Please visit our sponsor!










Bookmark and Share
In This Edition

Noam Chomsky returns with, "Why The Rest Of The World No Longer Wants To Be Like U.S.."

Uri Avnery takes us, "90 Years from Now."

Glen Ford with a must read, "Detroit Will Be Democracy's Decisive Battle."

Norman Solomon exposes, "Big Brother's Loyal Sister: How Dianne Feinstein Is Betraying Civil Liberties."

Jim Hightower wonders, "Cruzing To The White House?"

David Swanson explores, "Eisenhower's Drones."

James Donahue warns of, "The Looming Trans-Pacific Partnership."

John Nichols concludes, "Seattle's 'Another World Is Both Possible and Necessary' Campaign."

Chris Hedges is, "Imploding The Myth Of Israel."

Russell Brand says, "We Deserve More From Our Democratic System."

Paul Krugman examines, "Those Depressing Germans."

David Sirota hears, "The Single-Payer Signal In The Obamacare Noise."

Medea Benjamin reports, "Drones Have Come Out Of The Shadows."

Nevada Assemblyman Jim Wheeler wins this week's coveted, "Vidkun Quisling Award!"

Robert Reich explains, "Why Washington Is Cutting Safety Nets When Most Americans Are Still In The Great Recession."

Robert Scheer demands we, "Pay No Attention To That Imperialist Behind The Curtain."

And finally in the 'Parting Shots' department Andy Borowitz finds, "Study: Americans Safe From Gun Violence Except In Schools, Malls, Airports, Movie Theatres, Workplaces, Streets, Own Homes" but first Uncle Ernie finds himself, "Clutching Straws."

This week we spotlight the cartoons of John Sherffius, with additional cartoons, photos and videos from Tom Tomorrow, Jason Reed, Joe Rogue, LOLBrary.Com, Quick Meme.Com, Getty Images, Nation Books, Fiscal Times, The Telegraph, Times Books, The New Yorker, AP, BBC, Black Agenda Report, You Tube.Com and Issues & Alibis.Org.

Plus we have all of your favorite Departments...

The Quotable Quote...
The Dead Letter Office...
The Cartoon Corner...
To End On A Happy Note...
Have You Seen This...
Parting Shots...

Welcome one and all to "Uncle Ernie's Issues & Alibis."













Bookmark and Share


Clutching Straws
By Ernest Stewart

If you're drowning you don't clutch no straw, no, no
Lazy ~~~ Deep Purple

"We will not have any more crashes in our time." ~~~ John Maynard Keynes in 1927

"Assemblyman Wheeler's comments are deeply offensive and have no place in our society. He should retract his remarks and apologize." ~~~ Republican Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval

"There is no exercise better for the heart than reaching down and lifting people up." ~~~ John Holmes


I see the people and the voting booth manufacturers have spoken and the tea-baggers didn't do so well, except for Piggy boy in New Jersey. What is wrong with the people of New Jersey? Is there something in the water or the air that cause people to go insane? I know a couple of folks from Jersey and they seem to be normal and quite bright so WTF? My guess is the majority of Jersey-ites are masochists who enjoy being beaten up by the far right?

Still, for the most part, this off year election regained some ground around the country for the people. The folks in Virginia woke up and decided to stop goose stepping along by electing Terry McAuliffe over former state Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli. Cuccinelli might have fared better had he not embraced the Rethuglicans hate of women to the point that Ken wanted to control everything about the ladies including their bedrooms, as you can imagine, that didn't play well at the polls!

There were three major mayors races of note, all three won by Demoncrats. Voters in New York, Boston and Detroit elected and threw out the tea-baggers in New York City and replaced them with folks that look to gain back the things taken away from the people.

In New York City; Democratic Public Advocate Bill de Blasio won the mayor's office with nearly three quarters of the vote. An unabashed liberal, Bill campaigned on taxing the rich and ending far right Mayor Michael Bloomberg's most aggressive police tactics, de Blasio has become the city's first Democratic mayor in 20 years. Who knows, maybe the Big Apple isn't quite dead after all!

In Boston, Massachusetts lawmaker Marty Walsh, who was backed by organized labor, was picked to succeed longtime Boston Mayor Tom Menino, who has held the city's top job for two decades.

In Detroit, voters picked their first white Mayor in 40 years since Coleman Young all but destroyed Detroit in the 20 years he was Mayor. You'll recall that Coleman happily drove most all of the white folks from the city all the way "across 8 mile road." Of course, Mike Duggan will have his hands full of Kevin Orr the seditious traitor who was appointed by Emperor Snyder to oversee the destruction of Detroit by the sell off of everything worth anything, to the Wall street mob and British banksters, so good luck to Mike, he's certainly going to need it. It will be at least 6 months before he is anything close to being a real mayor. All he can do is bide his time and wait till Orr is gone and hopefully in jail for sedition and other major crimes!

One interesting race, a way down yonder in Alabama, where the GOP old school recorded a reassuring win in a special congressional election. Bradley Byrne, a former state legislature backed by congressional GOP leaders and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, (a real sweetie) wrested his party's nomination away from Dean Young, a real estate investor and tea-bagger activist known for his flame-throwing bullsh*t. So, apparently, you can teach and old conservative dog a new trick? Imagine that! I look forward to the election next year to perhaps get rid of the tea-baggers and return the House to the somewhat sane hands of the Demoncrats. Yes there isn't much difference between the slightly different sides of our one party, but it is, something other than straws, to clutch at.

In Other News

Have you noticed that the income gap between the richest 1% of Americans, and the rest of us widened to a record margin in 2012?

The top 1% of US earners collected 19.3% of household income, breaking a record previously set in 1927. Ya'll recall what happen to the economy just two years later? October 29th, 1929 is known to this day as Black Tuesday. The result was 20% unemployment and ten years of struggle and heartbreak for average Americans. This time we have over twice their population and three times the unemployed and they call it a recession, but of course, the recession is gone or Obama wouldn't have cut food stamps, right? Because, if not, the 60 million Americans that are currently unemployed will have even less of a chance of finding work as did folks in the early 1930s after that other shoe drops.

As I'm sure you know income inequality in the US has been growing out of control for the 1% for almost three decades. According to a recent study of the year 2012:

Overall, the pre-tax incomes of the top 1% of households rose 19.6% compared to a 1% increase for the rest of Americans.

And the top 10% of richest households represented just under half of all income in the year, according to the analysis.

The effects of the Rethuglicans efforts and the Demoncratic compliance to hold the economy down and with the people getting desperate, because of those efforts, it's about to have a drastic effect on the economy and American life in general. Our new "Great Depression" looks to be worse than the last "Great Depression" and one for the history books. I hope ya'll are prepared, look for the beginning of it come mid January. Beware the Ides of January Caesar!

And Finally

Methinks Nevada Assemblyman Jim Wheeler let the cat out of the bag the other day. If you're black or latino you'll want to pay attention to what Jim had to say! Perhaps, this is what the Rethuglican Tea-baggers have in store for us, when they take over?

Jim referenced an earlier exchange with conservative activist Chuck Muth, who in writing about Wheeler's 2010 losing candidacy said, "what if those citizens decided they want to, say, bring back slavery? Hey, if that's what they want, right Jim?" Jim said, "If that's what they wanted, I'd have to hold my nose, I'd have to bite my tongue and they'd probably have to hold a gun to my head, but yeah ... if that's what the constituency wants that elected me, that's what they elected me for." I'm going to repeat that again for those of you on drugs...

Jim will bring back slavery at the drop of a hat!

I wonder if, the voters wanted Jim to stand in front of a moving railroad train, if he would? Perhaps we can get his citizens to ask him just that? Where's Casey Jones when you need him? Be that as it may, we reward Jim's racism and stupidity with this week's Vidkun Quisling Award!

Keepin' On

I caught a break from the folks where I get the right to publish some authors and artists. They excepted partial payment and will allow me to pay them off by the first of the year. Which means we'll be publishing at least through December 27th. Ah, the friends you make in Hollywood!

Trouble is, we still need to raise $600 to keep publishing beyond that date. So a little help ya'll before it's too late. there's been zilch in the po box as of late, nor have I heard any rumors of an impending check on it's way.

Still, we have time to take it over it goal and perhaps bring back some old departments; if we do. As always, it's totally up to you, if we continue or if we don't. If what we do for you is important to you, and is important that we keep working for you, then send us whatever you can, as often as you can, and we'll keep bringing you today's most important commodity, the truth!

*****


03-04-1951 ~ 10-30-2013
Thanks for the jams!




*****

We get by with a little help from our friends!
So please help us if you can...?
Donations

*****

So how do you like Bush Lite so far?
And more importantly, what are you planning on doing about it?

Until the next time, Peace!
(c) 2013 Ernest Stewart a.k.a. Uncle Ernie is an unabashed radical, author, stand-up comic, DJ, actor, political pundit and for the last 12 years managing editor and publisher of Issues & Alibis magazine. Visit me on Facebook. Visit the Magazine's page on Facebook and like us when you do. Follow me on Twitter.













Why The Rest Of The World No Longer Wants To Be Like U.S.
Many countries in the world see the U.S. as the single greatest external threat to their societies.
By Noam Chomsky

During the latest episode of the Washington farce that has astonished a bemused world, a Chinese commentator wrote that if the United States cannot be a responsible member of the world system, perhaps the world should become "de-Americanized" - and separate itself from the rogue state that is the reigning military power but is losing credibility in other domains.

The Washington debacle's immediate source was the sharp shift to the right among the political class. In the past, the U.S. has sometimes been described sardonically - but not inaccurately - as a one-party state: the business party, with two factions called Democrats and Republicans.

That is no longer true. The U.S. is still a one-party state, the business party. But it only has one faction: moderate Republicans, now called New Democrats (as the U.S. Congressional coalition styles itself).

There is still a Republican organization, but it long ago abandoned any pretense of being a normal parliamentary party. Conservative commentator Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute describes today's Republicans as "a radical insurgency - ideologically extreme, scornful of facts and compromise, dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition": a serious danger to the society.

The party is in lock-step service to the very rich and the corporate sector. Since votes cannot be obtained on that platform, the party has been compelled to mobilize sectors of the society that are extremist by world standards. Crazy is the new norm among Tea Party members and a host of others beyond the mainstream.

The Republican establishment and its business sponsors had expected to use them as a battering ram in the neoliberal assault against the population - to privatize, to deregulate and to limit government, while retaining those parts that serve wealth and power, like the military.

The Republican establishment has had some success, but now finds that it can no longer control its base, much to its dismay. The impact on American society thus becomes even more severe. A case in point: the virulent reaction against the Affordable Care Act and the near-shutdown of the government.

The Chinese commentator's observation is not entirely novel. In 1999, political analyst Samuel P. Huntington warned that for much of the world, the U.S. is "becoming the rogue superpower," seen as "the single greatest external threat to their societies."

A few months into the Bush term, Robert Jervis, president of the American Political Science Association, warned that "In the eyes of much of the world, in fact, the prime rogue state today is the United States." Both Huntington and Jervis warned that such a course is unwise. The consequences for the U.S. could be harmful.

In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, the leading establishment journal, David Kaye reviews one aspect of Washington's departure from the world: rejection of multilateral treaties "as if it were sport."

He explains that some treaties are rejected outright, as when the U.S. Senate "voted against the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2012 and the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) in 1999."

Others are dismissed by inaction, including "such subjects as labor, economic and cultural rights, endangered species, pollution, armed conflict, peacekeeping, nuclear weapons, the law of the sea, and discrimination against women."

Rejection of international obligations "has grown so entrenched," Kaye writes, "that foreign governments no longer expect Washington's ratification or its full participation in the institutions treaties create. The world is moving on; laws get made elsewhere, with limited (if any) American involvement."

While not new, the practice has indeed become more entrenched in recent years, along with quiet acceptance at home of the doctrine that the U.S. has every right to act as a rogue state.

To take a typical example, a few weeks ago U.S. special operations forces snatched a suspect, Abu Anas al-Libi, from the streets of the Libyan capital Tripoli, bringing him to a naval vessel for interrogation without counsel or rights. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry informed the press that the actions are legal because they comply with American law, eliciting no particular comment.

Principles are valid only if they are universal. Reactions would be a bit different, needless to say, if Cuban special forces kidnapped the prominent terrorist Luis Posada Carriles in Miami, bringing him to Cuba for interrogation and trial in accordance with Cuban law.

Such actions are restricted to rogue states. More accurately, to the one rogue state that is powerful enough to act with impunity: in recent years, to carry out aggression at will, to terrorize large regions of the world with drone attacks, and much else.

And to defy the world in other ways, for example by persisting in its embargo against Cuba despite the long-term opposition of the entire world, apart from Israel, which voted with its protector when the United Nations again condemned the embargo (188-2) in October.

Whatever the world may think, U.S. actions are legitimate because we say so. The principle was enunciated by the eminent statesman Dean Acheson in 1962, when he instructed the American Society of International Law that no legal issue arises when the United States responds to a challenge to its "power, position, and prestige."

Cuba committed that crime when it beat back a U.S. invasion and then had the audacity to survive an assault designed to bring "the terrors of the earth" to Cuba, in the words of Kennedy adviser and historian Arthur Schlesinger.

When the U.S. gained independence, it sought to join the international community of the day. That is why the Declaration of Independence opens by expressing concern for the "decent respect to the opinions of mankind."

A crucial element was evolution from a disorderly confederacy to a unified "treaty-worthy nation," in diplomatic historian Eliga H. Gould's phrase, that observed the conventions of the European order. By achieving this status, the new nation also gained the right to act as it wished internally.

It could thus proceed to rid itself of the indigenous population and to expand slavery, an institution so "odious" that it could not be tolerated in England, as the distinguished jurist William Murray, Earl of Mansfield, ruled in 1772. Evolving English law was a factor impelling the slave-owning society to escape its reach.

Becoming a treaty-worthy nation thus conferred multiple advantages: foreign recognition, and the freedom to act at home without interference. Hegemonic power offers the opportunity to become a rogue state, freely defying international law and norms, while facing increased resistance abroad and contributing to its own decline through self-inflicted wounds.
(c) 2013 Noam Chomsky is emeritus professor of linguistics and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is co- author, with Gilbert Achcar, of Perilous Power: The Middle East & U.S. Foreign Policy: Dialogues on Terror, Democracy, War, and Justice. His most recent book is Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire.





90 Years from Now
By Uri Avnery

WILL ISRAEL exist in another 90 years? The very question is typical of Israel. No one would take it seriously in England or Germany, or even in other states born from immigration, like Australia or the USA.

Yet here, people speak of "existential dangers" all the time. A Palestinian state is an existential danger. The Iranian bomb is an existential danger. Why? They will have their bomb, we have our bomb, there will be a "balance of terror". So what?

There is something in our national character that fosters self-doubt, uncertainty. The Holocaust? Perhaps an unconscious sense of guilt? A result of eternal war, or even the reason for it?

LET ME state right from the beginning: Yes, I believe Israel will exist in 90 years. The question is: what kind of Israel? Will it be a country your great-great-great-grandsons and daughters will be proud of? A state they will want to live in?

On the day the state was founded, I was 24 years old. My comrades and I, soldiers in our new army, didn't think the event was very important. We were preparing ourselves for the battle that was to take place that night, and the speeches of politicians in Tel-Aviv did not really interest us. We knew that if we won the war there would be a state, and if not, there would be neither a state nor us.

I am not a nostalgic person. I have no nostalgia for Israel before (the war of) 1967, as some of my colleagues here have expressed. A lot was wrong then, too. Huge amounts of Arab property were expropriated. But let's not look back. Let's look at Israel as it is now, and ask ourselves: where do we go from here?

IF ISRAEL continues on its present course, there will be disaster.

The first stage will be apartheid. It already exists in the occupied territories, and it will spread to Israel proper. The descent into the abyss will not be dramatic or precipitous, It will be gradual, almost imperceptible.

Slowly pressure on Israel will grow. Demographics will do their work. Sometime before the 90 years are up, Israel will be compelled to grant civil rights to the Palestinians. There will be an Arab majority. Israel will be an Arab-majority state.

Some people may welcome that. But it will be the end of the Zionist dream. Zionism will become a historic episode. This state will be just another country where Jews live as a minority - those who remain here.

There are those who say: "There just is no solution." If so, we should all obtain foreign passports.

Some dream of the so-called "one-state solution." Well, during the last half-century, many states in which diverse nations lived together have broken apart. A partial list: the Soviet Union, Cyprus, Yugoslavia, then Serbia, Czechoslovakia, Sudan. There has not been a single instance of two nations freely uniting in one state. Not one.

I AM not afraid of any military threat. There is no real danger. In our time, no country possessing nuclear arms can be destroyed by force. We are quite able to defend ourselves.

Rather, I am afraid of internal dangers: the implosion of our intellectual standards, the proliferation of a parasitical orthodox establishment, and especially emigration. All over the world, people are becoming more and more mobile. Families disperse. Zionism is a two-way street. If you can be a good Jew in Los Angeles as well as in Tel Aviv, why stay here?

The connection between Israel and the world's Jews will become weaker. That is natural. We are a new nation, rooted in this country. That is the real aim. Our relations with the Diaspora will be like, say, between Australia and England.

I WANT to raise a basic question: will nationalism itself survive?

Will it be supplanted by new collective modes of organization and ideologies?

I think nationalism will continue to exist. In the last century, no power has succeeded in overcoming it. The internationalist Soviet Union has collapsed and left nothing behind but a rampant, racist nationalism. Communism succeeded only when it took a ride on nationalism, like in Vietnam and China. Religion succeeded when it took a hike on nationalism, like in Iran.

Wherein lies the power of nationalism? It seems that the human being needs a sense of belonging, belonging to a certain culture, tradition, historic memories (real or invented), homeland, language.

I SHALL pose the question in a different way: will the nation-state survive?

In factual terms, the nation-state is an anachronism. It came into being during the last three centuries because the economic need for a large local market, the military need for an adequate army and so forth required a state the size of, say, France. But now almost all these functions have been taken over by regional blocs like the EU.

This is the reason for a curious phenomenon: while nation-states join larger unions, they themselves break up into smaller units. Scots, Corsicans, the Flemish, Catalonians, Basques, Chechnians, French Canadians and many many more are seeking independence.

Why? A Scotsman thinks that an independent Scotland can join the EU and reap all the benefits, without having to suffer English snobbery. Local nationalism trumps larger nationalism.

SO WHERE shall we be in 90 years, at the beginning of the 22th century?

In the year of my birth, 1923, an Austrian nobleman named Count Nikolaus Coudenhove-Kalergi called for a pan-European movement in order to create the United States of Europe. At the time, a few years after World War I and a few years before World War II, it sounded like a crazy utopia. Now we have the European Union.

At this moment, the United States of the World sounds like a crazy utopia, too. But there is no escape from some kind of world governance. The global economy needs it to function. Global communications make it possible. Global spying is already with us. Only an effective global authority can save our suffering planet, put an end to wars and civil wars, world-wide epidemics and hunger.

Can world governance be democratic? I certainly hope so. World communications make it possible. Your descendents will vote for a world parliament.

Will the nation-state continue to exist in this brave new world? Yes, it will. Much as nation-states do exist in today's Europe: each with its flag, its anthem, its soccer team, its local administration.

THIS, THEN, is my optimistic vision: Israel, the nation-state of the Israeli people, closely aligned with the nation-state of the Palestinian people, will be a member of a regional Union that will include the Arab states and hopefully Turkey and Iran, as a proud member of the United States of the World.

A democratic, liberal and secular state where your descendents will be proud to proclaim: "I am an Israeli!"
(c) 2013 Uri Avnery ~~~ Gush Shalom







Detroit Will Be Democracy's Decisive Battle
By Glen Ford

"If we don't do something real soon, I think you'll have to agree that we're going to be forced either to use the ballot or the bullet. It's one or the other in 1964. It isn't that time is running out -- time has run out!" - Malcolm X, "The Ballot or the Bullet," Cleveland, Ohio, April 3, 1964.

A half-century after the man once known as Detroit Red spoke those words, the last grains of sand are trickling from the hour glass of what has passed for democracy in America. The principle of one-person, one vote - or any meaningful franchise, at all - is no longer operative for the majority of Black people in the state of Michigan, whose largely African American cities are run by emergency managers accountable to no one but Rick Snyder, the venture capitalist in the governor's mansion. The same bell is tolling for every urban center in the land, as hegemonic finance capital creates the template for direct corporate rule through the systematic destruction of Detroiters' citizenship rights.

The 82 percent Black metropolis has been reduced to a Bantustan in both the economic and political senses of the term. Surrounded by some of the richest counties in the nation, the impoverished city exemplifies a national racial wealth gap that is more profound than that which existed in South Africa at the height of apartheid, as detailed by Jon Jeter in this issue of BAR (See "Worse Than Apartheid: Black in Obama's America"). The Emergency Manager law, passed by the Republican state legislature after rejection by voters in a referendum, makes the Bantustan analogy complete, with a Black corporate lawyer overseeing the dismantling of every mechanism of local democracy. Kevyn Orr's ascension as plenipotentiary of Wall Street is also the ultimate logic of the most vulgar current of African American politics, which seeks only Black representation at the highest levels of power, no matter whose interests are served. Wall Street long ago scoped this Black weakness, and has exploited it at every political level.

Detroit's dissolution also sounds the death knell for a generation's dreams of authentic "Black Power" through purely electoral means in collaboration with corporate "renaissance" schemes. The Black masses have never been envisioned as part of any "renewal" of the cities under corporate auspices. Rather, investment is contingent on Black disempowerment and removal - the corporate axiom from which the Emergency Manager regime logically flows. Barack Obama, as loyal (and lawyerly) a servant of the banks as Orr, accepts the validity of the premise, which is why he raises no principled objection to Detroit's disenfranchisement, either in its particulars or as a model for urban America.

The drama unfolds in bankruptcy court, a venue whose rules were written almost entirely by the financial capitalist class. By virtue of the Emergency Manager law, Detroit is represented in court by its nemesis, Kevyn Orr - which is like imposing Newt Gingrich as chief counsel for the NAACP. (The Detroit NAACP seeks to halt the proceedings on voting rights grounds.) Orr's office is referred to as "the city" in both legal terms and by idiot corporate media, who confuse the public by reporting, as did Detroit PBS correspondent Christy McDonald, this week, that the issue is "whether the city can go ahead with its bankruptcy" process. In fact, hardly an elected official or candidate exists that openly supports bankruptcy, especially under Kevyn Orr's terms (Detroit holds a meaningless mayoral and council election, this week).

Orr may be the most hated man in Detroit - a fact that would be noted by every media outlet in the nation, if the metropolis were largely white. But the Detroit model for democracy's demolition is depicted as a white supremacist morality play, in which corruption and incompetence are the inevitable fruits of Black majority rule, which must be extirpated by any means necessary. White Americans, in general, can be distracted by the slightest hint of ghetto graffiti from seeing their own futures written on the wall.

Kevin Orr, ensconced in a $5,000 per month luxury penthouse condominium paid for by one of Governor Snyder's private slush funds with contributions from secret corporate donors, is building the template for urban democratic dissolution from scratch. He is a crude and unimaginative man, doing Wall Street's bidding with little finesse in the bright light of day. His arrogance is buttressed by the certainty that he is backed by the real rulers of the American State, Wall Street, and that the outcome in Judge Steven Rhodes' federal bankruptcy court will create precedent to render all of America's cities servile and neutered. Orr is also aware that his coloration provides perfect cover for his mission - added value for his services, well worth the luxury suite. (The judge ruled that Orr's accommodations were irrelevant to the case.)

First-responders, revered in the post-911 United States, are crucified along with the rest of the city rabble. Orr ejected 8,000 city retirees under age 65 from their city-paid $605 per month health insurance, including police and firefighters. The state constitution specifically forbids impairing pensions, which average only $18,000 a year, yet Orr testified that he thinks federal law allows him to override those protections. He and the governor, who was subpoenaed by unions, both claimed they didn't start out wanting to bankrupt the city - but why would Snyder hire bankruptcy lawyer Orr unless that were the intention? The lying duo claimed they never conspired to push Detroit into the venue, and that it was the unions that refused to negotiate in good faith. Apparently, "good faith" means negotiating away rights guaranteed by law.

Orr admitted that he never even raised the subject of getting the state to help Detroit out of its fiscal difficulties. And, why would he? His mission is not to save the city, but to break it into auctionable pieces and to garnishee its remaining revenue streams for bankers. His opening fiscal reorganization plan would pay off Bank of America and UBS, who have already made millions on a 2005 derivatives scheme with the city, establishing Britain's Barclay's Bank as the super-priority creditor with dibs on $4 million a month in Detroit casino revenues if the city defaults.

To ensure that the city can never escape the clutches of capital, the contract would allow Barclay's to immediately declare Detroit in default if Emergency Financial Manager rule is ended for any reason - that is, the corporate plan calls for the permanent cessation of democracy in Detroit.

That's the plan for the whole country. Wall Street recognizes that it cannot effectively consume the public sphere as long as the public retains the electoral democratic mechanisms to stop it. In other words, concentrated capital can no longer coexist with even the thin gruel of American democracy. The Black polity is the weakest link in the U.S. democratic armor. White folks won't protect it, and Black folks have the least resources to defend it. The generals of Wall Street have purposely chosen Detroit as the decisive battleground, where the power of massed capital will be hyper-charged by an endemic, unreconstructed racism that can reliably be expected to deny that democracy is really at stake, at all. It's just, you know - "the Blacks."

And even some Black folks will agree.
(c) 2013 Glen Ford is the Black Agenda Report executive editor. He can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.




Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee.



Big Brother's Loyal Sister: How Dianne Feinstein Is Betraying Civil Liberties
By Norman Solomon

Ever since the first big revelations about the National Security Agency five months ago, Dianne Feinstein has been in overdrive to defend the surveillance state. As chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, she generates an abundance of fog, weasel words, anti-whistleblower slander and bogus notions of reform -- while methodically stabbing civil liberties in the back.

Feinstein's powerful service to Big Brother, reaching new heights in recent months, is just getting started. She's hard at work to muddy all the waters of public discourse she can -- striving to protect the NSA from real legislative remedies while serving as a key political enabler for President Obama's shameless abuse of the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments.

Last Sunday, on CBS, when Feinstein told "Face the Nation" viewers that Edward Snowden has done "enormous disservice to our country," it was one of her more restrained smears. In June, when Snowden first went public as a whistleblower, Feinstein quickly declared that he had committed "an act of treason." Since then, she has refused to tone down the claim. "I stand by it," she told The Hill on Oct. 29.

Days ago, taking it from the top of the NSA's main talking points, Feinstein led off a San Francisco Chronicle op-ed piece with 9/11 fear-mongering. "The Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the United States was highly organized and sophisticated and designed to strike at the heart of the American economy and government," she wrote, and quickly added: "We know that terrorists remain determined to kill Americans and our allies."

From there, Senator Feinstein praised the NSA's "call-records program" and then insisted: "This is not a surveillance program." (Paging Mr. Orwell.)

Feinstein's essay -- touting her new bill, the "FISA Improvements Act," which she just pushed through the Senate Intelligence Committee -- claimed that the legislation will "bridge the gap between preventing terrorism and protecting civil liberties." But as Electronic Frontier Foundation activist Trevor Timm writes, the bill actually "codifies some of the NSA's worst practices, would be a huge setback for everyone's privacy, and it would permanently entrench the NSA's collection of every phone record held by U.S. telecoms."

California's senior senator is good at tactical maneuvers that blow media smoke. In late October -- while continuing to defend the NSA's planetary dragnet on emails and phone calls -- Feinstein voiced concern "that certain surveillance activities have been in effect for more than a decade and that the Senate Intelligence Committee wasn't satisfactorily informed." Spinning the myth that congressional oversight of the NSA really exists, she added: "Therefore, our oversight needs to be strengthened and increased."

As usual, Feinstein's verbal gymnastics were in sync with choreography from the Obama White House. The "certain surveillance activities" that she has begun to criticize are the NSA's efforts targeting the phones of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other allied foreign leaders. Feinstein mildly chided Obama for ostensibly not being aware of the eavesdropping on Merkel's cell phone ("That is a big problem"), but she was merely snipping at a few threads of the NSA's vast global spying -- while, like the administration as a whole, reaffirming support for the vast fabric of the agency's surveillance programs.

The White House is now signaling policy changes in response to the uproar about monitoring Merkel's phone, the New York Times reported on Nov. 5, but "President Obama and his top advisers have concluded that there is no workable alternative to the bulk collection of huge quantities of 'metadata,' including records of all telephone calls made inside the United States." Feinstein is on the same page: eager to fine tune and continue mass surveillance.

With fanfare that foreshadows a drawn-out onslaught of hype, Feinstein has announced that the Senate Intelligence Committee will hold hearings on NSA surveillance. "Her committee is now making preparations for a major investigative undertaking, which is expected to take at least several months," the Wall Street Journal reports. When the show is over, "The report that results from the probe will be classified."

With Dianne Feinstein's hand on the gavel, you can expect plenty of fake inquiries to pantomime actual oversight. She has shown a clear commitment to deep-sixing vital information about the surveillance state, in a never-ending quest for the uninformed consent of the governed. "From out of the gate, we know that her entire approach is to make those hearings into a tragic farce," I said during an interview on C-SPAN Radio last week. "Her entire approach to this issue has been to do damage control for the NSA.... She is an apologist and a flack for the surveillance state, she is aligned with the Obama White House with that agenda, and we at the grassroots must push back against that kind of a politics."
(c) 2013 Norman Solomon is co- founder of RootsAction.org and founding director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death" and "Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America's Warfare State."




Ted gives the corpo-rat salute!




Cruzing To The White House?

One of the stupidest bits of conventional wisdom popping out of Washington these days is that, whatever opinion you have about far-right tea party extremist Ted Cruz, you have to concede that he's "smart."

Really? Bull-goose goofiness and reckless self-absorption is smart? After all smart is as smart does, and plenty of hot shots with big IQs have turned out to be seriously stupid - not to mention narcissistic, ridiculous, delusional, destructive, corrupt, psychopathic, and criminal. Take Joe McCarthy, Al Capone, Richard Nixon, Bernie Madoff, the Koch brothers... and now down to Ted.

Not only has Cruz mounted a maniacal crusade to kill Obamacare at all costs, but he sees himself as monumentally heroic, even asserting that his recent petulant shutdown of our nation's government was the moral equivalent of the people who fought in World War II to stop Hitler. Wow - that is grandiosely stupid!

Moreover, Cruz splattered his vainglorious stupidity all over his own party. We're now seeing the spectacle of GOP lawmakers bellowing like crazy Cruzites, openly declaring their best idea on healthcare reform - indeed their only idea - is to kill reform. I can hardly wait for their 2014 campaign ads: "Hi, I'm Congressman Goober, and I've been fighting ferociously in Washington to keep you and your family from getting the health care you need. Remember, vote for the Goober."

Cruz, of course, can't even see his stupidity, for the tea party fringe has lifted him high atop its national political pedestal, dazzling him with impassioned pleas to run for president. However, it would be smart of Ted to recall that this same wobbly pedestal was most recently occupied by the likes of Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, and Donnie Trump - all of whom were also legends in their own minds.
(c) 2013 Jim Hightower's latest book, "If The Gods Had Meant Us To Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates," is available in a fully revised and updated paperback edition.








Eisenhower's Drones
By David Swanson

President Dwight Eisenhower is often admired for having avoided huge wars, having declared that every dollar wasted on militarism was food taken out of the mouths of children, and having warned -- albeit on his way out the door -- of the toxic influence of the military industrial complex (albeit in a speech of much more mixed messages than we tend to recall).

But when you oppose war, not because it murders, and not because it assaults the rights of the foreign places attacked, but because it costs too much in U.S. lives and dollars, then your steps tend in the direction of quick and easy warfare -- usually deceptively cheap and easy warfare.

President Obama and his subordinates are well aware that much of the world is outraged by the use of drones to kill. The warnings of likely blowback and long-term damage to U.S. interests and human interests and the rule of law are not hard to find. But our current warriors don't see a choice between murdering people with drones and using negotiations and courts of law to settle differences. They see a choice between murdering people with drones and murdering people with ground troops on a massive scale. The preference between these two options is so obvious to them as to require little thought.

President Eisenhower had his own cheap and easy tool for better warfare. It was called the Delightfully Deluded Dulles Brothers, and -- in terms of how much thought this pair of brothers gave to the possible outcomes of their reckless assault on the world -- it's fair to call them a couple of drones in a literal as well as an analogous sense.

John Foster Dulles at the State Department and Allen Dulles at the CIA are the subject of a new book by Stephen Kinzer called The Brothers, which ought to replace whatever history book the Texas School Board has most recently imposed on our children. This is a story of two vicious, racist, fanatical jerks, but it's also the story of the central thrust of U.S. public policy for the past 75 years.

The NSA didn't invent sliminess in the 21st century. The Dulles' grandfather and uncle did. Cameras weren't first put on airplanes over the earth when drones were invented. Allen Dulles started that with piloted planes -- the main result being scandal, outrage, and international antagonism -- a tradition we seem intent on keeping up. Oh, and the cameras also revealed that the CIA had been wildly exaggerating the strength of the Soviet Union's military -- but who needed to know that?

The Obama White House didn't invent aggression toward journalism. Allen and Foster Dulles make the current crop of propagandists, censors, intimidators, and human rights abusers look like amateurs singing from an old hymnal they can't properly read.

Black sites weren't created by George W. Bush. Allen Dulles set up secret prisons in Germany, Japan, and the Panama Canal Zone, the MKULTRA program, and the Gladio and other networks of forces staying behind in Europe after World War II (never really) ended.

The Dynamic Dulles Duo racked up quite a resume. They overthrew a democratic government in Iran, installing a fierce dictatorship, and never imagining that the eventual backlash might be unpleasant. Delighted by this -- and intimately in on it, as Kinzer documents -- Eisenhower backed the overthrow of Guatemala's democracy as well -- both of these operations being driven primarily by the interests of Foster Dulles' clients on Wall Street (where his firm had been rather embarrassingly late in halting its support for the Nazis). Never mind the hostility generated throughout Latin America, United Fruit claimed its rights to run Guatemala, and who were the Guatemalans to say otherwise?

Unsatisfied with this everlasting damage, the Dulles Brothers dragged the United States into a war of their own making on Vietnam, sought to overthrow Sukarno in Indonesia, teamed up with the Belgians to murder Lumumba in the Congo, and tried desperately to murder Fidel Castro or start an all-out war on Cuba. The Bay of Pigs fiasco was essentially the result of Allen Dulles' confidence that he could trap a new president (John Kennedy) into expanding a war.

If that weren't enough damage for two careers, the Disastrous Dulles Dimwits created the Council on Foreign Relations, shaped the creation of the United Nations to preserve U.S. imperialism, manufactured intense irrational fear of the Soviet Union and its mostly mythical plots for global domination, convinced Truman that intelligence and operations should be combined in the single agency of the CIA, sent countless secret agents to their deaths for no earthly reason, unwittingly allowed double agents to reveal much of their activities to their enemies, subverted democracy in the Philippines and Lebanon and Laos and numerous other nations, made hysteria a matter of national pride, ended serious Congressional oversight of foreign policy, pointlessly antagonized China and the USSR, boosted radically evil regimes likely to produce future blowback around the world and notably in Saudi Arabia but also in Pakistan -- with predictable damage to relations with India, failed miserably at overthrowing Nasser in Egypt but succeeded in turning the Arab world against the United States, in fact antagonized much of the world as it attempted an unacceptable neutrality in the Cold War, rejected Soviet peace overtures, aligned the U.S. government with Israel, built the CIA headquarters at Langley and training grounds at Camp Peary, and -- ironically enough -- radically expanded and entrenched the military industrial complex to which "covert actions" were supposed to be the easy new alternative (rather as the drone industry is doing today).

The Dulles Dolts were a lot like King Midas if the king's love had been for dogshit rather than gold. As icing on the cake of their careers, Allen Dulles -- dismissed in disgrace by Kennedy who regretted ever having kept him on -- manipulated the Warren Commission's investigation of Kennedy's death in a highly suspicious manner. Kinzer says no more than that, but James Douglass's JFK and the Unspeakable points to other grounds for concern, including Dulles's apparent coverup of Oswald's being an employee of the CIA.
(c) 2013 David Swanson is the author of "War Is A Lie."








The Looming Trans-Pacific Partnership
By James Donahue

It was probably inevitable that our ever-shrinking world would drift into the global partnership long described by the prophets of old as a "one world government." This emerging global enterprise is not like anything we ever imagined, however. That's because it is being designed by the people now in financial and political power who are primarily interested in creating a corporate plan to seize even more of the planet's resources, latch onto the world's wealth and further enslave the masses.

The idea, drafted secretly behind closed doors, is unveiling under the name Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP. This is a proposed trade pack that Japan is negotiating with the United States, Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam.

The idea is to expand the World Trade Organization to virtually include all of the major industrialized nations bordering the Pacific Rim. Organizers want liberalization of economies through the abolition of tariffs on trade. The United States, which joined the talks in 2008, is promoting a hard-core free trade policy. The United States and Japan together represent nearly 40 percent of the world's economy.

If the TPP gets international ratification and becomes a reality, the effect on the general population may make us all feel as if someone clamped chains around our necks. The freedoms we have enjoyed as corporate workers, members of a democratic society governed by elected officers, world communicators via the World Wide Web, and shoppers able to choose the products we eat and use based upon the belief that they are safe, will be snatched away from us.

At last report the TPP could allow for millions more American jobs to be lost to offshore employers, free corporate "banksters" from government oversight, ban the "buy American" promotions designed to help create green jobs and rebuild the U.S. economy, control our access to medicine, flood our grocery stores with unsafe food and products, and allow corporations to actually avoid American environmental laws and safeguards for public health.

The agreement goes beyond affecting trade issues. Among the other issues are: --It gives foreign corporations the right to override domestic U.S. laws governing trade and non-trade issues and actually sue governments in international tribunals to overrule national sovereignty. This could include things like environmental regulations on air, ground and water pollution, fracking for natural gas, offshore oil well drilling and control of nuclear energy.

* FPP would lift regulations on banks, power companies, insurance companies and stock market trading making it easier for corrupt banksters to swindle the people out of their hard-earned money.

* It would lower food safety inspections, prohibit mandatory labeling of genetically modified products and even the prohibition of the butchering and sale of meat from livestock stricken with serious disease.

* Through government procurement it would block people from buying locally produced farm products or possibly even growing their own food.

* It would allow for an international policing and monitoring of Internet user activities.

* There would be a regulation on public welfare, a halt to workplace safety standards and allow corporations to move more domestic jobs overseas.

* The agreement would increase patent and copyright protection, thus eliminating the freedom of Internet writers to quote from published documents and eliminating generic medicines that can be bought at affordable prices.

* There even is a potential restriction on essential services like public access to water, gas and electric services because of new investment rules. There are but a few of the possible impacts TPP may bring if adopted by our elected representatives in Washington. And the action, which has been in planning now for several years, has not been brought to public attention by our corporate owned media.

We are hoping the reports that have been slipping out from between the cracks in the closed doors are wrong. If not, TPP may be poised to change our lives forever, and do it with no less than an iron fist.
(c) 2013 James L. Donahue is a retired newspaper reporter, editor and columnist with more than 40 years of experience in professional writing. He is the published author of five books, all dealing with Michigan history, and several magazine articles. He currently produces daily articles for this web site.







Seattle's 'Another World Is Both Possible and Necessary' Campaign
By John Nichols

It may come as a surprise to Ted Cruz, but Americans have a rich history of entertaining democratic-socialist responses to economic and political challenges. Tom Paine charted the rough outlines of a social-welfare state in his 1797 pamphlet "Agrarian Justice." Fanny Wright was campaigning for the labor-linked and essentially social-democratic Workingmen's Party in 1829. Utopian socialists were regular contributors to Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, the newspaper that inspired the radical political experiment that came to be known as the Republican Party.

A century ago, members of the Socialist Party served in Congress and state legislatures, they were mayors of big cities and peopled city councils and school boards across the country. The Socialist Party candidate for president in 1912, Eugene Victor Debs, won close to a million votes and polled more than 10 percent of the vote in the states of Arizona, California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oklahoma and Washington.

The latter state was a hotbed of radicalism, especially in Seattle, where in 1916 activist Anna Louise Strong was elected to the school board. A militant supporter of left-wing causes and campaigns, she aligned with labor unions during the city's general strike and famously declared: "They say the Pharaohs built the pyramids. Do you think one Pharaoh dropped one bead of sweat? We built the pyramids for the Pharaohs and we're building for them yet."

As a member of the school board, Strong backed the antiwar and civil liberties crusades of Wisconsin Senator Robert M. La Follette, who is 1924 would seek the presidency as an independent progressive backed by the Socialist Party. La Follette came in third nationally but he finished second in Washington that year, behind Republican Calvin Coolidge but well ahead of Democrat John Davis.

Like San Francisco and Portland, Seattle remains a "Left Coast" city, with strong unions, a history of militant activism and adventurous local politics.

The latest adventure will play out November 5, when Seattle voters will decide whether to add a socialist to their city council. Kshama Sawant, a former software engineer who now teaches economics at Seattle Central Community College, is running a Socialist Alternative "Fund Human Needs, Fight Corporate Greed" campaign that declares: "We live in one of the richest cities in the richest nation on earth. There is no shortage of resources. Capitalism has failed the 99%. Another world is both possible and necessary-a socialist world based on the needs of humanity and the environment."

A veteran of Occupy protests and organizing drives, Sawant pulls no punches in her platform, which begins with a proposal to raise the minimum wage to $15 and hour and then promises to

* Seek "A Millionaire's Tax to fund mass transit, education, and living-wage union jobs providing vital social services." She proposes to: "End corporate welfare. Tax freeloading corporations. Reduce the unfair tax burden on small businesses, homeowners & workers.

* Support efforts to "Unionize Amazon, Starbucks & low-paid service workers."

* Commit to "No layoffs or attacks on public sector unions!"

That's a message with proven appeal in Seattle, where Sawant won 35 percent of the citywide primary vote and a place on the November 5 ballot challenging sixteen-year-incumbent Richard Conlin. In the officially nonpartisan race, Conlin is backed by most of the Democratic leadership in the very Democratic city of Seattle; he's also got the support of a number of major environmental groups. But both candidates have obtained endorsements from labor organizations and Sawant has won the enthusiastic support of the city's politically potent alternative weekly The Stranger.

"An immigrant woman of color, an Occupy Seattle organizer, and an economics instructor at Seattle Central Community College, Sawant offers voters a detailed policy agenda, backed up by a coherent economic critique and a sound strategy for moving the political debate in a leftward direction," argued The Stranger in an editorial that celebrated Sawant's run. "She is passionate but thoughtful. She speaks comfortably on non-economic issues. She is likable. And most important, she's winning over voters."

In August, the Seattle Weekly wrote: "We like her because she's an honest-to-god socialist who's willing to throw a few Molotov cocktails into the cloistered hatch-pits of our terribly staid civic 'debates.'"

Sawant is challenging a long-serving incumbent. She'll be outspent. That means that by most measures her race is an uphill one-as are those of the other independent and third-party candidates running on the left and the right this fall. The outlines of our electoral politics are, for the most part, drawn to favor the two major parties and a narrow range of ideas. But just as Robert Sarvis' unexpectedly strong Libertarian campaign for governor of Virginia (now in double digits in some polls) offers an indication that Americans are frustrated by the constraints of traditional two-party politics, Sawant's democratic-socialist campaign in Seattle is proving that a bold rejection of austerity has significant popular appeal.

"There is nobody in the political leadership of Seattle right now who comes into work every day with a sense of urgency to really fight for people's standard of living," says Sawant. "That's why voters are engaged in our campaign, because they are hearing a voice that they have been wanting to hear for years."
(c) 2013 John Nichols writes about politics for The Nation magazine as its Washington correspondent. His new book on protests and politics, Uprising: How Wisconsin Renewed the Politics of Protest, from Madison to Wall Street, has just been published by Nation Books. Follow John Nichols on Twitter @NicholsUprising.








Imploding The Myth Of Israel
By Chris Hedges

Israel has been poisoned by the psychosis of permanent war. It has been morally bankrupted by the sanctification of victimhood, which it uses to justify an occupation that rivals the brutality and racism of apartheid South Africa. Its democracy-which was always exclusively for Jews-has been hijacked by extremists who are pushing the country toward fascism. Many of Israel's most enlightened and educated citizens-1 million of them-have left the country. Its most courageous human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists-Israeli and Palestinian-are subject to constant state surveillance, arbitrary arrests and government-run smear campaigns. Its educational system, starting in primary school, has become an indoctrination machine for the military. And the greed and corruption of its venal political and economic elite have created vast income disparities, a mirror of the decay within America's democracy.

And yet, the hard truths about Israel remain largely unspoken. Liberal supporters of Israel decry its excesses. They wring their hands over the tragic necessity of airstrikes on Gaza or Lebanon or the demolition of Palestinian homes. They assure us that they respect human rights and want peace. But they react in inchoate fury when the reality of Israel is held up before them. This reality implodes the myth of the Jewish state. It exposes the cynicism of a state whose real goal is, and always has been, the transfer, forced immigration or utter subjugation and impoverishment of Palestinians inside Israel and the occupied territories. Reality shatters the fiction of a peace process. Reality lays bare the fact that Israel routinely has used deadly force against unarmed civilians, including children, to steal half the land on the West Bank and crowd forcibly displaced Palestinians into squalid, militarized ghettos while turning their land and homes over to Jewish settlers. Reality exposes the new racial laws adopted by Israel as those once advocated by the fanatic racist Meir Kahane. Reality unveils the Saharonim detention camp in the Negev Desert, the largest detention center in the world. Reality mocks the lie of open, democratic debate, including in the country's parliament, the Knesset, where racist diatribes and physical threats, often enshrined into law, are used to silence and criminalize the few who attempt to promote a civil society. Liberal Jewish critics inside and outside Israel, however, desperately need the myth, not only to fetishize Israel but also to fetishize themselves. Strike at the myth and you unleash a savage vitriol, which in its fury exposes the self-adulation and latent racism that lie at the core of modern Zionism.

There are very few intellectuals or writers who have the tenacity and courage to confront this reality. This is what makes Max Blumenthal's "Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel" one of the most fearless and honest books ever written about Israel. Blumenthal burrows deep into the dark heart of Israel. The American journalist binds himself to the beleaguered and shunned activists, radical journalists and human rights campaigners who are the conscience of the nation, as well as Palestinian families in the West Bank struggling in vain to hold back Israel's ceaseless theft of their land. Blumenthal, in chapter after chapter, methodically rips down the facade. And what he exposes, in the end, is a corpse.

I spent seven years in the Middle East as a correspondent, including months in Gaza and the West Bank. I lived for two years in Jerusalem. Many of the closest friends I made during my two decades overseas are Israeli. Most of them are among the Israeli outcasts that Blumenthal writes about, men and women whose innate decency and courage he honors throughout his book. They are those who, unlike the Israeli leadership and a population inculcated with racial hatred, sincerely want to end occupation, restore the rule of law and banish an ideology that creates moral hierarchies with Arabs hovering at the level of animal as Jews-especially Jews of European descent-are elevated to the status of demigods. It is a measure of Blumenthal's astuteness as a reporter that he viewed Israel through the eyes of these outcasts, as well as the Palestinians, and stood with them as they were arrested, tear-gassed and fired upon by Israeli soldiers. There is no other honest way to tell the story about Israel. And this is a very honest book.

"Goliath" is made up of numerous vignettes, some only a few pages long, that methodically build a picture of Israel, like pieces fit into a puzzle. It is in the details that Israel's reality is exposed. The Israeli army, Blumenthal points out in his first chapter, "To the Slaughter," employs a mathematical formula to limit outside food deliveries to Gaza to keep the caloric levels of the 1.5 million Palestinians trapped inside its open air prison just above starvation; a government official later denied that he had joked in a meeting that the practice is "like an appointment with a dietician." The saturation, 22-day bombing of Gaza that began on Dec. 27, 2008, led by 60 F-16 fighter jets, instantly killed 240 Palestinians, including scores of children. Israel's leading liberal intellectuals, including the writers Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua and David Grossman, blithely supported the wholesale murder of Palestinian civilians. And while Israelis blocked reporters from entering the coastal Gaza Strip-forcing them to watch distant explosions from Israel's Parash Hill, which some reporters nicknamed "the Hill of Shame"-the army and air force carried out atrocity after atrocity, day after day, crimes that were uncovered only after the attack was over and the press blockade lifted. This massive aerial and ground assault against a defenseless civilian population that is surrounded by the Israeli army, a population without an organized military, air force, air defenses, navy, heavy artillery or mechanized units, caused barely a ripple of protest inside Israel from the left or the right. It was part of the ongoing business of slaughtering the other.

"Unarmed civilians were torn to pieces with flechette darts sprayed from tank shells," Blumenthal writes. "Several other children covered in burns from white phosphorous chemical weapon rounds were taken to hospitals; a few were found dead with bizarre wounds after being hit with experimental Dense Inert Metal Explosive (DIME) bombs designed to dissolve into the body and rapidly erode internal soft tissue. A group of women were shot to death while waving a white flag; another family was destroyed by a missile while eating lunch; and Israeli soldiers killed Ibrahim Awajah, an eight-year-old child. His mother, Wafaa, told the documentary filmmaker Jen Marlowe that soldiers used his corpse for target practice. Numerous crimes like these were documented across the Gaza Strip."

By the end of the assault, with 1,400 dead, nearly all civilians, Gaza lay in ruins. The Israeli air force purposely targeted Gaza's infrastructure, including power plants, to reduce Gaza to a vast, overcrowded, dysfunctional slum. Israel, Blumenthal notes, destroyed "80 percent of all arable farmland in the coastal strip, bombing the strip's largest flour mill, leveling seven concrete factories, shelling a major cheese factory, and shooting up a chicken farm, killing thirty-one thousand chickens."

"Twelve [years old] and up, you are allowed to shoot. That's what they tell us," an Israeli sniper told Haaretz correspondent Amira Hass in 2004 at the height of the Second Intifada, Blumenthal writes. "This is according to what the IDF [Israel Defense Force] says to its soldiers. I do not know if this is what the IDF says to the media," the sniper was quoted as saying.

The 2008 murderous rampage is not, as Blumenthal understands, an anomaly. It is the overt policy of the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who advocates "a system of open apartheid." Israel, as Blumenthal points out, has not lifted its state of emergency since its foundation. It has detained at least 750,000 Palestinians, including 10,000 women, in its prisons since 1967. It currently holds more than 4,500 political prisoners, including more than 200 children and 322 people jailed without charges, Blumenthal writes, including those it has labeled "administrative detainees." Israel has a staggering 99.74 percent conviction rate for these so-called security prisoners, a figure that any totalitarian state would envy.

Blumenthal cites a survey of Jewish Israeli attitudes on the Gaza bombing, known as Operation Cast Lead. The survey, by Daniel Bar-Tal, a political psychologist from Tel Aviv University, concluded that the public's "consciousness is characterized by a sense of victimization, a siege mentality, blind patriotism, belligerence, self-righteousness, dehumanization of the Palestinians, and insensitivity to their suffering." Bar-Tal tells Blumenthal "these attitudes are the product of indoctrination." And Blumenthal sets out to chronicle the poison of this indoctrination and what it has spawned in Israeli society.

The racist narrative, once the domain of the far right and now the domain of the Israeli government and the mainstream, demonizes Palestinians and Arabs, as well as all non-Jews. Non-Jews, according to this propaganda, will forever seek the annihilation of the Jewish people. The Holocaust, in which Israeli victimhood is sanctified, is seamlessly conflated with Palestinian and Arab resistance to occupation. The state flies more than 25 percent of Israeli 11th-graders to Poland to tour Auschwitz and other Nazi extermination camps a year before they start army service. They are told that the goal of Arabs, along with the rest of the non-Jewish world, is another Auschwitz. And the only thing standing between Israelis and a death camp is the Israeli army. Israeli high schools show films such as "Sleeping With the Enemy" to warn students about dating non-Jews, especially Arabs. Racist books such as "Torat Ha'Melech," or "The King's Torah," are given to soldiers seeking rabbinical guidance on the rules of engagement. Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira and Rabbi Yosef Elitzur, the authors of the 230-page book, inform soldiers that non-Jews are "uncompassionate by nature" and may have to be killed in order to "curb their evil inclinations." "If we kill a gentile who has violated one of the seven commandments [of Noah] ... there is nothing wrong with the murder," Shapira and Elitzur write. The rabbis claim that under Jewish law "there is justification for killing babies if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us, and in such a situation they may be harmed deliberately, and not only during combat with adults."

These narratives of hatred make any act of deadly force by the Israeli army permissible, from the shooting of Palestinian children to the 2010 killing by Israeli commandos of nine unarmed activists on the Turkish boat the Mavi Marmara. The activists were part of a flotilla of six boats bringing humanitarian supplies to Gaza. The Israeli propaganda machine claimed that the small flotilla was a covert terror convoy. Never mind that the Mavi Marmara was in international waters when it was attacked. Never mind that no one on the boat, or any of the five other boats, was armed. Never mind that the boats were thoroughly searched before they left for Gaza. The Israeli lie was trumpeted while every camera, video and tape recorder, computer and cellphone of the activists on board was seized and destroyed-or in a few cases sold by Israeli soldiers when they got back to Israel-while those on the boats were towed to an Israeli port and detained in isolation. The ceaseless stoking of fear and racial hatred-given full vent by the Israeli government and media in the days after the Mavi Marmara incident-has served to empower racist political demagogues such as Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman, a camp follower of Meir Kahane. It has also effectively snuffed out Israel's old left-wing Zionist establishment.

"In Israel you have three systems of laws," the Israeli Arab politician Ahmed Tibi observes in the Blumenthal book. "One is democracy for 80 percent of the population. It is democracy for Jews. I call it an ethnocracy or you could call it a Judocracy. The second is racial discrimination for 20 percent of the population, the Israeli Arabs. The third is apartheid for the population in the West Bank and Gaza. This includes two sets of governments, one for the Palestinians and one for the settlers. Inside Israel there is not yet apartheid but we are being pushed there with ... new laws."

As Blumenthal documents, even Israeli Jews no longer live in a democracy. The mounting state repression against human rights advocates, journalists and dissidents has reached the proportions of U.S. Homeland Security. The overtly racist cant of the political elite and the masses-"Death to Arabs" is a popular chant at Israeli soccer matches-has emboldened mobs and vigilantes, including thugs from right-wing youth groups such as Im Tirtzu, to carry out indiscriminate acts of vandalism and violence against dissidents, Palestinians, Israeli Arabs and the hapless African immigrants who live crammed into the slums of Tel Aviv. Israel has pushed through a series of discriminatory laws against non-Jews that eerily resemble the racist Nuremberg Laws that disenfranchised Jews in Nazi Germany. The Communities Acceptance Law, for example, permits "small, exclusively Jewish towns planted across Israel's Galilee region to formally reject applicants for residency on the grounds of 'suitability to the community's fundamental outlook.'" And all who denounce the steady march of Israel toward fascism-including Jewish academics-are attacked in organized campaigns as being insufficiently Zionist. They are branded as terrorists or collaborators with terrorists. As a headline in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz read: "The settlers are the real government of Israel."

"Woody [a law school graduate from New York] became my initial liaison to Tel Aviv's radical left, introducing me to a loose-knit band of a few hundred anarchists, disillusioned ex-soldiers, disaffected children of ultra-Zionists, queers, academics, and generally idealistic and disillusioned young people who came of age during the Second Intifada when the liberal Zionist 'peace camp' closed ranks with the militaristic right wing," Blumenthal writes. "This tiny band of social deviants comprised the only grouping of people I met who sincerely embraced multiculturalism and who took concrete action against the discriminatory foundations of their country's political apparatus. Right-wingers and many Jewish Israelis who considered themselves part of the social mainstream referred to members of the radical left as smolinim, which simply means 'leftists,' but the word carried a deeply insulting connotation of an unacceptable caste, an Other. As branded social outcasts, inflexible in their principles, disdainful of ordinary politics, and brazen in their racial liberalism they resembled nothing so much as the pre-Civil War abolitionists."

The late Amnon Dankner, the former editor of Maariv, one of Israel's major newspapers, Blumenthal notes, denounced "neo-Nazi expressions in the Knesset" and "entire parties whose tenor and tone arouse feelings of horror and terrifying memories." David Landau, the former editor-in-chief of Haaretz, has called on Israelis to boycott the Knesset "to stand against the wave of fascism that has engulfed the Zionist project." And Uri Avnery, a left-wing politician and journalist, says: "Israel's very existence is threatened by fascism."

The disillusionment among idealistic young immigrants to Israel dots the book. As one example, Canadian David Sheen is recorded as saying that everything he had known about Israel and Palestinians was, in Blumenthal's words, "a fantasy cultivated through years of heavy indoctrination." But perhaps what is saddest is that Israel has, and has always had, within its population intellectuals, including the great scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who sought to save Israel from itself.

Leibowitz, whom Isaiah Berlin called "the conscience of Israel," warned that if Israel did not separate church and state it would give rise to a corrupt rabbinate that would warp Judaism into a fascistic cult.

"Religious nationalism is to religion what National Socialism was to socialism," said Leibowitz, who died in 1994. He understood that the blind veneration of the military, especially after the 1967 war that captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem, was dangerous and would lead to the ultimate destruction of the Jewish state and any hope of democracy. "Our situation will deteriorate to that of a second Vietnam, to a war in constant escalation without prospect of ultimate resolution." He foresaw that "the Arabs would be the working people and the Jews the administrators, inspectors, officials, and police-mainly secret police. A state ruling a hostile population of 1.5 million to 2 million foreigners would necessarily become a secret-police state, with all that this implies for education, free speech and democratic institutions. The corruption characteristic of every colonial regime would also prevail in the State of Israel. The administration would have to suppress Arab insurgency on the one hand and acquire Arab Quislings on the other. There is also good reason to fear that the Israel Defense Force, which has been until now a people's army, would, as a result of being transformed into an army of occupation, degenerate, and its commanders, who will have become military governors, resemble their colleagues in other nations." He warned that the rise of a virulent racism would consume Israeli society. He knew that prolonged occupation of the Palestinians would spawn "concentration camps" for the occupied and that, in his words, "Israel would not deserve to exist, and it will not be worthwhile to preserve it."

But few, then or now, cared to listen. This is why Blumenthal's new book is so important.
(c) 2013 Chris Hedges, the former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times, spent seven years in the Middle East. He was part of the paper's team of reporters who won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of global terrorism. He is the author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His latest book is, ""Death Of The Liberal Class."




Russell Brand doesn't think a revolution is coming... he knows it.
'I ain't got a flicker of doubt. This is the end-it's time to wake up.'




We Deserve More From Our Democratic System
By Russell Brand

I've had an incredible week since I spoke from the heart, some would say via my arse, on Paxman. I've had slaps on the back, fist bumps, cheers and hugs while out and about, cock-eyed offers of political power from well intentioned chancers and some good ol' fashioned character assassinations in the papers.

The people who liked the interview said it was because I'd articulated what they were thinking. I recognise this. God knows I'd love to think the attention was about me but I said nothing new or original, it was the expression of the knowledge that democracy is irrelevant that resonated. As long as the priorities of those in government remain the interests of big business, rather than the people they were elected to serve, the impact of voting is negligible and it is our responsibility to be more active if we want real change.

Turns out that among the disenchanted is Paxman himself who spends most of his time at the meek heart of the political establishment and can't summons up the self-delusion to drag his nib across the ballot box. He, more than any of us is aware that politicians are frauds. I've not spent too much time around them, only on the telly, it's not pleasant; once you've been on Question Time and seen Boris simpering under a make-up brush it's difficult to be enthusiastic about politics.

The only reason to vote is if the vote represents power or change. I don't think it does. I fervently believe that we deserve more from our democratic system than the few derisory tit-bits tossed from the carousel of the mighty, when they hop a few inches left or right. The lazily duplicitous servants of The City expect us to gratefully participate in what amounts to little more than a political hokey cokey where every four years we get to choose what colour tie the liar who leads us wears.

I remember the election and Cameron didn't even get properly voted in, he became prime minister by default when he teamed up with Clegg. Clegg who immediately reneged (Renegy-Cleggy?) on his flagship pledge to end tuition fees at the first whiff of power.

When students, perhaps students who had voted for him, rioted they were condemned. People riot when dialogue fails, when they feel unrepresented and bored by the illusion, bilious with the piped in toxic belch wafted into their homes by the media.

The reason these coalitions are so easily achieved is that the distinctions between the parties are insignificant. My friend went to a posh "do" in the country where David Cameron, a man whose face resembles a little painted egg, was in attendance. Also present were members of the opposition and former prime minister Tony Blair. Whatever party they claim to represent in the day, at night they show their true colours and all go to the same party.

Obviously there has been some criticism of my outburst, I've not been universally applauded as a cross between Jack Sparrow and Spartacus (which is what I'm going for) but they've been oddly personal and I think irrelevant to the argument. I try not to read about myself as the mean stuff is hurtful and the good stuff hard to believe, but my mates always give me the gist of what's going on, the bastards. Some people say I'm a hypocrite because I've got money now. When I was poor and I complained about inequality people said I was bitter, now I'm rich and I complain about inequality they say I'm a hypocrite. I'm beginning to think they just don't want inequality on the agenda because it is a real problem that needs to be addressed.

It's easy to attack me, I'm a right twerp, I'm a junkie and a cheeky monkey, I accept it, but that doesn't detract from the incontrovertible fact that we are living in a time of huge economic disparity and confronting ecological disaster. This disparity has always been, in cultures since expired, a warning sign of end of days. In Rome, Egypt and Easter Island the incubated ruling elites, who had forgotten that we are one interconnected people, destroyed their societies by not sharing. That is what's happening now, regardless of what you think of my hair or me using long words, the facts are the facts and the problem is the problem. Don't be distracted. I think these columnist fellas who give me aggro for not devising a solution or for using long words are just being territorial. When they say "long words" they mean "their words" like I'm a monkey who got in their Mum's dressing up box or a hooligan in policeman's helmet.

As I said to Paxman at the time "I can't conjure up a global Utopia right now in this hotel room." Obviously that's not my job and it doesn't need to be, we have brilliant thinkers and organisations and no one needs to cook up an egalitarian Shangri-La on their todd; we can all do it together.

I like Jeremy Paxman, incidentally. I think he's a decent bloke but like a lot of people who work deep within the system it's hard for him to countenance ideas from outside the narrowly prescribed trench of contemporary democracy. Most of the people who criticized me have a vested interest in the maintenance of the system. They say the system works. What they mean is "the system works for me." The less privileged among us are already living in the apocalypse, the thousands of street sleepers in our country, the refugees and the exploited underclass across our planet daily confront what we would regard as the end of the world. No money, no home, no friends, no support, no hand of friendship reaching out, just acculturated and inculcated condemnation.

The less privileged among us are already living in the apocalypse, the thousands of street sleepers in our country, the refugees and the exploited underclass across our planet daily confront what we would regard as the end of the world.

When I first got a few quid it was like an anaesthetic that made me forget what was important but now I've woken up. I can't deny that I've done a lot of daft things while I was under the capitalist fugue, some silly telly, soppy scandals, movies better left unmade. I've also become rich. I don't hate rich people; Che Guevara was a rich person. I don't hate anyone, I judge no one, that's not my job, I'm a comedian and my job is to say whatever I like to whoever I want if I'm prepared to take the consequences. Well I am.

My favourite experiences since Paxman-nacht are both examples of the dialogue it sparked. Firstly my friend's 15-year-old son wrote an essay for his politics class after he read my New Statesman piece. He didn't agree with everything I said, he prefers the idea of spoiling ballots to not voting "to show we do care" maybe he's right, I don't know. The reason not voting could be effective is that if we starve them of our consent we could force them to acknowledge that they operate on behalf of The City and Wall Street; that the financing of political parties and lobbying is where the true influence lies; not in the ballot box. However, this 15-year-old is quite smart and it's quite possible that my opinions are a result of decades of drug abuse.

I'm on tour so I've been with thousands of people every night (not like in the old days, I'm a changed man) this is why I'm aware of how much impact the Newsnight interview had. Not everyone I chat to agrees with me but their beliefs are a lot closer to mine than the broadsheets, and it's their job to be serious. One thing I've learned and was surprised by is that I may suffer from the ol' sexism. I can only assume I have an unaddressed cultural hangover, like my adorable Nan who had a heart that shone like a pearl but was, let's face it, a bit racist. I don't want to be a sexist so I'm trying my best to check meself before I wreck meself. The problem may resolve itself as I'm in a loving relationship with a benevolent dictator and have entirely relinquished personal autonomy.

Whilst travelling between gigs I had my second notable encounter. One night late at the Watford Gap I got chatting to a couple of squaddies, one Para, one Marine, we talked a bit about family and politics, I invited them to a show. Then we were joined by three Muslim women, all hijabbed up. For a few perfect minutes in the strip lit inertia of this place, that was nowhere in particular but uniquely Britain, I felt how plausible and beautiful The Revolution could be. We just chatted.

Between three sets of different people; first generation Muslims, servicemen and the privileged elite that they serve (that would be me) effortless cooperation occurred. Here we were free from the divisive rule that tears us apart. That sends brave men and women to foreign lands to fight their capitalist wars, that intimidates and unsettles people whose faith and culture superficially distinguishes them, that tells the comfortable "hush now" you have your trinkets. It seemed ridiculous that refracted through the power prism that blinds us; the soldiers could be invading the homeland of these women's forefathers in order to augment my luxurious stupour. Here in the gap we were together. Our differences irrelevant. With no one to impose separation we are united.

I realised then that our treasured concepts of tribe and nation are not valued by those who govern except when it is to divide us from each other. They don't believe in Britain or America they believe in the dollar and the pound. These are deep and entrenchedsystemic wrongs that are unaddressed by party politics.

The symptoms of these wrongs are obvious, global and painful. Drone strikes on the innocent, a festering investment for future conflict.

How many combatants are created each time an innocent person in a faraway land is silently ironed out from an Arizona call centre? The reality is we have more in common with the people we're bombing than the people we're bombing them for.

NSA spying, how far-reaching is the issue of surveillance? Do you think we don't have our own cute, quaint British version? Does it matter if the dominant paradigm of Western Capitalism is indifferent to our Bud Flanagan belief in nation? Can we really believe these problems can be altered within the system that created them? That depends on them? The system that we are invited to vote for? Of course not, that's why I won't vote. That's why I support the growing revolution.

We can all contribute ideas as to how to change our world; schoolboys, squaddies, hippies, Muslims, Jews and if what I'm describing is naive then you can keep your education and your indoctrination because loving our planet and each other is a duty, a beautiful obligation. While chatting to people this week I heard some interesting ideas, here are a couple.

We could use the money accumulated by those who have too much, not normal people with a couple of cars, giant corporations, to fund a fairer society.

The US government gave a trillion dollars to bail out the big five banks over the past year. Banks that have grown by 30% since the crisis and are experiencing record profits and giving their execs record bonuses. How about, hang on to your hats because here comes a naive suggestion, don't give them that money, use it to create one million jobs at fifty grand a year for people who teach, nurse or protect.

These bailouts for elites over services for the many are institutionalised within the system, no party proposes changing it. American people that voted, voted for it. I'm not voting for that.

That's one suggestion for the Americans; we started their country so we owe them a favour now things are getting heavy.

Here's one for blighty; Philip Green, the bloke who owns Top Shop didn't pay any income tax on a 1.2bn pounds dividend in 2005. None. Unless he paid himself a salary that year, in addition to the 1.2bn pounds dividend, the largest in corporate history, then the people who clean Top Shop paid more income tax than he did. That's for two reasons – firstly because he said that all of his 1.2bn pounds earnings belong to his missus, who was registered in Monaco and secondly because he's an arsehole. The money he's nicked through legal loopholes would pay the annual salary for 20,000 NHS nurses. It's not illegal; it's systemic, British people who voted, voted for it. I'm not voting for that.

Why don't you try not paying taxes and see how quickly a lump of bird gets thrown in your face. It's socialism for corporate elites and feudalism for the rest of us. Those suggestions did not come from me; no the mind that gave the planet Booky Wook and Ponderland didn't just add an economically viable wealth distribution system to the laudable list of accolades, to place next to my Shagger Of The Year awards.

The first came from Dave DeGraw, the second Johann Hari got from UK Uncut. Luckily with organisations like them, Occupy, Anonymous and The People's Assembly I don't need to come with ideas, we can all participate. I'm happy to be a part of the conversation, if more young people are talking about fracking instead of twerking we're heading in the right direction. The people that govern us don't want an active population who are politically engaged, they want passive consumers distracted by the spectacle of which I accept I am a part.

If we all collude and collaborate together we can design a new system that makes the current one obsolete. The reality is there are alternatives. That is the terrifying truth that the media, government and big business work so hard to conceal. Even the outlet that printed this will tomorrow print a couple of columns saying what a naive wanker I am, or try to find ways that I've fucked up. Well I am naive and I have fucked up but I tell you something else. I believe in change. I don't mind getting my hands dirty because my hands are dirty already. I don't mind giving my life to this because I'm only alive because of the compassion and love of others. Men and women strong enough to defy this system and live according to higher laws. This is a journey we can all go on together, all of us. We can include everyone and fear no one. A system that serves the planet and the people. I'd vote for that.
(c) 2013 Russell Brand is an actor, comedian, and social commentator. In a foray into journalism in 2013, Brand was invited to guest-edit the October 24 'Revolution-themed' issue of the New Statesman. Find him on Twitter: @rustyrockets.








Those Depressing Germans
By Paul Krugman

German officials are furious at America, and not just because of the business about Angela Merkel's cellphone. What has them enraged now is one (long) paragraph in a U.S. Treasury report on foreign economic and currency policies. In that paragraph Treasury argues that Germany's huge surplus on current account - a broad measure of the trade balance - is harmful, creating "a deflationary bias for the euro area, as well as for the world economy."

The Germans angrily pronounced this argument "incomprehensible." "There are no imbalances in Germany which require a correction of our growth-friendly economic and fiscal policy," declared a spokesman for the nation's finance ministry.

But Treasury was right, and the German reaction was disturbing. For one thing, it was an indicator of the continuing refusal of policy makers in Germany, in Europe more broadly and for that matter around the world to face up to the nature of our economic problems. For another, it demonstrated Germany's unfortunate tendency to respond to any criticism of its economic policies with cries of victimization.

First, the facts. Remember the China syndrome, in which Asia's largest economy kept running enormous trade surpluses thanks to an undervalued currency? Well, China is still running surpluses, but they have declined. Meanwhile, Germany has taken China's place: Last year Germany, not China, ran the world's biggest current account surplus. And measured as a share of G.D.P., Germany's surplus was more than twice as large as China's.

Now, it's true that Germany has been running big surpluses for almost a decade. At first, however, these surpluses were matched by large deficits in southern Europe, financed by large inflows of German capital. Europe as a whole continued to have roughly balanced trade.

Then came the crisis, and flows of capital to Europe's periphery collapsed. The debtor nations were forced - in part at Germany's insistence - into harsh austerity, which eliminated their trade deficits. But something went wrong. The narrowing of trade imbalances should have been symmetric, with Germany's surpluses shrinking along with the debtors' deficits. Instead, however, Germany failed to make any adjustment at all; deficits in Spain, Greece and elsewhere shrank, but Germany's surplus didn't.

This was a very bad thing for Europe, because Germany's failure to adjust magnified the cost of austerity. Take Spain, the biggest deficit country before the crisis. It was inevitable that Spain would face lean years as it learned to live within its means. It was not, however, inevitable that Spanish unemployment would be almost 27 percent, and youth unemployment almost 57 percent. And Germany's immovability was an important contributor to Spain's pain.

It has also been a bad thing for the rest of the world. It's simply arithmetic: Since southern Europe has been forced to end its deficits while Germany hasn't reduced its surplus, Europe as a whole is running large trade surpluses, helping to keep the world economy depressed.

German officials, as we've seen, respond to all of this with angry declarations that German policy has been impeccable. Sorry, but this (a) doesn't matter and (b) isn't true.

Why it doesn't matter: Five years after the fall of Lehman, the world economy is still depressed, suffering from a persistent shortage of demand. In this environment, a country that runs a trade surplus is, to use the old phrase, beggaring its neighbors. It's diverting spending away from their goods and services to its own, and thereby taking away jobs. It doesn't matter whether it's doing this maliciously or with the best of intentions, it's doing it all the same.

Furthermore, as it happens, Germany isn't blameless. It shares a currency with its neighbors, greatly benefiting German exporters, who get to price their goods in a weak euro instead of what would surely have been a soaring Deutsche mark. Yet Germany has failed to deliver on its side of the bargain: To avoid a European depression, it needed to spend more as its neighbors were forced to spend less, and it hasn't done that.

German officials won't, of course, accept any of this. They consider their country a shining role model, to be emulated by all, and the awkward fact that we can't all run gigantic trade surpluses simply doesn't register.

And the thing is, it's not just the Germans. Germany's trade surplus is damaging for the same reason cutting food stamps and unemployment benefits in America destroys jobs - and Republican politicians are about as receptive as German officials to anyone who tries to point out their error. In the sixth year of a global economic crisis whose essence is that there isn't enough spending, many policy makers still don't get it. And it looks as if they never will.
(c) 2013 Paul Krugman --- The New York Times






The Quotable Quote...



"Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like the evil spirits at the dawn of day."
~~~ Thomas Jefferson









The Single-Payer Signal In The Obamacare Noise
By David Sirota

Whenever scandal arises in Washington, D.C., the fight between the two parties typically ends up being a competition to identify a concise message in the chaos - or, as scientists might say, a signal in all the noise. This week confirms that truism, as glitches plagued the new Obamacare website and as insurance companies cancelled policies for many customers on the individual market.

Amid the subsequent noise of congressional debate and cable TV outrage, Republicans argued that the signal is about government - more specifically, they claim the controversies validate their age-old assertions that government can't do anything right. Democrats countered that the signal in the noise is about universal health care - Obamacare is a big undertaking, they argue, and so there will be bumps in the road as the program works to provide better health services to all Americans.

This back and forth is creating an even more confusing cacophony - and further obscuring the signal that neither the two parties nor their health industry financiers want to discuss. That signal is about the need for single-payer health care - otherwise known as Medicare for all.

One way to detect this signal is to consider the White House guest list.

In trying to show that he was successfully managing the Obamacare roll out, the president last week staged a high-profile White House meeting with private health insurance executives - aka Obamacare's middlemen. The spectacle of a president begging these middlemen for help was a reminder that Obamacare did not limit the power of the insurance companies as a single-payer system would. The new law instead cemented the industry's profit-extracting role in the larger health system - and it still leaves millions without insurance.

The second way to see this single-payer signal is to behold the Obamacare-related congressional hearings. During the proceedings, you've been hearing a lot about the insurance enrollment website that the government is paying millions to insurer UnitedHealth Group to build.

But you're not hearing much about actual health care. That's because the insurance industry wrote the Affordable Care Act, meaning the new statute's top priority isn't delivering health services. Obamacare is primarily about getting the insurance industry more customers and government contracts, whether or not that actually improves health services.

The third way to see this single-payer signal is to simply experience the confusion about Obamacare for yourself.

If you've managed to successfully navigate Healthcare.gov, you probably have been treated to a wave of perplexing information about different kinds of private insurance plans and premiums. In other words, you haven't seen a simple, standardized and guaranteed form of health care coverage like the kind provided by the single-payer government-administered Medicare system. You've likely seen the same maddeningly labyrinthine private insurance system that works to ration - and often deny - access to health care.

It didn't have to be this way. Back when Obamacare was being negotiated, Congress could have circumvented the private insurance industry by simply expanding Medicare to cover everybody. Medicare isn't perfect, of course, but it remains one of the most popular institutions in America because its single-payer model guarantees access to decent, cost-effective health care rather than just meager health insurance. It also does a good job of preventing profit-taking middlemen from getting between patients and their physicians.

Obamacare doesn't do all that. It certainly includes some important reforms, but it doesn't do what a single-payer system does - it doesn't guarantee better health care or a more simple health system.

Those Democrats who pretend it does are just as dishonest as the Republicans who ignore Medicare and pretend government cannot effectively manage health care. All of them are making noise to drown out the single-payer signal.
(c) 2013 David Sirota is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist, magazine journalist and the best-selling author of "Hostile Takeover" and "The Uprising." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado and blogs at OpenLeft.com. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com. David Sirota is a former spokesperson for the House Appropriations Committee. Follow him on Twitter @davidsirota .








Drones Have Come Out Of The Shadows
By Medea Benjamin

At each of the over 200 cities I've traveled to this past year with my book Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control, I ask the audience an easy question: Have they ever seen or heard from drone strike victims in the mainstream US press? Not one hand has ever gone up. This is an obvious indication that the media has failed to do its job of humanizing the civilian casualties that accompany President Obama's deadly drone program.

This has started to change, with new films, reports and media coverage finally giving the American public a taste of the personal tragedies involved.

On October 29, the Rehman family-a father with his two children-came all the way from the Pakistani tribal territory of North Waziristan to the US Capitol to tell the heart-wrenching story of the death of the children's beloved 67-year-old grandmother. And while the briefing, organized by Congressman Alan Grayson, was only attended by four other congresspeople, it was packed with media.

Watching the beautiful 9-year-old Nabila relate how her grandmother was blown to bits while outside picking okra softened the hearts of even the most hardened DC politicos. From the Congressmen to the translator to the media, tears flowed. Even the satirical journalist Dana Milbank, who normally pokes fun at everything and everyone in his Washington Post column, covered the family's tragedy with genuine sympathy.

The visit by the Rehman family was timed for the release of the groundbreaking new documentary Unmanned: America's Drone Wars by Robert Greenwald of Brave New Foundation. The emotion-packed film is filled with victims' stories, including that of 16-year-old Tariq Aziz, a peace-loving, soccer-playing teenager obliterated three days after attending an anti-drone conference in Islamabad. Lawyers in the firm pose the critical question: If Tariq was a threat, why didn't they capture him at the meeting and give him the right to a fair trial? Another just released documentary is Wounds of Waziristan, a well-crafted, 20-minute piece by Pakistani filmmaker Madiha Tahir that explains how drone attacks rip apart communities and terrorize entire populations.

Just as the visit and the films have put real faces on drone victims, a plethora of new reports by prestigious institutions-five in total-have exposed new dimensions of the drone wars.

On October 22, Human Rights Watch issued a report on drone strikes in Yemen and Amnesty International issued another on drone strikes in Pakistan. While not calling for an end to all drone strikes, the reports detail cases of civilian casualties and criticize the US government for considering itself above the rule of law and accountability. A third report, License to Kill, released by the Geneva-based group Al Karama, is much more damning of US policy. While Amnesty and Human Rights Watch say drones are lawful under certain circumstances and mainly push for transparency, Al Karama asserts that the US drone war is a clear violation of international law. It calls for an end to extrajudicial executions and targeted killings; complete reparations to victims; and a resolution by the UN Human Rights Council opposing the US practice of extrajudicial executions.

Adding to these well-researched reports by non-governmental organizations are two documents commissioned by the United Nations. One is by Christof Heyns, the UN's special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. The other is by Ben Emmerson, the special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism. Heyns warns that while drones may be more targeted than other weapons, they are easier to use and may "lower social barriers against the use of lethal force." He said that a "drones only" approach risks ignoring peaceful approaches such as individual arrests and trial, negotiations and building alliances.

Emmerson said states have the obligation to capture terrorist suspects, when feasible, and should only use force as a last resort. He blasted the US lack of transparency, calling it the single greatest obstacle to an evaluation of the civilian impact of drone strikes. He said states must be transparent about the acquisition and use of drones, the legal basis and criteria for targeting, and their impact. "National security does not justify keeping secret the statistical and methodological data about the use of drones," he claimed.

But perhaps more impactful than the UN reports themselves was the debate they engendered on the floor of the UN General Assembly. On October 26, for the first time ever, representatives from a broad swath of nations waited their turn to denounce the US drone policy. Venezuela called drones "flagrantly illegal" and said they were a form of "collective punishment." Brazil pushed the UN rapporteurs to take an even stronger stand. China called drones a "blank space in international law" and insisted that nations "respect the principles of UN charters, the sovereignty of states and the legitimate rights of the citizens of all countries."

The representative of Pakistan tried to put to rest press reports that the Pakistani government secretly approved of the strikes. He stated that drones put all Pakistanis at risk and radicalize more people, and called for "an immediate cessation of drone strikes within the territorial boundaries of Pakistan." This was the same sentiment expressed by Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in his October 23 meeting with President Obama.

The US government is feeling the pressure. It has taken steps to reduce civilian casualties and has reduced the actual number of strikes, but certainly not eliminated them. In fact, there was a drone strike in Somalia on October 28 and another one in Pakistan on October 31 that killed Taliban leader Hakimullah Mahsoud, who was about to engage in peace talks with the Pakistan government.

While the reduction in the number of strikes is a partial victory, it cannot erase the hundreds of innocent lives lost over the years. Also, with the global proliferation of drones (thanks to the easing of restrictions on overseas sales and the introduction of domestic drones into US skies by September 2015), their usage will inevitably increase. A mobilized global community is the only force that can serve as a restraining factor.

It is also best way to honor the Rehman family and other victims. As 13-year-old Zubair Rehman testified, "I hope that by telling you about my village and death of my grandmother, I can convince you that drones are not the answer. I hope I can return home to tell my community that Americans listened and are trying to help us solve the many problems we face. And maybe, just maybe, America may soon stop the drones."

Responding to this call is the Global Drone Summit November 16-17 in Washington DC, where hundreds of people from around the world will gather to strategize and to organize a global network. They will also announce campaigns to pressure the US government to release the legal memos justifying drone strikes, and create a compensation fund for civilian victims. Check here to register for the summit or watch the livestream.
(c) 2013 Medea Benjamin is cofounder of Global Exchange and CODEPINK, which has organized seven humanitarian delegations to Gaza. She is author of Don't Be Afraid Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart.





The Dead Letter Office...





Jim gives the corpo-rat salute

Heil Obama,

Dear Nevada Unterfuhrer Wheeler,

Congratulations, you have just been awarded the "Vidkun Quisling Award!" Your name will now live throughout history with such past award winners as Marcus Junius Brutus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, George Stephanopoulos, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Prescott Bush, Sam Bush, Fredo Bush, Kate Bush, Kyle Busch, Anheuser Busch, Vidkun Quisling and last year's winner Volksjudge John (the enforcer) Roberts.

Without your lock step calling for the repeal of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, your willingness to bring back slavery if the people you represent want it, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Iran and those many other profitable oil wars to come would have been impossible! With the help of our mutual friends, the other "Republican whores" you have made it possible for all of us to goose-step off to a brave new bank account!

Along with this award you will be given the Iron Cross first class, presented by our glorious Fuhrer, Herr Obama at a gala celebration at "der Fuhrer Bunker," formally the "White House," on 11-30-2013. We salute you Herr Wheeler, Sieg Heil!

Signed by,
Vice Fuhrer Biden

Heil Obama






Why Washington Is Cutting Safety Nets When Most Americans Are Still In The Great Recession
By Robert Reich

So how to explain this paradox?

As of November 1 more than 47 million Americans have lost some or all of their food stamp benefits. House Republicans are pushing for further cuts. If the sequester isn't stopped everything else poor and working-class Americans depend on will be further squeezed.

We're not talking about a small sliver of America here. Half of all children get food stamps at some point during their childhood. Half of all adults get them sometime between ages 18 and 65. Many employers - including the nation's largest, Walmart - now pay so little that food stamps are necessary in order to keep food on the family table, and other forms of assistance are required to keep a roof overhead.

The larger reality is that most Americans are still living in the Great Recession. Median household income continues to drop. In last week's Washington Post-ABC poll, 75 percent rated the state of the economy as "negative" or "poor."

So why is Washington whacking safety nets and services that a large portion of Americans need, when we still very much need them?

It's easy to blame Republicans and the rightwing billionaires that bankroll them, and their unceasing demonization of "big government" as well as deficits. But Democrats in Washington bear some of the responsibility. In last year's fiscal cliff debate neither party pushed to extend the payroll tax holiday or find other ways to help the working middle class and poor.

Here's a clue: A new survey of families in the top 10 percent of net worth (done by the American Affluence Research Center) shows they're feeling better than they've felt since 2007, before the Great Recession.

It's not just that the top 10 percent have jobs and their wages are rising. The top 10 percent also owns 80 percent of the stock market. And the stock market is up a whopping 24 percent this year.

The stock market is up even though most Americans are down for two big reasons.

First, businesses are busily handing their cash back to their shareholders - buying back their stock and thereby boosting share prices - rather than using the cash to expand and hire. It makes no sense to expand and hire when most Americans don't have the money to buy.

The S&P 500 "Buyback Index," which measures the 100 stocks with the highest buyback ratios, has surged 40 percent this year, compared with a 24% rally for the S&P 500.

IBM has just approved another $15 billion for share buybacks on top of about $5.6 billion it set aside previously, thereby boosting its share prices even though business is sluggish. In April, Apple announced a $50 billion increase in buybacks plus a 15% rise in dividends, but even this wasn't enough for multi-billionaire Carl Icahn, who's now demanding that Apple use more of its $170 billion cash stash to buy back its stock and make Ichan even richer.

Big corporations can also borrow at rock-bottom rates these days in order to buy back even more of their stock - courtesy of the Fed's $85 billion a month bond-buying program. (Ichan also wants Apple to borrow $150 billion at 3 percent interest, in order to buy back more stock and further enrich himself.)

The second big reason why shares are up while most Americans are down is corporations continue to find new ways to boost profits and share prices by cutting their labor costs - substituting software for people, cutting wages and benefits, and piling more responsibilities on each of the employees that remain.

Neither of these two strategies - buying back stock and paring payrolls - can be sustained over the long run (so you have every right to worry about another Wall Street bubble). They don't improve a company's products or customer service.

But in an era of sluggish sales - when the vast American middle class lacks the purchasing power to keep the economy going - these two strategies at least keep shareholders happy. And that means they keep the top 10 percent happy.

Congress, meanwhile, doesn't know much about the bottom 90 percent. The top 10 percent provide almost all campaign contributions and funding of "independent" ads.

Moreover, just about all members of Congress are drawn from the same top 10 percent - as are almost all their friends and associates, and even the media who report on them.

Get it? The bottom 90 percent of Americans - most of whom are still suffering from the Great Recession, most of whom have been on a downward escalator for decades - have disappeared from official Washington.
(c) 2013 Robert Reich is Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He has written twelve books, including The Work of Nations, Locked in the Cabinet, and his most recent book, "Beyond Outrage," is now out in paperback. He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine and chairman of Common Cause. His new film, "Inequality for All," will be out September 27.




U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry meets with Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, right, in Cairo, Egypt.




Pay No Attention To That Imperialist Behind The Curtain
By Robert Scheer

What John Kerry did this week in Egypt and Saudi Arabia is nothing short of despicable. He, and the president who appointed him, managed to honor both a vicious military dictatorship and a totalitarian medieval monarchy as examples of progress toward a more democratic Middle East, as if neither stood in contradiction to professed U.S. objectives for the region.

"Egyptians Following Right Path, Kerry Says," read the New York Times headline Sunday trumpeting the secretary of state's homage to ruthless military dictators who the very next day were scheduled to stage a show trial of Egypt's first democratically elected president.

This was all part of a "road map" to democracy "being carried out to the best of our perception," Kerry intoned, apparently embracing the calumny that the destruction of representative government in Egypt was always the American plan.

Kerry's perception did not extend to the court farce the next day when Egypt's duly elected president, Mohamed Morsi, held incommunicado for four months and denied access to his lawyers, was put on trial on accusations of causing violence among protesters in the streets, violence that paled in comparison to the deliberate killing of civilians by an Egyptian military trained and financed by the government Kerry represents.

Indeed, the Obama administration has refused to categorize the Egyptian military's overthrow of the Morsi government as a coup, for fear that would automatically trigger the legal requirement of a cutoff of most of the $1.5 billion in annual aid to the Egyptian military. Kerry was at great pains to assure Egyptian reporters that even the temporary hold on some weapons that the U.S. had implemented was not intended to penalize the Egyptian military for destroying Egypt's experiment in democracy.

"It is not a punishment," Kerry said. "It's a reflection of policy in the United States under our law." Drat that law that says we should not be rewarding military dictators who jail freely elected presidents.

At the moment Morsi was denouncing "this criminal military coup" from his courtroom cage, Kerry was off in Saudi Arabia paying tribute to "a true relationship between friends (that) is based on sincerity, candor and frankness, rather than mere courtesy." But not so frank that Kerry would answer questions concerning the recent protest by Saudi women attempting to obtain the right to drive a car. Certainly never so frank as to get to the bottom of why this great U.S. ally funded the most virulent anti-American Islamic fanatics throughout the world; was one of only three nations to recognize the Taliban-run government of Afghanistan when it harbored al-Qaida as it directed terrorist attacks aimed at the United States; and was home country of 15 of the 19 hijackers who attacked America on 9/11 as well as bin Laden, their leader.

If there is logic to the U.S. position, it clearly has nothing to do with the stated goals of American policy to prevent terrorist attacks on the U.S. while somehow advancing human rights as a means of creating a more stable, peaceful world. Were that this government's objective, Kerry would not have traveled to Saudi Arabia to assure the monarchy that the U.S. still favors the Saudi-financed opposition in Syria that includes a considerable contingent of fighters the American intelligence agencies have labeled as Islamic terrorists. Nor would he now embrace a deeply corrupt military oligarchy in Egypt that can continue to enjoy the perks of its disproportionate power only by denying political freedom to the people of Egypt.

There is nothing new in this ugly embrace of the dark side of Mideast life. Cynicism of purpose and contempt for the well-being of most of the region's inhabitants have underscored centuries of Western imperial intrusion, and the current U.S. example is of that pattern. Indeed, the backdrop issue driving the current drama, the role of Iran, has its origins in past Western machinations when the U.S. overthrew Mohammad Mossadegh, the last freely elected leader of Iran, when he was threatening to nationalize Western oil interests.

In Saudi Arabia, Kerry said that President Obama had dispatched him to assure the monarchy that the United States remained committed to protect the Royal Kingdom against external threats. That presumed threat refers to Iran, and Kerry is out to assuage Saudi, Egyptian and, most important, Israeli fears that peace might break out between Iran and the United States. Sadly Israel, which long has cultivated an image as providing the only democratic presence in the region, favored the coup in Iran, as it has this year in Egypt, preferring the security of totalitarian regimes to those that might be more responsive to popular sentiment, including support for the human rights of occupied Palestinians.

The problem with this all too familiar game is that it has consequences that at some point will spiral out of control. The entire region desperately needs modernization for its stability or the eruptions of violence that have affected the world will become ever more commonplace. But modernization without representation is a contradiction all too long apparent in this most tempestuous region. That is the sad consequence of the imprisonment of Morsi, who was elected with more than 50 percent of the vote of Egyptians, and the U.S. acceptance of the military that ousted him along with the Saudi royalty who detest everything that is post feudal in the country's culture.

John Kerry, despite his democratic pretense, has sent a message to the disenfranchised of the Muslim world that the call for representative democracy on the part of the United States is nothing more than a public relations gimmick.
(c) 2013 Robert Scheer is the editor of Truthdig. A journalist with over 30 years experience, Scheer has built his reputation on the strength of his social and political writing. His columns have appeared in newspapers across the country, and his in- depth interviews have made headlines. He is the author, most recently, of "The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America," published by Twelve Books.




The Cartoon Corner...

This edition we're proud to showcase the cartoons of
~~~ John Sherffius ~~~










To End On A Happy Note...





Have You Seen This...





Parting Shots...





Study: Americans Safe From Gun Violence Except In Schools, Malls, Airports, Movie Theatres, Workplaces, Streets, Own Homes
By Andy Borowitz

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)-A new study released today indicates that Americans are safe from the threat of gun violence except in schools, malls, airports, movie theatres, workplaces, streets, and their own homes.

Also: highways, turnpikes, libraries, places of worship, parks, universities, restaurants, post offices, and cars.

Plus: driveways, garages, gyms, stores, military bases-and a host of other buildings, structures, and sites.

National Rifle Association C.E.O. Wayne LaPierre applauded the study, saying that it reinforced his organization's long-held position that the United States does not need additional gun laws. "This study makes it abundantly clear that Americans are in no danger of gun violence except in these isolated four hundred and thirteen places," he said.

He added that he hoped that the study would spark a conversation "about the root cause of mass shootings: people who recklessly show up at places where they could be shot at."
(c) 2013 Andy Borowitz




Email:uncle-ernie@issuesandalibis.org


The Gross National Debt




Iraq Deaths Estimator


The Animal Rescue Site















View my page on indieProducer.net










Issues & Alibis Vol 13 # 43 (c) 11/08/2013


Issues & Alibis is published in America every Friday. We are not affiliated with, nor do we accept funds from any political party. We are a non-profit group that is dedicated to the restoration of the American Republic. All views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily the views of Issues & Alibis.Org.

In regards to copying anything from this site remember that everything here is copyrighted. Issues & Alibis has been given permission to publish everything on this site. When this isn't possible we rely on the "Fair Use" copyright law provisions. If you copy anything from this site to reprint make sure that you do too. We ask that you get our permission to reprint anything from this site and that you provide a link back to us. Here is the "Fair Use" provision.

"Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.

In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:

(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors."