Israel Lobby Pushes for US Action Against the Syrian Government
By Stephen J. Sniegoski | The Passionate Attachment | February 13, 2012
In Russia Today’s recent Crosstalk program on Syria, guest James Morris was brave enough to incisively point out the taboo fact that the Israel lobby has been in the forefront in pushing a hardline interventionist approach for the US toward that divided country. The host and the two other guests on the show pooh-poohed the idea on the grounds that (in their minds) it would not be in Israel’s national interest to topple the secular Assad regime and possibly bring about an Islamist state that could be even more hostile to Israel. But when one moves from speculation to an analysis of the actual position of members of the Israel lobby, one can see that Morris was completely correct. Moreover, Morris was completely correct in pointing out that the Israel lobby’s position has nothing to do with ending oppression, and everything to do with Israeli security, as members of the Israel lobby have perceived Israel’s interest (which might not be the same as the Crosstalk threesome.)
The neoconservatives, the vanguard of the Israel lobby, have especially been ardent in their advocacy of a hardline, interventionist position toward Syria. Evidence abounds for this finding, but it is best encapsulated by an August 2011 open letter from the neoconservative Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (an organization which claims to address any “threat facing America, Israel and the West”) to President Obama, urging him to take stronger measures against Syria. Among the signatories of the letter are such neocon luminaries as: Elliott Abrams (son-in-law of neocon “godfather” Norman Podhoretz and a former National Security adviser to President George W. Bush); the Council on Foreign Relations’ Max Boot; “Weekly Standard” editor Bill Kristol; Douglas Feith (Under Secretary of Defense for Policy under George W. Bush and an author of the “Clean Break” policy paper); Joshua Muravchik (affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute [AEI], the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, and “Commentary”); Frederick W. Kagan (AEI, co-author of the “surge” in Iraq); Robert Kagan (co-founder of the Project for the New American Century PNAC); James Woolsey (head of the CIA under Clinton and chair of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies); Randy Scheunemann (former President of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq and foreign affairs adviser to John McCain in his 2008 presidential campaign); Reuel Marc Gerecht (former Director of the Project for the New American Century’s Middle East Initiative and a former resident fellow at AEI); Michael Makovsky (advisor to the propagandistic Office of Special Plans, which was under Douglas Feith); John Hannah (senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy [WINEP] and a former national security adviser to U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney); and Gary Schmitt (AEI and former President for the Project for a New American Century).
As Morris notes in his presentation, elimination of the Assad regime in Syria was not an idea conceived by either the neocons or the broader Israel lobby; rather it can be traced back to the Israeli Likudniks, being articulated by Oded Yinon in his 1982 piece, “A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties.” In this article, Yinon called for Israel to use military means to bring about the dissolution of Israel’s neighboring states and their fragmentation into a mosaic of ethnic and sectarian groupings. Yinon believed that this would not be a difficult undertaking because nearly all the Arab states were afflicted with internal ethnic and religious divisions. In essence, the end result would be a Middle East of powerless mini-statelets that could in no way confront Israeli power. Lebanon, then facing divisive chaos, was Yinon’s model for the entire Middle East. Yinon wrote: “Lebanon’s total dissolution into five provinces serves as a precedent for the entire Arab world including Egypt, Syria, Iraq and the Arabian peninsula and is already following that track. The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique areas such as in Lebanon, is Israel’s primary target on the Eastern front in the long run, while the dissolution of the military power of those states serves as the primary short term target.” (Quoted in “The Transparent Cabal,” p. 51)
What stands out in the stark contrast to the debate taking place today is that Yinon’s rationale for eliminating the dictatorial regimes in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East had absolutely nothing to do with their oppressive practices and lack of democracy, but rather was based solely on Israel’s geostrategic interests-the aim being to permanently weaken Israel’s enemies. The neoconservatives took up the gist of the Yinon’s position in their 1996 Clean Break policy paper, whose authors included neocons Richard Perle, David Wurmser, Douglas Feith, which was presented to then incoming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It urged him to use military force against a number of Israel’s enemies, which beginning with Iraq would include “weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria.” Once again the fundamental concern was Israeli security, not liberty and democracy for the people of those countries. (“The Transparent Cabal,” p. 90)
Numerous neocons before and after 9/11 expressed the need to confront Syria in order to protect the security of both the United States and Israel, whose interests they claimed coincided. And this position on Syria was concurred in by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who, one month before the US invasion of Iraq, identified it, along with Libya and Iran, as an ideal target for future US action. Sharon stated: “These are irresponsible states, which must be disarmed of weapons [of] mass destruction, and a successful American move in Iraq as a model will make that easier to achieve.” (Quoted in “The Transparent Cabal,” p. 172)
A month after Bush’s 2004 re-election, Bill Kristol would emphasize the key position of Syria in the “war on terrorism.” He wrote in the “Weekly Standard” that because Syria was allegedly interfering with America’s efforts to put down the insurgency in Iraq, it was thus essential for the United States “to get serious about dealing with Syria as part of winning in Iraq, and in the broader Middle East.” (Quoted in “The Transparent Cabal,” pp. 253-254)
The close ties between Syria and Iran would begin to provide a fundamental reason for the neocons’ desire to take action against Syria. It was this factor that shaped neocon thinking on the Israel’s July 2006 incursion into Lebanon. Some months after the Israeli invasion, neocon Meyrav Wurmser would affirm that it was neocon influence in the Bush administration that was setting US policy on Lebanon, with the aim being a direct Israeli confrontation with Syria. “The neocons are responsible for the fact that Israel got a lot of time and space,” Wurmser stated. “They believed that Israel should be allowed to win. A great part of it was the thought that Israel should fight against the real enemy, the one backing Hizbullah. It was obvious that it is impossible to fight directly against Iran, but the thought was that its strategic and important ally should be hit.” Furthermore, “If Israel had hit Syria, it would have been such a harsh blow for Iran that it would have weakened it and [changed] the strategic map in the Middle East.” (Quoted in “The Transparent Cabal,” p. 278)
And any action by Iran to protect its Syrian ally would provide a casus belli for the United States to attack Iran, which is what the neocons sought. Michael Ledeen opined, “The only way we are going to win this war is to bring down those regimes in Tehran and Damascus and they are not going to fall as a result of fighting between their terrorist proxies in Gaza and Lebanon on the one hand, and Israel on the other. Only the United States can accomplish it.” (Quoted in “The Transparent Cabal,” p. 279)
Bill Kristol argued the same point in his article, “It’s Our War,” underscoring the need for direct American involvement in the ongoing conflict. America “might consider countering this act of Iranian aggression [arms provided to Hezbollah] with a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities.” (Quoted in “The Transparent Cabal,” p. 279)
As can be seen, the goal of eliminating the Assad Baathist regime has existed among Israeli Likudniks and the neocons for some time. And it currently propels the demand for militant action against the Syrian government. Moreover, action taken against Syria has become viewed as a way of seriously weakening Iran (perceived as a much more dangerous enemy), or even leading to war with it. That Israel might not benefit from regime change in Syria, and that some in Israel might actually fear such a development, does not alter the obvious fact that the neocons and much of the overall Israel lobby support it. And it is they who affect the policy of the United States.
Related articles
- The ‘Humanitarian’ Road to Damascus (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- Sanctioning Syria (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- Wars for Israel: a Reminder of Who Is Giving the Marching Orders (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- NGOs in Egypt: Promoting Democracy or Destabilization? (alethonews.wordpress.com)
February 13, 2012 Posted by aletho | Deception, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Israel, Syria | Leave a comment
The Dresden Holocaust – ‘A Single Column Of Flame’
Rense.com
On the evening of February 13, 1945, an orgy of genocide and barbarism began against a defenseless German city, one of the greatest cultural centers of northern Europe. Within less than 14 hours not only was it reduced to flaming ruins, but an estimated one-third of its inhabitants, possibly as many as a half a million, had perished in what was the worst single event massacre of all time.
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Toward the end of World War II, as Allied planes rained death and destruction over Germany, the old Saxon city of Dresden lay like an island of tranquillity amid desolation. Famous as a cultural center and possessing no military value, Dresden had been spared the terror that descended from the skies over the rest of the country.
In fact, little had been done to provide the ancient city of artists and craftsmen with anti-aircraft defenses. One squadron of planes had been stationed in Dresden for awhile, but the Luftwaffe decided to move the aircraft to another area where they would be of use. A gentlemen’s agreement seemed to prevail, designating Dresden an “open city.”
February 13/14 1945: Holocaust over Dresden, known as the Florence of the North. Dresden was a hospital city for wounded soldiers. Not one military unit, not one anti-aircraft battery was deployed in the city. Together with the 600.000 refugees from Breslau, Dresden was filled with nearly 1.2 million people. Churchill had asked for “suggestions how to blaze 600.000 refugees”. He wasn’t interested how to target military installations 60 miles outside of Dresden. More than 700.000 phosphorus bombs were dropped on 1.2 million people. One bomb for every 2 people. The temperature in the centre of the city reached 1600 o centigrade. More than 260.000 bodies and residues of bodies were counted. But those who perished in the centre of the city can’t be traced. Approximately 500.000 children, women, the elderly, wounded soldiers and the animals of the zoo were slaughtered in one night.
On Shrove Tuesday, February 13, 1945, a flood of refugees fleeing the Red Army 60 miles away had swollen the city’s population to well over a million. Each new refugee brought fearful accounts of Soviet atrocities. Little did those refugees retreating from the Red terror imagine that they were about to die in a horror worse than anything Stalin could devise.
Normally, a carnival atmosphere prevailed in Dresden on Shrove Tuesday. In 1945, however, the outlook was rather dismal. Houses everywhere overflowed with refugees, and thousands were forced to camp out in the streets shivering in the bitter cold.
However, the people felt relatively safe; and although the mood was grim, the circus played to a full house that night as thousands came to forget for a moment the horrors of war. Bands of little girls paraded about in carnival dress in an effort to bolster warning spirits. Half-sad smiles greeted the laughing girls, but spirits were lifted.
No one realized that in less than 24 hours those same innocent children would die screaming in Churchill’s firestorms. But, of course, no one could know that then. The Russians, to be sure, were savages, but at least the Americans and British were “honorable.”
So, when those first alarms signaled the start of 14 hours of hell, Dresden’s people streamed dutifully into their shelters. But they did so without much enthusiasm, believing the alarms to be false, since their city had never been threatened from the air. Many would never come out alive, for that “great democratic statesman,” Winston Churchill–in collusion with that other “great democratic statesman,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt–had decided that the city of Dresden was to be obliterated by saturation bombing.
What where Churchill’s motives? They appear to have been political, rather than military. Historians unanimously agree that Dresden had no military value. What industry it did have produced only cigarettes and china.
But the Yalta Conference was coming up, in which the Soviets and their Western allies would sit down like ghouls to carve up the shattered corpse of Europe. Churchill wanted a trump card–a devastating “thunderclap of Anglo-American annihilation”–with which to “impress” Stalin.
That card, however, was never played at Yalta, because bad weather delayed the originally scheduled raid. Yet Churchill insisted that the raid be carried out–to “disrupt and confuse” the German civilian population behind the lines.
Dresden’s citizens barely had time to reach their shelters. The first bomb fell at 10:09 p.m. The attack lasted 24 minutes, leaving the inner city a raging sea of fire. “Precision saturation bombing” had created the desired firestorm.
A firestorm is caused when hundreds of smaller fires join in one vast conflagration. Huge masses of air are sucked in to feed the inferno, causing an artificial tornado. Those persons unlucky enough to be caught in the rush of wind are hurled down entire streets into the flames. Those who seek refuge underground often suffocate as oxygen is pulled from the air to feed the blaze, or they perish in a blast of white heat–heat intense enough to melt human flesh.
One eyewitness who survived told of seeing “young women carrying babies running up and down the streets, their dresses and hair on fire, screaming until they fell down, or the collapsing buildings fell on top of them.”
There was a three-hour pause between the first and second raids. The lull had been calculated to lure civilians from their shelters into the open again. To escape the flames, tens of thousands of civilians had crowded into the Grosser Garten, a magnificent park nearly one and a half miles square.
The second raid came at 1:22 a.m. with no warning. Twice as many bombers returned with a massive load of incendiary bombs. The second wave was designed to spread the raging firestorm into the Grosser Garten.
It was a complete “success.” Within a few minutes a sheet of flame ripped across the grass, uprooting trees and littering the branches of others with everything from bicycles to human limbs. For days afterward, they remained bizarrely strewn about as grim reminders of Allied sadism.
At the start of the second air assault, many were still huddled in tunnels and cellars, waiting for the fires of the first attack to die down. At 1:30 a.m. an ominous rumble reached the ears of the commander of a Labor Service convoy sent into the city on a rescue mission. He described it this way:
“The detonation shook the cellar walls. The sound of the explosions mingled with a new, stranger sound which seemed to come closer and closer, the sound of a thundering waterfall; it was the sound of the mighty tornado howling in the inner city.”
MELTING HUMAN FLESH
Others hiding below ground died. But they died painlessly–they simply glowed bright orange and blue in the darkness. As the heat intensified, they either disintegrated into cinders or melted into a thick liquid–often three or four feet deep in spots.
Shortly after 10:30 on the morning of February 14, the last raid swept over the city. American bombers pounded the rubble that had been Dresden for a steady 38 minutes. But this attack was not nearly as heavy as the first two.
However, what distinguished this raid was the cold-blooded ruthlessness with which it was carried out. U.S. Mustangs appeared low over the city, strafing anything that moved, including a column of rescue vehicles rushing to the city to evacuate survivors. One assault was aimed at the banks of the Elbe River, where refugees had huddled during the horrible night.
In the last year of the war, Dresden had become a hospital town. During the previous night’s massacre, heroic nurses had dragged thousands of crippled patients to the Elbe. The low-flying Mustangs machine-gunned those helpless patients, as well as thousands of old men, women and children who had escaped the city.
When the last plane left the sky, Dresden was a scorched ruin, its blackened streets filled with corpses. The city was spared no horror. A flock of vultures escaped from the zoo and fattened on the carnage. Rats swarmed over the piles of corpses.
A Swiss citizen described his visit to Dresden two weeks after the raid: “I could see torn-off arms and legs, mutilated torsos and heads which had been wrenched from their bodies and rolled away. In places the corpses were still lying so densely that I had to clear a path through them in order not to tread on arms and legs.”
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February 12, 2012 Posted by aletho | Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes | Dresden, Germany, Winston Churchill, World War II | Leave a comment
The ICC debate: A pan-African perspective
“An international cabal of pan-African and global imperialist interests are combining forces to destabilise Africa”
By Zaya Yeebo – PAMBAZUKA NEWS – 2012-02-08
Once again, the spotlight is on Africa as four Kenyans – three political leaders and a journalist – have been indicted at the International Criminal Court (ICC). Once again, the question that has never been answered is, why Africa? And why the speed? In Anglo-Saxon parts of the world, some leaders are treated with kid gloves when they commit ‘crimes against humanity’. Others, like the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and former US President George Bush, go on to write memoirs defending their abuse of international laws.
Let us put this in context, in Ivory Coast, ex-President Laurent Gbagbo was ‘abducted’ (the words used by Jerry John Rawlings, former President of Ghana) at midnight and carted off to The Hague. In my view, his crimes remain unknown except to the French and his Ivorian adversaries. Charles Taylor (Liberia) remains in The Hague incarcerated. Now we learn that all along, the former President of Liberia may have been a CIA agent. So we can guess why the leadership of the United States would like to see him remain in The Hague. He knows too much. In the case of Libya, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and his sons were even indicted before the ICC could establish whether they had committed crimes ‘against humanity.’ Other Africans from the Democratic Republic of the Congo are also facing charges in The Hague. In the Sudan, a sitting head of state, President Omar Bashir, has also been indicted. The queue of Africans waiting to be hanged by this international court is endless.
Yet, a cursory glance at the world also tells of many crimes committed against ordinary citizens – from Palestine to Afghanistan, to Libya and, of course, Iraq. Who bears responsibility for these crimes? Are we suggesting that the lives of Iraqi, Libyan and Palestanian children and women do not matter? How come no one is facing so-called justice in The Hague?
This raises serious questions about the selective justice and double standards of the international systems of justice that is selectively applied to Africa and especially African leaders by the so-called ‘international community’. It leaves me with no option but to conclude that the ICC has become a vehicle for enforcing neocolonial interest in Africa, which members of the UN Security Council can exploit. What is even more worrying is that the ICC has become a tool in the hands of vicious African elite/politicians fighting for the national cake. All it takes is to convince the so-called international community that your opponent needs to go to The Hague. I will suggest in all seriousness that serious crimes against humanity have been committed in Libya by NATO forces, and by both sides in the post-election crisis in the Ivory Coast. But we are yet to see some action on that front. The work of the ICC will make sense, and justice will be served, if the leaders who authorised the bombing of Tripoli under the guise of UN resolutions also face the same justice that the Kenyans are supposedly going to face.
In the case of Kenya, the facts should be separated from the chaff. There was post-election violence in which over 1,000 citizens died, some under gruesome conditions. Someone or some groups bear responsibility for this. As usual, the international community, and a flaking Kenyan leadership, abdicated responsibility for punishing those responsible to a horde of international experts and UN rapporteurs with lengthy reports.
Maybe, these people did some good, but these reports are now gathering dust while all attention is paid to the antics of the chief prosecutor of the ICC Luis Moreno-Ocampo. The man now thinks he is a celebrity in Kenya. ‘Kenyans love me’, he is reported to have said. Second, the Kenyan ruling class failed to set up a local tribunal to address cases of post-election violence and historical injustices, thereby fuelling the feeling among ordinary Kenyans that the ICC route was the only way to seek justice. Third, the Kenyan elite, especially those in civil society, seem united in their view that to end ‘impunity’, they need the intervention of some foreign ‘knight in armour’ who should descend in Kenya to take out the bad guys (their leaders who are responsible for impunity). I suggest that impunity is deep-seated in Africa, and its historical and structural causes should be addressed. Impunity has colonial and neo colonial roots. The ICC can only deal with the symptoms.
In Kenya, the ICC debate, like most debates, has become a lawyers’ paradise where people talk of ‘the Rome statute’ and similar words with arrogant recklessness and self-satisfaction. That African heads of states signed up to this is ‘Rome statute’ is not in doubt, but for good reasons. Others refused. But this does not constitute a blood oath to which we are bound for life, as the juju takers in Nollywood movies suggest.
The debate about how to seek justice for the victims of the post-election violence in Kenya seems to have been relegated to a few campaigners. The internally displaced people (citizens) of Kenya are still living in IDP camps. Women who were abused have not been offered counseling or financial compensation or support to deal with the consequences of the abuse. Children of IDP families are not receiving quality primary education as their families are on the move and lack stability. Kenya is yet to heal, as the ruling elite and the so-called international community engages in futile and sometimes endless debates about ‘impunity’ and the ICC. The nongovernmental organisations and civil society have been caught up in this maze as some seek publicity for themselves and their organisations at the expense of real justice for victims. Playing to the international gallery has become the endgame in Nairobi. Who speaks for the IDPs? Who speaks for the women who were abused?
This reminds me of Sierra Leone. When I visited Freetown after the civil war, there was a lot of talk about ‘impunity’ and justice, as we are hearing today. The UN Tribunal for Sierra Leone was set up in a huge compound in Freetown as a justice centre of some sort to deal with so-called perpetrators of the civil war, nothing about the victims. It was full of young European and American lawyers recruited as ‘investigators’, with their fanciful laptops and mobile phones. All was set for justice. Down the road was an amputee camp, where amputees, real victims of the savage civil war, lived in unimaginable abject poverty. So the question I asked myself was: where is our sense of priority? Are we condemning the living, young as they are, to a life of penury, so that some octogenerian leaders can be put on trial, and for what purpose? Millions of dollars were spent on this illusive justice while the youthful victims of the civil war – ex-combatants and their families – were abandoned by the same international system which has ripped off Sierra Leone for its diamonds. Is that the African sense of justice? Many Sierra Leoneans and other West Africans had the same feeling; we could only shake our heads in disbelief. In the case of Sierra Leone, most of the so-called perpetrators died in jail awaiting trials.
I would suggest that Kenya is headed in that same direction. The broad sense of seeking social justice for victims has been pushed to the dustbin of history as people seek retribution, and settle petty political scores of a different nature. Whether the four indicted individuals deserve to be indicted by the ICC or not is for Kenyans to answer. But some of us will never know, as only those with voices and access to Kenya’s media which is embedded with powerful interests, and positions that appeal to or support the marginalisation of Africa, and the abuse of African leaders in the international system get heard. But it would be churlish and ahistorical to separate what is happening to the Kenyan four. It is part of a broader cat and mouse game of humiliating African leaders to serve the global imperialist interests of some countries, and to justify their continued plunder of the continent and its resources, a game in which Africa will always emerge as the loser.
In the case of the Kenyan four, I cannot help but feel that this is more about the impending election (2012 0or 2013), than about justice for victims. Some in the international community and their minions have suggested that some ethnic groups should be sidelined. A dangerous proposition for a country seeking to build a cohesive society.
In a contribution to Pambazuka News last year, I suggested that an international cabal of pan-African and global imperialist interests are combining forces to destabilise Africa. This is a continuation of this debate. The idea that shipping four Kenyans (Africans) to join the already high number in The Hague is somehow the best way to achieve justice does not appeal to me. My position will be the same if these four were Libyan, Nigerian, Ghanaian or Ugandan. I believe that Africa has come of age to settle its own problems. I believe that neither the US nor British governments will subject their citizens, especially, young, intelligent and committed politicians, to the sort of humiliation that the four Kenyans are being subjected to in the name of fighting impunity.
The ICC has time and time again proven that it is beholden to countries that are not even signatories to the Rome statute (for example the United States, as in the case of President Charles Taylor). Ocampo has proven that he is anti-African, that his interest is only in persecuting and prosecuting Africans because we have made ourselves vulnerable to this process. This same court which acknowledges that African countries are signatories ignores the voice of the African Union leadership – those we have elected to represent our interest as Africans. Will the ICC ignore the leaders of France, the UK, the European Union and the United States? Yet, the ICC ignored the AU in the case of Sudan, and ignored the pleas of Kenya’s Vice President who had the support of the majority of progressive thinking African leaders in the Africa Union. This underlies the contemptuous attitude towards African leaders by lower officials in international organisations. Why do we allow this to happen?
In the case of Kenya, what is even more worrying is the impact of this process on the national psyche. It destabilises the country, creates unnecessary anxiety and fuels rumours of the dangerous type. Kenyans need closure to the post-election violence if they are to build a cohesive and progressive society based on the ethic of the 2010 constitution. The intelligentsia is supposed to lead this struggle, but it is failing as they are devoid of any ideological leanings or clarity. ‘Human rights’ is treated as if it is value-free, with no ideological underpinnings. The debate about political transition in Kenya is being sidelined and made to look moribund as the country frets and is on tenterhooks awaiting decisions from the ICC. In Kenya, the ICC has been elevated to a ‘god’ with the prosecutor as some sort of deity. Dissenting voices are silenced or seen as irrelevant to this debate.
However, it is important for Africans to realise that there is no alternative to nation-building and to local processes. Neither the US nor France will abdicate such awesome responsibilities to a foreign court or subject the whole nation to such unnecessary anxiety. Africans must have the courage and steadfast belief in our ability to change the continent, to deal with abuses and seek justice on our own terms. For me, the ICC will always remain an imperialist-led institution set up to hold back the forces of progress, while undermining African institutions and our ability to deal with forces of retrogression and ‘impunity’. It is time for African leaders to take charge and not hand over the continent to some faceless ‘judges’ of the international system.
Related articles
- ICC’s Kenya decision is no cause for celebration (nation.com.pk)
February 12, 2012 Posted by aletho | Deception, Timeless or most popular | Africa, Hague, International Criminal Court, Kenya, Laurent Gbagbo, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, Sierra Leone | Leave a comment
Moscow calls to suspend US adoptions
Press TV – February 12, 2012
Moscow has called for an immediate ban on adoption of Russian children by American citizens amid the increasing number of child cruelty cases by the US adoptive parents.
In a statement issued on Saturday, Russian foreign ministry said that the adoption by US families should be suspended until the international adoption agreement signed by the two countries on July 13, 2011 comes into force.
“Against the backdrop of an unending series of crimes in the United States against Russian children, the Russian foreign ministry believes … it expedient to suspend the adoptions procedure for US citizens in the Russian Federation,” the statement said.
According to Russian authorities at least 17 Russian children have died in domestic violence incidents in their American families.
The ministry also condemned a ‘too mild’ prison sentence given to an American woman charged with brutally abusing her adopted Russian daughter. Theresa McNulty was sentenced to 23 months in prison with possibility of release within 8 months. The girl was eventually hospitalized after suffering burns to 10 percent of her body.
In 2010, a woman in the US city of Tennessee put her adopted Russian son on a plane back to Moscow alone, saying she could no longer cope with his violent behavior.
The United States has the world’s most adoptive parents and Russia has long been one of its biggest providers. US citizens have adopted nearly 50,000 Russian children since the early 1990s.
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February 12, 2012 Posted by aletho | Timeless or most popular | Adoption, Russia, United States | Leave a comment
Kosher Terrorists to be Delisted
By Gilad Atzmon | February 11, 2012
NBC reported two days ago that Israel teams up with terror group to kill Iran’s nuclear scientists.
The attacks, which have killed five Iranian nuclear scientists since 2007 and may have destroyed a missile research and development site, have been carried out in dramatic fashion, with motorcycle-borne assailants often attaching small magnetic bombs to the exterior of the victims’ cars.
Both Iranian, Israeli and Western commentators tend to believe that Israel and the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, known as the MEK are behind the terror campaign.
In 1997, the State Department listed the MEK as a terrorist group, justifying it with an unclassified 40-page summary of the organization’s activities going back more than 25 years.
But in the last few weeks the Jewish Lobby in the USA is going out of its way to support the terrorist MEK.
Watch Zionist Alan Dershowitz advocating the immediate delisting of an active terror organisation.
In the video above Zionist Dershowitz urges the U.S. government to protect the 3,400 MEK members and their families at Camp Ashraf in Iraq, about 35 miles north of Baghdad. With the departure of U.S. troops, the MEK feared that Iraqi forces, with encouragement from Iran, would attack the camp, leading to a bloodbath. One may be naïve enough to believe that Dershowitz’call is nothing but noble, yet, embarrassingly enough, the same Dershowitz, has never been caught trying to stop his beloved Jewish State from murdering Palestinians in Gaza, in the West Bank or anywhere else.
This discrepancy is far from being a coincidence. Apparently killing civilians in the name of the Jewish State must be a ‘kosher endeavour’.
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- Hebrew and English (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- Gilad Atzmon : The Zionist Caricature (middleeastatemporal.wordpress.com)
February 12, 2012 Posted by aletho | Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | Alan Dershowitz, Camp Ashraf, Gilad Atzmon, Israel, Jewish Lobby | Leave a comment
Israel’s Favourite Arab Proposes ‘A Kosovo Model for Syria’
By Maidhc Ó Cathail | The Passionate Attachment | February 12, 2012
Bill Clinton’s bombing of Serbia should serve as an inspiration, Fouad Ajami opines in the Wall Street Journal:
In this Syrian ordeal, President Obama has a similar opportunity to stop “the killing of innocents” in Homs, Hama and Deraa. The Damascus regime is living on bluster, running out of money, and relying on an army that has no faith in the mission given it or in the man at the helm. It could be brought down without a massive American commitment.
We could, with some moral clarity, recognize the Syrian National Council as the country’s legitimate government, impose a no-fly zone in the many besieged areas, help train and equip the Free Syrian Army, prompt Turkey to give greater support to defectors from Syrian units, and rally the wealthy Arab states to finance the effort.
There are risks to be run, no doubt. But at present we have only the shame of averting our eyes from Syrian massacres. If we act now, President Obama, when he pens his memoirs, could still claim vindication, or at least that he gave Homs and Hama and Deraa his best.
This is the same Middle East expert who predicted in 2002 that “after liberation in Basra and Baghdad, the streets are sure to erupt in joy.”
Like his friend Paul Wolfowitz, Ajami’s being so wrong about the consequences of the U.S. invasion of Israel’s then-enemy du jour appears not to have done his career any harm. A 2003 profile in The Nation noted that the Lebanese-born American
attached himself to such powerful patrons as Laurence Tisch, former chairman of CBS; Mort Zuckerman, the owner of US News & World Report; Martin Peretz, a co-owner of The New Republic; and Leslie Gelb, head of the Council on Foreign Relations.
No doubt Ajami’s “powerful patrons” are just as concerned as he is about the “the killing of innocents” in Syria.
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- Foolishly Ignoring the Arab League Report on Syria (alethonews.wordpress.com)
February 12, 2012 Posted by aletho | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Council on Foreign Relations, Fouad Ajami, Free Syrian Army, Syria | Leave a comment
The Host and the Parasite – How Israel’s Fifth Column Consumed America
Review of Greg Felton’s “The Host and the Parasite – How Israel’s Fifth Column Consumed America” (Video Below)
By D. Saykaly
“The Host and the Parasite” is an extraordinarily important book that traces America’s slide into fascism and subservience to a foreign power.
Felton argues persuasively that 3 groups have converged and come to dominate American policy for the benefit of Israel. Those 3 groups are: the neo-conservatives; the Republican evangelicals (Christian Zionists); and Jewish Zionists. He backs up his analysis with over 800 footnoted references to government, scholarly and media sources.
Felton refutes the traditional progressive view that Israel is merely a client state of America. If this is so, he asks, how has America come to pursue policies that are so utterly contrary to America’s own national interest while being so highly beneficial to its junior partner?
Felton also refutes the theory that ‘it’s all about oil’, arguing that the first Gulf War was the last American oil war and that the 2nd Gulf War ignored the interests of American oil companies, increased American oil costs and reduced American national security. How could this have happened? The 2nd war, he demonstrates, can only be adequately explained by the take-over of American foreign and domestic policy for the benefit of Israel.
Felton’s book integrates a remarkable range of relevant material, including:
– the decline of American republican government from Vietnam to the present;
– the rise of American fascism since the Reagan years;
– the rise of the pro-Israel lobby in America and its growing influence on the presidency from 1948 until now;
– the subjugation of America’s Congress and Senate by the pro-Israel lobby;
– the anti-democratic philosophy of Leo Strauss and its corrosive influence on America via the neo-conservative movement;
– the growth and goals of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) and other right wing think tanks;
– PNAC’s search for a new ‘Pearl Harbour’ to permit the restructuring of America;
– The Israeli foreign policy goal of dismembering Iraq to ensure Israeli regional domination;
– the demonization of Islam;
– the origins and rise of the religious right in America and its obsession with Israel;
– the planned attack on Iran that is being pushed by Israel and its proxies in America;
– the extremely gloomy prospects for America to “return to normal”.
Felton is generous in his praise of others who have explored some of this material such as John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt, Jimmy Carter and Paul Findley. Felton’s book, however, is a far more comprehensive study of the subject and integrates a much fuller range of issues and data to demonstrate the self-destructive nature of American policy in our time.
For those who imagine that America’s Mid East policy is motivated by “love of justice and democracy”, Felton reviews America’s shameful and ongoing record of supporting dictators and overthrowing democratically elected 3rd world governments.
For those who pretend that America’s Mid East policy is intended to serve America’s self-interest, Felton reviews the appalling cost to America of its pro-Israel policy: thousands of dead American soldiers; trillions of dollars of debt incurred over the years due to higher oil costs and ruinous wars; the enmity of the world; and the destruction of the American system of republican government.
And what has America gained by supporting Israel? Nothing, Felton argues, that can begin to justify the appalling cost.
The book’s cover (see above) makes it clear that ‘Israel’s 5th column’ includes secular neo-con crooks like Rumsfeld and Cheney; Christian evangelical maniacs like Bush; and Jewish Zionist power players like Perle, Feith and Wolfowitz. Together, these people have torn up the American Constitution, dedicated America to endless war, bankrupted the country and endangered its security while cynically promoting the interests of a foreign power.
Review by Harrison Koehl
The Host and the Parasite is the most comprehensive account of the rise of American fascism, its causes, facilitating factors, and implications for the future. Felton analyzes the profound effect of simplistic and authoritarian political and economic theories, in particular “Straussian” economics, in concert with equally dangerous religious fanaticism and political Zionism.
This combination of elements has created an opening for people like Bolton, Perle, Bush, and Cheney to ascend to influential leadership positions. That is, people without conscience who give full support to a foreign pathocratic regime: Israel.
Felton examines the many myths behind the justification for the Iraq war, both official and alternative, and demonstrates that none of these reasons hold up. His conclusion is the only tenable one: Iraq was invaded for the sake of Israel.
The book also has the most compact and informative account of the events of 9/11, including the stories that most other researchers ignore. That is, the Israeli spy operations in the months leading up to 9/11 and the Israeli Mossad agents that were arrested in New York on 9/11.
In short, The Host and the Parasite is a thorough and logical analysis of American foreign policy and the truth behind the “War on Terror”.
~
Greg Felton:
The Host and The Parasite (Part 1) – Click here to continue
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February 11, 2012 Posted by aletho | Book Review, Timeless or most popular, Video, Wars for Israel | Israel lobby in the United States, Project for the New American Century | Leave a comment
Ethnic Cleansing in a Zionist Fairyland
By Vacy Vlazna | Palestine Chronicle | February 10, 2012
‘De-Arabizing the history of Palestine is another crucial element of the ethnic cleansing. 1500 years of Arab and Muslim rule and culture in Palestine are trivialized, evidence of its existence is being destroyed and all this is done to make the absurd connection between the ancient Hebrew civilization and today’s Israel. The most glaring example of this today is in Silwan, (Wadi Hilwe) a town adjacent to the Old City of Jerusalem with some 50,000 residents. Israel is expelling families from Silwan and destroying their homes because it claims that king David built a city there some 3000 years ago. Thousands of families will be made homeless so that Israel can build a park to commemorate a king that may or may not have lived 3000 years ago. Not a shred of historical evidence exists that can prove King David ever lived yet Palestinian men, women, children and the elderly along with their schools and mosques, churches and ancient cemeteries and any evidence of their existence must be destroyed and then denied so that Zionist claims to exclusive rights to the land may be substantiated.’ — Miko Peled, Israeli dissident.
Indeed, archaeology has become a state apparatus for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the Zionist fairyland aka the City of David Archaeological Park located in the Palestinian village of Silwan in East Jerusalem.
East Jerusalem is the proclaimed capital of the proposed Palestine state. It was illegally annexed by Israel in the 1967 war. Prohibiting annexation of territories gained by military conquest is one of the major principles of international law. The international community does not recognise Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem nevertheless over 50,000 illegal premises have been built for 250,000 illegal Israeli colonists.
The goal of the archaeological judaisation of Jerusalem is to transform Jerusalem into the City of David, the capital of Greater Israel by eradicating the mixed ethnic composition of the Palestinian and Jewish population of East Jerusalem to a solely Jewish identity and unifying East and West Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty.
This judaising in Silwan is executed by the Israeli government, the Municipality of Jerusalem, and the rightwing colonist (settler) organisation, Elad, through the revocation of residency rights, absentee property laws, discriminatory taxation policies, home demolitions, transfer of Palestinian residents, replacing Arabic place names with Hebrew names and the expansion of settlements which Richard Falk, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, describes ‘as a form of ethnic cleansing ‘ which is defined as a crime against humanity under the statutes of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Furthermore Article 53 of the Geneva Convention states: “Any destruction by the Occupying Power of real or personal property belonging individually or collectively to private persons.is prohibited.”
Financial support for judaising programmes comes from hundreds of moneyed Zionist organisations and foundations worldwide. In 2005, archaeologist Eilat Mazar announced she had discovered the palace of King David circa 10 Century BCE. The excavations in Silwan were funded by the Shalem Center whose Zionist neocons have invested heavily in the judaisation efforts to give historicity to the David myth. Shalem’s founder, Ron Lauder of the Estee Lauder empire, is an uncompromising Zionist extremist, a Likudnik and a major shareholder in Israeli TV Channel 10 as well as the current Chairman of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) and President of the World Jewish Congress (JWC) which normalises the Israeli occupation. Curiously, in January, Abbas and Erekat had a closed meeting with Lauder in London even though the Palestinian team refused to meet with Netanyahu.
The Shalem Center has association with Sheldon Adelson, the casino billionaire who is a Likud supporter and a key financial backer of the Newt Gingrich campaign and Newt’s ‘Palestinians are an invented people’ idiocy. From 2007-9 the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies in the Shalem Center was directed by Natan Sharansky who is now Chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, a quasi-governmental organisation advancing Jewish immigration to Israel including the illegal colonies. Its 2008 the core budget was $314,760,000. The Jewish Agency was established by the World Zionist Organization (WZO) in 1929 founded on the commitment to warrant “The unity of the Jewish people, its bond to its historic homeland Eretz Yisrael, and the centrality of the State of Israel and Jerusalem, its capital “It acts as agent of the government in assigning land to Jewish colonists in the Israeli-occupied territories. Its new chairman is religious Zionist Avraham Duvdevani who served as head of the WZO’s Settlement Division, co-chairman of the board of the Jewish National Fund and a member of the Jewish Agency’s Executive. Over a quarter of WZO delegates are from Orthodox Zionists attesting to their sinister rising influence.
The Shalem Centre works closely with Elad the right-wing hardline colonist organization and militia that advocates illegal Jewish colonial settlement in East Jerusalem acquiring, in cahoots with the Jewish National Fund and its subsidiary Hemanuta, Palestinian properties often through threats, false depositions, forged documents, posthumous witness signatures and militant house takeovers.
Elad is mainly funded by the tax-exempt ‘charities’ Ir David Incorporated and the Irving Moskowitz Foundation which illegally funnel monies to Zionist political objectives. Moskowitz, the casino magnate, is a hardcore Zionist and founder of the Friends of Ateret Cohanim which finances Jews to live in East Jerusalem and owns about 70 properties in the Muslim Quarter. Daniel Luria, its chief fund-raiser commented “Our [fund-raising] activity in New York goes solely toward land redemption.” In 2005, Ateret Cohanim instigated, without license, an archaeological project tunneling 20 meters toward the Al-Aqsa compound causing damage to Palestinian homes in violation of the law.
Elad was given, without tender, exclusive control over the City of David Archaeological Park including a tunnel network that is being dug around and under the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Elad’s lucrative tours of the historic sites, although there is no historical evidence of David or Solomon’s existence, spout historical fabrications from the Jewish biblical narrative such as the Byzantine water pit that is falsified as Jeremiah’s pit. The 8000 year old Palestinian-Canaanite narrative is glossed over.
In December 2011, Australian listeners were treated to a fantasy tour of the so-called Palace of David by ABC presenter Rachael Kohn and archaeologist Avner Goren both of whom gushed forth fairytales about the mythical king absurdly comparing him to George Washington and sidestepping his dubious authenticity by urging trust in the Bible.
In archaeological circles there is an ongoing controversy about whether Biblical texts can be equated to history. In the 70s William Dever suggested that rather than Biblical Archaeology, the term Syro-Palestinian Archaeology (note not Syro-Israeli) was more appropriate and is used in academic circles.
Archaeologists who follow the Minimalist or Copenhagen school “conclude that the books of the Hebrew Bible were written during the Persian (or Hellenistic) period. The historical books actually contain made-up stories (that may have exploited some vague, ancient legends) through which the local organized refugee population provided itself with a mythic cover-(hi)story that linked it to the land and to a religion. This conclusion has two important corollaries: (1) Bible narratives about the political, social, and intellectual world of ancient Israel from Abraham to the temple’s destruction lack probative value. (2) Any narrative about what actually happened to the real people living in the central mountain areas of ancient Israel during what archaeologists call the Iron Age must, accordingly, be based on archaeological data alone. No other authentic sources for their history are available.”
It is widely accepted that the Bible originated in the 7th Century BCE, 300 years after David and other historical aberrations encompass the palaces officially ascribed to Solomon in Megiddo which are dated long after Solomon’s time. Cities conquered by Joshua in the 14th century BCE were destroyed well before that era. Daniel Gavron comments that “The story of Abraham’s journey from Ur of the Chaldees, the Patriarchs, the Exodus, Sinai, and the conquest of Canaan, all these were apparently based on legends…” In 2004, Yuval Goren admitted he examined ” a seemingly endless line of fake biblical texts of various kinds. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of such forgeries referring especially to the time of the First Temple. It will not be an exaggeration to say that the disciplines of biblical history and archaeology have been contaminated to such an extent that no unprovenanced written source seems to be reliable anymore.”
Proof of David’s existence rests on a piece of stone found at Tel Dan in northern Galilee (not Jerusalem) inscribed with the words ‘Beit David’ which could mean House of ‘David’ or ‘Beloved’ but not King David conclusively as with the sherd found at Tel Safi with the name ‘Goliath’ which “almost certainly did not belong to David’s Goliath, if it does say “Goliath” then it shows that there was such a personal name used in the region at approximately the correct chronological period.” The first ancient reference to an Israelite king is found in an 8th Century BCE Assyrian document recording “King Ahab of Israel sent 2,000 chariots and 10,000 soldiers.”
Sumud (steadfastness) life and land are synonymous in the Palestinian soul. King David may be a myth but it is the modern indigenous Palestinians, outcasts in their own land, who stand alone with the stone of sumud in their hands daily facing off the militant aliyah hordes backed by the Zionist Goliaths of multi-billion dollar empires, by Christian Zionist offerings, by the servile US Congress, by a depraved UK and EU and by a contemptibly inadequate United Nations.
– Dr. Vacy Vlazna is Coordinator of Justice for Palestine Matters. She was Human Rights Advisor to the GAM team in the second round of the Acheh peace talks, Helsinki, February 2005 and was coordinator of the East Timor Justice Lobby as well as serving in East Timor with UNAMET and UNTAET from 1999-2001.
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February 11, 2012 Posted by aletho | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | Al-Aqsa Mosque, Jerusalem, Jewish National Fund, Palestine, Shalem Center, Silwan | Leave a comment
B[elated] Broadcasting Corporation reports on ‘UK’s secret mission to beat Gaddafi’ — Silent on not-so-secret mission to beat Assad
By Maidhc Ó Cathail | The Passionate Attachment | February 11, 2012
Almost a year late, on January 19 the BBC “revealed”:
British efforts to help topple Colonel Gaddafi were not limited to air strikes. On the ground – and on the quiet – special forces soldiers were blending in with rebel fighters. This is the previously untold account of the crucial part they played.
On February 8, the Israeli intelligence-linked Debkafile reported:
British and Qatari special operations units are operating with rebel forces under cover in the Syrian city of Homs just 162 kilometers from Damascus, according to debkafile’s exclusive military and intelligence sources. The foreign troops are not engaged in direct combat with the Syrian forces bombarding different parts of Syria’s third largest city of 1.2 million. They are tactical advisers, manage rebel communications lines and relay their requests for arms, ammo, fighters and logistical aid to outside suppliers, mostly in Turkey.
This site is the first to report the presence of foreign military forces in any of the Syrian uprising’s embattled areas.
Our sources report the two foreign contingents have set up four centers of operation – in the northern Homs district of Khaldiya, Bab Amro in the east, and Bab Derib and Rastan in the north. Each district is home to about a quarter of a million people.
How long will it take before the venerable Beeb decides to report the “Inside story of the UK’s secret mission to beat Assad”?
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February 11, 2012 Posted by aletho | Deception, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | BBC, Syria | Leave a comment
Veteran US Diplomat Questions Syria Storyline
By Sharmine Narwani | Al Akhbar | 2012-02-10
The problem with US policy in the Middle East is that it now operates almost entirely at the political level: gone are the days when area experts were the heavyweights in the command center, weaving historical context, relationships and nuance into vital policy decisions.
Today you are more likely to have single-issue interest groups, commercial projects and election cycles impact key deliberations. It’s a short-term view: tactical more than strategic and black and white in its approach. Like a high-octane marketing campaign, it is heavily focused on key phrases, scene-setting, and narrative building.
The spotlight on Syria in recent weeks has been intense and the propaganda has been incessant: Regime massacres in Homs, evil Russia and China, a benevolent UN Security Council trying to save Syria, 1982’s Hama slaughter resuscitated, and an American ambassador left “disgusted” at the gall of others using veto power.
But take the hysteria down a notch or two, bring the debate back into the hands of measured, experienced observers, and the storyline may be tangibly different. Over the weekend, I had the privilege of receiving an email that reminded me of a time when area experts at the US State Department delivered honest assessments of events so that wiser decisions could be taken.
The missive was from a former US diplomat with service experience in Syria who has asked to remain unnamed. I am publishing the email below in its entirety for the benefit of readers:
I have serious problems with all the talk about military intervention in Syria. Everyone, especially the media, seems to be relying solely on anti-regime activists for their information. How do we know 260 people were killed by the regime in Homs yesterday? That number seems based solely on claims by anti-regime figures and I seriously doubt its accuracy.
I served over three years in Damascus at the US Embassy and I know how difficult it is to sort fact from rumor in that closed political society. We were constantly trying to verify rumors that we had heard about assassinations, regime arrests, etc., and that included the Agency, which was just as much in the dark as everyone else. Today, we have a skeleton embassy which I am sure is under constant surveillance and with very few personnel to go out and report on what is happening. When I was in Damascus over two years ago, I was less than impressed with the Embassy’s sources and with its understanding of the dynamics of what was going on Syria. And the same is true when I talk to officials at the State Department.
The media, and to an extent the Administration, have personalized the conflict in Syria as being about Bashar Assad and his family. They have consistently underestimated the sectarian nature of the conflict there. It is not just Bashar Assad and his family that are hanging onto power at all costs, it is the entire Alawi system of control of the country, including the military, the security services and the Baath Party. I believe that Alawites firmly think that if they lose power, the Sunnis will slaughter them, That was one reason Hafez and his brother Rifaat were so ruthless in Hama thirty years ago. And everyone in the West conveniently forgets the campaign of assassinations and suicide bombings carried out in the three or four years before Hama by the Muslim Brotherhood throughout the country. I personally witnessed the aftermath of such bombings in which several hundred people were killed. While the State Department, the CIA and other organs of government may have short historical memories, the people in Syria do not.
There have been few good analyses of the conflict in Syria. With the exception of the journalist Nir Rosen and the International Crisis Group, most reporting has been superficial and biased in favor of opponents of the regime. This is no basis on which to base policy, especially if officials in Washington are contemplating some form of military intervention. We would be opening a Pandora’s box of sectarian conflict that could easily spread to Lebanon, Israel, Kurdish areas of Iraq and elsewhere.
One irony of the current situation compared to thirty years ago is Iraq’s role. Then, we had reasonably good information that Saddam Hussein was supporting the Brotherhood with arms, explosives and facilitating the smuggling of both across the Syrian-Iraqi border. Today, the Maliki government in Baghdad appears to be supporting the Assad regime. And thirty years ago, we also had information that the Brotherhood leadership was given sanctuary in Jordan by King Hussein and in Saudi Arabia.
I don’t think we know how to play in this arena, just as we don’t understand how to play in the Afghanistan-Pakistan arena. US military intervention, whether under the guise of NATO or some other umbrella, could have serious unforeseen consequences for the US, Europe and the region. Officials in Washington should have the law of unforeseen consequences hammered into their heads every morning.
These thoughts are from a US diplomat with direct and fairly recent experience in Syria. Why don’t we ever hear similarly sober assessments from the figures in Washington? Part of the reason, of course, is the over-politicization of the policy-making process, which has long been wrested from the hands of able area experts and delivered into the arms of hawks, ideologues and politicians building campaign warchests.
It is worth mentioning that much of the US administration’s focus on Syria derives from its unhealthy fixation on Iran. In supporting Iran’s worldview that US and Israeli hegemony in the Middle East must end, Syria has put itself in the crosshairs of American policy priorities.
The New York Times’ David Sanger wrote shortly after the Arab Awakening had devoured its first two dictators, Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak:
“Every decision — from Libya to Yemen to Bahrain to Syria — is being examined under the prism of how it will affect what was, until mid-January, the dominating calculus in the Obama administration’s regional strategy: how to slow Iran’s nuclear progress, and speed the arrival of opportunities for a successful uprising there.”
Efforts to undermine Bashar Assad’s government were a longstanding policy objective, even in the years before popular revolts hit the wider Middle East in 2011. WikiLeaks has revealed a veritable goldmine of information about Washington’s interventions in Syria, which include direct US financial assistance to opposition groups.
Dirty politics and geopolitical mudslinging aside, at the heart of this matter rests an issue that is fundamental to good policy-making: When do handy narratives simply become lies that spawn bad policies?
This WikiLeaks cable from 2006 illustrates Washington’s efforts to identify “opportunities” to expose “vulnerabilities” in the Syrian regime and cause sectarian/ethnic division, discord within the military/security apparatus and economic hardship. How will the US achieve this? The cable lists a whole host of Syrian vulnerabilities to be exploited, and then recommends:
“These proposals will need to be fleshed out and converted into real actions and we need to be ready to move quickly to take advantage of such opportunities. Many of our suggestions underline using Public Diplomacy and more indirect means to send messages that influence the inner circle.”
Propagandizing the American Public
Public Diplomacy, in effect, means propaganda – which under the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 specifies the terms in which the US government can disseminate information to foreign audiences. In 1972, the Act prohibited domestic access to information intended for foreign audiences – in other words, it became illegal for the US government to propagandize Americans.
But Washington has found many ways around this. After all, US citizens need to be “on board” the myriad overseas military adventures undertaken by successive administrations. How, then, does government stay within the confines of the law while propagandizing Americans so that they are pumped up for wars (Iraq, Afghanistan, maybe Iran), weapons sales to questionable allies (Saudi Arabia and Israel), and human rights violations (Guantanamo, drones)?
The fake story of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) targeting the US and its allies was an essential narrative in the build-up to military intervention in Iraq. Recall then-Secretary of State Colin Powell’s testimony about evidence of Saddam’s WMD activities and President George W. Bush’s State of the Union speech when he falsely accused Iraq of procuring yellowcake uranium from Niger – the media scrutiny of these statements was wholly justified: it is illegal to lie to the American people.
Officials are careful about how they circumvent the restrictions of Smith-Mundt. The quickest way to feed Americans inaccurate, tainted or sometimes entirely false information is through “leaks.” Peruse any newspaper of record in Washington, New York or Los Angeles and you will see the foreign news sections chock full of leaks from “officials.”
The internet, too, is a natural playground for the dissemination of disinformation. Its vast reach across the globe, its millions of blogs with varying credibility – these lend themselves well to the game of public diplomacy.
Powell’s former Chief of Staff Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson – another ex-official who has spoken candidly about policy and process shortcomings since leaving his post – told me in April 2010: “(Defense Secretary Donald) Rumsfeld and others, for example, just ignored the law. They would put a story in a Sydney newspaper, for example, and then ‘internet it’ back to the United States. So you’re propagandizing the American people.”
Wilkerson insists: “we have a statutory divergence that needs to be fixed first – legislation that says you can’t mix public affairs, which is aimed at the American people, and public diplomacy, which is aimed at the international audience. We need to stop propaganda, period. We need to tell the truth. I understand we don’t give out state secrets, but why don’t we tell the truth?”
The problem with foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, is ultimately about the kinds of people making the decisions – ideologues with clear agendas: against Iran and for Israel; against the Syrian “dictator” but in favor of the Saudi, Bahraini, Yemeni, Qatari ones; against Iranian nuclear capability, defending 200 nukes in Israel; abusing UN veto power (80+ times), deriding others for exercising a veto (Russia, China), and so on and so forth.
“It’s broken – it’s utterly dysfunctional,” Wilkerson says about the decision-making process in government: “They put ideologues in to corral, corner, orchestrate, cajole, push, wheedle the civil servants into doing something that they think ought to be done.”
Back to Syria.
A reporter from a major western cable news network just emailed me about his visit to Syria: “I got back from Homs last month unconvinced that the country was rising up against the Assad regime, and far from convinced that there are any good guys.”
Very little is known about what’s going on in the country. And it is not necessarily because there is limited media there: the Arab League mission report lists 147 foreign and Arab media organizations in Syria. The reason we still do not know what is taking place in Homs is because there is a ferocious battle for narratives between two rigid political mindsets. And the current dominant narrative is the one coming out of Washington – which, according to Wikileaks, has been waiting for “opportunities” to seize upon “vulnerabilities” to undermine the regime of Bashar Assad.
Not give us the truth, mind you. But to pursue a policy objective that US citizens have not agreed upon because they are unaware of the facts.
Sharmine Narwani is a commentary writer and political analyst covering the Middle East. You can follow Sharmine on twitter @snarwani.
February 10, 2012 Posted by aletho | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | Homs, International Crisis Group, Middle East, Syria, United States Department of State | Leave a comment
UK helps Israel steal Palestinian water
Press TV – February 10, 2012
Britain has decided to help the Israeli regime steal water from Palestinians, while even the Israeli press describe the act as a ‘water occupation.’
British Water, which represents the UK water industry supply chain, signed an agreement with Israel in December which received no media coverage. The agreement was not even published on British Water’s website. However, the Israeli regime’s embassy in London proudly reported the agreement.
This comes as Israel’s 400-mile apartheid wall illegally encloses key water supplies. The International Court of Justice at The Hague ruled the apartheid wall is ‘contrary to international law’ and that “all States are under an obligation not to recognize the illegal situation resulting from the construction of the wall and not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by such construction.”
Israel’s apartheid wall is not even built along the so-called Green Line which itself is not a legal and official border. It bites deep into the occupied Palestinian West Bank and its construction is aimed at stealing Palestinians’ water and selling them their own water at an inflated price.
Palestinians have no access to the Jordan River because of the Israeli regime’s closures. Moreover, during the Gaza Massacre in 2008, Israel destroyed more than 30 kilometers of water networks and 11 water wells in a ‘deliberate and systematic’ manner, as described by a UN Fact Finding Mission.
Despite the establishment of a Joint Water Committee, which was set up to secure water supply to Palestinians, Israel was given veto power.
This way, Palestinians are forced to buy their own water, which is extracted from wells within their own land.
Although between 100 and 150 liters of water per day are necessary to meet health needs, an individual in marginalized Palestinian communities in the Occupied West Bank live on less than 20 liters of water a day. This comes as an average Israeli consumes 280 liters of Palestinians’ water each day.
Britain’s complicity with Israel in robbing the Palestinians of their water comes as even the Israeli newspaper Haaretz admitted that “some 450,000 [illegal] Israeli settlers on the [Occupied] West Bank use more water than the 2.3 million Palestinians that live there.”
The newspaper even considered the situation as a ‘water occupation’ that the Israeli regime has launched against the Palestinian people.
Given the bigger picture of the establishment of the Zionist state which would not be possible without Arthur Balfour, Britain’s foreign secretary from 1916 to 1919, and the UK Trade and Investment Department’s commitment to benefit Israel such acts on the part of Britain are not unexpected.
“In Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country. The four powers are committed to Zionism and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now occupy that land,” said Balfour in his Balfour Declaration back in 1917.
Balfour’s comments were made as Britain had promised “the 700,000 Arabs” that had “occupied the land” independence in return for their assistance in defeating the Ottoman-German Alliance in World War I.
However, after “Turks were smitten,” as described by Stephen Ostrander, the British government gave no thought to its promise as it surrendered Palestine for the establishment of a Zionist state.
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February 10, 2012 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Balfour, Zionism | Leave a comment
Executive Excess in the New Gilded Age
What’s Driving Economic Inequality
By SARAH ANDERSON | CounterPunch | February 9, 2012
Let me begin with the good news. Our nation has tackled this problem before — and successfully so. A century ago, during the original “Gilded Age,” we experienced extremely high levels of inequality, levels comparable to those we are seeing today. Over the span of several decades, policymakers, backed by strong labor unions and other social movements, turned that inequality around. Through fair taxation and effective social programs and standards, we had achieved much lower levels of inequality by the middle of the twentieth century. We had laid the foundation for a strong and stable economy and put in place a middle class that was broader than any the world had ever seen. There is much to learn from that experience.
Executive compensation as a key driver of inequality
The Institute for Policy Studies has particular expertise in one aspect of our nation’s drift into deep and extreme inequality: executive compensation.
For nearly 20 years, we at IPS have been publishing an annual analysis of the upward spiral in CEO pay. Our Executive Excess series has helped track and explain this trend, which has contributed significantly to the rising share of national income that flows to our nation’s top 1 percent. Increases in executive compensation do not tell the whole story behind our growing economic divide, but they do offer an important lens into the broader problem.
Some select indicators of just how disproportionately large rewards for executives have become: The ratio between CEO and worker pay has risen from 42-to-1 in 1980 to 107-to-1 in 1990 to 325-to-1 in 2010.1
Average compensation for S&P 500 CEOs reached $10.8 million in 2010, more than six times the level for large company CEOs in 1980, after taking inflation into account, and triple the level in 1990.2
Executives and financial professionals account for 70 percent of the increase in the share of national income going to the top 0.1 percent between 1979 and 2005.3 Combined compensation for the top five executives by corporate enterprise increased as an average percentage of corporate profits from 5 percent in the period 1993-1995 to nearly 10 percent in the period 2001-2003.4
Why should policymakers be concerned about excessive executive compensation?
1. Excessive compensation encourages executive behavior that harms the broader economy
Over nearly two decades, my colleagues and I at the Institute for Policy Studies have examined how extremely high levels of compensation affect executive behavior. Such massive jackpots, we’ve found, give executives incentives to behave in ways that may boost short-term profits and expand their own paychecks at the expense of our nation’s long-term economic health.
Among our research findings:
- In last year’s annual Executive Excess report, we looked at the intersection between executive compensation and tax dodging. We found that among the top 100 highest-paid CEOs in 2010, 25 had made more in personal compensation than their companies had paid in federal income taxes.5
- In 2010, we found that CEOs of the 50 firms that had laid off the most workers since the onset of the economic crisis had made nearly $12 million on average, 42 percent more than the CEO pay average at S&P 500 firms as a whole.6
- In 2009, we found that the top five executives at the 20 banks that had accepted the most federal bailout dollars had averaged $32 million each in personal compensation during the three years leading up to the 2008 meltdown.7
- In 2004, we found that CEOs at companies which had outsourced the most U.S. jobs to other countries were rewarded with bigger paychecks than their peers. Average CEO compensation at the 50 firms that had outsourced the most service jobs increased by 46 percent in 2003, compared to a 9 percent average increase for all large company CEOs. Top outsourcers earned an average of $10.4 million, 28 percent more than the average CEO compensation of $8.1 million.8
- In 2002, we found that top executives at 23 companies under government investigation for their accounting practices had earned far more during the preceding three years than average CEOs. CEOs at the firms under investigation had earned an average of $60.1 million during 1999-2001, 65 percent more than the average of $36.5 million for all leading executives for that period.9
Tax dodging, mass layoffs, reckless financial deals, offshoring jobs, “creative accounting”—all of these appear to boost CEO pay. But they have dealt one body blow after another to the American middle class, leaving a deeply skewed distribution of income and wealth.
2. Extreme CEO-worker pay gaps undermine business enterprise effectiveness
Our nation’s long-term economic health depends to a great extent on the effectiveness of our U.S. enterprises. A growing body of research indicates that extreme inequality within firms leaves enterprises less productive and effective. A Stanford University review of several studies found that organizations with highly differentiated pay between top and bottom earners tended to experience a decline in employee morale and job satisfaction.10 Another study showed that in corporations with relatively narrow pay gaps, employees tended to produce higher quality products.11 Additional research indicates that wide pay gaps lead to higher employee turnover rates.12
John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, limits his cash compensation to no more than 19 times the average for workers at his firm. In the Harvard Business Review, he wrote “Because of the yawning gap between the leaders and the led, employee morale is suffering, talented performers’ loyalty is evaporating, and strategy and execution is suffering at American companies.”13
Peter Drucker, the father of modern management theory, pointed out in the early 1980s that in any hierarchy, every level of bureaucracy must be compensated at a higher rate than the level below. The more levels, the higher the pay at the top. This gives CEOs a personal interest in maintaining rigid hierarchies that are disempowering for workers. Drucker’s solution was to limit executive pay to no more than 20 times the compensation of their employees.14 A landmark Brookings Institution report by David Levine supported this general view, stating “large differences in status can inhibit participation.”15
Jim Collins, the author of several best-selling books on management science, spent five years trying to determine “what it takes” to turn an average company into a “great” one. He eventually identified 11 firms that had successfully generated off-the-charts stock returns over 15 years. Not a single one had a high-paid CEO. A celebrity CEO, Collins wrote, turns a company into “one genius with 1,000 helpers.”16
Recent reforms to address excessive executive compensation
Executive pay is not just an issue for shareholders. As the Wall Street meltdown made vividly clear, excessive pay packages contribute to a reckless corporate culture that endangers the well-being of the broader public. Responsible action is needed to encourage more rational pay practices.
Dodd-Frank Pay Reforms: In the wake of the 2008 crash, Congress did include a number of modest executive compensation provisions in the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. One of the most innovative of these provisions, Section 953b, requires all U.S. corporations to compute and report the ratio between CEO and median employee pay. This disclosure requirement will improve information available for shareholders and the public on a metric fundamental to enterprise success. Hopefully, it will also encourage corporate boards to narrow this gap by raising median worker pay and/or reducing pay at the top.17
However, in the face of an intense backlash from corporate lobby groups, the SEC has delayed implementation of this new law. Regulators are facing strong pressure to water down several additional Dodd-Frank pay provisions, including Section 956, which would give regulators the power to prohibit pay packages for financial executives that encourage inappropriate risks.
Limits on the Tax Deductibility of Executive Pay: Congress also set an important precedent in the Troubled Asset Relief Program by establishing a $500,000 cap on the tax deductibility of executive compensation at bailout firms. A similar provision was included in the 2010 health care reform legislation with regard to health insurance companies. These provisions took an important step towards filling a loophole in the tax code that encourages excessive pay.
Currently, there are no meaningful limits on how much corporations can deduct from their taxes for the expense of executive compensation. The more they pay their CEO, the more they can deduct from their taxes. Other taxpayers bear the brunt of this loophole, either through the increased taxes needed to fill the revenue gaps or through cutbacks in public spending. A tax deductibility cap on executive compensation should be established for all corporations. Ideally, it would deny all firms tax deductions on any executive pay that runs over 25 times the pay of a firm’s lowest-paid employee or $500,000, whichever is higher.
A broader agenda to reverse extreme inequality
While Congress has made some small steps forward in recent years, much more needs to be done to rein in executive pay, as part of a broader effort to reverse extreme inequality. This broad agenda will need to include initiatives to lift up the bottom through living wages and more accessible high-quality health care and education, as well as efforts to address corporate concentration, campaign finance laws, and other obstacles to shared prosperity. But a look back at the previous era’s efforts to tackle inequality reveals that one of those reformers most important tools was progressive taxation.
In the middle of the last century, the U.S. tax system did a great deal to offset maldistributions of income and wealth. A major reason corporate boards did not compensate executives at such exorbitant levels during that period was that the bulk of that excessive pay would have simply been taxed away.
During the 1950s and early 1960s, the top marginal tax rate on income over $400,000 a year (the equivalent of less than $3 million today) faced a tax rate just over 90 percent. During that time, the share of the nation’s total pre-tax income going to the top 1% hovered around 10 percent, according to one academic study.18 As taxes on the wealthy have declined over the past 50 years, we’ve seen a steady increase in wealth and income concentration at the top. Today, with a top marginal rate of only 35 percent, the top 1% enjoy more than 20 percent of the nation’s income.19 Not only did the “high-tax” decades coincide with lower inequality rates, they were also marked by relatively high GDP growth rates.
A recent report by the Congressional Budget Office found similar trends towards rising inequality in after-tax income during the period 1979-2007. According to their calculations, the top 1 percent of the population with the highest income saw an increase in their average real after-tax household income of 275 percent during this period, compared to only 65 percent for the rest of the highest quintile (the 81st through 99th percentiles); 37 percent for the population in the middle of the income scale (the 21st through 80th percentiles); and 18 percent for the lowest quintile.20
Preferential treatment and loopholes have allowed the richest Americans to pay far less than the statutory tax rates. The richest 400 U.S. taxpayers have seen their effective tax rate decline from over 40 percent of their income in 1961 to just 18.1 percent in 2010.21 In 2009, the most recent data available, 1,500 millionaires paid no income taxes, largely because they made use of off-shore tax schemes, according to the Internal Revenue Service.22
Key elements of tax reform to reverse extreme inequality
This section draws heavily from the forthcoming book by my Institute for Policy Studies colleague Chuck Collins, 99 to 1: How Wealth Inequality is Wrecking the World and What We Can Do About It (Berrett-Koehler, March 2012).
New income tax brackets for the 1 percent. Under our current tax rate structure, households with incomes over $350,000 pay the same top income tax rate as households with incomes over $10 million. In the 1950s, there were 16 additional tax rates over the highest rate (35 percent) that we have today.
A tax on financial speculation. The richest 1 percent of Americans contributed to the 2008 economic meltdown by moving vast amounts of wealth into the speculative shadow banking system. Our society is still paying the mammoth social costs of this meltdown — through home foreclosures, unemployment, and the destruction of personal savings. A modest federal tax on every transaction that involves the buying and selling of stocks and other financial products would both generate substantial revenue and dampen short-term speculation. For ordinary investors, the cost would be negligible. A financial speculation tax would amount to a tiny insurance fee to protect against financial instability.
A higher tax rate on income from wealth. Giving tax advantages to income from wealth also encourages short-term speculation. With carefully structured rate reform, we can end this preferential treatment for capital gains and dividends and, as Warren Buffett and other analysts have noted, encourage long-term investing.
A progressive estate tax on the fortunes of the 1 percent. The wealthiest Americans have all benefited from generations of investments in pubic goods that have left the United States with an infrastructure — in everything from education and roads to dispute resolution — that enables wealth creation. Our wealthy have a responsibility to give back to the society that has given them so much. The current estate tax on inherited wealth stands at 35 percent and only applies to estates over $5 million ($10 million for a couple). Congress could raise additional revenue from those with the greatest capacity to pay by establishing a progressive estate tax with graduated rates and a 10 percent surtax on the value of an estate above $500 million, or $1 billion for a couple.
An end to tax haven abuse. By one estimate, the use of tax havens by corporations and wealthy individuals costs the federal treasury $100 billion a year.23 These havens are transferring wealth out of local communities into the foreign bank accounts of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful.24 Tax havens, or more accurately “secrecy jurisdictions,” can also facilitate criminal activity, from drug money laundering to the financing of terrorist networks.
A wealth tax on the top 1 percent. A “net worth tax” could be levied on household assets, including real estate, cash, investment funds, savings in insurance and pension plans, and personal trusts. Such a tax could be calibrated to tax wealth only above a certain threshold. For example, France’s solidarity tax on wealth only kicks in on asset value in excess of $1.1 million.
The elimination on the cap on social security withholding taxes. Extending the payroll tax to cover all wages, not just wage income up to $110,100, would be an important step. Some of our richest Americans are done paying withholding taxes in January, while ordinary working people pay all year.
Conclusion
Our current levels of extreme inequality did not suddenly appear. They have grown steadily over the past 30 years. Reversing this inequality trend will be a long-term challenge. But we have transformed a highly divided nation into a more stable and equitable society before. We can certainly do it again.
Sarah Anderson is director of the Institute for Policy Studies’ Global Economy Project.
NOTES
1 Figures from 1980 and 1990 are from BusinessWeek, April 26, 1993. Figure for 2010 is from Sarah Anderson, Chuck Collins, Scott Klinger, Sam Pizzigati, “Executive Excess 2011: The Massive CEO Rewards for Tax Dodging,” Institute for Policy
2 Ibid.
3 The share of national income (excluding capital gains) received by the top 0.1 percent increased from 2.83 percent in 1979 to 7.34 percent in 2005. Source: Jon Bakija, Adam Cole, and Bradley T. Heim, “Jobs and Income Growth of Top Earners and the Causes of Changing Income Inequality: Evidence from U.S. Tax Return Data,” National Bureau of Economic Research, October 2010. Available at: http://www.nber.org/public_html/confer/2010/PEf10/Bakija_Heim_Cole.pdf
4 Lucian A. Bebchuk and Yaniv Grinstein, “The Growth of Executive Pay,” Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Summer 2005. Available at: http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/bebchuk/pdfs/Bebchuk-Grinstein.Growth-of-Pay.pdf
5 Sarah Anderson, Chuck Collins, Scott Klinger, and Sam Pizzigati, “Executive Excess 2011: The Massive CEO Rewards for Tax Dodging,” Institute for Policy Studies, August 31, 2011. Available at: http://www.ips-dc.org/reports/executive_excess_2011_the_massive_ceo_rewards_for_tax_dodging/
6 Sarah Anderson, Chuck Collins, Sam Pizzigati, and Kevin Shih, “Executive Excess 2010: CEO Pay and the Great Recession,” Institute for Policy Studies, September 1, 2010. Available at: http://www.ips-dc.org/reports/executive_excess_2010
7 Sarah Anderson, John Cavanagh, Chuck Collins, and Sam Pizzigati, “Executive Excess 2009: America’s Bailout Barons,” Institute for Policy Studies, September 2, 2009. Available at: http://www.ips-dc.org/reports/executive_excess_2009
8 Sarah Anderson, John Cavanagh, Chris Hartman, and Scott Klinger, “Executive Excess 2004: Campaign Contributions, Outsourcing, Unexpensed Stock Options and Rising CEO Pay,” Institute for Policy Studies, August 31, 2004. Available at: http://www.ips-dc.org/reports/executive_excess_2004
9 Sarah Anderson, John Cavanagh, Chris Hartman, Scott Klinger, and Holly Sklar, “Executive Excess 2002: CEOs Cook the Books, Skewer the Rest of Us,” Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy, August 26, 2002. Available at: http://www.ips-dc.org/reports/executive_excess_2002_ceos_cook_the_books_skewer_the_rest_of_us
10 Jeffrey Pfeffer, “Human Resources from an Organizational Behavior Perspective: Some Paradoxes Explained,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 21, 2007. Available at: http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.21.4.115
11 Douglas Cowherd and David Levine, “Product Quality and Pay Equity Between Lower-Level Employees and Top Management,” Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 37, 1992. Available at: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m4035/is_n2_v37/ai_12729185/
12 Matt Bloom and John Michel, “The Relationships Among Organizational Context, Pay Dispersion, and Managerial Turnover,” Academy of Management Journal, 2002. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/pss/3069283 See also James Wade, Charles O’Reilly III and Timothy Pollock, “Overpaid CEOs and Underpaid Managers: Fairness and Executive Compensation,” Organization Science, 2006. Available at: http://test.scripts.psu.edu/users/t/x/txp14/pdfs/os06.pdf
13 John Mackey, “Why Sky-High CEO Pay Is Bad Business,” Harvard Business Review, June 17, 2009. Available at: http://blogs.hbr.org/hbr/how-to-fix-executive-pay/2009/06/why-high-ceo-pay-is-bad-business.html
14 Peter F. Drucker, The Changing World of the Executive. New York: Times Books, 1982, p. 22.
15 David I. Levine, Reinventing the workplace: how business and employees can both win. Brookings Institution Press, April 1, 1995, p. 53.
16 Jim Collins, “Good to Great,” Fast Company, October 2001. Available at: http://www.jimcollins.com/article_topics/articles/good-to-great.html
17 See: Institute for Policy Studies Comments to the SEC on Section 953(b) of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, March 16, 2011. Available at: http://www.sec.gov/comments/df-title-ix/executive-compensation/executivecompensation-62.pdf
18 Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913-1998,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 118(1), 2003. Updated at http://emlab.berkeley.edu/users/saez.
19 Ibid.
20 Congressional Budget Office, “Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007,” October 2011. Available at: http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/124xx/doc12485/10-25-HouseholdIncome.pdf
21 Sam Pizzigati, “The New Forbes 400— and Their $1.5 Trillion,” Institute for Policy Studies, September 25, 2011. Available at: http://inequality.org/forbes-400-15-trillion.
22 Amy Bingham, “Almost 1,500 millionaires Do Not Pay Income Tax,” ABC News, August 6, 2011. Available at: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/1500-millionaires-pay-income-tax/story?id=14242254#.TrwQYWDdLwN
23 U.S. Senate, “Tax Haven Banks and U.S. Tax Compliance,” Staff report, Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, July 17, 2008. See: http://hsgac.senate.gov/public/_files/071708PSIReport.pdf
24 Nicholas Shaxson, Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens, 2010. See: http://treasureislands.org/
This article is adapted from Sarah Anderson’s testimony to the Senate Budget Committee on Inequality, Mobility, and Opportunity, from Sarah Anderson, Global Economy Program Director
February 9, 2012 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Economics, Timeless or most popular | Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, Executive pay | Leave a comment
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