Only sanctions against Israel will end occupation — Gideon Levy

Dec 01, 2013 11:53 am | Philip Weiss

Gideon Levy calls for international sanctions against Israel to end the occupation. He says the Iran case proves that sanctions work. And that John Kerry should end the masquerade of peace talks, which only he believes in, because Israel will never give up territory without pressure — including, by the way, “occupied East Jerusalem.” How often do these arguments appear in the mainstream American press, or the words “occupied East Jerusalem”? (Almost never, and yes the “shrill U.S. Jewish lobby,” words that also do not appear under threat of censure, is the main reason). Levy:

It appears that international sanctions work and that a boycott is a tool like no other. Even Israel’s prime minister has admitted this; he has called on the world not to ease the sanctions and to even intensify them, and following his lead is the shrill U.S. Jewish lobby.

This being the case, the moral is clear: This is the way to act with recalcitrant states. This applies not only to Iran, where the theory is being proved before our eyes, but with another country that does not obey the decisions of the international community.

Israel has signed the Horizon 2020 agreement for scientific research with the EU barring funding from companies or institutions with ties to the settlements. This is irrefutable proof that a boycott threat works well with Israel, too.

The truth is hard to miss. By signing the agreement, Israel gave a hand to the first official international boycott of the settlements…

Levy notes the “hypocrisy of boycotting just the settlements.”

Every Israeli organization, institution or authority is somehow involved with what’s going on beyond the Green Line. Every bank, university, supermarket chain or medical institution has branches, employees or clients who are settlers. The settlements are an all-Israeli project and the boycott can’t be limited to them, just as the boycott of apartheid-era South Africa couldn’t be limited to the institutions of apartheid.
There everything was apartheid, and here everything is tainted by occupation. Israel funds, protects and nurtures the settlements, so all of Israel is responsible for their existence. It’s unfair to boycott just the settlers. We’re all guilty. …

So the time has come for sanctions. When these are felt in Israel, only then should an international committee be formed, whether in Geneva, Jerusalem, Oslo or Ramallah, where the world will translate economic sanctions into political achievements.
This worked with Iran, and it will work with Israel and prevent bloodshed. There’s no reason to continue the masquerade of peace talks that, with the exception of one American, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, no one takes seriously. Even he will eventually come around because as long as Israelis don’t pay a price for the occupation or are blind to it, they won’t end it. That’s the truth.

A Poem for President Drone by Michael Robbins

Obama's drone program, journalism and ideology, and 'the role of the half-assed political poet.'
May 23rd, 2013 reset - +

I DIDN'T VOTE for Barack Obama, either time. It’s been a long time since I voted for anyone for anything, and I don’t expect to ever vote in a presidential election again. Almost everyone I know voted for Obama, both times. The first time around, I was like the cynical reporter in The Ides of March, telling Ryan Gosling that George Clooney was just another politician who would disappoint him eventually. In 2012, I was Rorschach at the end of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen, bitterly refusing to compromise, telling Dr. Manhattan, “Evil must be punished. People must be told.”

I know these figures are ridiculous. I know all the arguments. Mitt Romney is a snake and Paul Ryan is a used-car salesman. I know.

In Mythologies, Roland Barthes provides a wonderful image of dialectical thinking, in a description of the unity of what he calls the “meaning” and “form” of mythical speech:

There never is any contradiction, conflict, or split between the meaning and the form: they are never at the same place. In the same way, if I am in a car and I look at the scenery through the window, I can at will focus on the scenery or on the windowpane. At one moment I grasp the presence of the glass and the distance of the landscape; at another, on the contrary, the transparence of the glass and the depth of the landscape; but the result of this alternation is constant: the glass is at once present and empty to me, and the landscape unreal and full.

Barthes’s example of mythical signifier is a phrase in a Latin primer that means “my name is lion.” As meaning, it is full of history: “I am an animal, a lion, I live in a certain country, I have just been hunting.” As form, none of this matters: any sentence would do, as long as it illustrated the rule about the agreement of the predicate. What it says, as form, is “I am a grammatical example.” A grammar student alternates between the meaning and the form, thinking about lions but understanding that it is predicates that are really at issue. She can focus on one thing (the windowpane) or the other (the scenery). But the two elements form a unity. Their contradiction is what sustains them as a whole.

This is how I think of Obama. As form, Shepard Fairey’s “Hope” poster says, “Vote for this man, Barack Obama, with his particular policy proposals.” As meaning, it says, “See how far the United States has come? A black man can become president. Things really are getting better.” But the unity of these elements proclaims: “Capitalism is pleased to allow certain cosmetic changes so long as they don’t interfere with profit.” (Have you checked the Dow Jones industrial average lately?) This is why the liberal reading of right-wing opposition to Obama as simply racist is inadequate. The real problem is that, among certain sectors of the nation, the concrete situation of human subjects has degraded to the point where they are unable to read the myths correctly. We see the truth of this in Republican leaders’ growing fear of their own base.

Focusing on the windowpane, you would have to be soulless not to be cheered by what it says about this country that it elected a man whose father was born in East Africa to its highest office. Focusing on the scenery, you would have to be ignorant not to notice that his African ancestry is pretty much all that differentiates Obama from his predecessors. The man graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School. On economic issues, he is, for the most part, to the right of Richard Nixon.

I watched him, our president, on television after the Newtown shooting. He shed a tear for the slaughtered children. For some reason this was newsworthy. Was there anyone who wouldn’t have been moved to tears, addressing the nation on such a matter at such a time? My editor reminds me that this essay will appear months after Newtown. This reminder depresses me. It says: we both know how it is. A man gunned down 20 children, but he did it a few news cycles ago, so, you know. Twenty children and six adults. I imagine that somewhere in Sandy Hook Elementary School there was one of those banners with the 26 letters of the alphabet marching above a blackboard. You could arrange each dead body into the shape of one letter. They could spell anything.

This is the grisly tableau that occurs to me as I watch Obama wipe away his tears on television. Because I’m already thinking of writing about this, I’m already thinking of selling out those dead children. I’m already pissed off at Obama’s gall. I’m already thinking about the drones.

¤

Not one American newspaper, to my knowledge (aside from one letter to the editor published in the Baltimore Sun), pointed out the incongruity of Obama’s tears. It was left to the British press to state the obvious. In a Guardian article headlined “In the US, mass child killings are tragedies. In Pakistan, mere bug splats,” with the lede “Barack Obama’s tears for the children of Newtown are in stark contrast to his silence over the children murdered by his drones,” George Monbiot wrote:

If the victims of Mr Obama’s drone strikes are mentioned by the state at all, they are discussed in terms which suggest that they are less than human. The people who operate the drones, Rolling Stone magazine reports, describe their casualties as “bug splats”, “since viewing the body through a grainy-green video image gives the sense of an insect being crushed”. Or they are reduced to vegetation: justifying the drone war, Obama’s counterterrorism adviser Bruce Riedel explained that “you’ve got to mow the lawn all the time. The minute you stop mowing, the grass is going to grow back”.

Like George Bush’s government in Iraq, Obama’s administration neither documents nor acknowledges the civilian casualties of the CIA’s drone strikes in north-west Pakistan. But a report by the law schools at Stanford and New York universities suggests that during the first three years of his time in office, the 259 strikes for which he is ultimately responsible killed between 297 and 569 civilians, of whom at least 64 were children. These are figures extracted from credible reports: there may be more which have not been fully documented.

This, along with similar critiques by Glenn Greenwald and others, drew a predictable response, which basically boils down to: It’s not the same. A blogger for the Telegraph put it bluntly:

It is the height of infantile Leftish posturing to ask why people seem “disproportionately” shocked by the Sandy Hook attack. It’s because, quite rightly, those who live in generally non-violent, democratic communities expect adherence to a certain standard of moral behaviour, and when their expectations are brutally mown down, they reel back in horror. It isn’t that Americans don’t care about Pakistanis, but rather that they believe, quite legitimately, that war situations are morally different to non-war normality.

Because violent civilian deaths are all too common in Mideast war zones like Pakistan, and uncommon in suburban American communities like Newtown, Connecticut, it makes perfect sense that a person would get more exercised about the latter. This could well be true, but it misses the point. I, for one, am not bewildered by people being more upset about the Newtown victims than they are about the children their taxes help to murder in Pakistan and Yemen. I simply believe that they should be as upset about the latter. Or more so.

Leaving aside the absolutely relevant fact that the United States is not currently at war with Pakistan or Yemen, is there a “moral difference” between the cases at issue? Of course there is: you and I bear no responsibility for the Newtown shootings. (I suppose one could argue that we bear a slight responsibility, insofar as we have not been active enough in the fight for sane gun legislation, but let that go.) But we are indeed complicit in the deaths of those 64 Pakistani children. It is our government that is killing them, after all. The drones and their operators are bought and paid for with our money. And there is a remarkable venality in the suggestion that, because children live in a war zone, their deaths matter less. The more trenchant question is whether our attacks on Pakistani citizens are immoral. I believe they are. And I believe that our president is a war criminal with the blood of innocent children on his hands. No doubt that makes me an infantile leftist. There are worse fates.

¤

“I’m a poet” is a sentence I try not to say too often, since it usually elicits either a smirk or a deadpan “Oh how nice” — or, much worse, a “Me too,” followed by an offer to send me an entire self-published oeuvre. But I am, for richer or poorer, a poet, and I strive to maintain a certain reasonable level of artistic dignity. So when Yahoo! News approached me in 2012 about writing an alternative inaugural poem, my first impulse was to delete the email. My second impulse was to read the part about the $300 fee again. Also, Paul Muldoon and James Franco had already signed on. Paul Muldoon is one of my favorite poets, and James Franco is James Franco, and I am a terribly vain person, so what the hell. I told the Yahoo! editor, with whom I yet enjoyed cordial relations, that if I were going to write a poem it would be a poetical critique of Obama’s drone program. He thought that was fine; nothing attracts page views like a mild tropical storm in a teapot, I guess.

This is the poem I wrote for Yahoo! News:

To the Drone Vaguely Realizing Eastward

This is a poem for President Drone.
It was written by a camel.
Can I borrow your phone?
This is for President Mark Hamill.

Newtown sounds a red alert.
Mark Hamill asks is Ernie burnt?
Every camel’s a first-person shooter.
The Prez’s fez is haute couture.

It seems strange that he should be offended.
The same orders are given by him.
Paging Pakistan and Yemen.
Calling all the drone-dead children.

The camel can’t come to the phone.
This is for the drone-in-chief.
Mumbai used to be Bombay.
The bomb bay opens with a queef.

At this point, it’s easiest just to reproduce my notes for this essay:

I have finished my drone poem. Its last word is “queef.” Yahoo! is informed, because I am nothing if not conscientious. I am assured “queef” is pretty cool for a drone poem.

Interlude: The OED. Entry for “queef” mildly hilarious.

Yahoo! emails back with bad Yahoo! news. “Queef” actually a pretty big problem for the “standards desk.” I withdraw poem in predictable huff, place it on my tumblr, telling all. Righteous indignation on my behalf resounds throughout the blogosphere (need better word for “blogosphere”).

Yahoo! is embarrassed. Will I accept a call from Virginia Heffernan [Yahoo!’s national correspondent] herself? I will. Virginia, too, is cool. “Queef,” such a silly thing to cause such an uproar. Alas, the Puritans. The prigs. The prudes. Request I replace it w/ “keef.” Pressed to explain, Virginia admits “keef” is not a word. I stand my ground. Alternative routes for publication are suggested. The drama of these negotiations.

Scene: Virginia Heffernan’s phone. I have decided my best course of action is to flirt aggressively w/ Virginia Heffernan.

[Redacted.]

Negotiations w/ Yahoo! break down. Relations between me & Yahoo! at an all-time low. Poem goes back up on my tumblr. I remember I am doing this for the murdered children. I remember to feel guilty that I am using murdered children as a pretext to stir up queef controversy. People like the poem. Other people do not like the poem.

How many civilians have been killed by drone strikes while I was embroiled in queef drama? The role of the political poet. The role of the half-assed political poet.

What an interesting country, where you’re free to call the president a criminal or walk down a crowded street with a loaded gun, but a word for vaginal farting is dangerous, like a tube of toothpaste of a certain size on an airplane.

¤

According to Omar Shakir, of Stanford Law School’s International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic, co-author of the Stanford/NYU report “Living Under Drones” (you can read it at livingunderdrones.org), “The US government has been using armed unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, to carry out hundreds of covert missile strikes in northwest Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and other countries since at least 2002.” To reiterate: for over 10 years, the United States has been regularly bombing countries with which it is not at war. As Shakir put it in an email to me:

While civilian casualties are rarely acknowledged by the US government, there is significant evidence that US drone strikes have injured and killed civilians. In public statements, the US states that there have been “no” or “single digit” civilian casualties. It is difficult to obtain data on strike casualties because of US efforts to shield the drone program from democratic accountability, compounded by the obstacles to independent investigation of strikes in North Waziristan. The best currently available public aggregate data on drone strikes are provided by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), an independent journalist organization. TBIJ reports that from June 2004 through mid-September 2012, available data indicate that drone strikes killed 2,562–3,325 people in Pakistan, of whom 474–881 were civilians, including 176 children. TBIJ reports that these strikes also injured an additional 1,228–1,362 individuals.

President Obama has now ordered six times as many drone strikes as did his predecessor. The drone program has received more scrutiny of late, thanks to Obama’s nomination of John Brennan, his counterterrorism advisor, to head the CIA. But the narrative remains somewhat obtuse. Rand Paul’s anti-drone filibuster was based primarily on opposition to Obama’s targeting of U.S. citizens. This is a fine thing to oppose, of course. (Perhaps Obama’s supporters would like to take a moment to reflect that this president has, in violation of the Fifth Amendment, assassinated American citizens; that his Department of Justice has assured him that he has the right to assassinate American citizens; that he refuses to answer the question whether he has the authority to order hits on American citizens on American soil. As this article was going to press, the White House announced that it was restricting the scope of the drone program, even as it finally admitted that it had killed American citizens in drone strikes.) But ultimately such focus merely reinforces the assumption that American lives count more.

Indeed, reading the media coverage of the drone campaign is a lesson in ideology. Dexter Filkins, who can hardly be accused of cheerleading for America, begins his New Yorker blog entry on drone strikes by recounting a meeting he had in 2011 with Yemeni villagers. The United States had bombed their village, which apparently harbored an al-Qaeda training camp, killing 14 al-Qaeda fighters and 41 civilians, including 23 children. Filkins met a teenage girl who had suffered horrific burns in the attack, and another whose mother had been killed. This is some bad mojo, right? But Filkins — or his editor at The New Yorker — is very careful not to condemn anyone too harshly:

Later, when I spoke to American officials, they seemed genuinely perplexed. They didn’t deny that a large number of civilians had been killed. They felt bad about it. But the aerial surveillance, they said, had clearly showed that a training camp for militants was operating there. “It was a terrible outcome,” an American official told me. “Nobody wanted that.”

None of the above is intended as an attack on Brennan, who has spent the past four years as President Obama’s counterterrorism advisor. He has a hard job.

I am trying not to be shrill. I am trying not to write things like “Filkins’s evenhandedness here makes me want to fucking puke” or “Poor Brennan, whose job, especially the child-murdering part, is so goddamned hard.” I am a veritable monument to objectivity. Brennan felt bad about it. He has a hard job. None of the above is intended as an attack. And it’s true: the missile strike on the training camp was not intended as an attack on the 23 children whose deaths the officials felt bad about. Intentions matter, don’t they?

I don’t believe that Barack Obama is evil. I believe that he is probably a decent person. He certainly seems vastly more intelligent than any other American president in my lifetime, and I agree with a number of his positions. But so what? Does that mean that we have to pretend, as Filkins does, that there are, after all, two sides to every story, and that America’s secret wars, for instance, are very complex affairs that must be judged dispassionately, and with the tacit assumption that their aims are, while perhaps flawed in execution, noble in intent? Isn’t this exactly how ideology works? There are certain propositions that must not be formulated — or, more accurately, that literally cannot be formulated, that lie beyond the horizon of what it is possible to think.

For instance, almost any public discussion of these matters takes for granted that “terrorist” is a real category, and that the United States has the right to pursue and kill all those who belong to it. Filkins is direct: Brennan’s “hard job” is “to keep Americans safe, and he’s done that. Al Qaeda’s leadership, particularly in the tribal areas of Pakistan, has been decimated.” Note that the extrajudicial killing of “terrorists” is presumed to be a righteous goal, and that it is self-evident that such killing “keeps Americans safe.” To frame the drone strike program in any other way is taken as a sign of perversity or fanaticism. Recently, the Financial Times interviewed Noam Chomsky. Asked his opinion of Obama, Chomsky says, “He’s carrying out a global assassination campaign.” The reporter calls this “vintage Chomsky, a provocative idea in a matter-of-fact tone, daring the interlocutor to respond.” But isn’t it just the literal truth? I mean, in what sense is the Obama administration not carrying out a global assassination campaign?

¤

I confess that I was surprised by one response that my drone poem elicited, from an astute fellow who informed me that Mumbai is not located in Pakistan. This objection roused my onomamania, for I had been thinking of the name change as a metonym for shifting political signifiers in general. Pakistan used to be India. It’s not a war, it’s a police action. Funding millionaires’ bonuses with public subsidies is socialism. What would we call those who decided they could bomb our country at will, targeting, say, Henry Kissinger and Dick Cheney, but occasionally blowing up an elementary school as well? Would it help if they said they felt bad about it? A queef by any other name …

As I type this, a headline on the website of The New York Times reads “Afghan Children Reported Among Dead in Air Strike.” I click on it, hit refresh, then stop, until I get past the paywall. Ten children have been killed, apparently not by a drone this time. I am not a utilitarian. I do not believe, for instance, that we should kill one person so that five may live, even though that would maximize utility. I believe our common moral intuitions are often correct. But consequentialism, the idea that action should be judged by its outcome and not by its motives, is hard to refute when you’re looking at pictures of dead children (not that American media tend to run them). We do our best to avoid “civilian casualties” — but our noble motives are so much Monopoly money to 13-year-old Roya, discussed in Medea Benjamin’s recent Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control, whose house on the outskirts of Kabul was destroyed by an American bomb that killed her mother and two brothers. Her father collected as many of his wife’s and sons’ body parts as he could find and buried them in accordance with Islamic rites. His house, it seems, had been too near a Taliban housing compound. Presumably the bombers felt bad about it.

Little noted by American journalists was a Reuters article published in November 2012 headlined “Obama victory infuriates Pakistani drone victims.” “The same person who attacked my home has gotten re-elected,” said 28-year-old Mohammad Rehman Khan, whose father, three brothers, and nephew were killed by an American drone strike a month after Obama took office. The article continues:

“Any American, whether Obama or Mitt Romney, is cruel,” Warshameen Jaan Haji, whose neighborhood was struck by a drone last week, told Reuters on the eve of the election. “I lost my wife in the drone attack and my children are injured. Whatever happens, it will be bad for Muslims.”

This is surely infantile leftism at its purest.

No one is responsible. Obama doesn’t have the blood of innocent children on his hands. Brennan has a hard job. “Like Fascism,” Adorno wrote of “Hitler’s robot-bombs,” “the robots career without a Subject.” The drone strikes are just a videogame played by CIA operatives thousands of miles from their targets. The postmodern critique of bourgeois subjectivity finds its apotheosis in Roya’s mother’s scattered limbs.

I don’t pretend my poem is of any consequence whatsoever. All I have is my No, and that’s not enough. I’m not brave enough to throw my body on the gears. I’m skinny and nearsighted anyway. So I go on saying No, no, no, and write my little poems, and wait for my kill fee from Yahoo! to arrive in the mail.

¤

Michael Robbins is the author of Alien vs. Predator (Penguin, 2012). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Harper's, Boston Review, and elsewhere.
Recommended Reads

Drone Warfare: Tiqqun, the Young-Girl and the Imperialism of the Trivial
Bot Like Me: Illah Reza Nourbakhsh’s “Robot Futures”
What Was Neoliberalism?
The Future Belongs to Crowds
The Constant Gardener: On Louise Glück
Obama’s Foreign Policy Crossroads
War By Manhunt: Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
Playing It Cool: An Interview with Poet Michael Robbins
Virtual Violence

Nima Shirazi on US-Iran nuclear deal: follow the link to hear him on Anti-war Radio

http://www.wideasleepinamerica.com/2013/11/talkin-newly-inked-interim-nuclear-deal-scott-horton.html

There Obama goes again-- exporting democracy

from mondoweiss.org
James North on November 20, 2013 18

Did the U.S. undermine democracy in the Maldives because it wants to set up military bases there?

There was depressing news from the Maldives this week, after the Indian Ocean island nation voted in the second round of presidential elections on November 20. Mohamed Nasheed, the dynamic, young, pro-environmentalist Muslim leader who had led after the first round, lost by a couple of percentage points to the old regime’s candidate, Abdulla Yameen.

As I reported, the imressive Nasheed had been elected back in 2008, but then overthrown in a military/police coup on February 7, 2012. Since then, the old regime had tried to block Nasheed and his reformist, youthful Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) from making a comeback, including annulling and postponing the election three times, and regularly arresting and jailing his nonviolent supporters.

The rest of the world protested vigorously; the Canadian foreign minister even marched in a pro-democracy demonstration in New York. But the United States was conspicuously quiet. The Obama administration accepted the illegal coup in 2012, and issued only feeble admonitions at the more recent pre-electoral maneuvers.

Why the pathetic and embarrassing silence, given that Nasheed and his movement are exactly the kind of forward-looking, democratic Muslims the United States should be supporting every chance it gets?

One suggestion was that the U.S. ambassador (to Sri Lanka and the Maldives), Michele Sison, had too close a friendship with the Defense Minister, Mohamed Nazim, who the pro-democracy movement believes was one of the 2012 coup leaders. But that (possible) relationship did not seem to explain enough.

I had been following the crisis on Twitter (@jamesnorth7), in part because mainstream media coverage was misleading or non-existent. Many Maldivians are fluent in English, and #Maldives was vigorous with debate. So I put the question to them: what explains the disgraceful American policy?

I got immediate and valuable responses. Apparently, earlier this year the U.S. government was negotiating with the Maldives about a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), which would have led to increased military cooperation between the two countries, possibly including U.S. bases there. Someone leaked a draft of the agreement to the Maldivian press, and the U.S. embassy was forced to concede that such talks were going on, although denying plans for a permanent American base.

This is an extraordinary revelation, completely unreported in the New York Times or elsewhere. The U.S. government was willing to set aside its stated principles and negotiate with a regime that came to power in a violent, illegal coup. An administration headed by Barack Obama was prepared to sell out the Maldivians who should be its natural allies, brave people who have risked their freedom and even their lives for democracy, just so it could set up yet another unnecessary U.S. military base at the other end of the world.

In the real tally of violence, Palestinians have it much worse

from Haaretz
There is no Palestinian without a personal and familial history of injustice that was caused by, and is still caused by Israel.
By Amira Hass | Nov. 21, 2013 | 3:08 AM | 3


Anyone who has worn a uniform past or in present, whether speaking on the record or off, immediately “knows” that the latest terror attack and what looks to soldiers as the latest attempted terror attack does not signify the beginning of a third Intifada. Or, they "know" it does signify such a beginning, and it's all because of the peace negotiations or because of Palestinian incitement, or both. Relying on the knowledgeable military brass is a fixed Israeli reflex; it is part of the balance of power and part of how the Israelis exert control over their subjects.

Whoever said 100,000 Palestinians have unfinished business with the Israel Defense Forces took it a step further creating the impression that he really knows and thinks, and does more than calculate tallies. But the starting point for calculation is somewhere else completely: There is no Palestinian whose score with the State of Israel is settled - whether he lives in forced exile or whether he lives within the borders of Israel, or in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. There is no Palestinian without a personal and familial history of injustice that was caused by, and is still caused by Israel. Just because the Israeli media does not report on all the injustices Israel causes day in and day out - even if only because they so numerous - does not mean they go away and neither does the anger they cause. Therefore, according to the correct calculation, the number of attacks by Palestinian individuals is relatively microscopic. This small number shows that for the vast majority of Palestinians - passing, murderous and hopeless revenge is not an option.

But nonetheless, the fatal attacks in recent months are worrying. They point at the political and social bankruptcy of the Palestinian leadership and organizations, who have stopped serving as the national rallying point, and are unable to hold back the waves of despair. The Palestinian feels isolated against his attackers. New initiatives and other forms of leadership are still in their diapers. And in the meantime, the Israel's methods of injustice are becoming more sophisticated. To speak about the anger without linking it to the occupation and systematic discrimination is like discussing environmental pollution without reference to the polluter.

Any Jew in the world who has never so much as set foot here, automatically enjoys the right to enter Israel, to find shelter here from economic distress (Argentina) or political distress (Russia), to tour the land, to settle down, to live and to work on both sides of the Green Line. These are rights that are partially or fully denied to Palestinians - whether they are citizens of the state or not, whether they live in Israel, whether their family comes from here and whether they lost land and property to the other.

What kind of feelings does the structural discrimination against Palestinians engender? It riles up and infuriates. The Israeli experts, those who keep stats on Palestinian violence, either ignore their own violence or else they are smart enough to cover it up. We must therefore cry out again and again: Every Palestinian, man or woman, poor and less poor, and also the very wealthy, refugees or not, and those who live in the Land of Israel (within the borders of the British Mandate) daily risk that the Israeli authorities and their representatives (soldiers, policemen, settlers, right-wingers) will harm them in some fashion. The situation jeopardizes their lives, livelihood, property, land, health, education, or the continuity of their family and social relations.

In every area, there are additional varieties of harm and harassment particular to it. For citizens of Israel, it is the creeping racist legislation. In East Jerusalem, it is the negation of residency status and expulsion from Israel. In the West Bank, it is the wholesale arrests, the settlements, the settlers, land expropriations under a pseudo-legal guise, and lack of running water in many communities during the summer. And in the Gaza Strip? Unseen jailers, whose identity is known. They sequester its residents in the world’s largest prison camp, and there is no one who will say as God said to Moses during the crossing of the Red Sea: Wake up, compose thyself, my beloved ones are drowning in the sewage and in the sea of oblivion.

How the Super-Rich Are Abandoning America

By Paul Buchheit
As they accumulate more and more wealth, the very rich have less need for society. At the same time, they've convinced themselves that they made it on their own, and that contributing to societal needs is unfair to them. There is ample evidence that this small group of takers is giving up on the country that made it possible for them
to build huge fortunes.

They've Taken $25 Trillion of New Wealth While Paying Less Taxes
The 2013 Global Wealth Databook shows that U.S. wealth has increased from $47 trillion in 2008 to $72 trillion in mid-2013. But according to U.S. Government Revenue figures, federal income taxes have gone DOWN from 2008 to 2012. Even worse, corporations cut their tax rate in half.
American society has gained nothing from its massive wealth expansion. There's no wealth tax, no financial transaction tax, no way to ensure that infrastructure and public education are supported.
Just how much have the super-rich taken over the past five years? Each of the elite 5% -- the richest 12 million Americans -- gained, on average, nearly a million dollars in financial wealth between 2008 and 2013.
2. For the First Time in History, They Believe They Don't Need the Rest of Us
The rich have always needed the middle class to work in their factories and buy their products. With globalization this is no longer true. Their factories can be in China, producing goods for people in India or Europe or anywhere else in the world.

They don't need our infrastructure for their yachts and helicopters and submarines. They pay for private schools for their kids, private security for their homes. They have private emergency rooms to avoid the health care hassle. All they need is an assortment of servants, who might be guest workers coming to America on H2B visas, willing to work for less than a middle-class American can afford.
The sentiment is spreading from the super-rich to the merely rich. In 2005 Sandy Springs, a wealthy suburb of Atlanta, stopped paying for most public services, deciding instead to avoid subsidizing poorer residents of Fulton County by hiring a "city outsourcer" called CH2M to manage everything except the police and fire departments. That includes paving the roads, running the courts, issuing tickets, handling waste, and various other public services. Several other towns followed suit.

Results have been mixed, with some of CH2M's clients backing out or renegotiating. But privatization keeps coming at us. Selective decisions about public services threaten to worsen already destitute conditions for many communities. Detroit, of course, is at the forefront. According to an Urban Land Institute report, "more municipalities may follow Detroit's example and abandon services in certain districts."

3. They Soaked the Middle Class, and Now Demand Cuts in the Middle-Class Retirement Fund
The richest Americans take the greatest share of over $2 trillion in Tax Expenditures, Tax Underpayments, Tax Haven holdings, and unpaid Corporate Taxes.
The Soial Security budget is less than half of that. Yet much of Congress and many other wealthy Americans think it should be cut. These are the same people who deprive the American public of $300 billion a year by not paying their full share of the payroll tax.

4. They Continue to Insist that They "Made It on Their Own"
They didn't. Their fortunes derived in varying degrees - usually big degrees - from public funding, which provided almost half of basic research funds into the 1980s, and even today supports about 60 percent of the research performed at universities.
Businesses rely on roads and seaports and airports to ship their products, the FAA and TSA and Coast Guard and Department of Transportation to safeguard them, a nationwide energy grid to power their factories, communications towers and satellites to conduct online business, the Department of Commerce to promote and safeguard global markets, the U.S. Navy to monitor shipping lanes, and FEMA to clean up after them.
Apple, the tax haven specialist, still does most of its product and research development in the United States, with US-educated engineers and computer scientists. Google's business is based on the Internet, which started as ARPANET, the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency computer network from the 1960s. The National Science Foundation funded the Digital Library Initiative research at Stanford University that was adopted as the Google model. Microsoft was started by our richest American, Bill Gates, whose success derived at least in part by taking the work of competitors and adapting it as his own. Same with Steve Jobs, who admitted: "We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas."

Companies like Pfizer and Merck have relied on basic research performed at the National Institute of Health. A Congressional Budget Office study reminds us that The primary rationale for the government to play a role in basic research is that private companies perform too little such research themselves (relative to what is best for society).

5. As a Final Insult, Many of Them Desert the Country that Made Them Rich
Many of the beneficiaries of American research and technology have abandoned their country because of taxes. Like multinational companies that rationalize the move by claiming to be citizens of the world, almost 2,000 Americans, and perhaps up to 8,000, have left their responsibilities behind for more favorable tax climates.
The most egregious example is Eduardo Saverin, who found safe refuge in the U.S. after his family was threatened in Brazil, landed Mark Zuckerberg as a roommate at Harvard, benefited from American technology to make billions from his 4% share in Facebook, and then skipped out on his tax bill.
An Apt Summary?

Bernard Marcus, co-founder of Home Depot and member of the Forbes 400, had this to say about any American who might object to all the greed: "Who gives a crap about some imbecile?"
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Reprinted from commondreams.org
 
 

 

 

Socialist Kshama Sawant Elected To Seattle City Council

Huffington Post
By MANUEL VALDES 11/15/13 11:23 PM ET EST


SEATTLE (AP) — Seattle voters have elected a socialist to city council for the first time in modern history.
Kshama Sawant's lead continued to grow on Friday, prompting 16-year incumbent Richard Conlin to concede.
Even in this liberal city, Sawant's win has surprised many here. Conlin was backed by the city's political establishment. On election night, she trailed by four percentage points. She wasn't a veteran politician, having only run in one previous campaign.
But in the days following election night, Sawant's share of the votes outgrew Conlin's.
"I don't think socialism makes most people in Seattle afraid," Conlin said Friday.
While city council races are technically non-partisan, Sawant made sure people knew she was running as a socialist — a label that would be politically poisonous in many parts of the country.
Sawant, a 41-year-old college economics professor, first drew attention as part of local Occupy Wall Street protests that included taking over a downtown park and a junior college campus in late 2011. She then ran for legislative office in 2012, challenging the powerful speaker of the state House, a Democrat. She was easily defeated.
This year, though, she pushed a platform that resonated with the city. She backed efforts to raise the minimum wage to $15; called for rent control in the city where rental prices keep climbing; and supports a tax on millionaires to help fund a public transit system and other services.
"I will reach out to the people who supported Richard Conlin, working with everyone in Seattle to fight for a minimum wage of $15 (an) hour, affordable housing, and the needs of ordinary people," Sawant said in a statement.
During her campaign, she condemned economic inequality, contending that some people aren't benefiting from the city's declining jobless rate, ongoing recovery from the recession, and downtown building boom.
"She's passionate about her values," Conlin said.
Research showed no socialist candidate had won a citywide office in the past 100 years. The last socialist candidate to make it into the general election was in 1991 and was defeated, said Scott Cline, the city's archivist.