Lying About the Harlem Protest Against Obama
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford | January 24, 2012
Last Thursday’s demonstration, in New York’s Harlem, against President Obama’s foreign and domestic policies was a great success, with about 400 protesters massed across the street from an Obama fundraiser at the Apollo Theater. But, you would not know that from reading the Daily Kos or In These Times, or from watching Democracy Now! That’s because these outfits represent the left flank of Obama’s apologists and protectors, whose self-assigned job is to perpetuate the fantasy that the First Black President is not a servant of Wall Street and the Pentagon. These publications and programs are also in thrall to another fantasy: that they have some kind of entree or influence with the Obama administration, when in fact, this White House is an annex of finance capital.
Nellie Bailey, the veteran Harlem organizer and member of Occupy Harlem, has already set the record straight: that this was a Black-led demonstration called for by Occupy Harlem, which enlisted the support of the larger Occupy Movement, Stop Stop-and-Frisk, MoveOn, the Black Is Back Coalition, and other progressive organizations. The turnout was larger than even the organizers had hoped, and heavily Black and Latino. But Democracy Now!, whose politics has undergone a palpable turn to the right during Obama’s time in office, told its audience that only about 100 people protested, when in reality, the MoveOn section of the demonstration alone approached that number. In this sense, Democracy Now! is worse than the police at reporting demonstrations it doesn’t support.
Daily Kos, which often behaves like an arm of the administration, published the rantings of someone calling himself Brooklyn Bad Boy, who admits he isn’t a “fan of street protests” but goes ballistic over the effrontery of protesting Obama. He claims the demonstrators ignore the pro-banker policies of Republican candidates. But then, the Brooklyn Bad Boy doesn’t show up at too many demonstrations, by his own admission, so how would he know? No matter, his pro-Obama stance qualifies for space on Daily Kos.
Allison Kilkenny’s In These Times article was the most insidious example of a hit-piece. She offered no crowd estimate, but made reference to a “handful” of Occupy Wall Street activists, thus belittling the turnout. Much worse, Kilkenny highlighted the uninvited presence of a few Lyndon LaRouche supporters in order to tar the whole demonstration – as if Occupy Harlem can dictate who shows up on the street. Then Kilkenny – a white woman – argues that white people from Occupy Wall Street should have stayed away from Harlem, on the grounds that their presence did not take “into account the city’s tense race relations” and the fierce gentrification of the neighborhood – gentrification fueled by Wall Street bankers.
As Occupy Harlem’s Nellie Bailey writes, Kilkenny is talking like old school southern white racists, accusing whites in Occupy Wall Street of being “outside agitators.” Kilkenny doesn’t think Black progressives have the right to ask white and Latino progressives to attend Black-led demonstrations in Black neighborhoods. She wants a segregated Occupy Wall Street movement, in which Blacks that oppose Obama’s corporate policies would get no meaningful solidarity from whites in the movement. Or, maybe she’ll just say anything to avoid confronting the corporate president.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
Obama Satisfies Jewish Supporters with Vow to Prevent ‘Nuclear Iran’
Al-Manar | January 25, 2012
US President Barack Obama satisfied Jewish supporters in his State of the Union address on Tuesday his with his administration’s determination to “prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon and will take no options off the table to achieve that goal”.
“A peaceful resolution of the Iran nuclear dispute is still possible if Iran changes course and meets international obligations,” Obama said in a speech largely devoted to the US economy.
He addressed Syrian President Bashar Assad saying Assad would discover that “forces of change cannot be reversed.”
The US President voiced his commitment to the Zionist entity’s security something that would soothes his Jewish supporters.
“Our ironclad commitment to Israel’s security has meant the closest cooperation between our countries in history,” Obama stated.
Obama’s Israel commitment lauded
U.S. Jewish democrats on Wednesday praised Obama’s address, saying that it was an endorsement of ‘Jewish Values’.
In a statement released by the National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC) in response to his speech, the NJDC said that the “iron-clad” commitment to Israeli security, and the guarantee that the Obama administration was determined to prevent Iran from obtaining ‘nuclear weapons’ expressed in the address, “speak volumes” about Obama’s record as President.
“On two foreign policy issues of special concern to the American Jewish community, Israel and Iran, President Obama’s words tonight speak volumes,” the statement said.
Overall, they said, his speech reflected “the policy concerns of the vast majority of American Jews. We thank and congratulate the President for this positive, proactive approach to addressing those concerns in tonight’s State of the Union Address.”
Related articles
- Obama: ‘No options off the table’ on Iran (thejc.com)
The High Costs of Nuclear Arsenals
Instruments of Annihilation
By DAVID KRIEGER | November 2, 2011
Nuclear weapons are costly in many ways. They change our relationship to other nations, to the earth, to the future and to ourselves.
In the mid-1990s a group of researchers at the Brookings Institution did a study of US expenditures on nuclear weapons. They found that the US had spent $5.8 trillion between 1940 and 1996 (in constant 1996 dollars).
This figure was informally updated in 2005 to $7.5 trillion from 1940 to 2005 (in constant 2005 dollars). Today the figure is approaching $8 trillion, and that amount is for the US alone.
There are currently nine countries with a total of over 20,000 nuclear weapons, spending $105 billion annually on their nuclear arsenals and delivery systems. That will amount to more than $1 trillion over the next decade. The US accounts for about 60 percent of this amount.
The World Bank has estimated that $40 to $60 billion in annual global expenditures would be sufficient to meet the eight agreed-upon United Nations Millennium Development Goals for poverty alleviation by 2015.
Meeting these goals would eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; achieve universal primary education; promote gender equality/empowerment; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; combat HIV/AIDS and other diseases; ensure environmental sustainability; and develop partnerships for development.
The US is now spending over $60 billion annually on nuclear weapons and this is expected to rise to average about $70 billion annually over the next decade. The US spends more than the other eight nuclear weapons states combined.
We are now planning to modernize our nuclear weapons infrastructure and also our nuclear weapons and their delivery systems. This was part of the deal that President Obama agreed to for getting the New START agreement ratified in the Senate. It may prove to be a bad bargain.
The US foreign aid contribution in 2010 was $30 billion; in the same year, we spent $55 billion on our nuclear arsenal. Which expenditures keep us safer?
Another informative comparison is with the regular annual United Nations budget of $2.5 billion and the annual UN Peacekeeping budget of $7.3 billion. UN and Peacekeeping expenditures total to about $10 billion, which is less than one-tenth of what is being spent by the nine nuclear weapon states for maintaining and improving their nuclear arsenals.
The annual UN budget for its disarmament office (United Nations Office of Disarmament Affairs) is $10 million. The nuclear weapons states spend more than that amount on their nuclear weapons every hour. Or, to put it another way, the nine nuclear weapons states annually spend 10,000 times more for their nuclear arsenals than the United Nations spends to pursue all forms of disarmament, including nuclear disarmament.
The one place the US is saving money on its nuclear weapons is where it should be spending the most, and that is on the dismantlement of the retired weapons. The amount that the US spends on dismantlement of its nuclear weapons has dropped significantly under the Obama administration from $186 million in 2009 to $96 million in 2010 to $58 million in 2011. In the 1990s the US dismantled more than 1,000 nuclear weapons annually. We dismantled 648 weapons in 2008 and only 260 in 2010.
The US has about 5,000 nuclear weapons awaiting dismantlement, which, at the current rate of dismantlement, will take the US about 20 years. There are another 5,000 US nuclear weapons that are either deployed or held in reserve.
Beyond being very costly to maintain and improve, nuclear weapons have changed us and cost us in many other ways.
They have undermined our respect for the law. How can a country respect the law and be perpetually engaged in threatening mass murder?
These weapons have also undermined our sense of reason, balance and morality. They are designed to kill massively and indiscriminately – men, women and children.
They have increased our secrecy and undermined our democracy. Can you put a cost on losing our democracy?
Uranium mining, nuclear tests and nuclear waste storage for the next 240,000 years have incalculable costs. They are a measure of our hubris, as are the weapons themselves.
Nuclear weapons – perhaps more accurately called instruments of annihilation – require us to play Russian Roulette with our common future. What is the cost of threatening to foreclose the future? What is the cost of actually doing so?
Related article
Why Obama’s “new thinking” initiative on Middle East peace is doomed to fail
By Lawrence Davidson | January 22, 2011
According to Laura Rozen, a journalist specializing in foreign policy matters and writing in Politico (13 January 2011), the Obama administration is seeking “new ideas from outside experts on how to advance the peace process” in the Middle East. This is because the president and his counsellors are “utterly stuck” following the failure of last year’s efforts to strong-arm Mahmoud Abbas and bribe Binyamin Netanyahu into negotiations. Quoting an administration consultant, Rozen tells us “there is no pretence of progress. With the State of the Union coming up and the new GOP [Grand Old Party – the Republican Party] Congress, they [the administration] are taking a few weeks to regroup and solicit ideas to push forward and … to give a real jump-start” to the negotiation process”.
On the surface this would appear to be welcome news. The White House entourages having this revelation that their process, and that of their predecessors too, have all failed and so we need some new, progressive thinking about peace in the Holy Land. Maybe there should be a new approach that would play to the leverage the US can bring to bear on both parties (and not just the Palestinians). But then Rozen proceeds (in a completely dead pan style) to explain to us how the administration is going about its search for “new ideas from outside experts”.
Two separate efforts have been set up to brainstorm these new ideas:
1. “One task force has been convened by Sandy Berger and Stephen Hadley”. Who are they? Berger was national security adviser to Bill Clinton. He was a “prominent actor at the Camp David 2000 Summit”. What about Hadley? He was assistant to Undersecretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz during George W. Bush’s first term of office and then national security adviser to the president during Bush’s second term. In these positions he worked closely and comfortably not only with Wolfowitz, but also with men like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
2. “A second effort [is] led by Martin Indyk.” And who is Martin Indyk? Indyk served twice as US ambassador to Israel as well as being a member of the National Security Council (NSC) under Clinton. Before that he was deputy research director for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and served eight years as the executive director of the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), which he helped co-found. WINEP is supported by AIPAC. According to Rozen’s report, one of the first things Indyk has done in his search for “new ideas” is to seek out, among others, “senior NSC Middle East/Iran adviser Dennis Ross”. And who is Dennis Ross? Ross was Bill Clinton’s Middle East envoy in the 1990s. Before that he was on Ronald Reagan’s NSC and, along with Indyk, helped co-found WINEP.
These are the people who the Obama administration is looking to for new thinking about the peace process. One is left simply amazed at this development. Almost, but not quite, speechless. For all these men – Berger, Hadley, Indyk and Ross – are strongly biased in favour of Israel, and among the folks who have been running the US side of the peace process at least since the 1980s. They are not “outside experts” at all. They are retreaded inside “experts” whose records, with very minor exceptions, in regard to the peace process, are ones of failure. Going to these people for “new ideas” that will “jump-start” peace talks in the Middle East is like going to Supreme Court Justice Anthony Scalia for a forward-looking and progressive take on the US Constitution. Such an effort is a standing contradiction. It is a rigged game designed to get you the opposite of what you claim to seek.
The unavoidable question is why is the Obama administration wasting its time and our money doing this? The answer has to be first and foremost domestic politics. Although Barack Obama would, understandably, still like to make a positive impact on the Palestinian-Israeli impasse, he is convinced that any effort in this regard must conform to the wishes of domestic political forces led by the Zionist lobby. For instance, what would happen if he decided that all those listed above were hopeless failures and, instead of going to back to them, he was going to turn to, say, Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University? Khalidi is undoubtedly an expert on the Middle East and the Palestinian-Israeli question. However, he is also very much in favour of justice for the Palestinians. If President Obama was to consult Khalidi there would be an immediate knee-jerk reaction in Congress consisting of quite literal screaming and yelling. AIPAC would call Obama a man seriously lacking in judgment and Khalidi a friend of terrorists. The president’s possibilities for re-election would, allegedly, recede dramatically. On the other hand, there is no doubt that he would get “new ideas” from an “outside expert”.
The political pragmatist might argue, what good are “new ideas” if they cannot be implemented? But this position accepts the same assumption noted above, that any US president must be tied down by the political power of the Zionist lobby. It is, in fact, an assumption that must be challenged if any future progress is to be made. Thus, the president should take a chance. He should consider making a new and forceful initiative and demand Israeli compliance like Eisenhower did at the end of the Sinai Crisis of 1956. He should go to the American people and explain what he is doing and why. He should use every presidential prerogative there is, including the negative ones, to assure Israeli cooperation, etc. Oh, this is political suicide, answers the political pragmatist; it will never work. But, as is obvious, nothing else has worked to date. We are spending enormous sums to subsidize Israeli obstinacy and, according to General David Petraeus, the man who leads the American effort in Afghanistan, doing so is helping to kill American soldiers. So, go ahead Mr President, take the bull by the horns already.
Alas, he will not. And Rozen’s report is proof positive that the president will not do this. He is first and foremost a domestically-oriented politician cut out of a very standard mould. Politically, then, it has been judged safer to resurrect the dead in the form of Berger, Hadley, Indyk and Ross. So, there you have it. What is necessary for success in the peace process is always assumed to equal political failure at home. On the other hand, political success at home (which entails letting the Zionist lobby set the criteria for what is possible) equals continued failure of the peace process. It also equals ever increasing danger for US interests in the Middle East and the Muslim world. This latter equation is not based on an assumption. It is a historically demonstrated fact.
This is why we fail. No one wants to seriously test the old standing assumptions. Our political system is ossified. It is trapped in a lobby-driven, financially-corrupt rut. And until we find a way out of it we are doomed to go round in circles. That is what the administration’s pseudo effort at seeking “new ideas from outside experts” amounts to, going in a circle. Round and round and round and round.
Detention and Torture
Obama’s Plan for Indefinite Detentions
By JENNIFER VAN BERGEN and DOUGLAS VALENTINE | December 30, 2010
Author’s Note: With the news of President Obama’s plan to make indefinite detentions a permanent feature of our legal landscape, we thought it apropos to re-publish an updated, edited excerpt from a law review article we wrote in 2006 THE DANGEROUS WORLD OF INDEFINITE DETENTIONS: VIETNAM TO ABU GHRAIB.
Where you find administrative detentions, you are likely to find torture. This connection exists even where it is clear that investigations and screenings leading to such detentions are, as Alberto Gonzales put it, “not haphazard, but elaborate, and careful . . . reasoned and deliberate.”
This reason is simple and can be traced to the elements of administrative detention itself: the absence of human rights safeguards and normal legal guarantees such as due process, habeas corpus, fair trial, confidential legal counsel, and judicial review; vague and confusing definitions, standards, and procedures; inadequate adversarial procedural oversight; excessive Executive Branch power stemming from prolonged emergencies; and the involvement of the Central Intelligence Agency, or other secret, thus unaccountable, Executive Branch agencies.
Without such protections, justice does not work and human rights are jeopardized. As William F. Schultz, Executive Director of Amnesty International, put it:
“[W]e are witnessing not just a series of brutal but fundamentally independent human rights violations committed by disparate governments around the globe. [W]e are witnessing something far more fundamental and far more dangerous. [W]e are witnessing the orchestrated destruction by the United States of the very basis, the fragile scaffolding, upon which international human rights have been built, painstakingly, bit by bit by bit, since the end of World War II.”
This is a remarkable statement that was originally made about the Bush Administration, but it applies equally as well now to the Obama Administration. The system was intentionally broken by the Bush Administration, just as it was by the Johnson and Nixon Administrations during the Vietnam War. And now Obama plans to sanctify this wrong and make it a permanent feature of American law.
Obama’s indefinite detention follows, at least in idea, the precedent set by and codified in the PATRIOT Act, enacted six weeks after 9/11. Section 412, which is still on the books, provides for the “mandatory detention of suspected terrorists.” This section nowhere refers to the detentions as “administrative detentions,” which result from administrative (that is, Executive Branch), not judicial, determinations. Yet this is exactly what they are. And they have been used before. The U.S. government’s internment of Japanese immigrants during the Second World War is perhaps the most recognizable example.
Section 412(a) authorizes the Attorney General to take into custody any alien whom he certifies as a terrorist. The alien may be detained indefinitely, in renewable periods of six months, as long as the Attorney General determines that he is a threat to national security, or endangers some individual or the general public.
In addition to PATRIOT Act detentions, the November 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF), which preceded the PATRIOT Act, has been used by the DOJ to justify administrative detentions.
Scholars have raised concerns about the PATRIOT Act detention provisions, as well as detentions under AUMF, which allow the Secretary of Defense to detain designated alien terrorist suspects without the restrictions that Section 412 contains. Additionally, military detentions of U.S. citizens Yaser Esam Hamdi, Jose Padilla, and Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri have raised concerns. President Bush, citing his power as Commander-in-Chief and the laws of war, unilaterally declared these individuals “unlawful enemy combatants” subject to indefinite detention without trial or access to an attorney and without providing for a status determination hearing by a competent tribunal, which is required by the Geneva Conventions. The central concern raised by qualified legal observers about these detentions generally involves the important issues of due process and other constitutional and/or human rights guarantees.
Administrative detentions — sometimes called preventive detentions — are, by definition and practice, sought only during “national emergencies.” The emergency is the rationale for depriving suspected terrorists of adequate due process or human rights safeguards. A declaration of a national emergency is generally made unilaterally by the President and, once declared, the administrative detention laws may stay on the books for decades. This is one of the primary reasons why they are so dangerous, for without any Congressional determination of the beginning or end of hostilities, these inherently anti-democratic laws may be used for purposes of political repression.
However, few legal scholars or government officials have discussed the historically established connection between administrative detentions and torture. The subject only came into public consciousness with the revelation that U.S. soldiers were torturing terrorist suspects at Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq, Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan, and the detention facilities at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo, Cuba. Since then, American and foreign journalists and human rights activists began to raise suspicions, subsequently borne out, that U.S. soldiers and CIA officers were routinely torturing terrorist suspects at numerous detention centers around the world. Nonetheless, to date, nothing has been done to ameliorate concerns about these detentions.
The conjoining of administrative detentions and torture is sadly by no means new to U.S. Government policies and practices. Specifically, during the Vietnam War, the United States engaged in a massive program of indefinite administrative detentions in South Vietnam of persons considered “dangerous to the national security” that engendered widespread torture and deaths of terrorist suspects.
There are many similarities between the Vietnam detentions and those used in the War on Terror, and those similarities are found not only within the procedures themselves but in the rationales for and policies behind them and even in the conditions of fear that created them.The Vietnam detention procedures provide a clear and compelling flow chart of the web of connections between administrative detentions, intelligence laws, national security courts (i.e. courts intended to deal exclusively with national security concerns), violations of international law (particularly the Geneva Conventions), and torture. These components now also appear in U.S. law and policies in the War on Terror and are continued, codified, and sanctified in Obama’s intended executive order.
One would have thought that a nation which was in large part responsible for the rescue of tens of thousands of Concentration Camp survivors and was a judicial participant in one of the most significant war crimes tribunals in history, the Nuremburg trials, would know better. How American officials could justify the detention camps in Vietnam, knowing about the torture and murders of innocents in them, after having witnessed Hitler’s internment camps and learned of the horrors he perpetrated in them, is an unanswered question. But, after the revelations of Vietnam — which all came out in congressional hearings in 1971 that led to both the repeal of the EDA and ultimately by degrees to “reforms” of the CIA’s Phoenix Program, contributing to the end of that protracted War, — Section 412 of the PATRIOT Act, Bush’s Military Commissions and unlawful enemy combatant designations, and now, Obama’s executive order establishing permanent indefinite detention are inexcusable.
For the full law review article, click here.
Jennifer Van Bergen, J.D., M.S.I.E., is the founder of the 12th Generation Institute, and author of THE TWILIGHT OF DEMOCRACY: THE BUSH PLAN FOR AMERICA (Common Courage Press, 2004) and Archetypes for Writers: Using the Power of Your Subconscious (Michael Weise Productions, 2007). She is currently working under contract with Bucknell University Press on a biography of Leonora Sansay, an early American novelist who was involved in the Aaron Burr Conspiracy, and on a screenplay about the conspiracy. She can be reached at jennifer.vanbergen@gmail.com.
Douglas Valentine is the author of numerous articles and five books: THE HOTEL TACLOBAN (1984), THE PHOENIX PROGRAM (1990), TDY (2000), THE STRENGTH OF THE WOLF (2004), and THE STRENGTH OF THE PACK (2009) (the latter two are histories of federal drug law enforcement). See: http://www.douglasvalentine.com/.
Related article
Honoring Helen Thomas
By JAMES ABOUREZK | November 22, 2010
These remarks were delivered at a tribute for Helen Thomas, Thursday, November 18, at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington DC D.C., sponsored by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC).
I’m very proud to be asked to speak at a tribute to one of the great journalists in the history of this country – Helen Thomas. I say she is a great journalist because she was never cuddled up in the lap of the President – any president – when she was doing her job. She is someone my old friend, I.F. Stone, would be very proud of if he were still alive.
To say that she made a long succession of Presidents uncomfortable with her sharp questioning would be an understatement. Even Barack Obama, who has been advertised as a tolerant man, had to join in the denunciations of Helen. He, along with the others in the press corps, acted very much like children in a school yard. When one of the children falls down, the rest start kicking.
Helen was not necessarily done in by her statement about Israel. What she said is what I’ve been saying for years – the Zionists should get the hell out of Palestine.
Where they go when they leave there is not my concern, just as it is not the Zionists’ concern where the Palestinians went when they were driven out of Palestine. She was done in because she embarrassed the group of lap dogs who call themselves White House reporters. She has been doing what each and every one of them wishes they had the temerity to do – find out what the government is doing to us on a day by day basis.
She has consistently posed serious questions to each administration in turn – questions that affect the financial and emotional and security health of our country. She refused to go along with the game played by the national press – that is, to be very, very polite to the President during his press conferences so that they may stay in the good graces of the government they are supposed to be reporting on.
I’m especially proud because now ADC has been called anti-semitic by the Director of the Bnai Brith Defamation League, Abe Foxman. You remember Dr Johnson’s saying, that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel? Well, anti-semitism has become the last gasp of the worn-out old Zionists who, instead of trying to make America a better place in which to live, make their living snarling at anyone who might criticize what Israel is doing to the Palestinians and to the Lebanese, and to the Syrians.
I once called Alan Dershowitz a snake on Al Manar television. Al Manar is Hezbollah’s news channel in Lebanon. When he found out what I had said, he wrote a column in the Jerusalem post, calling me an anti-Semite. My response has been – to him and to anyone else – that an anti-Semite is synonymous with disliking Jews, and that I do not dislike Jews, I only dislike Alan Dershowitz, and Abe Foxman, and Bibi Netanyahu.
I also know now that I should have apologized to the snakes.
As for Abe Foxman, he is the head of the B’Nai Brith, whose stated mission is to promote tolerance and to fight against racism. He demonstrated that tolerance when he came out bleating that he was opposed to a mosque being built near the World Trade Center site. And he has made a living equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, which, so far as tolerance goes, promotes only hatred and racism.
The truth is, that Israel has very little to do with Judaism, but it has a lot to do with fascism.
For the Zionist supporters of Israel, it’s OK for Israel to kill on the average of at least one Palestinian a day during its illegal occupation;.
It’s OK for Israel to use the million and a half people in Gaza as living targets in a shooting gallery.
It’s OK to bomb Syria and Lebanon any time such an attack is needed to bolster the military credentials of Israel=s politicians.
It’s OK to invade Lebanon whenever they feel like it. In my memory, Israel’s military has killed at least 30,000 civilians in their Lebanon invasions. But lately, with Hezbollah standing up to them, it=s happening on fewer and fewer occasions, and fewer and fewer Lebanese are being slaughtered by Israel.
It’s OK to destroy the olive groves of Palestinian farmers. It’s OK to move them off their land to make room for Jewish settlements.
It’s OK for Israel to send agents to spy on the United States, and it’s OK for the Obama Administration to dismiss charges against those of Israel’s spies who have been caught red-handed.
It’s OK for Israel to commit an act of criminal piracy on the high seas by boarding a ship full of people and food and medicine on their way to help stem the starvation brought on by Israel’s policy in Gaza, and to outright murder 9 people, including an American citizen out on the high seas. Have you heard much lately about the American boy who was assassinated by the Israeli military on board one of those aid ships? Have you wondered why you haven’t heard anything about it from those great American journalists who so bravely ganged up on Helen Thomas?
It’s OK to do all of those things I’ve listed, but it’s not OK to send money and food to Palestinian refugees to help them survive.
And it’s not OK for Helen Thomas to tell Israel to get the hell out of Palestine.
And it’s not OK for anyone else to say that Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine is wrong and against the law, and that American taxpayers’ money is being used to help Israel commit these crimes against humanity. That kind of criticism brings down calls of “anti-Semitism” from the likes of Foxman and Dershowitz.
As an American citizen, I am deeply worried, among other things, about the direction our government has taken and is taking with respect to its financing of Israel’s crimes. There is no one left in the press corps to ask such questions now that they’ve drummed Helen out of journalism.
Helen’s fatal, and final, sin was, during a discussion of Iran’s nuclear program during a press conference, to ask President Obama if anyone else in the Middle East -beside Iran – has nuclear weapons. Of course, he didn’t answer the question, which probably explains why he joined the chorus of denouncers to drum Helen Thomas out of the White House press room. He simply didn’t want the question coming up again at a future press conference.
But you can easily see the service Helen performed by asking that question. As the Zionists and the Israelis are working very hard to get our country into a war with Iran, there remains almost no voice in the press or in the Congress to call a halt to this madness.
That is why we are all paying tribute to Helen tonight, and I hope, for a long time after this night. We pay tribute to all soldiers who act with bravery, and tonight, we add Helen Thomas to that company. She deserves our thanks, and she deserves the thanks of our nation.
Thank you.
James Abourezk is a former U.S. Senator, who practices law in Sioux Falls. He can be reached at georgepatton45@gmail.com.
Obama’s Electric Vehicle Fetish
Cars for the Elite
By ROBERT BRYCE | November 11, 2010
Imagine an American president who, during a press conference, extols the importance of cars made by Mercedes Benz or BMW. The reaction, particularly on Fox News, is easily envisioned: outraged cries of “elitist” and “out of touch” would persist for days or even months afterward.
That, in essence, is exactly what President Barack Obama did last Wednesday. Obama acknowledged the thumping that the Democrats took at the polls on November 2, and went on to discuss the need for more all-electric vehicles, at one point saying “There’s a lot of agreement around the need to make sure that electric cars are developed here in the United States.”
Fine. Both Mercedes and BMW manufacture cars in the U.S. But here are two essential points: Those two automakers each control about the same percentage of the domestic car market that automotive analysts believe electric cars will have by 2020. Second, and perhaps more important: the same people who buy Benzes and Beemers – the wealthy – are the ones most likely to buy a new electric car.
Obama’s electric vehicle fetish reflects much of the inanity of our discussions about energy. The idea that oil is bad, and that we must therefore throw vast sums of money at efforts aimed at fueling our automotive fleet with something else – anything else – ignores both economic realities and the myriad problems inherent with EVs.
First, the economic realities. Earlier this year, Deloitte Consulting released a report on EVs which found that the most likely buyers are people with household incomes “in excess of $200,000” and “who already own one or more vehicles.” Furthermore, Deloitte expects those buyers to be “concentrated around southern California where weather and infrastructure allow for ease of EV ownership.”
Deloitte concluded that the US now has about 1.3 million consumers who “fit the demographic and psychographic profiles” of expected EV buyers. It went on, saying that mass adoption of the EV “will be gradual” and that by 2020, perhaps 3 percent of the US car market could be amenable to EVs. The report also says that the keys to “mass adoption are 1) a reduction in price; and 2) a driving experience in which the EV is equivalent to the internal combustion engine.”
Think about those numbers. Out of 300 million Americans, perhaps 1.3 million of them – with many of those living in areas in or around Los Angeles and San Diego — are likely to buy an EV.
Deloitte’s projections are exactly the same as those recently put forward by Johnson Controls Inc., a company that makes batteries for cars and is building two new plants in order to supply the EV market. Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that Johnson Controls’ research “found that the pool of US customers for whom an electric car makes financial sense – those who travel many miles a year, but on short trips – is very small, about three percent of drivers.”
Hmmm. Three percent of drivers? In both 2009 and 2010, Mercedes and BMW each controlled about 2 percent of the US auto market.
Why will EVs be playthings for the rich? The answer is simple: the history of the EV is a century of failure tailgating failure. Consider this quote: In 1911, the New York Times declared that the electric car “has long been recognized as the ideal solution” because it “is cleaner and quieter” and “much more economical” that gasoline-fueled cars.
Whenever you hear about the wonders of the new hybrid-electric Chevrolet Volt, which at $41,000 per copy costs as much as a new Mercedes-Benz C350, consider this assessment by a believing reporter: “Prices on electric cars will continue to drop until they are within reach of the average family.” That line appeared in the Washington Post on Halloween, 1915.
And since the Volt is being built by GM, ponder this news item which declared that the carmaker has found “a breakthrough in batteries” that “now makes electric cars commercially practical.” The batteries will provide the “100-mile range that General Motors executives believe is necessary to successfully sell electric vehicles to the public.” That story was published in the Washington Post on September 26, 1979.
The problem today is the same as it was in 1911, 1915, and 1979: the paltry energy density of batteries. On a gravimetric basis, gasoline has 80 times the energy density of the best lithium-ion batteries. Of course, electric-car supporters will immediately retort that electric motors are about four times more efficient than internal combustion engines. But even with that four-fold advantage in efficiency, gasoline will still have 20 times the energy density of batteries. And that is an essential advantage when it comes to automobiles, where weight, storage space, and of course, range, are critical considerations.
Despite the all-electric automobile’s long history of failure, despite the fact that EVs will likely only be driveway jewelry for the wealthy, the Obama administration is providing more than $20 billion in subsidies and tax breaks for the development and production of cars that use electricity instead of oil.
Indeed, the administration keeps throwing money at EVs despite a January 2009 report published by the Department of Energy’s Office of Vehicle Technologies, which said that despite the enormous investments being made in plug-in hybrid-electric vehicles and lithium-ion batteries, four key barriers stand in the way of their commercialization: cost, performance, abuse tolerance, and life. The key problem, according the DOE analysts, was—predictably—the battery system. The report concludes that lithium-based batteries, which it calls “the most promising chemistry,” are three to five times too expensive, are lacking in energy density, and are “not intrinsically tolerant to abusive conditions.”
Remember when Barack Obama, the presidential candidate, berated the Bush administration for not paying attention to the science? In December 2008, shortly after being elected to the White House, he declared, “It’s time we once again put science at the top of our agenda and worked to restore America’s place as the world leader in science and technology.”
Restoring America’s leadership in science and technology is a worthy goal. But by attempting to pick winners in the car business — arguably the world’s single most competitive industry — the Obama administration is forgetting history and the panoply of problems that have kept EVs in the garage since the days of Thomas Edison. It’s time to unplug this subsidy-dependent industry and let the free market work.
Obama uses Weekly Address to lobby for Israeli firm BrightSource
~
BrightSource founder Arnold Goldman
Related articles
- UK Former General Greases Skids for $1-Billion Helicopter Deal Benefiting Israel’s Elbit Systems (alethonews.wordpress.com)
On James Petras’ Twelve Reasons to Reject Obama
By James Petras | Axis of Logic | October 29, 2008
The presidential elections in the US, once again, provide an acid test of the integrity and consequential conduct of US intellectuals. If it is the duty and responsibility of the public intellectual to speak truth to power, the recent statements of most of our well-known and prestigious public pundits have failed miserably. Instead of highlighting, exposing and denouncing the reactionary foreign and domestic policies of Democratic Party candidate Senator Barack Obama, they have chosen to support him, ‘critically, offering as excuses that even ‘limited differences’ can result in positive outcomes,and that ‘Obama is the lesser evil’ and ‘creates an opportunity for a possibility of change.’
What makes these arguments untenable is the fact that Obama’s public pronouncements, his top policy advisers, and the likely policymakers in his government have openly defined a most bellicose foreign policy and a profoundly reactionary domestic economic policy totally in line with Paulson-Bush-Wall Street. On the major issues of war, peace, the economic crisis and the savaging of the US wage and salaried class, Obama promises to extend and deepen the policies which the majority of Americans reject and repudiate.
Twelve Reasons to Reject Obama
1. Obama publicly and repeatedly promises to escalate the US military intervention in Afghanistan, increasing the number of US troops, expanding their operations and engaging in systematic cross-border attacks. In other words, Obama is a greater warmonger than Bush.
2. Obama publicly has declared that his regime will extend the ‘war against terrorism’ by systematic, large-scale ground and air attacks on Pakistan, thus escalating the war to include villages, towns and cities deemed sympathetic to the Afghan resistance.
3. Obama opposes the withdrawal of US troops in Iraq in favor of redeployment; the relocation of US troops from combat zones to training and logistical positions, contingent on the military capability of the Iraqi Army to defeat the resistance. Obama opposes a clearly defined deadline to withdraw US forces from Iraq because US troops in Iraq are essential to pursuing his overall policies in the Middle East, which include military confrontations with Iran, Syria and Southern Lebanon.
4. Obama has declared his unconditional support for the position of the pro-Israel Lobby and the colonial expansionist and bellicose policies of the Jewish state. He has promised to back Israeli military attacks whatever the cost to the US. His abject servility to Israel was evident in his speech at the annual AIPAC conference in Washington 2008. Top advisers who have long and notorious links to the top echelons of the principle Zionist propaganda mills and the Presidents of the Leading Jewish American Organizations wrote the speech and formulate his Middle East policy.
5. Obama has promised to attack Iran if it continues to process uranium for its nuclear programs. Twice, just weeks before the elections, Obama’s running mate Joseph Biden spelled out a series of ‘points of conflict’ (including Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Russia and North Korea) emphasizing that Obama ‘would respond forcefully’. Obama’s senior Middle East advisers include leading Zionists like Dennis Ross, closely linked to the ‘Bipartisan Policy Center’, which published a report serving as a blueprint for war with Iran. Obama’s proposed offer to negotiate with Iran is little more than a pretext for issuing an ultimatum to Iran to surrender its sovereignty or face massive military assault.
6. Obama unconditionally supports Israel’s expulsion of Palestinians and the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the leading cause of Middle East hostility, warfare and the discredit of US policy in the region. With three dozen Israel-Firsters among his leading campaign organizers, top policy advisers, speech writers and among the likely candidates for cabinet positions, there is virtually no hope of ‘influencing from within’ or ‘applying popular pressure’ to change Obama’s slavish submission to the Zionist Power Configuration. By supporting Obama, the “progressive intellectuals” are, in effect, allies of his Zionist mentors.
7. On the domestic front, Obama’s key economic advisers have impeccable Wall Street credentials. He gave unquestioning and immediate endorsement to Treasury Secretary Paulson’s $700 billion dollar taxpayer bailout of the richest investment banks in the US. Obama has failed to challenge Paulson or the banks over the use of Federal funds for buyouts and acquisitions instead of loans and credit to producers and homeowners. Obama’s backing of Paulson and the Wall Street bailout is matched by his meager proposals to suspend mortgage foreclosures for a three-month period, pending re-negotiations of interest payments. Obama proposes to escalate transfers of government funds to mismanaged financial institutions and bankrupt capitalist corporations, in efforts to save failed capitalism rather than pursue any new large-scale, long-term public investment programs which will generate well-paid employment for workers.
1. Obama’s economic team has openly declared their embrace and practice of ‘free market’ ideology and opposition to any effort to engage in large-scale injections of government funds in publicly-owned productive activity and social services in the face of wide-spread private sector failure, corruption and collapse.
2. Obama embraces failed private sector health plans, run and controlled by corporate insurance companies, conservative medical and hospital associations and Big Pharma. He publicly rejects a universal national health program modeled after the successful Federal Medicare program in favor of inefficient, state-subsidized private for profit plans that are costly and beyond the means of over one third of US families.
3. Obama is and continues to be an advocate for Big Agro and its highly subsidized and profitable ethanol program, which has increased food prices for millions in the US and for hundreds of millions in the world.
4. Obama advocates continuing the criminal embargo on Cuba, hostile confrontation with Venezuela’s populist President Chavez and other Latin American reformers and the duplicitous policy of promoting protectionism at home and free market access to Latin America. His key policy advisers on Latin America propose cosmetic changes in style and diplomacy but unrelenting support for re-asserting US hegemony.
5. Obama has not proposed, nor do his free market advisers and billionaire financial backers envision, any comprehensive plan or strategy to get us out of the deepening recession. On the contrary, the course of piecemeal measures presented by Obama are internally inconsistent: Fiscal austerity is incompatible with job creation; bailing out Wall Street drains funds from productive investment; and pursuing new wars undermine domestic recovery.
CONCLUSION
The intellectuals who, in the name of ‘realism’, support a politician who publicly and openly embraces new wars, billionaire bailouts and for profit, private sector-run health programs are repudiating their own claims as ‘responsible critics’. They are what C. Wright Mills called ‘crackpot realists’, abdicating their responsibility as critical intellectuals. In purporting to support the ‘lesser evil’ they are promoting the ‘greater evil’: The continuation of four more years of deepening recession, colonial wars and popular alienation. Moreover, they are allies of the mass media, major parties and the legal system which has marginalized or outright excluded the alternative candidates, Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney, who do speak out and oppose the war, the pro-Wall Street bailouts and propose genuine large-scale public investment in the domestic economy, a universal single payer health program, sustainable and pro-environment economic policies and large-scale, long-term income redistributive policies.
What is crass and unacceptable is the argument of these intellectuals, (an insignificant pimple on the Democratic donkey’s rear-end) that for a single moment believe that their ‘critical support’ of the Obama political machine will open space for radical ideas. The Zionists and civilian militarists totally control Obama’s war policy in the Middle East: There will be no space for peace with Iran, Palestine, Pakistan, Afghanistan or Iraq. Wall Street controls the Obama’s financial policy: There will be no space for some Cambridge progressive to sneak in a handout for families losing their homes.
If the trade unions that have spent a hundred million dollars on each presidential campaign have failed to secure a single piece of progressive legislation in over 50 years, isn’t it delusional for our progressive ‘public intellectuals’ to imagine that they, in their splendid organizational isolation, can ‘pressure’ President Obama to renounce his advisers, backers and public defense of military escalation, to see his way to peace with Iran and to promote social justice for our workers and unemployed?
Featured Video
Patrik Baab: Europe’s New Iron Curtain – Freedom of Speech Dies
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
Jack Ruby: Israel’s Smoking Gun
BY LAURENT GUYÉNOT • UNZ REVIEW • NOVEMBER 13, 2021
By a strange paradox, most Kennedy researchers who believe that Oswald was “just a patsy” spend an awful lot of time exploring his biography. This is about as useful as investigating Osama bin Laden for solving 9/11. Any serious quest for the real assassins of JFK should start by investigating the man who shot Oswald at pointblank in the stomach at 11:21 a.m. on September 24, 1963 in the Dallas Police station, thereby sealing the possibility that a judicial inquiry would draw attention to the inconsistencies of the charge against him, and perhaps expose the real perpetrators. One would normally expect the Dallas strip-club owner Jack Ruby to be the most investigated character by Kennedy truthers. But that is not the case. … continue
Blog Roll
Recent Comments
Aletho News- Russia open to discussing Ukraine’s ‘external governance’ – senior diplomat
- US Caribbean Buildup Near $3B — Report
- Munich Security Conference and the U.S. elephant in the room
- Epstein Pitched JPMorgan Chase on Plan to Get Bill Gates ‘More Money for Vaccines’
- Germany’s CDU Pushes Real-Name Social Media Mandate and ID Checks
- Patrik Baab: Europe’s New Iron Curtain – Freedom of Speech Dies
- Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’ exports Israeli ‘ceasefire’ diplomacy to the world
- Israeli army closes dozens of cases involving killing of Palestinians inside torture camps
- Europe creates a ‘Russian government-in-exile’, consisting of a bunch of losers
- Munich, 2007: The Day the West Was Told No
- If Americans Knew
- ISIS-linked border guards, GHF-linked aid – Not a ceasefire Day 128
- Israel battles Palestinian right of return, one Palestinian at a time – Not a ceasefire Day 127
- Noor’s short life of unimaginable suffering
- Israel Destroyed Gaza’s Hospitals. Now It’s Banning Doctors Without Borders.
- Is Spite of What Zionists Say, It’s a Good Thing to Criticize Governments
- Palestinian mother, daughter recount strip searches, harsh conditions in Israeli detention
- Israel used weapons in Gaza that made thousands of Palestinians evaporate
- ADL’s Stats Twist Israel’s Critics Into Antisemites
- Why Is the World Silent When the Gaza Genocide Is Not Over?
- In Gaza: 8,000 bodies under rubble, 3,000 missing – Not a ceasefire Day 126
- No Tricks Zone
- Unfudging The Data: Dutch Meteorological Institute Reinstates Early 20th Centruy Heat Waves It Had Erased Earlier
- German Gas Crisis…Chancellor Merz Allegedly Bans Gas Debate Ahead of Elections!
- Pollen Reconstructions Show The Last Glacial’s Warming Events Were Global, 10x Greater Than Modern
- Germany’s Natural Gas Storage Level Dwindles To Just 28%… Increasingly Critical
- New Study Rebuts The Assumption That Anthropogenic CO2 Molecules Have ‘Special’ Properties
- Climate Scientist Who Predicted End Of “Heavy Frost And Snow” Now Refuses Media Inquiries
- Polar Bear Numbers Rising And Health Improving In Areas With The Most Rapid Sea Ice Decline
- One Reason Only For Germany’s Heating Gas Crisis: Its Hardcore-Dumbass Energy Policy
- 130 Years Later: The CO2 Greenhouse Effect Is Still Only An Imaginary-World Thought Experiment
- New Study Affirms Rising CO2’s Greening Impact Across India – A Region With No Net Warming In 75 Years
Aletho News 