved Zionist state. Western Zionists in politics and the media constantly denounce western Moslems for their alleged dual loyalties but the uprising in Egypt revealed that the Zionists themselves  have no such duality: they are devoted to the interests of a foreign state.

During the Egyptian uprising, it cannot be said, however, that all western politicians were total shills to the Zionist cause. President Obama initially supported the uprising but was quickly forced to recant under pressure from the Zionist think tanks dug in on the lawns of the white house. He sent a personal envoy to the Pharaoh, supposedly to have a chat about him taking early retirement but, after the meeting, the envoy publicly announced that Mubarak should stay in office. “After turning against Mubarak, he suddenly opined that he must stay in power, in order to carry out democratic reforms. As his representative he sent to Egypt a retired diplomat whose current employer is a law firm that represents the Mubarak family (much as Bill Clinton used to send committed Jewish Zionists to “mediate” between Israel and the Palestinians).” (Uri Avnery ‘Tsunami in Egypt’ February 14, 2011).

However, Obama would not be beaten into submission by Zionist politicians/media/lobbies. On the morning of Thursday February 10, 2011, it was reported that Mubarak would announce his retirement that evening. Obama couldn’t hide his jubilation even though he knew this would provoke Zionist scorn and, sooner or later, revenge. When Mubarak finally resigned who could doubt the adoration Obama heaped upon the Egyptian protestors? His speech outlined with crystal clarity the best of western political principles and values. Those who opposed Egypt’s western style protestors were nothing less than un-American and anti-western traitors. It was all too symbolic that after his enforced resignation Mubarak moved to a part of Egypt which is as close to the Zionist state as he could get without actually leaving the country. Clearly he feared that if the Egyptian people launched a violent uprising which threatened his life and that of his family, then their safe haven would be only a few miles away.[xviii] Doubtlessly the Zionist state would have welcomed into its midst yet another criminal with vast amounts of wealth just as it had done with Robert Maxwell and the Russian oligarchs not to mention a few American-Jews who’d fled there to escape justice in America.

There were two factors that might have persuaded Mubarak to stay on in power albeit, in the end, only for less than 24 hours. Firstly, Ehud Barack, the Zionists’ defence minister, flew to Washington to denounce the Obama administration for showing concern for the aspirations of Egyptian protestors when it should have supported Mubarak in crushing the uprising – doubtlessly with the same ferocity the Zionist state uses in crushing Palestinian protests.[xix] Secondly, the Saudi leader, fearing an uprising in his own personal fiefdom, offered to fund Mubarak’s armed forces if the Obama administration ever decided to withdraw its annual funding for the Egyptian military.[xx] These dramatic interventions must have convinced Mubarak he still had enough international support to survive.

The State of Global Politics

So what does the Egyptian uprising indicate about the state of global politics? America is commonly recognized as the only remaining superpower. Some commentators go much further and refer to it as an American empire. But most American politicians couldn’t muster the political power to celebrate Egyptians’ democratic protests because of the pressure being exerted on them by the Zionist state and its vastly wealthy allies in America. When American politicians turned their backs on people who seemed to be trying to replicate American values and democratic institutions this suggests there are profoundly suspicious factors at work. The reality is that America’s ruling elite consists substantially of Zionists who care more about the Zionist state in Palestine than they do about America or American democracy and that they are willing to use American military power to promote that foreign state no matter how much it undermines America’s military capabilities or the country’s financial resources and political prestige around the world.

Since the end of the cold war, the key global strategic criterion guiding the west’s formulation of political policies has increasingly become whether these policies enhance or detract from the security of the Zionist state in Palestine.[xxi] Whether this political phenomenon can be categorized as a global Zionist empire or Zionist world domination is open to debate but when the west goes out of its way to prop up a tiny, virulently aggressive, illegal, colonial state with no raw resources and a tiny population of 6 million, and thereby alienates a multiplicity of Arab/Islamic countries with vast quantities of natural resources and a combined population of hundreds of millions, it has to be one or the other.

Over the last sixty years, the Zionist state has heaped a flood of humiliations upon American presidents and politicians. These are humiliations that the powerful inflict on the powerless, not the pin pricks that satellite states occasionally inflict on their colonial masters. No American president has dared to criticize let alone insult political leaders in the Zionist state but Zionist politicians insult American presidents with impunity because they know that America’s Zionist lobby is powerful enough to prevent American presidents from seeking revenge.

It doesn’t matter what shameful, disgusting, or downright criminal, acts the Zionist state carries out whether this might be starving Palestinians into submission, denying them medical supplies, slaughtering innocent people, or even attacking American military ships such as the U.S.S. liberty, American politicians cheer it on and protect it in the united nations. There is no barbarism carried out by the Zionist state that American politicians have not slavishly defended to their utmost. There is no limit to the amount of hatred they are willing to suffer for the sake of by defending the barbarity of the Zionist state. The Zionist state beats its American dog whenever it wants and the poor dog’s inbred loyalty just keeps leading it back to its master for more abuse and punishment. It is a testimony to the Zionist domination in America, that the Zionist state can repeatedly humiliate American presidents and yet the American public shows no sense of patriotic anger about it.

Hannah Arendt coined the phrase ‘the boomerang effect’ when colonial/imperial powers suffered ethically, financially, politically, and militarily, because of the appalling activities of their colonists/imperialists in foreign countries. America has suffered considerably, militarily, financially, and in terms of its political reputation, for its contribution to the growth of the Zionist empire – the holding of American hostages during the first Islamic revolution in Iran, the wars against Saddam Hussein, the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the invasion of Afghanistan. And yet still the American dog faithfully serves its master.

Another, even more stark indicator that America is a gigantic satellite of the Zionist state is that no American president has been able to limit, let alone withdraw, what are frequently referred to as subsidies to the Zionist state in order to punish it for its misdeeds. The reason for this is that these are not subsidies but tribute payments. Satellites are supposed to make tribute payments to their colonial/imperial powers, not vice versa and this is precisely what is happening when America hands over vast sums of money to the Zionist state which it then uses in whatever way it thinks fit even if it embarrasses America.

Even more critical for appreciating America’s subservient role to the Zionist master is that America has no influence over the Zionist state’s domestic policies especially those affecting the Palestinians. Indeed, it could be argued the Zionist state has more influence over America’s domestic policies than the reverse. And the same is true in terms of foreign policies. America has little control over Zionists’ foreign policies but Zionists have a critical influence over America’s foreign policies. America’s foreign policies are being determined by its so-called satellite across an ever increasing area of the world not merely the middle east nor even the greater middle east but the entire Moslem world. “… Israel is at the center of virtually every move the United States makes in the region.” (Kathleen Christison ‘The US as Israel’s Enabler in the Middle East’ February 16, 2011). [xxii]

Prospects for Democracy in Egypt

The prospects for democracy in Egypt do not look good but, then again, just a few months ago the prospects for overthrowing Mubarak seemed non-existent.[xxiii] The Egyptian uprising seemed to be an entirely modern, high tech, liberation brought about with the aid of mobile phones and social networking websites. Such websites are notorious for organizing spontaneous, one-off, anarchic, street parties so whether they are suitable for formulating a revolution has yet to be seen. However, the protests seemed so highly co-ordinated and tactically astute, successfully managing to maintain the momentum of the protests despite the efforts made to counter them, that this bodes well for the next, much more difficult, stage of founding democratic institutions.[xxiv]

Although social networking websites creep into the public domain the Egyptian protestors seemed to be able to organize themselves either without the authorities and international secret agencies being aware of what they were doing or, if the authorities were aware, of being unable to counter what the protestors were doing. [xxv] Little is known about the protestors or what motivated them. Western commentators are only now beginning to ascertain such motivations. “It’s fair to say that at this stage the Egyptian street keeps close to its heart those that supported it, from al-Jazeera and assorted Arab nationalists to Hezbollah in Lebanon. And knows very well those that despised it – from the House of Saud and assorted Wahhabi extremists to Israel. No one will forget that Saudi King Abdullah accused the street of “meddling in the security and stability of Arab and Muslim Egypt”.” (Pepe Escobar ‘Under the (Egyptian) volcano’  February 15, 2011).

Having been so successful in liberating themselves, it is to be hoped they can take the next revolutionary step. Whether they will be able to do so is difficult to assess especially since the protestors relinquished their main political leverage, the occupation of Tahrir square, within days of the pharaoh’s overthrow. It has to be suspected that the egyptian army will be reluctant to stop issuing communiqués. “There’s no way a new Egypt may be born without overthrowing this whole system. Ergo, the street has to take on the army. Expect major fireworks ahead. Forget about the army swiftly handing over power to a civilian-led interim government.” (Pepe Escobar ‘Under the (Egyptian) volcano’ February 15, 2011).

However, Egypt’s protestors face an even more insidious enemy than the Egyptian army – the Zionist state and its global allies who will pressure the army to stay in power. The Zionist state will do its utmost to restore another Zionist quisling as dictator. The Zionists may have been thrown off guard by the spontaneity of Egypt’s struggle for liberation but they are not going to allow the much longer, and far more complex, process of establishing democracy to proceed without doing their best to manipulate events in order to restore their power. Watch out for fabrications such as ‘Iraqi soldiers bayonet babies in incubators’.

In a future democracy, Egyptians may wish to change or abandon the Camp David accords. They may refuse to continue supporting the siege of Gaza, the continuing war crimes against the Palestinian people, and the Zionist colonization of Palestine. They may refuse Zionist ships passage through the Suez canal,[xxvi] and stop subsidizing gas exports to the Zionist state.[xxvii] They may oppose Zionist wars against its neighbours and its regional supremacy.[xxviii] They will want to develop new, independent, foreign policies. Such policy changes would be unacceptable to the Zionist state but there may be even worse to follow, the Egyptian people will invariably demand precisely what westerners have and what the Iranian people have now also: nuclear energy. This will almost certainly lead to demands for the acquisition of nuclear weapons to ensure their military defence and bring about a less unbalanced military situation in the middle east.

Although such changes in Egypt may not be in the least bit detrimental to the long term interests of the Zionist state, they would certainly be perceived as anathema by the current bunch of warmongers occupying Palestine. From the perspective of the warmongering Zionist state it would lose too much for it to allow democratic reforms in Egypt especially if this might lead to the country acquiring nuclear weapons. They will deem it imperative to scupper any move to democracy in favour of restoring a Zionist quisling who would once again put Zionist interests before those of the Egyptian people.

The west’s values, political principles, and national interests, would be best served through the creation of a democratic Egypt similar to that in turkey. Its primary strategic concern would be the Suez canal but given the Egyptians’ open attitude to the west this shouldn’t be a problem. The west doesn’t have to fear Egypt’s development of an independent foreign policy – only those suffering from Zionist paranoia would fear the worst.[xxix] But given Zionist domination of America’s political system, Zionist propagandists will doubtlessly terrify American politicians and the American public by conjuring up even more fantastic Islamic bogeymen in Egypt. The foundation of freedom in Egypt is thus a test of Zionist world domination. Zionists may have lost out because of the Egyptian uprising, and the refusal of a significant part of western public opinion to denounce Egyptian freedom fighters, but they will certainly try to restore their dominance.

After the second world war, the cold war became the primary global political preoccupation. The foundation of the Zionist state was a relatively insignificant issue in the worldwide competition for global supremacy. But during this time the Zionists’ military successes led them install pliant Arab dictators and to use Islamophobia to whip up opposition against Palestinian freedom fighters and hostile Moslem states across the African-Asian continents. After the demise of the cold war, the west’s Zionist ruling elites, its Zionist owned media, and its Zionist lobbies succeeded in pressuring western politicians into adopting their Islamophobia. Western political leaders increasingly see Zionist colonialism as their own cause. Zionists’ achievement of manipulating the west, and the rest of the world including Russia and China who also have their Islamic minorities who object to their second class status, into adopting the Zionist creed is the most blatant manifestation of Zionist global dominion. After the demise of the Russian empire, many commentators in the west wondered what the next global conflict would be since both superpowers seemed to rely on a cold war conflict to keep their military-industrial complexes in profit and an ideology that unified their peoples. Many thought it might be china or Asian tigers. The Zionists have successfully conned the west into supporting Zionism against fictitious Islamic bogeymen. The best way that people in the west can help Egyptian protestors to defeat their adversaries i.e. the Egyptian army and Zionist colonialists, is to challenge Zionist dominance at home.

February 22, 2011 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

Steve Walt: Time to start thinking beyond ‘impossible’ two state solution

By Philip Weiss on February 21, 2011

Glenn Greenwald describes the sad tidings from New York– and acknowledges that the Israel lobby effected Obama’s first veto in the UN Security Council. Note that he uses the language of national interests:

at one of the most critical times in that region in more than a century, the U.S. openly subverts the world consensus to protect the Israelis from censure over blatantly illegal acts — all to avoid angering “its supporters” in the U.S.

Remember, though:  talking about the power of the Israel Lobby and the way it causes the U.S. to sacrifice its own interests for this foreign country is strictly prohibited and a sure sign of deep malice.  And the only possible reason why Muslims in that region might harbor hostility toward the U.S. is because of primitive, crazed religious fanaticism and a contempt for Our Freedoms.

Steve Walt also talks about the Israel lobby, of course, but gets to the point about two states. Excerpts:

Thus far, all that Obama’s Middle East team has managed to do in two years is to further undermine U.S. credibility as a potential mediator between Israel and the Palestinians, and to dash the early hopes that the United States was serious about “two states for two peoples.” And while Obama, Mitchell, Clinton, Ross, and the rest of the team have floundered, the Netanyahu government has continued to evict Palestinian residents from their homes, its bulldozers and construction crews continuing to seize more and more of the land on which the Palestinians hoped to create a state.

Needless to say, the United States is all by its lonesome on this issue. …

As [many] commentators recognize, the real reason for Obama’s misguided decision was the profound influence of the Israel lobby. Indeed, few observers have missed this simple and obvious fact. One can only conclude that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s repeated claims that they are “friends of Israel” and devoted to its security are nothing more than empty, politically expedient rhetoric. Whatever they may say, the policies they are pursuing — including this latest veto — are in fact harmful to Israel’s long-term future. The man who declared in Cairo on June 4, 2009 that a two-state solution was “in the “Israel’s interest, the Palestinians’ interest, America’s interest, and the world’s interest” must have changed his mind, because his actions ever since have merely hastened the moment when creating two viable states will be impossible (if that is not already the case). Then remember what former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in 2007, “if the two-state solution fails, Israel will face a South African style struggle for political rights.” And “once that happens,” he warned, “the state of Israel is finished.”…

If the United States hopes to be on the right side of history, it is time to start thinking about what its policy should be when everybody finally acknowledges that “two states for two peoples” is no longer a practical possibility. This is going to happen sooner or later, and anyone who is still advocating for a two-state solution at that point is going to sound like an ignorant fool. Not because of the flaws in that option, but simply because it will be impossible to implement. What alternative solution will the president and secretary of state support then? Ethnic cleansing? A binational, liberal democracy in which all inhabitants of Israel/Palestine have equal civil and political rights? Or permanent apartheid, in the form of disconnected Palestinian Bantustans under de facto Israeli control?

February 21, 2011 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

Craven US veto costs Washington its last shred of credibility

By Stuart Littlewood | Redress | 22 February 2011

Hang your head in shame, O Peace Prize laureate.

The Nobel award, said Barack Obama at the time, was “an affirmation of American leadership on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations” and must be shared with everyone who strives for “justice and dignity”. Where was the justice and dignity in the sad story of America’s UN veto?

Having blocked the United Nations Security Council draft resolution on 18 February, which would have condemned Israeli squatter colonies as illegal, Obama has now written America completely out of the script on Middle East peace.

Many will see it as a blessing that the US has so spectacularly disqualified itself from serious discussion, and that Obama has finally lifted the scales from the eyes of all those who unwisely invested high hopes in him.

Netanyahu’s office was cock-a-hoop and said Israel was “deeply grateful” to be let off the hook and being rewarded for the delinquent promises to be a good boy and “pursue negotiations vigorously” with the Palestinians. The US veto made it clear that “the only path to such a peace will come through direct negotiations and not through the decisions of international bodies”.

Some people will do anything to stop the United Nations getting a grip on the crisis. It would be more than a tad inconvenient to the crazed Greater Israel project. No doubt the champagne corks were popping in the US-Israeli Combined Operations headquarters as the Zionists danced late into the night to celebrate their victory.

The resolution, besides condemning the continuation of settlement activities and other measures aimed at altering the demographic composition, character and status of the occupied Palestinian territories, in violation of international humanitarian law and relevant resolutions, demanded that Israel cease forthwith and fully respect all of its legal obligations in that regard.

The US argued that although it opposes Israeli settlements, taking the issue to the UN would only complicate efforts to resume stalled negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians on a two-state solution. Why that should be the case wasn’t explained. Nor was the reason why negotiations should be restarted in the teeth of Israel’s uncompromising territorial objectives and clear dislike of peace.

It seems, from what US ambassador Susan Rice says, that craven Washington cannot bring itself to call Israel’s settlements on stolen Palestinian land what they really are – illegal – and is only prepared to label them “illegitimate”, presumably in case the correct term ruffles too many Israel lobby feathers.

Falling back onto the administration’s familiar double-speak, Rice explained that the veto “should not be misunderstood to mean we support settlement activity” but the US thinks it “unwise for this council to attempt to resolve the core issues that divide Israelis and Palestinians”.

In other words, the United States would much prefer to have the Israel-Palestine question resolved by arm-twisting behind closed doors, in the guise of “direct talks”, than let the Security Council intervene with another binding resolution.

This latest resolution had nearly 120 co-sponsors and the other 14 Security Council members all voted in favour. There are reports that Washington earlier threatened to slash aid to the Palestinian Authority if it wasn’t withdrawn, as if to remove any lingering doubt as to the crooked purpose of America’s meddling. When this failed the US, as one of the five permanent council members with blocking power, struck it down.

In doing so, the United States has advertised itself to the whole wide world as the willing tool of Zionist ambition and branded itself an enemy of Palestine and of all other countries threatened by the Israeli regime.

Sucked into the swamp of “direct negotiations”

Right on cue, British Foreign Secretary William Hague chimed in with some carefully-crafted balderdash:

I have made clear my serious concern about the current stalemate in the Middle East peace process. Today the UK voted with others, including France and Germany, to reinforce this and our longstanding view that settlements, including in East Jerusalem, are illegal under international law, an obstacle to peace and constitute a threat to a two-state solution…

He started well but quickly showed his eagerness to be sucked down by the US and Israel into the swamp of direct negotiations.

I call on both parties to return as soon as possible to direct negotiations towards a two-state solution, on the basis of clear parameters…

  • An agreement on the borders of the two states, based on 4 June 1967 lines with equivalent land swaps as may be agreed between the parties.
  • Security arrangements that, for Palestinians, respect their sovereignty and show that the occupation is over; and, for Israelis, protect their security, prevent the resurgence of terrorism and deal effectively with new and emerging threats.
  • A just, fair and agreed solution to the refugee question.
  • Fulfillment of the aspirations of both parties for Jerusalem. A way must be found through negotiations to resolve the status of Jerusalem as the future capital of both states.

Just pause there, please, Mr Hague. First, if a state is doing something that’s illegal and an obstacle to peace, and won’t stop when asked, it surely becomes the responsibility of international community and its law courts, and especially the United Nations, to sort it out. The victim can hardly be expected to NEGOTIATE an end to it.

Secondly, why are Israel’s accumulated crimes now deemed negotiable when the issues were long ago determined by the UN and by international law and still wait to be implemented? Not once do you mention delivering that long-awaited justice. Instead you are obsessed with endless, unequal negotiations that are dishonestly convened and favour a very strong party that literally holds a gun to the weak party’s head.

And always the talk is of security for the Israelis rather than the Palestinians. You mention security arrangements to “prevent the resurgence of terrorism and deal effectively with new and emerging threats” against Israel. I don’t hear you pressing for equivalent arrangements to prevent Israeli terrorism against the Palestinians.

Mr Hague says:

We therefore look to both parties to return to negotiations as soon as possible on this basis. Our goal remains an agreement on all final status issues and the welcoming of Palestine as a full member by September 2011. We will contribute to achieving this goal in any and every way that we can.

What has the British government done over the years to pave the way towards Palestinian statehood, Mr Hague? Now you’re in an all-fired hurry to rush it through in six months but still unwilling to act positively to establish any likelihood of a JUST solution.

According to Mr Hague:

We understand Israel’s deep and justified security concerns. As friends of Israel, we share those concerns, and will strive with Israel to preserve her security and the stability of the region around her. It is precisely because of those concerns that we vote today in favour of this resolution.

And not for the key reason that the settlements are illegal and moving Israeli squatters onto occupied territory seriously breaches the Geneva Convention and amounts to a war crime? Is that not of sufficient concern for you to say so loudly and clearly?

For Mr Hague:

We regret anything which sets back the prospects for peace because we believe it also sets back Israel’s security.

There you go again – this slavish attachment to Israel’s security above all else. How can Britain be seen as an honest broker any more than the Zionist lackeys of the US administration?

The fact is, Mr Hague, the country you represent does not regard itself particularly as a friends of Israel and is not interested in preserving Israel’s security at the expense of its neighbours. It certainly doesn’t wish to be thought of as an enemy of Palestine just to appease your funny friends in Tel Aviv and Washington.

February 21, 2011 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

What If the Egyptian Protesters Were Democrats?

By Steven Salaita | Pulse Media | February 21, 2011

Their recent upheaval would certainly have been different, perhaps dramatically different.

In the past month, the people of Egypt—inspired by the recent democratic revolution in Tunisia and preceding emergent revolutions in Libya, Algeria, Bahrain, Jordan, Yemen, and Syria—have undertaken a revolt of truly stunning proportions, one that includes men and women from all class strata, religious and ethnic origins, and ideological commitments.  They managed to rid themselves of a longstanding and brutal dictator worth over $40 billion and supported by the collective power of the United States, European Union, Israel, and the Arab Gulf States.

Now that two Arab dictators have been vanquished by the collective will of unaffiliated protesters, many American commentators have been forced to rethink their assumptions about the supposedly tribal and authoritarian Arab mind.  Such commentators, sometimes conservative but often liberal, fancy themselves guardians of a civic and political enlightenment that in reality is misinformed in addition to being conceited and imperialistic.

Nevertheless, given the ardor and self-confidence of the notion that American values exemplify democratic modernity, let us imagine a few potential outcomes had the pioneering people of Egypt followed the example of today’s liberal American Democrats.

Mubarak offered the Egyptian people what he deemed sweeping reforms.  The people rejected his overtures as inadequate and disingenuous, which only increased their desire to oust Mubarak.  A protester named Dalia observed, “Nothing will make this regime go unless we keep on coming and keep on coming.”  Had Dalia been a Democrat, she might have instead responded, “The Egyptian government has a real opportunity in the face of this very clear demonstration of opposition to begin a process that will truly respond to the aspirations of the people of Egypt.”

Despite police brutality, the people of Egypt remained steadfast and continued their chants of “down with Mubarak” and “Tunisia is the solution,” both slogans underscoring the importance of a genuinely transformative revolution.  Had they been Democrats, they surely would not have been so quixotic and would have instead opted for a pragmatic approach, as most Democrats do in every American election.  As Michael Moore warns, democratic transformation has no real place in American politics:  “And so, I just—I think that—I mean, what I’ve proposed for the last few years is that if we really want to try and get this power in our hands, in the people’s hands, in the hands of the working people of this country, then we should, on a very grassroots level, from the bottom up, be doing things to—whether it’s running for local office, taking over the local Democratic Party.”

Working within a corrupt system, rather than trying to abolish it, is the way American liberals like Moore prefer to pursue justice:  “well, we have these two political parties which are really very much like one party, why don’t we make sure that one of those parties actually is a second party and start locally and do that?  And that’s what I encourage people to do.  That’s my approach.”

The Egyptian protesters demanded rule by the people rather than subservience to a small caste of politicians and crony capitalists.  They continue to agitate for a new constitution, universal health care, a multiple-party democracy, unionization for workers, and an end to the violent suppression of dissent.  If they were Democrats, they probably wouldn’t be so ambitious.  In the United States, dissent is often suppressed, sometimes violently, unions are busted, two parties representing 300 million people assert plutocratic hegemony, and politicians of the two parties serve the interests not of their citizen constituents but of crony capitalists.  The Democrats do not tolerate dissentient action in the form of mass protest; they prefer the tactic of voting for Democrats during election season.

Liberal commentators dismiss as silliness any desire to oust dictatorial leaders outside the pragmatic framework of Democratic values.  Todd Gitlin preaches discipline in the face of abusive state power:  “Will the rebellious left discipline itself, cool its boiling blood, and decide that the pleasures of sectarianism are worth less than the steady resolve of infrastructural work?”  Speaking against—what else?—leftist politician Ralph Nader, Eric Alterman is less diplomatic:  “The man needs to go away.  I think he needs to live in a different country.  He’s done enough damage to this one.  Let him damage somebody else’s now.”  Alterman despises Nader because of Nader’s lack of faith in politicians:  “Politicians blow with political winds.  To force them to blow our way, progressives need leaders who can combine hardheaded realism with the ability to inspire Americans’ nascent idealism.”

According to liberal Democrats, alternate politics are impossible and thus undesirable.  The Egyptian people do not share the same viewpoint.  There was nothing pragmatic about what they did:  it is never a reasonable idea to march into bullets, tear gas canisters, and police boots in order to upend a rotten political system brandishing the imprimatur of the world’s most powerful armies and politicians.  But if the Egyptian people wanted a just political system, rather than the practical realities of theft and corruption, they needed to replace and not merely reform their government.  To challenge bad politicians by electing more bad politicians is not serious political thinking; it is an inducement to apathy and intellectual frivolity.

The Egyptian people erected a remarkably functional democratic space in Tahreer Square, complete with an infirmary, a kindergarten, and a pharmacy.  When Democratic Party bosses get together, protesters are entrapped in chain link cages.

In short, if the Egyptian protesters were Democrats, they would have undertaken no revolution.  The Democratic Party represents the pervasiveness of elite corporate power; its liberal supporters represent the appropriation of oppositional politics into the neoliberal economies of electoral hegemony; the Egyptian protesters represent a determined, collective will to social justice and legitimate freedom.  If those protesters were American liberals, they would have sided with the state while professing support for the people.

If the Egyptian protesters were Democrats, they would have accepted Mubarak’s proposed reforms—not because those reforms were good, but because Democrats are accustomed to settling for empty rhetoric.  They would have accepted Mubarak’s handpicked successor, the infamous torturer Omar Suleiman—not because they like him, but because he would presumably be less evil than his predecessor.  They would have accepted the inevitability of defeat—not because they wanted to lose, but because losing would be both pragmatic and realistic.  The actual Egyptian protesters, however, would only accept freedom.

For those who might respond to this hypothetical exercise by pointing out that the United States is not Egypt, I would agree.  Egypt under Mubarak was more equitable than the United States under Barack Obama.  Egypt has far less income inequality than the United States, and all of Mubarak’s brutality was at least indirectly underwritten by the American government.

The people of the Middle East and North Africa have never listened to American liberals, who through the years have loved to bestow unsolicited advice on Arabs.  Had the Arabs accepted this unsolicited advice, they would have become Democrats instead of revolutionaries.

The only acceptable liberal American response to the revolutions in the Arab World is the silence that enlivens a sincere attempt to listen.  Clearly it is time for American liberals to stop lecturing Arabs and start following their example, instead.

February 21, 2011 Posted by | Corruption, Progressive Hypocrite, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

American Zionism against the Egyptian Pro-Democracy Movement

By James Petras | The People’s Voice | February 20th, 2011

One of the least analyzed aspects of the Egyptian pro-democracy movement and US policy toward it, is the role of the influential Zionist power configuration (ZPC) including the leading umbrella organization – the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations (CPMAJO) – Congressional Middle East committee members, officials occupying strategic positions in the Obama Administration’s Middle East bureaus, as well as prominent editors, publicists and journalists who play a major role in the prestigious newspapers and popular weekly magazines. This essay is based on a survey of every issue of the Daily Alert (propaganda bulletin of the CPMAJO), the NY Times and the Washington Post between January 25 – February 17, 2011.

From the very beginning of the Egyptian pro-democracy movement, the ZPC, called into question the legitimacy of the anti-dictatorial demands by focusing on the “Islamic threat”. In particular the ultra-Zionist Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and the Daily Alert harped on the “threat” of an “Islamic takeover” by the Muslim Brotherhood even as the overwhelming number of non-Zionist experts and reporters in Egypt demonstrated that the vast majority of protestors were not members of any Islamic political movement, but largely advocates of a secular democratic republic (see the Financial Times 1/26/11-2/17/11).

Once their initial propaganda ploy failed, the ZPC developed several new propaganda lines: the most prominent of which was a sustained defense of the Mubarak dictatorship as a bulwark of Israel’s ‘security’ and guardian of the so-called “Peace Accord” of 1979. In other words the ZPC pressured the US administration, via Congressional hearings, the press and AIPAC to support Mubarak as a key guarantor and collaborator of Israel’s supremacy in the Middle East; although it meant that the Obama regime would have to openly oppose the million-member Egyptian freedom movement. Israeli journalists, officials and their US Zionist counterparts willingly admitted that although the Mubarak regime was a bloody, corrupt tyranny, he should be supported because a democratic government in Cairo might end Egypt’s decades-old collaboration with the brutal Israeli colonization of Palestine.

Once it became clear that uncritical support for Mubarak was no longer a viable position and the Obama Administration was appealing to the democratic movement to “dialogue” and negotiate with the dictator, the ZPC demanded caution in backing a “dialogue” and assurance that the dialogue did not lead to any abrupt changes in the Mubarak-Israeli treaty. The ZPC and its scribes in the Washington Post presented Mubarak’s hand picked “Vice President” Omar Suleiman, a notorious torturer and long-term collaborator of Israel’s Mossad, as the legitimate interlocutor for the dialogue – even as he was unanimously rejected by the entire pro-democracy movement.

As the demonstrators grew in number and engulfed the major public squares throughout the country and extended beyond the first week, Israel and the ZPC promoted a possible alternative solution, which would keep Mubarak in power, during a nine month ‘transition’ period. Caught off guard by the rapid growth of Egypt’s pro-democracy movement, Israel’s willing accomplices in the US administration and media conceded that an end to the dictatorship would be a good thing… if it was managed appropriately; namely, if it excluded or minimized the role of the Muslim Brotherhood and maximized the role of the pro-Israel military high command and intelligence services as overseers of the “transition”. The ZPC contemptuously rejected Egypt’s independent pro-democracy movement and its leaders and sought to undermine the Egyptian people’s movement by inflating the role of the “best organized” Islamic Brotherhood and warned of a future Islamist “seizure of power”.

The leading Zionist official in the Obama Administration and AIPAC point man, Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg traveled to Israel to assure the Netanyahu/Lieberman regime that the US was in contact with the Egyptian military high command and sectors of the civilian opposition (ElBaradei) and that Washington’s support of the democracy movement was conditioned by their assurance that the Israeli-Egyptian Treaty would remain unchanged.

When Mubarak was finally forced to resign, handing power to a military junta, the ZPC congratulated the coup-makers, supported its demobilization of the movement and more importantly, celebrated the Egyptian generals’ endorsement of the “Peace Agreement of 1979”. Now the Israeli propaganda machine began to harshly criticize Mubarak and portrayed the military coup as a positive step toward an “orderly and peaceful transition”. By ‘orderly’ the Zionist think tankers meant a ‘regime change’ that did nothing to change the blockade of Gaza, the regular shipment of fuel to Israel, or the hotline of collaboration between Tel Aviv and Cairo. Israeli and American Zionists rejected early elections and promoted a prolonged process in which the Egyptian military, the US Administration and the ZPC could handpick members of the ‘transitional constitutional and electoral commissions’ committed to continuing Mubarak’s policy of unconditional submission to Israel. By “peaceful” the pro-Israel diplomats in the Obama Administration meant clearing the streets of the masses of pro-democracy activists and demonstrators so that decisions could be controlled by the small circle of Mubarak military and civilian holdovers behind closed doors. By “transition”, the circles of Zionists propagandists, US/Israeli policy makers and Egyptian generals meant that nothing would change but the face of Mubarak.

While Israel and the bulk of Zionist scribes and propagandists in the US opposed or questioned the pro-democracy movements against pro-Israeli rulers in the Middle East, they embraced and publicized the social movements opposing the Iranian regime. In every print and electronic outlet, the pro-Israel journalists emphasized the repressive, brutal nature of the Iranian regime, called for regime change and raised the specter of a military confrontation if Iranian warships traversed the Suez Canal, Iran’s right by international maritime law. Israeli security, the threat of ‘radical Islam’ and Iran were cited to place narrow limits on all discussions and debates over US policy regarding the enormous and growing mass pro-democracy movements throughout the Arab world.

The same prominent US Zionist scribes who, at first, defended US support for the dictatorial Mubarak regime and then supported the military takeover in Cairo, have now become born-again backers of anti-regime democrats in Iran. This is not inconsistent: the issue for US Zionists is how might pro-democracy movements affect Israel’s colonial policies in Palestine and Israel’s expanding power in the Middle East? In other words, the ZPC in Congress and the White House are not concerned about promoting democracy through American foreign policy, but only about harnessing US diplomacy and military leverage to serve Israel.

What is striking about Obama’s twist and turns in policy toward the mass popular struggles in Egypt is how closely it repeats and implements the policy positions of the US Zionist power configuration clearly presented in the ‘52 organizations’ propaganda organ, the Daily Alert.

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James Petras is the author of over 62 books published in 29 languages, and over 600 articles in professional journals, including the American Sociological Review, British Journal of Sociology, Social Research, and Journal of Peasant Studies. He has published over 2000 articles in nonprofessional journals such as the New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, Christian Science Monitor, Foreign Policy, New Left Review, Partisan Review, TempsModerne, Le Monde Diplomatique, and his commentary is widely carried out in the Internet. James Petras is a former professor of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York, has a 50-year membership in the class struggle, the author is an advisor to the landless and jobless in Brazil and Argentina and is co – author of Globalization Unmasked (Zed Books) and Zionism, Militarism and the Decline of U.S. Power (Clarity Press, 2008). James Petras latest book is War Crimes in Gaza and the Zionist Fifth Column in America (Atlanta:Clarity Pres 2010)

James Petras can be reached at: jpetras@binghamton.edu or visit his website: http://petras.lahaine.org/index.php

February 20, 2011 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite | Leave a comment

US vetoes UN resolution on Illegal Jewish only settlements

Aletho News | February 19, 2011

Despite receiving the backing of 14 out of 15 members of the United Nations’ security council, a UN resolution branding Israeli settlements illegal was vetoed by the United States Ambassador to the U.N., Susan Rice.

Susan Rice is not related to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice but there is a connection between Condoleeza Rice and Susan Rice’s godmother, Madeleine Albright. Condoleezza Rice was Dr. Joseph Korbel’s star student at the University of Denver. Madeleine Albright is Korbel’s daughter. Rice has said that her role at the U.N. will be to battle “the anti-Israel crap.”

Rice has been involved with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) a hawkish pro-Israel think tank which has been a home for many of the neocon architects of the invasion of Iraq. WINEP’s advisory board has included militarists such as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Edward Luttwak, James Woolsey (who is also ostensibly a Democrat), and Mort Zuckerman. Susan Rice took part in a WINEP “2008 Presidential Task Force” study which resulted in a report entitled, “Strengthening the Partnership: How to Deepen US-Israel Cooperation on the Iranian Nuclear Challenge”. WINEP was founded in coordination with the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

Al Jazeera spoke with Susan Rice about the Obama administration’s veto of the Security Council resolution:

February 19, 2011 Posted by | Author: Atheo, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, Video, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

Omar Barghouti kept from entering the U.S. for BDS speaking tour

February 18, 2011

The following press release was just issued by the publisher of Omar Barghouti’s upcoming book:

Effectively canceling a planned speaking tour, the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem has inexplicably delayed the granting of a visa for Omar Barghouti, founding member of the Palestinian Civil Society Boycott, Divestment, Sanction (BDS) campaign, due to tour the United States this April for the release of his new book, Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights.

Nobel Peace Laureate, Archbishop Desmond Tutu called the book “lucid and morally compelling… perfectly timed to make a major contribution to this urgently needed global campaign for justice, freedom and peace.” Former President of the UN General Assembly, Father Miguel d’’Escoto Brockmann called it “timely and responsibly written by a man who understands that creative nonviolence is the only way out of the dire situation in Palestine.””

In recent years, numerous foreign scholars and experts have been subject to visa delays and denials that have prohibited them from speaking and teaching in the U.S.—a process the American Civil Liberties Union describes as “Ideological Exclusion,” which they say violates Americans’ First Amendment right to hear constitutionally protected speech by denying foreign scholars, artists, politicians and others entry to the United States.  Foreign nationals who have recently been denied visas include Fulbright scholar Marixa Lasso; Iraqi doctor Riyadh Lafta, who disputed the official Iraqi civilian death numbers in the respected British medical journal The Lancet; respected South African scholar and vocal Iraq War critic Dr. Adam Habib, and Oxford’s Tariq Ramadan, who have both recently received visas to speak in the United States after many years of delays and denials.

For the release of Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions, Barghouti has standing invitations for events in New York City, Harvard, Yale, Brown, Brandeis University, Washington DC, and Philadelphia. Barghouti studied, lived and worked in the United States for 11 years before permanently relocating to Jerusalem. He attended Columbia University, receiving both Bachelors and Masters degrees from the school. His U.S. born child, whom he needs a visa to visit, currently attends college in Indiana. Between 2005-2010, Barghouti visited the U.S. extensively without incident, on a 5 year visa, which only recently expired.

Barghouti’s publisher, Anthony Arnove of Haymarket Books, stated that “It’s essential authors be able to travel to promote their books and ideas, and as publishers we believe the free exchange of ideas is vital to a democratic culture. We find it frustrating that Omar’s visa is being delayed and potentially denied for political reasons and hope the Consulate will grant his visa immediately.”

Barghouti tour sponsors are calling on supporters to contact the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem and the Department of State to ask them to fulfill the promise from the Obama Administration of “promoting the global marketplace of ideas” and grant Barghouti’s visa immediately.

U.S. Consulate:
Consul General Daniel Rubinstein
U.S. Consulate General, Jerusalem
18 Agron Road, Jerusalem 94190
Tel.: +972.2.622.7230, Fax: +972.2.625.9270
jerusalemvisa@state.gov
UsConGenJerusalem@state.gov

Department of State:
Visa Services
Public Inquiries Division
202-663-1225
usvisa@state.gov

*

On Facebook: Join the group “Let Omar Barghouti Be Heard” and invite your friends



February 18, 2011 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

Obama Requests Funding For Venezuelan Opposition in 2012 Budget

BY EVA GOLINGER | February 17, 2011

This week, US President Barack Obama presented Congress with a $3.7 trillion dollar budget for 2012, the most expensive budget in United States history. Within his massive request, which proposes cuts in important social programs and federal jobs throughout the country, is a partition for special funding for anti-Chavez groups in Venezuela.

Included in the whopping $3.7 trillion request is over $670 billion for the Pentagon’s ever-increasing annual budget, nearly $75 billion for the intelligence community and $55.7 billion for the State Department and the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

For the first time in recent history, the Foreign Operations Budget (State Department) openly details direct funding of at least $5 million to anti-Chavez groups in Venezuela. Specifically, the budget justification document states, “These funds will help strengthen and support a Venezuelan civil society that will protect democratic space and seek to serve the interests and needs of the Venezuelan people. Funding will enhance citizens’ access to objective information, facilitate peaceful debate on key issues, provide support to democratic institutions and processes, promote citizen participation and encourage democratic leadership”.

While the descriptive language justifying the diversion of millions in US taxpayers dollars to fund political groups in a foreign nation may sound “pretty”, this type of funding has been a principal source of promoting subversion and destabilization in Venezuela against the democratic and majority-supported government of Hugo Chavez during the past eight years. According to public documents, just between the years 2008 to 2011, the US State Department channeled more than $40 million to the Venezuelan opposition, primarily directing those funds to electoral campaigns against President Chavez and propaganda slated to influence Venezuelan public opinion.

The funding requested in Obama’s 2012 budget for anti-Chavez groups in Venezuela comes from a State Department division titled “Economic Support Fund” (ESF), which per State spokesman Philip Crowley, is used to fund NGOs and other non-governmental groups in “key strategic and important countries” for Washington. On top of the ESF funds for the Venezuelan opposition, additional multimillion-dollar financing for political campaigns, media propaganda and other destabilization activities in the South American nation is channeled through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), International Republican Institute (IRI), National Democratic Institute (NDI) and various other US and international agencies that support groups around the world who promote US agenda.

ILLEGAL FUNDING

The State Department’s public disclosure of 2012 funding for the Venezuelan opposition comes just after the Venezuelan National Assembly passed a law prohibiting foreign funding for political activities in late December 2010. The Law in Defense of Political Sovereignty and National Self-Determination clearly renders all foreign funding for political campaigns, parties and organizations, including NGOs, that engage in political activities, illegal. How exactly does Washington propose to channel those $5 million to Venezuelan groups, when such financing clearly constitutes a violation of Venezuelan law?

In previous years, the Foreign Operations Budget never explicitly detailed direct State funding to political groups in Venezuela. Since 2002, Washington has used an office of USAID, the Office for Transition Initiatives (OTI), to filter its multimillion-dollar funding to its Venezuelan counterparts. The OTI office, which was run like a clandestine operation in Caracas and never had authorization from the Venezuelan government to set up shop in the country, abruptly closed its doors at the end of 2010 and transferred its activities to Washington, and Miami. It was the longest running OTI operation in US history.

Clearly, funding and political support for the Venezuelan opposition has now been given a top priority and will be handled directly by the State Department.

The funds requested in the State Department’s budget for 2012 most likely will be directed towards political campaigns, since Venezuela has both key presidential and regional elections that year.

The State Department budget also requests $20 million in funding for anti-Castro groups in Miami and elsewhere to continue efforts to undermine the Cuban Revolution.

Do US taxpayers know their hard-earned dollars are going to fund political activities in other nations instead of being invested in jobs, healthcare and social programs in their own country?

February 18, 2011 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite | Leave a comment

Obama’s 2012 Budget, A Tool for Class War

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS | CounterPunch | February 18, 2011

Obama’s new budget is a continuation of Wall Street’s class war against the poor and middle class.  Wall Street wasn’t through with us when the banksters sold their fraudulent derivatives into our pension funds, wrecked Americans’ job prospects and retirement plans, secured a $700 billion bailout at taxpayers’ expense while foreclosing on the homes of millions of Americans, and loaded up the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet with several trillion dollars of junk financial paper in exchange for newly created money to shore up the banks’ balance sheets.  The effect of the Federal Reserve’s “quantitative easing” on inflation, interest rates, and the dollar’s foreign exchange value are yet to hit.  When they do, Americans will get a lesson in poverty.

Now the ruling oligarchies have struck again, this time through the federal budget. The U.S. government has a huge military/security budget.  It is as large as the budgets of the rest of the world combined. The Pentagon, CIA, and Homeland Security budgets account for the $1.1 trillion federal deficit that the Obama administration forecasts for fiscal year 2012. This massive deficit spending serves only one purpose–the enrichment of the private companies that serve the military/security complex. These companies, along with those on Wall Street, are who elect the U.S. government.

The U.S. has no enemies except those that the U.S. creates by bombing and invading other countries and by overthrowing foreign leaders and installing American puppets in their place.

China does not conduct naval exercises off the California coast, but the U.S. conducts war games in the China Sea off China’s coast. Russia does not mass troops on Europe’s borders, but the U.S. places missiles on Russia’s borders. The U.S. is determined to create as many enemies as possible in order to continue its bleeding of the American population to feed the ravenous military/security complex.

The U.S. government actually spends $56 billion a year, that is, $56,000 million, in order that American air travelers can be porno-scanned and sexually groped so that firms represented by former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff can make large profits selling the scanning equipment.

With a perpetual budget deficit driven by the military/security complex’s desire for profits, the real cause of America’s enormous budget deficit is off-limits for discussion.

The U.S. Secretary of War-Mongering, Robert Gates, declared: “We shrink from our global security responsibilities at our peril.” The military brass warns of cutting any of the billions of aid to Israel and Egypt, two functionaries for its Middle East “policy.”

But what are “our” global security responsibilities?  Where did they come from?  Why would America be at peril if America stopped bombing and invading other countries and interfering in their internal affairs?  The perils America faces are all self-created.

The answer to this question used to be that otherwise we would be murdered in our beds by “the worldwide communist conspiracy.”  Today the answer is that we will be murdered in our airplanes, train stations, and shopping centers by “Muslim terrorists” and by a newly created imaginary threat–”domestic extremists,” that is, war protesters and environmentalists.

The U.S. military/security complex is capable of creating any number of false flag events in order to make these threats seem real to a public whose intelligence is limited to TV, shopping mall experiences, and football games.

So Americans are stuck with enormous budget deficits that the Federal Reserve must finance by printing new money, money that sooner or later will destroy the purchasing power of the dollar and its role as world reserve currency.  When the dollar goes, American power goes.

For the ruling oligarchies, the question is: how to save their power.

Their answer is: make the people pay.

And that is what their latest puppet, President Obama, is doing.

With the U.S. in the worst recession since the Great Depression, a great recession that John Williams and Gerald Celente, along with myself, have said is deepening, the “Obama budget” takes aim at support programs for the poor and out-of-work.  The American elites are transforming themselves into idiots as they seek to replicate in America the conditions that have led to the overthrows of similarly corrupt elites in Tunisia and Egypt and mounting challenges to U.S. puppet governments elsewhere.

All we need is a few million more Americans with nothing to lose in order to bring the disturbances in the Middle East home to America. With the U.S. military bogged down in wars abroad, an American revolution would have the best chance of success.

American politicians have to fund Israel as the money returns in campaign contributions.

The U.S. government must fund the Egyptian military if there is to be any hope of turning the next Egyptian government into another American puppet that will serve Israel by continuing the blockade of the Palestinians herded into the Gaza ghetto.

These goals are far more important to the American elite than Pell Grants that enable poor Americans to obtain an education, or clean water, or community block grants, or the low income energy assistance program (cut by the amount that U.S. taxpayers are forced to give to Israel).

There are also $7,700 million of cuts in Medicaid and other health programs over the next five years.

Given the magnitude of the U.S. budget deficit, these sums are a pittance. The cuts will have no effect on U.S. Treasury financing needs.  They will put no brakes on the Federal Reserve’s need to print money in order to keep the U.S. government in operation.

These cuts serve one purpose: to further the Republican Party’s myth that America is in economic trouble because of the poor:  The poor are shiftless. They won’t work. The only reason unemployment is high is that the poor had rather be on welfare.

A new addition to the welfare myth is that recent middle class college graduates won’t take the jobs offered them, because their parents have too much money, and the kids like living at home without having to do anything. A spoiled generation, they come out of university refusing any job that doesn’t start out as CEO of a Fortune 500 company.  The reason that engineering graduates do not get job interviews is that they do not want them.

What all this leads to is an assault on “entitlements”, which means Social Security and Medicare. The elites have programmed, through their control of the media, a large part of the population, especially those who think of themselves as conservatives, to conflate  “entitlements” with welfare.  America is going to hell not because of foreign wars that serve no American purpose, but because people, who have paid 15 per cent  of their payroll all their lives for old age pensions and medical care, want “handouts” in their retirement years. Why do these selfish people think that working Americans should be forced through payroll taxes to pay for the pensions and medical care of the retirees?  Why didn’t the retirees consume less and prepare for their own retirement?

The elite’s line, and that of their hired spokespersons in “think tanks” and universities, is that America is in trouble because of its retirees.

Too many Americans have been brainwashed to believe that America is in trouble because of its poor and its retirees.  America is not in trouble because it coerces a dwindling number of taxpayers to support the military/security complex’s enormous profits, American puppet governments abroad, and Israel.

The American elite’s solution for America’s problems is not merely to foreclose on the homes of Americans whose jobs were sent offshore, but to add to the numbers of distressed Americans with nothing to lose the sick and the dispossessed retirees, and the university graduates who cannot find jobs that have been sent to Chine and India.

Of all the countries in the world, none need a revolution as bad as the United States, a country ruled by a handful of selfish oligarchs who have more income and wealth than can be spent in a lifetime.

~

Paul Craig Roberts was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury.  His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

February 18, 2011 Posted by | Deception, Economics, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment