This brief article is worth reading as it describes the clean air efforts Kerry is making diplomatically at the global level. And what the epa is doing domestically re coal fired plants.
We can't miss the purely concocted politics of this matter.
The impression which modern Zionist propaganda from the late 19th Century forward would have us accept AS FACT is that the European Ashkenazi, the vast bulk of today's Israelis, are the literal *biological* descendants of Hebrews living in ancient Israel, i.e., Roman Palestine, at the time of Christ. They also want us to believe that these alleged ancestors were a population "isolate" exiled en masse by the Romans, that they didn't intermarry significantly and ended up in Eastern Europe specifically by way of Italy and Germany. That is their "Rhineland hypothesis" which they still cling to today for political purposes as religion alone gives no one credible rights to real estate 2,000 years later. For everyone that is counter-intuitive. Politically they must be the same people to make the argument for a right of return based on descent. As a matter of common sense a totally different people can not return.
The Zionist Rhineland hypothesis has been known to be implausible for many decades and now it has been definitively proved false by a young Israeli geneticist on the faculty of medicine at Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Eran Elhaik, a gentleman who might well be willing to speak to the issue in this forum.
The technical aspects of his article in a prestigious Oxford University journal are not easily accessible to laymen. But both the abstract and summary material near the end certainly are. And the whole thing has been rendered in English by a woman whose work is to make science explicable to non-scientists. I will post her Johns Hopkins article here also.
The Ashkenazi did not come from the Middle East, but from roughly what today is Ukraine and the region between the Caspian and the Black Seas. They were originally Turkic tribes, horsemen of the Steppe with a large empire, who in the medieval era were converted by Jewish missionaries. They were religiously Jewish but were not the descendants of the people of Palestine.
No surprise at all. And there is even more affinity than just among the overtly nationalist political ideologies. All four of the essentially utopian European systems which focused on visionary ends in a happier time, Marxism/Leninism, fascism, National Socialism and Zionism, arose out of the great 19th European socialist tradition.
And politics isn't linear. We shouldn't still be thinking in terms of right and left. It describes a circle. And when Nazis and fascists marched off toward what they thought was the right, and Marxists and Zionists toward whey they thought was the left, in fact they ended up cheek by jowel on the other side with far more systemic similarities than they would have admitted upon starting their journeys.
"Israel under Netanyahu is not willing to concede or deal on anything."
Of course not. Our policy-making apparatus has been conquered by their Lobby. By their standards, why should they? More of that below.
How could anyone who has watched them operate in fake "negotiations" over the last forty-six years without any pay-back be confused about that? How could anyone watch the pusillanimous conduct of our Congress during that time and have any doubt?
Yet (how I hate to use the word for this) our government is "politically" constrained from making life difficult for them in response.
And the unpleasantness flows only one way.
Our political class fear the domestic consequences of applying pressure to Israel. They fear retaliation at the individual level and the brutal destruction of careers and even for the future of of the Democratic Party.
This historically unique Lobby, the likes of which have never been seen before in our history, doesn't distinguish between the parties as traditional domestic lobbies do. It's relationship with Congress is on a member by member basis with a dossier on every single individual, and It thinks only of Israel's interests as its leaders erroneously believe they understand them to be. The result is that they apply or threaten to apply a sort of electoral terror to all and sundry. If found wanting in loyalty they will drive Republicans from office as readily as democrats.
Yet the application of intense and credible pressure to Israel is for Americans a national necessity. So much of what she does fills well-intentioned men and women with revulsion, but they can't do a thing even about that. It can't even be acknowledged in public. Nor can we protect ourselves from the blow-back at the global level. The land of the free and the home of the brave, indeed.
A few observations when I control my hilarity in response to Kurt.
Five minutes later. Okay. This is intuition and personal opinion, not social science.
The Republican Party is a coalition of the most diverse and thus inherently unstable sort. It was, after all, an alliance conceived by Tricky Dick and his men.
On one hand it's old whites, and megachurch-educated ignorati living in the South and in the fly-over zones. This obscurantist wing has very little in common with the pragmatic business and corporate faction where the money is. It is obviously a marriage of convenience which is fully understood by the corporatists but not by the aforesaid ignorati which oddly equate reaction with the work of a humanist radical 2,000 years ago.
That alliance is going to collapse because its major components have conflicting interests. The captains of industry need our bright young people to be fit for their purposes and like it or not, national power is a function of our economy and mental fitness. Class warfare as acted out in recent decades enhances neither. Nor does it enhance the domestic market.
There isn't much question that the corporate wing's long term interests are closer to those of conservative/centrist Democrats, with whom they are capable of getting along tolerably well as those Democrats are definitely not socialist radicals. They simply need an informal understanding that they can organize to get a fair apportionment of GNP and can provide for their kids to be upwardly mobile again. In other words they need a tacit disavowal of the class warfare led by Republicans which has so hurt the country.
It is not impossible as we achieved it in the 1950s, the most idyllic decade in our history, with an independent working class, and especially with essentially free university education. I remember it well. We can reach a general consensus again. It would leave the Evangelicals with less power within the Republican Party but nowhere else to go. When we generate a healthy attitude toward worker organization and education being rights as we had then, we should arrest our national decline into mediocrisy.
I emerged from eight years in college and at the University with no debt whatever. My Dad was a rural school administrator. There was no inherited wealth. My mother worked at home. My generation's opportunity was the fruit of the post-war understanding, tacit though it might have been. Why has the party of the right thrown that away? It was a sensible compromise which benefited everyone. It provided stability.
So, in a two party system, what we need is a loyal opposition. That's been thrown out with the bathwater. It didn't have to be that way.
If everything is surveilled or capable of being so due to software secrecy and and a likely government/industry conspiracy, then what?
Here's Hunter's bold solution to something he knows nothing about:
Isn't this a red-blooded American manufacturing opportunity? Business guys build new hardware and open source guys write the code and see to encryption. Then no one has a conflict of interest. There's a Chinese Wall in place. Software and its weaknesses would be monitored and discussed all over the country in the bright light of day. The moment there is skullduggery the whistles will be deafening. The factory guys and the software guys don't even have to meet each other. And nothing's made in Asia. Instead of a Smartphone, it will be the 'Genuine Patriot Cleanphone'. And when government inquires, it's: 'sorry, we don't do that part of it. Talk to the Assange/Snowden Open Source Society. Just remember that all conversations with government will be open to the public. If you've got nothing to hide, etc.'
This is a little more difficult. In the meantime anyone who wishes to buy an insecure phone because of its bells and whistles has knowingly waived his constitutional rights? And Apple can continue selling them?
Hey, I might use one as anyone listening to our calls would die of boredom in short order.
In short Mr. Steerpike, what do we do? Setting up a secret court doesn't seem to have worked. In retrospect that's not surprising. It was destined to be co-opted immediately. After all kidnap victims often become sympathetic with their kidnappers.
I am only marginally computer literate but I'm not sure that matters.
“Apple has never worked with the NSA to create a back door in any of our products, including iPhone," the statement read.
My, my, but there IS a back door. Or an exploitable vulnerability which the company surely was aware of. How and why did THAT come about? Might they have worked on a back door with the FBI or some one of the other fifteen intelligence agencies? Did Apple anticipate the government's needs without "working" with it? Did it have 'needs' of its own which the NSA rascals exploited? Anyway, that is a pretty weak denial of complicity and in a class action it would certainly be subject to close scrutiny by very talented trial guys.
Has Apple worked to frustrate such intrusions generically? Has it worked to provide itself with notice that a hostile takeover is in progress so that it can be blocked? If the answer is 'no' to both, isn't that negligence?
And has it specifically worked to ensure that its phones can not be taken over by government intrusion? If not can it really declare its innocence?
"Additionally, we have been unaware of this alleged NSA program targeting our products."
So, it's just 'didn't work with them' and 'didn't know'. That's weak, as is the counterintuitive post-facto claim that they really do care:
" We care deeply about our customers’ privacy and security. Our team is continuously working to make our products even more secure, and we make it easy for customers to keep their software up to date with the latest advancements."
These tours of the horizon which you seem to produce for us so effortlessly are very useful. I especially appreciate the impression provided of Saudi Arabia which I've always seen as an incompetent pseudo-royal kleptocracy at best, one which can not be described as an ally of the United States without averting the eyes and holding the nose.
However, I beg to differ on the advisability of encouraging the Chinese Communists to assume our responsibilities in the region. The quicker they do so the sooner we trade places with them economically and militarily. By the way, Professor Cole can you shed light on the power of the Israel Lobby in China?
The "why" is because they are confident that they and their Lobby can successfully and permanently intimidate our political class and that they can also continue to dominate the discourse on Palestine generally here in the States. It's brutal and reprehensible politics on Netanyahu's part. It needs to be punished.
It's also a perfidious insult to our Secretary of State and to the President. It should be rebuffed in unprecedented fashion as a violation of good faith and punished. I just posted ten ways in which that can be accomplished.
Is the cloud computing sky falling? The problem grows exponentially and we have so little time. One of our two parties won't even acknowledge that there is a problem. In the democratic sense our country appears to be ungovernable. Following our national interests in foreign policy has become virtually impossible. The country is awash with military weapons. And gradually the gun nuts' defense that government is the enemy contains little flashes of credibility. Where, after all, are the greatest of all leakers? In prison, in an Ecuadorian Embassy and in that epicenter of civic rectitude, Moscow.
I'm ordering a copy of "Brazil" so as to most vividly recall the future, and a history of the civil war in Somalia with the same intent.
How shall we define "the Islamophobic network in the US"? Are the Southern Baptists and other evangelicals a big part of it operationally speaking? Well, no. They are not of this world. Then who are the sophisticated, false-flag-experienced elements who are so "deep" into such things as, for example, the subornation of a de facto American declaration of war against Islam per se because "all Muslims are terrorists who hate us for what we are, not what we do in their region."
As the depth of the taboos are so intense and I'm so easily intimidated I'll withdraw to my watery cave in a cloud of squiddish ink. But not before saying again that we must change the *nature* of our primarily relationship in the Near East, i.e., we must determine to manage it first and foremost according to our interests and global responsibilities. And if we haven't learned that from 9/11 and the wars in the region we're close-on to deserving them.
Surely the GOP-symps who conspired against our own people in Benghazi have committed crimes. What's the FBI for? These disgusting traitors need to be prosecuted. And their political connections need to be exposed relentlessly. Why is the Administration so delicate about these things? That's what has me worried.
These observations from the inside are fine indeed. I especially liked the stream of consciousness riff from a few days ago. It all rings true. Don't tell anyone, but you write very well. I don't know what you're doing today but I hope you're keeping busy.
"If there is a nuclear weapons program, I seriously doubt it was engineered to exchange for coming in from the cold."
I doubt it too. If it exists it is far more likely to have been created to deter Israel's nuclear program and to enhance Iran's regional power and influence.
"We're not afraid of them. They should be afraid of us." Brave as were the refuseniks and the wives of the 1825 rebels, if you listen closely to what these women are saying about Russia, it's pure Custine.
"Russia is a nation of mutes; some magician has changed sixty million men into automatons."[6]
"Nations have always good reasons for being what they are, and the best of all is that they cannot be otherwise."
"The love of their country is with them only a mode of flattering its master; as soon as they think that master can no longer hear, they speak of everything with a frankness which is the more startling because those who listen to it become responsible."
"I came here to see a country, but what I find is a theater... The names are the same as everywhere else... In appearances everything happens as it does everywhere else. There is no difference except in the very foundation of things."
"I don't reproach the Russians for being what they are; what I blame them for is their desire to appear to be what we [Europeans] are.... They are much less interested in being civilized than in making us believe them so... They would be quite content to be in effect more awful and barbaric than they actually are, if only others could thereby be made to believe them better and more civilized."
Quotations are from George F. Kennan, The Marquis de Custine and his Russia in 1839, Princeton University Press, 1971, via Wiki. My copy of Custine's Russia letters contains an introduction by General George Marshall written as I recall during the early Cold War in which he opines that should one wish to understand the Russians of the last half of the 20th Century, the best possible book to read is Custine's "A Journey for our Time" written in 1839. Clearly it continues to be as true in the 21st as it was then.
WE, in the form of the Government of the United States under President George W. Bush and Vice President Cheney, "morphed" the War in Afghanistan into a 12 year catastrophe all by ourselves. It did not grow like topsy.
Why did we do it? It's not credible that such decisions were driven by the conduct of Mullah Omar leading up to 9/11. I don't buy it. It doesn't pass the smell test. The American people couldn't gain a thing by it but pain, suffering and bankruptcy. It had to have been the result of something else, something more anyway, in the air in Washington.
The point I'm trying to make is that irrespective of a secondary and factually tenuous war crimes case against a few individual Afghan leaders, we had no palpable national interest in invading and occupying the country and subduing the Afghan people, but we *did it anyway*. We did precisely the same thing in Iraq, urged on by Israel's neocon partizans and its all-smothering Lobby and with falsified intelligence from an office next door to Mr. Netanyahu's in Israel. All I could see regarding motivation was neoconservative influence, the Lobby, and an attempt to enhance Israel's strategic position in the region, in the proverbial tough neighborhood. I still can't see anything else.
I hope you fellows will address what I'm saying here. With appropriate, verifiable facts and cogent argument I'll be happy to change my mind. In the meantime I think both wars to have been field tests of neoconservative ideology which in turn was concocted for the sake of Israel, not the United States.
Criminal complicity? Unfortunately we Americans are familiar with that. Far more so than are the Afghans. We've been complicit in ongoing crimes in the Near East for over forty years and too self-righteous to admit it even to ourselves. And we've done it under the heading of self-defense too, another country's alleged right of self-defense used primarily to justify colonial oppression..
So let's say for the sake of the argument that we had a right to subdue and occupy Afghanistan. Does that right oblige us to actually do such a ridiculous thing? Clearly not, so why did we do it if it wasn't in our interests? Can we discuss that in the open or is it too sensitive? Might we have done it in an effort to improve the quality of life in a tough neighborhood? For whom? Did we do it for ideological reasons even though it didn't meet any pragmatic standard? And whose ideology might that have been? The neocons' perhaps? Is there a better explanation for such an absurdity?
Bill,
I'll edit a few lines from above and then add a few more. You misunderstood my thesis.
It was that after a century of dishing out the fear and indiscriminate terror of modern war on other continents from behind our ocean barriers, we suddenly experienced them ourselves for the first time at the level of three thousand dead in one primitive stroke. "Shock and awe" had actually been brought to our shores and our unseasoned response became undisciplined, disproportionate, somewhat like what happens in a stirred-up anthill.
I wasn't judging the legitimacy of America's entry into the great wars of the 20th Century. Far from it. I was speaking of the fear and terror we as a nation had NOT experienced in that time due to the protection offered by our location. When the phenomenon of modern war finally reached us with its "shock and awe" we were not hardened to it. We weren't steady. We didn't handle the fear and terror of it well. The result was panic fraught legislation which is far more dangerous to us in the long run than 3,000 dead and three collapsed buildings. And there were other awful stupidities. Our counter-offensive absurdly became the attack, occupation and ultimate failure to subdue two Muslim countries which had not attacked us on 9/11. We were stampeded off to war before the American people even understood it.
"That guns in America kill many more each year than the 9/11 attacks demonstrates the need for more gun control. Nevertheless, it is a non-sequitur as a discussion point regarding counter-terrorist measures and their constitutionality."
Isn't it interesting to contrast our responses to different categories of domestic carnage. Fifty thousand or so dead a year on the highways doesn't so much as cross our minds. Concern about gun dead is a little more elevated because of mass murders, but really doesn't strike fear in our hearts. We don't believe we as individuals will be victims and the reform movement suffers from entropy. But after a century of dishing it out on other continents from behind our ocean barriers, we suddenly experience real fear at the level of "only" three thousand. War can actually be brought to our shores and our response becomes disproportionate, somewhat like what happens in a stirred-up anthill.
Fear is fine. It's healthy, constructive. It's our response to it which is out of proportion. We haven't been steady under fire. With the first round of incoming we immediately designate as "patriot" programs which couldn't be better designed but to destroy our liberties over the long haul.
We've got to think this through more carefully. In sum, we've got to be willing to accept some casualties in the defense of who and what we are. We do it in war on other peoples' turf. But here?
Yes it will, but I'd like to see the ACLU involved. They work hard at seeing Constitutional problems in context and with an eye to the long haul. They must be really focused on this. We live in interesting times.
Without a pardon he most probably wouldn't see the light of day for another 40 years. What he's done is infinitely more important than any other whistle blowing I'm aware of. Prison is not a platform for continuing to fight the good fight. I think it's really important that he be able to join the struggle following up his disclosures.
The SC is only marginally right wing in US parlance. We have no more ability to judge the outcome in advance than we did with the Health Care Act. In fact the NSA's surveillance programs should raise huge issues for that branch of "conservatism" usually labeled Libertarian.
I'm curious, do you see *any* dangers in an Orwellian universal domestic surveillance system such as we speak of here being built into our government fabric without even so much as a sunset provision while we're still arguably a free people? I sure as hell do. No government, not even our own, can be trusted implicitly . Our 18th Century founders understood it and did their best. But it's an iron law and circumstances change. It doesn't even need systematic demonstration. It's intuitively obvious. Power corrupts, etc. That's why we've got to avoid the slippery slope the best we can. You know damned well that's precisely what the ACLU is trying to do.
Obviously necessary reforms are already in the pipeline. Obama saw to it in timely fashion. It will likely change the shape of the outcome. Judge Pauley appears to have kicked the entire problem upstairs. Did he do it to buy time for the appeal to become moot? Or, perhaps, so that the court system can provide guidance? I don't know those answers. But change is in the wind no matter what shape it will take.
That the NSA's program is the government's "counterpunch" isn't relevant to its constitutionality. Neither is how full of himself Snowden is.
One hopes that Mr. Obama will end Snowden's time on the cross with a pardon. Can anyone doubt that it is deserved more, for example, than was Nixon's? Or that it would benefit Obama by bringing the matter further toward closure with only a slight touch of humiliation? He must see and say publicly that the tendency was wrong and that the Snowden crisis brought that fact to his attention.
In principle the NSA struggle reminds me of the great crisis of the Bolshevik Revolution when Spiridonova, bitter enemy of the Bolsheviks and finally undisputed leader of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, the peasants' party, then planning a revolt, confronted Lenin and Trotsky on the stage of the packed Bolshoi theater. The issue there was similar, how to formulate the rights of the Russian people then facing the exportation of the Cheka police state (and the red terror) from a small archipelago of cities to the countryside where eighty-five percent of them lived. The SR revolt was put down quickly and the peasantry was engulfed in the early stage of "revolutionary" violence to be completed later by Stalin.
I don't think many will see any analogy for the present day, but here we are, creating secret institutions and universal domestic spying procedures aimed at our entire population in a time of ostensible liberal democratic governance which fit an authoritarian or even totalitarian police state perfectly. It's a terrible tendency which Joe Sixpack is not going to give a damn about because he hasn't spent his spare time reading European history.
The 20th Century in Europe without much question provides the benchmarks with which to judge these dangerous consolidations of knowledge and power and where they are likely to lead in the form of further, and even ultimate, consolidations.
The prospect of Muslim terrorism is a tiny matter in comparison to what is at stake over time for the American people.
During my tour long ago General Butler was formally lionized in training and that was long after his retirement and writing of that famous essay which I encourage everyone to read because historically it's the truth. I can't imagine that he is not still Saint Smedley inside the U.S.M.C. They obviously didn't give a damn about his post-retirement politics then. Why should they now? It didn't have anything to do with his leadership in the banana republics and China.
As to Van Riper's problem, you can attribute that to the Navy. The Marines are not especially invested in aircraft carrier battle groups.
And yes, however irrational it may be, the juices continue to flow pretty strong far outside of politics. Accordingly, whatever you think of it, it works.
Can one even imagine how amoral and destructive the Lobby is when it blatantly sabotages efforts by an American President to resolve our most critical issues of war and peace?
Just think about it. We have this egregious interference with our government's most important operations, and, of course, we also have the law specifically designed to stop it (The Foreign Agents Registration Act) but our leaders are too intimidated to use it. It's shocking that our government can't even enforce the law for fear of the Israel Lobby. AIPAC can and should be shut down.
Regarding the invasion of Afghanistan Hunter said:
"At that point (when both the Taliban and al Queda had been routed) why did we do it? Surely not our need for oil. What else was there unrelated to our obsessional connection with Israel?
And Joe said:
Iran. China. Central Asia. The Indian subcontinent. Pakistan.
I'm sorry, my friend, but you have the burden on that one. At a point when America had no interests in Afghanistan how did our interests in these other countries mandate the invasion? Without an explanation we have no idea what you mean.
"I think you define American geopolitical interests too narrowly when you insist that everything comes down to Israel."
It doesn't and that's inherent to the problem. It's quite the opposite. American geopolitical interests and responsibilities are probably more broad than those of any other country. That's precisely why they frequently conflict with those of Israel which is a tiny regional power.
The nature of the relationship, which oddly enough is grossly humiliating, has cost us much of our potential for leadership at the global level and earned us the contempt of the entire Muslim world, and justly so. That's quite an accomplishment for a country of six million people. It boils down to the fact that we have no choice but to enable enable her in her oppression of Muslim peoples, and at the same time can neither influence nor part from her. Her Lobby has our political class in a state of abject paralysis. There has never been anything like it in our entire history.
"My point was not to claim that US action played no role in the fall of the Taliban, but to point out that there were two different actions taken: toppling the Taliban/routing al Qaeda took place in 2001. The invasion of Afghanistan took place after that."
The Devil's in the details. Thanks for pointing this out. So, the full-blown attack and occupation occurred after the justifications for it according to Bill's analysis were no longer applicable.
So at that point in time the U.S. no longer had an interest in the invasion of the country but did it anyway.
At that point, why did we do it? Surely not our need for oil. What else was there unrelated our obsessional connection with Israel?
"The answer to your question, Mr. Watson, is had it not been for 9/11 we would have had no interest in Afghanistan."
Okay, that's settled. It's crucial too. Let's proceed to look at the nature of our interests in Afghanistan created by a terror attack in Manhattan perpetrated by a Saudi. Did that attack make it cost effective to occupy the country and to subject it to a decade of warfare? Neoconservatives with obvious conflicts of interest might think so, but if the American people had fully understood it do you think their love of video games would have trumped their common sense?
" After 9/11, however, the U.S. response was not to wreak “vengeance” on Afghanistan;"
Do you think the Afghans could tell the difference when that is objectively what we did in response to 9/11, what we did to a primitive peasant society in whose land and culture you acknowledge we had no national interest, call it what you will.
The victims were the entirely innocent Afghan and American and to some extent Pakistani people with the last part of it continuing today. That can't be said to have been done in our interests, especially long term. It was either vengeance with 'bring 'em on' Bushian macho or the clearly Zionist doctrine of neoconservatism. One can take his pick. I don't think there is another legitimate explanation.
We vastly exceeded the doctrine of "hot pursuit" and mounted a general invasion and occupation of the country totally out of proportion with any legitimate beef we may have had with the Afghan statesman, Mullah Omar, and a few of his colleagues.
As always, no Israeli warriors were included despite what we knew about the motivations of the Saudi, bin Laden, and al Queda ideology in attacking us from Afghanistan.
"... it was to root out Al-Qaeda and the Taliban leaders who granted him a base of operations for his terrorist activities."
Anyone can express the Bush/Cheney hasbara political line while disregarding both their behavior and the national interest, but it doesn't take the larger picture into account. A single example is neoconservative doctrine then ascendant in the Whitehouse.
"In granting Al-Qaeda this base, Mullah Omar was fully implicated in Bin Laden’s terrorist activities. The attacks on 9/11 were acts of war that fully justified the U.S. response. (Israel, by the way, had nothing to do with our response to the 9/11 attacks.)"
"Fully implicated, justified, nothing to do, etc." No offense, Bill, but this is hopelessly superficial and thus gives the wrong impression. When you have no discernable national interest there, you don't invade and occupy a nation wholesale because you failed to capture a couple of criminals. That's what the limits in the hot pursuit doctrine are about.
But more than anything the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan disregarded our obvious national interests. And if on nothing else, that judgement is based on the history of the Afghan response to invasions by outsiders to say nothing of any rational cost/benefit analysis. Our leadership screwed it up, but why?
Bush and Cheney were acting out neoconservative theory and that go it alone fanaticism had everything to do with Israel and virtually nothing to do with the welfare of the American people.
During the dozen years between the collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1989 and 9/11, what compelling national interest did we have in Afghanistan? The answer, damn it, is none.
In fact, if one discounts the prospect of Soviet imperialism, did we ever before 9/11 have such an interest in that country? Again, the answer is no.
Right or wrong the British had an empire to defend in that region. We did not. And the idea that we might nevertheless assume such responsibilities just for the hell of it makes no sense whatever.
More particularly, after 9/11 what interest did we have in Afghanistan other than the "hot pursuit" of bin Laden, a Saudi? Punishing the Taliban for Al Queda's crime meant, of course, subduing the entire country and that led to nation building. How, pray tell, was that in our national interest?
Okay, let's look.. Was Afghanistan a threat to our access to Persian Gulf oil? As a matter of fact, no.
What did Bush, Cheney and the neocons think they were doing regarding Afghanistan other than protecting the Gulf region and the interests of Israel against the rest of the Muslim World? I believe it to be fair to reject the crack brain theory that we had to defend "our" oil pool from control by other great powers. And that leaves Israel at the top of the heap of our motivations. We were to deliver an improvement of conditions in the neighborhood, flatten them all and let the Zionists sort 'em out in terms of hegemony in the region. And in fact that's exactly what was being talked about inside the Administration regarding both Iraq and Afghanistan, that we were doing it to protect Israel's position in the region. (It is discussed in 'The Israel Lobby' by Mearsheimer and Walt)
The Muslim World is gigantic and strategically located. Unlike tiny Israel, we Americans do have national and global interests in that immense region as a whole. Israel, a tiny regional power, does not. So, what else is there in the mix except taking vengeance for 9/11 in a fashion which would benefit Israel, our "ally" (cough, choke, gasp) by by visiting destruction and terror on her Islamic neighbors far and near? After all it's been Iraq I, Afghanistan, Iraq II and now the pressure is to attack Iran and syria. And of course the USA is to do the attacking. In whose interest is all this mayhem? Certainly not ours.
Good rant, Charley. Only one thing we all ought to know. The doctrine that corporations are the legal equivalent of persons goes back long before I started law school in 1968.
Thank you Mr. Steward. That is a breath of fresh air.
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While I'm here perhaps I can ask knowledgeable people how an arrest for underpayment of wages could EVER result in a strip search and cavity examination? I thought that such things were reserved for drug smuggling arrests and other contraband.
Someone above mentioned probable cause as a requirement. Can one imagine that it is not? And if it is how can we judge this situation without knowing what the probable cause for the "search" consisted of?
I still think that the public is going to have to mobilize on far more than an individual basis , and to a greater extent than it did in the sixties which is the only peacetime precedent. These critiques address the momentum of the problem, not its existence or direction.
It's existential. One wants to loosen up the corporate types this way while the kids take to the streets in Washington. Master litigator Mike Cherry of Chicago led the fight against the Palisades Nuclear Plant on Lake Michigan and then later at Midland, the home of Dow Chemical:
Do we have time? Jamail is ominous. If the movement is plant by plant, state by state, do have a chance of getting there before we've passed the tipping point? That alone is a huge organizational decision.
The Federal Government has the authority. Washington can in fact be shut down by protesters. That is feasible if the young with the most at stake come out as they did back in the day. Wouldn't a piecemeal approach be doomed to failure?
Back in the 1960s and 70s, the green and salad days of the environmental movement, I was a pretty committed activist. We organized a chapter of the Sierra Club and the University's Environmental Law Society. Over the years we participated in some epic fights regarding a nuclear power plant being built on Lake Michigan , a massive pulp mill planned for the south shore of Lake Superior, and protection of Michigan's wild rivers, the test being the lower reaches of the Au Sable. Those were the days of the passage of Michigan's Environmental Protection Act and the bottle and can deposit legislation, and later we worked on questions of zoned protection for a part the Lake Superior shoreline.
Some of this work was quite successful. Some was not, but I imagined myself to have made a contribution to the commonweal. Now that I've read this report by Mr. Jamail, I'm beginning to wonder whether I should have spent all that time in an Ashram contemplating my navel.
So where do our young people who are fit for the struggle go now?
Sumner Redstone, owner of CBS, once said about his media and entertainment businesses: "Content is King." Might that apply to the 60 Minutes broadcast?
The ASA boycott, doubtless the result of an anonymous ballot, is a very welcome victory though it could have taken place decades ago had it not been for an inchoate *fear* of individual retribution even among tenured academics.
The same thing is true even if much more intense where it really counts, at the governmental level, and this, years after the publication of the diagnosis in 'The Israel Lobby and American Foreign Policy'.
This giant oppression of our more or less democratically elected government is a humiliation which seeps down through the population itself in more concrete forms: 35,000 casualties among the cannon fodder underclass, multiple tours of duty, near bankruptcy, actual unemployment of something like 14%, giant contractor fraud associated with the wars. And if one thinks that there is no connection, well, it should be talked about in the open.
Lest the argument from fear seem overreaching or even hysterical, we should think about the fact that AIPAC, the spearhead of our woes in Washington, is an illegally operating unregistered foreign lobby. More specifically it violates FARA, the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and yes, Virginia, American citizens who lobby for a foreign country must register and stay out of electoral politics under that act. The last time the enforcement process was even begun was under Robert Kennedy's Justice Department and we recall what cut it short.
Why, we may ask, has it not been done since? It's still fear, of course, in various forms even at that level where the power is immense and that fear may be primarily about the next election.
So what do we do? Surely the problem is not without a solution, but what what the hell is it? And why must it be left to to civil society?
I'm reading Burton's Arabian memoir now. It's free on Gutenberg. As it turns out my faded memory from decades ago was of C.M. Doughty's 'Travels in Arabia Deserta'.
We'll never know what would have happened, but as long as we're in the what-if mode and the Balfour Declaration has been invoked, I suggest we posit that if the colonial period had ground to a halt well before WWI instead of well after WWII, there would have been no Balfour Declaration, certainly not one naming Palestine, which by that time would have had an indigenous government.
I see Balfour as a tragic mistake in the real world made on the altar of little more than a utopian political theory. We watched those constructs, all of which were designed to give privileged insight into the future, crash and burn over and over again in the 20th Century.
Auda Abu Tayi was my favorite figure too when I first read Seven Pillars as a teen ager. To my taste then Faisal seemed a bit aristocratic and remote.
Whatever their faults, both the book, a classic in the great 19th Century English travel/adventure/exploration tradition, and the wonderful film, served what seemed to me to be Lawrence's purpose, to depict the dignity and basic gravitas of the Arab people.
I'm a layman. Can anyone help me remember the great English traveler who did indeed pass for Arab wandering about alone in Arabian Peninsula in the 19th Century. He even visited Mecca, essentially in disguise. It was a display of raw courage in the service of intellectual curiosity which I think equalled that of Lawrence.
Oil as the source of all evil in the Middle East is grossly overrated. It's a fungible product on a world market and its producers happily sell to all comers without scruple. How can they be expected to deny themselves the short term extractive windfalls for ideological or political reasons?
I know it's fantasy but can't quite say why. Help me out, please. I've been thinking about the huge artificial harbors the Brits built and assembled on the coast of Normandy for the invasion of occupied France. Why shouldn't the western great powers build one on the beach at Gaza and end the suffering?
Bill, do you join me in believing that the Europeans are waiting for decisive American leadership and the political cover that will provide? It's up to us to break the paralysis and they will happily help us. It will be irresistible. But we're not likely to have a better shot at it than during this, Mr. Obama's lame duck term. If he is going to follow-up on what he and Mr. Kerry have done so far, I hope he doesn't wait until after the midterm elections. He is very cautious.
"We need to remember that the crimes that Israel commits in the West Bank originate in Tel Aviv. We should not only boycott Israeli settlers we should also boycott all of Israel."
Yes, of course. But our statesmen can't conceive of running the personal risks of even discussing such a thing in public. How are they going to send their kids to Harvard if they have been driven from office by the Lobby, their careers are destroyed and they've been labeled with the social kiss of death: anti-Semite!?
Reports of the death of the two state solution are premature.
They originated on the Zionist side of the equation and are suspect if only on grounds of conflict of interest. Note that our President and Secretary of State have not embraced this sort of defeatism. It is not American policy even though one would not know it from de facto American behavior since, say, 1967.
We Americans must at minimum think of it in terms of our actual interests which are so profoundly divergent from those of the ideological Likud coalition and its fierce American poodle, AIPAC.
What do we face if Israel proceeds to any of the theoretical alternatives to an independent Palestine so trenchantly outlined by John Mearsheimer a few years ago? Every one of them would be disastrous for us because we simply can not distance ourselves from Israel. We can not pressure her effectively. Our politics has become so corrupted by the Lobby and our fanatical right that we have lost control of the process by which our interests are protected in Middle Eastern policy.
I read somewhere yesterday that it is now estimated that the out-of-pocket costs for the American people of "securing the Persian Gulf region" has risen to something like eight trillion. It's obvious that but for the supine nature of our relationship with Israel it simply could not have been anything like that. It's just flat-out impossible.
The bantustans option, the apparent Israeli choice, means that in reality the grossly illegal Occupation will be permanent and that we Americans will not be able escape our historic association with it. It will enshrine the essential criminality of the resultant Jewish State. Will we have a choice but to continue to nanny the Israelis nevertheless? Our pusillanimous behavior since the Kennedy era argues that we will behave as if we do not. It's humiliating, insufferable.
All politics is highly intuitive in addition to being truly organized.
Will the Boddingtons ever simply tell us where they are coming from and what their political allegiances are regarding the great issues in the Middle East? Of course not, so we summon up our intuitive powers, connect the dots and draw our own conclusions. They don't like it.
And now comes fear at the individual level. Constant monitoring by Big Brother is corrosive. The next step is a doctrine defining enemies of the people.
So, Mr. Bodden, you do want the United States to intervene in the Syrian civil war. And you argue it based on a fondness for the history of American and British interventions in the region. Please explain to us how such a thing is in the American national interest as opposed to that of the Israelis. We really have to distinguish the two if we're to think clearly about this endless regional crisis.
Mr. Bodden:
Your treatment of our President is remarkably ugly, and incoherent too. You have no basis for asserting that Mr. Obama has been given some sort of illicit 'assignment' by any interests. You have no basis for speaking of him as if he were a criminal with a "modus operandum". Many young and coming politicians are given chances to speak at both Democratic and Republican Conventions. It's ridiculous for you to whine about his having been a success there. Were you offended by that success at the time? The Daley "machine" no longer exists and irrespective of that, of course he had many friends in his hometown, Chicago, who supported his rise. What's wrong with that? Is that sort of thing unknown to Republicans? And just what, pray tell, are you talking about regarding alleged conflicts between his actions and his rhetoric back in 2008? How can you deny that hope has been rewarded by change? The Affordable Care Act alone is a nearly unprecedented accomplishment. And then there is that final slander that he is motivated in decision-making while in office by considerations of a post-presidential career. You've got a lot of chutzpah when you treat this forum as if it were a usenet snake pit.
"Obama did not veto an American military intervention in Syria, unless you call first his threat to lob cruise missiles into Syria and then his abrupt about face to take the issue to Congress a “veto.”"
"To everyone else, it appeared to be vacillation and indecision. The Russians, of course, saved the day by pulling his irons out of the fire."
I acknowledge having used the word loosely. And he did vacillate. I'll settle for his simply not having invaded or bombed Syria as of yet coupled with the belief that he won't do so. But what's the difference what word is used as Congress wasn't going to go to war in Syria in any event. By referring it to Congress he killed it as if it had been vetoed. And he had political cover for it.
The Russians helped by suggesting a solution to the Syrian chemical weapons problem which defused Israeli pressure for another war. In any event we have not chosen to impose a military solution on Syria. And Putin's intervention was very smart and timely. Our interests happen to have overlapped on that one. What a pleasure given our history with them!
"Regarding a “nuclear agreement” with Iran, it remains to be seen how far that will go. One hopes a satisfactory agreement will be reached, but it is far too early to get excited just because initial talks have occurred."
I'm not inclined to believe that because things may go wrong they will. And I'm not searching for our President's faults. Both are counter-productive. And though I've been disappointed at times, I still feel that President Obama is by far our best bet for getting a settlement in Palestine. He's a lame duck and the Israelis have given him a very hard time. He's looking at his historical record. The American people will love it. He has all the motivation necessary.
Wouldn't getting all private money out of the electoral process by penalty of law set us on the right track? Or did the infamous Supreme Court decision base itself on the the personhood of corporations? The news reports made me so depressed that I could never bring myself to read it.
Perfect. The truth of it is displayed by the memory of the Soviet Union wherein fear at the individual level was the central principle of governance. We recall that she limped along, blustering, grossly distorted and militarized for decades and then abruptly collapsed, leaving the worn-out Russian people a terrible legacy which is nowhere near overcome thirty-two years later.
I'm not familiar with those blogs but will certainly look when I can. Feel free to re-post anything I write here wherever you think it might do some good. I appreciate the compliment.
You framed the issue yourself in this fashion: "When Obama’s State Department bans Israelis who make equally egregious statements, they might reach the level of President Bush’s State Department under Baker." We have to live with what we write.
John, I share the frustrations, but you slip past fundamental questions of the Constitutional breadth of Presidential authority and leap immediately to the ends we both desire.
Was not the justification of means by ends the very tendency which turned the 20th Century into the unprecedented slaughterhouse of nations it had become by the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union? It's true that Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus and FDR took over the manufacturing economy in wartime. But those existential crises were not precedents for what you propose. As a people we need the political institutions we have created gradually since the 18th Century. When they work poorly we need to reform them with deliberation; we can't permit ourselves the thrill of throwing them out with the bath water by executive fiat. We Americans are not immune to what JF Revel called the totalitarian temptation.
"When Obama’s State Department bans Israelis who make equally egregious statements, they might reach the level of President Bush’s State Department under Baker."
What you describe is an interpersonal spat over a display of bad manners by a man infamous for them. It had nothing to do with matters of strategic policy in today's version of the great game.
What our President has done is to stop Netanyahu's drive for an American attack on Iran in its tracks and put in its place a diplomatic alternative which is consistent with American and other great power interests. It shows signs of initial success. He has also vetoed an American military intervention in Syria and has fundamentally deemphasized the importance of the entire region to American global concerns through the pivot toward Asia.
These are matters of great significance to our responsibilities as the greatest of great powers, not mere trifles of personality such as the event you describe. I sense that there are more in the pipeline. Do you despite your distaste for President Obama?
Do you remember the days when we were forbidden by Israel and her Lobby to have direct contact with groups like Hamas and Hezbollah on the theory that they were terrorists? Now we *negotiate* a multilateral agreement on nuclear arms with Iran, the supposed arch-terrorist state and bitter enemy of Israel, without even keeping Netanyahu in the loop. We ignore his daily saber rattling and go about the pursuit of *our * national interests with the views of this tiny regional power put in their correct context.
There are other indicators too. AIPAC seems to have gone silent on its support of Israel's demand that we attack Iran. What after all can they do about it through the further oppression of our Congress? Not much it appears. Obama is using the power of the Executive Branch to accomplish these things. Earlier Presidents could have done it too. By and large they did not for reasons that interested laymen can now understand quite clearly with the help of scholars who have much broader audiences than in the past.
All professional politicians are willing participants in the game despite the fact that it is indeed very difficult to effect systemic change. But 'very difficult' is not impossible.
The passage of the Affordable Care Act was was hard indeed, having been pending since the time of Harry Truman. It was driven home over fanatical opposition and the struggle is not yet resolved. The outcome is not fully certain but there will be no fundamental retreat by Obama. He will make the system work as if life itself depended upon it.
No President since Jack Kennedy (with his equally courageous brother Robert) has been willing to exert so much pressure on the Israeli Zionists as Barack Obama. The Palestinian issue is not resolved, but there is no sign that he is going to cut and run here either. I believe that's shown by what follows here.
If one thinks of the context the sense of crisis must be intense for Netanyahu and his men, perhaps the most incompetent big stakes gamblers since the autumn of 1939. Time is no longer on their side. An example is the rush to implement the apparently criminal Prawer Plan before it is too late.
Then there is the fundamental change in our military orientation reflected by the pivot of our deployments in the direction of East and Southeast Asia. This is certainly not without political significance, especially in regard to the Middle East with which we have had a fatal and self-defeating fascination for decades.
And then in the same time frame comes the so far successful multilateral negotiations with the new Iranian regime on containment of their nuclear weapons program, if any.
These things happened without effective input by the Israel Lobby or our supine Congress. I don't think it is over and believe that the pressure on the Israelis is going to mount inexorably. They were simply presented with accomplished facts well within executive powers.
Having only escaped the century of the NKVD and the Gestapo by the skin of our teeth, all of us ought all to be able to know it when we see it as does Professor Cole with such clarity.
As to our President , there is a heavy sense of tragedy. An admirable man as potentially 'great' as any American leader during that awful time, he appears to be trapped in this giant system which he struggles to master on a daily basis in the most poisonous atmosphere we have experienced since, perhaps, the Civil War.
Are the United States governable today in a fashion consistent with our liberties?
Hostile foreign elements don't fall upon us because they dislike the cut of our jib or the nature of our spiritual lives. That would be far too expensive and dangerous. They have lives to live and families to care for like anyone else. They attack us because of noxious things we do in their parts of the world.
Those who, for example, attempt to convince us that we must war against Islam per se (!) because its adherents have terror in their very blood streams are deranged or have interests which conflict with ours. A primary source of it is, excuse me for saying so, Israeli hasbara, i.e., propaganda. The purpose is quite simply to keep us embroiled militarily in their drive to be a dominant regional power with sole possession of nuclear weapons.
But why on earth should those be American goals? From our perspective they're prima facie absurd. We can't possibly benefit from their attainment.
For the most part we create the hostile animus and thus the terror ourselves, needlessly. We then set about oppressing our own people to defend against them. The circle is vicious indeed.
We'll never be completely without potentially violent adversaries, but it's in our interests to make far fewer of them and to make none needlessly.
The classic example of our folly is how we went about squandering the 'peace dividend' at the end of the Cold War by immediately becoming embroiled in the Middle-East. In sum it was and remains breathtakingly stupid when viewed in light of our actual interests. Thanks to Juan we now know that we've squandered eight trillion in our effort to "secure" the Persian Gulf region. That's not chump change. For whom and why did we engage in the struggle? For ourselves? Hardly. Had we declined the honor it would have prevented the accumulation of our present foreign accounts problem at a single stroke. We were sold a bill of goods without full disclosure in reliance on the essential provincialism of the American people. We bought it and it was a disaster for all of us. For whom and why was it done? Perhaps we should leave that for another time. But it's critical that we think about it if we're going to choose the correct path going forward.
There are obvious places to begin in changing our attitude toward the outside world. The first is to indirectly impose a settlement on the Israelis, i.e., with appropriate sugar coating to bring them to heel. Their understanding of their own interests is even inferior to ours.
The way we act out our missionary impulses must be reconsidered. Stephen Walt for Secretary of State precisely because, though a clear-eyed realist, he is not an isolationist.
We need to reconsider our default determination to project military power on a global scale without a palpable need for it. Plans and simultaneous funding for two or three front foreign wars?! Ridiculous. We're the only people in the entire world who do such things. Our paranoid attitude toward national defense is killing us.
It's pretty mundane. The business of America is business and the quality of life of our people. Success in these rather than the squandering of our substance in unnecessary foreign military adventures is where real power and influence comes from. Not one of the world's other great powers does what we do militarily, not even in proportion to their populations. Accordingly it is obvious that WE don't have to do it either. Is that isolationism? Not any more than what is practiced by our great power peers. We need a fundamental reassessment of how to run our foreign affairs.
"To return again to social media and technology. Traditionally, academics have published their work in academic journals and books, given lectures to classes and seminars, and presented papers to conferences. I am by no means a proponent of eliminating peer-review and rigorous oversight. On the contrary. However, the increasingly commodified way in which we publish our material, in particular the ways in which journals take free labor – paid for, in fact, by universities – and convert this labor into large profits, should make us consider some alternative venues for publication and public discourse. We should attempt to take advantage of the public channels available to us, in addition to the increasing number of open-access journals."
We show up on college campuses as fresh faced kids and for years live in an extremely stimulating hot house world of scholars and students who are almost all cuts above, and if curious by nature we genuinely live what for each of us as individuals is the life of the mind and it's a very passionate time. Then one day it ends and we leave that world, the memory of it live for the rest of our lives. And if it "took" we were changed forever. But suddenly it dawns on us that we no longer have access to the University libraries, not even to the journals. We've been cast into the wilderness and lost our connection with that wonderful hothouse. We no longer deal with it. We deal with very expensive publishing houses.
Surely there is a duty or at least a great value in a democratic republic for universities and professors to inform the public in ways which help the people to perform their duties as citizens and also in ways which help them lead more rewarding lives. I don't know how the system could be changed in a fashion fair to everyone involved, but think it should be.
John, you seem to forget that the litany of his derelictions is not exclusively sexual. It appears that his first loyalty has been, contrary to his congressional oath, to a foreign country, the state of Israel over there in Asia. We Americans have an obligation to object to that behavior.
Nationalism is a bit out of fashion today but men in public office have an obligation not to set another country's interests against those of their own.
This brief article is worth reading as it describes the clean air efforts Kerry is making diplomatically at the global level. And what the epa is doing domestically re coal fired plants.
http://cleantechnica.com/2014/01/04/john-kerry-throws-cold-water-keystone-xl-pipeline/
We can't miss the purely concocted politics of this matter.
The impression which modern Zionist propaganda from the late 19th Century forward would have us accept AS FACT is that the European Ashkenazi, the vast bulk of today's Israelis, are the literal *biological* descendants of Hebrews living in ancient Israel, i.e., Roman Palestine, at the time of Christ. They also want us to believe that these alleged ancestors were a population "isolate" exiled en masse by the Romans, that they didn't intermarry significantly and ended up in Eastern Europe specifically by way of Italy and Germany. That is their "Rhineland hypothesis" which they still cling to today for political purposes as religion alone gives no one credible rights to real estate 2,000 years later. For everyone that is counter-intuitive. Politically they must be the same people to make the argument for a right of return based on descent. As a matter of common sense a totally different people can not return.
The Zionist Rhineland hypothesis has been known to be implausible for many decades and now it has been definitively proved false by a young Israeli geneticist on the faculty of medicine at Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Eran Elhaik, a gentleman who might well be willing to speak to the issue in this forum.
http://eelhaik.aravindachakravartilab.org/ArticlesPDFs/MissingLink2012.pdf
The technical aspects of his article in a prestigious Oxford University journal are not easily accessible to laymen. But both the abstract and summary material near the end certainly are. And the whole thing has been rendered in English by a woman whose work is to make science explicable to non-scientists. I will post her Johns Hopkins article here also.
The Ashkenazi did not come from the Middle East, but from roughly what today is Ukraine and the region between the Caspian and the Black Seas. They were originally Turkic tribes, horsemen of the Steppe with a large empire, who in the medieval era were converted by Jewish missionaries. They were religiously Jewish but were not the descendants of the people of Palestine.
No surprise at all. And there is even more affinity than just among the overtly nationalist political ideologies. All four of the essentially utopian European systems which focused on visionary ends in a happier time, Marxism/Leninism, fascism, National Socialism and Zionism, arose out of the great 19th European socialist tradition.
And politics isn't linear. We shouldn't still be thinking in terms of right and left. It describes a circle. And when Nazis and fascists marched off toward what they thought was the right, and Marxists and Zionists toward whey they thought was the left, in fact they ended up cheek by jowel on the other side with far more systemic similarities than they would have admitted upon starting their journeys.
Let us hope so.
"Israel under Netanyahu is not willing to concede or deal on anything."
Of course not. Our policy-making apparatus has been conquered by their Lobby. By their standards, why should they? More of that below.
How could anyone who has watched them operate in fake "negotiations" over the last forty-six years without any pay-back be confused about that? How could anyone watch the pusillanimous conduct of our Congress during that time and have any doubt?
Yet (how I hate to use the word for this) our government is "politically" constrained from making life difficult for them in response.
And the unpleasantness flows only one way.
Our political class fear the domestic consequences of applying pressure to Israel. They fear retaliation at the individual level and the brutal destruction of careers and even for the future of of the Democratic Party.
This historically unique Lobby, the likes of which have never been seen before in our history, doesn't distinguish between the parties as traditional domestic lobbies do. It's relationship with Congress is on a member by member basis with a dossier on every single individual, and It thinks only of Israel's interests as its leaders erroneously believe they understand them to be. The result is that they apply or threaten to apply a sort of electoral terror to all and sundry. If found wanting in loyalty they will drive Republicans from office as readily as democrats.
Yet the application of intense and credible pressure to Israel is for Americans a national necessity. So much of what she does fills well-intentioned men and women with revulsion, but they can't do a thing even about that. It can't even be acknowledged in public. Nor can we protect ourselves from the blow-back at the global level. The land of the free and the home of the brave, indeed.
Wouldn't it be a fourth if the assault by tribal levies is included? We shouldn't lose track of any opportunities to bask in Fallujan glory.
Thanks, JT, for the connection with Ross Caputi and Dr. Dahlia Wasif.
From McCain's website:
"... we cannot afford to remain disengaged any longer.”
By the way, McCain's Washington Office now has a copy of Professor Cole's article.
I know only Rumi, in translation of course. If there are others of equivalent quality the tradition must be glorious indeed.
Perhaps I'm unjustified in trying to imagine a civilized solution short of chaos and civil war. On the other hand, what choice do we have?
A few observations when I control my hilarity in response to Kurt.
Five minutes later. Okay. This is intuition and personal opinion, not social science.
The Republican Party is a coalition of the most diverse and thus inherently unstable sort. It was, after all, an alliance conceived by Tricky Dick and his men.
On one hand it's old whites, and megachurch-educated ignorati living in the South and in the fly-over zones. This obscurantist wing has very little in common with the pragmatic business and corporate faction where the money is. It is obviously a marriage of convenience which is fully understood by the corporatists but not by the aforesaid ignorati which oddly equate reaction with the work of a humanist radical 2,000 years ago.
That alliance is going to collapse because its major components have conflicting interests. The captains of industry need our bright young people to be fit for their purposes and like it or not, national power is a function of our economy and mental fitness. Class warfare as acted out in recent decades enhances neither. Nor does it enhance the domestic market.
There isn't much question that the corporate wing's long term interests are closer to those of conservative/centrist Democrats, with whom they are capable of getting along tolerably well as those Democrats are definitely not socialist radicals. They simply need an informal understanding that they can organize to get a fair apportionment of GNP and can provide for their kids to be upwardly mobile again. In other words they need a tacit disavowal of the class warfare led by Republicans which has so hurt the country.
It is not impossible as we achieved it in the 1950s, the most idyllic decade in our history, with an independent working class, and especially with essentially free university education. I remember it well. We can reach a general consensus again. It would leave the Evangelicals with less power within the Republican Party but nowhere else to go. When we generate a healthy attitude toward worker organization and education being rights as we had then, we should arrest our national decline into mediocrisy.
I emerged from eight years in college and at the University with no debt whatever. My Dad was a rural school administrator. There was no inherited wealth. My mother worked at home. My generation's opportunity was the fruit of the post-war understanding, tacit though it might have been. Why has the party of the right thrown that away? It was a sensible compromise which benefited everyone. It provided stability.
So, in a two party system, what we need is a loyal opposition. That's been thrown out with the bathwater. It didn't have to be that way.
So no open source phones are available now?
I'm hopelessly over my head here, but .....
If everything is surveilled or capable of being so due to software secrecy and and a likely government/industry conspiracy, then what?
Here's Hunter's bold solution to something he knows nothing about:
Isn't this a red-blooded American manufacturing opportunity? Business guys build new hardware and open source guys write the code and see to encryption. Then no one has a conflict of interest. There's a Chinese Wall in place. Software and its weaknesses would be monitored and discussed all over the country in the bright light of day. The moment there is skullduggery the whistles will be deafening. The factory guys and the software guys don't even have to meet each other. And nothing's made in Asia. Instead of a Smartphone, it will be the 'Genuine Patriot Cleanphone'. And when government inquires, it's: 'sorry, we don't do that part of it. Talk to the Assange/Snowden Open Source Society. Just remember that all conversations with government will be open to the public. If you've got nothing to hide, etc.'
This is a little more difficult. In the meantime anyone who wishes to buy an insecure phone because of its bells and whistles has knowingly waived his constitutional rights? And Apple can continue selling them?
Hey, I might use one as anyone listening to our calls would die of boredom in short order.
In short Mr. Steerpike, what do we do? Setting up a secret court doesn't seem to have worked. In retrospect that's not surprising. It was destined to be co-opted immediately. After all kidnap victims often become sympathetic with their kidnappers.
I am only marginally computer literate but I'm not sure that matters.
“Apple has never worked with the NSA to create a back door in any of our products, including iPhone," the statement read.
My, my, but there IS a back door. Or an exploitable vulnerability which the company surely was aware of. How and why did THAT come about? Might they have worked on a back door with the FBI or some one of the other fifteen intelligence agencies? Did Apple anticipate the government's needs without "working" with it? Did it have 'needs' of its own which the NSA rascals exploited? Anyway, that is a pretty weak denial of complicity and in a class action it would certainly be subject to close scrutiny by very talented trial guys.
Has Apple worked to frustrate such intrusions generically? Has it worked to provide itself with notice that a hostile takeover is in progress so that it can be blocked? If the answer is 'no' to both, isn't that negligence?
And has it specifically worked to ensure that its phones can not be taken over by government intrusion? If not can it really declare its innocence?
"Additionally, we have been unaware of this alleged NSA program targeting our products."
So, it's just 'didn't work with them' and 'didn't know'. That's weak, as is the counterintuitive post-facto claim that they really do care:
" We care deeply about our customers’ privacy and security. Our team is continuously working to make our products even more secure, and we make it easy for customers to keep their software up to date with the latest advancements."
These tours of the horizon which you seem to produce for us so effortlessly are very useful. I especially appreciate the impression provided of Saudi Arabia which I've always seen as an incompetent pseudo-royal kleptocracy at best, one which can not be described as an ally of the United States without averting the eyes and holding the nose.
However, I beg to differ on the advisability of encouraging the Chinese Communists to assume our responsibilities in the region. The quicker they do so the sooner we trade places with them economically and militarily. By the way, Professor Cole can you shed light on the power of the Israel Lobby in China?
Thank you for the citation to the Turkish English language newspaper, todayszaman.com.
Do you know how long the anonymous IDF Sergeant actually served?
The "why" is because they are confident that they and their Lobby can successfully and permanently intimidate our political class and that they can also continue to dominate the discourse on Palestine generally here in the States. It's brutal and reprehensible politics on Netanyahu's part. It needs to be punished.
It's also a perfidious insult to our Secretary of State and to the President. It should be rebuffed in unprecedented fashion as a violation of good faith and punished. I just posted ten ways in which that can be accomplished.
Nope, no excuse at all. The English must have had a difficult time swallowing the "engineer" part of it in gentlemanly silence.
Is there any excuse not to terminate that arrangement with Israel immediately?
Is the cloud computing sky falling? The problem grows exponentially and we have so little time. One of our two parties won't even acknowledge that there is a problem. In the democratic sense our country appears to be ungovernable. Following our national interests in foreign policy has become virtually impossible. The country is awash with military weapons. And gradually the gun nuts' defense that government is the enemy contains little flashes of credibility. Where, after all, are the greatest of all leakers? In prison, in an Ecuadorian Embassy and in that epicenter of civic rectitude, Moscow.
I'm ordering a copy of "Brazil" so as to most vividly recall the future, and a history of the civil war in Somalia with the same intent.
Yes, but he has his own militia.
How shall we define "the Islamophobic network in the US"? Are the Southern Baptists and other evangelicals a big part of it operationally speaking? Well, no. They are not of this world. Then who are the sophisticated, false-flag-experienced elements who are so "deep" into such things as, for example, the subornation of a de facto American declaration of war against Islam per se because "all Muslims are terrorists who hate us for what we are, not what we do in their region."
As the depth of the taboos are so intense and I'm so easily intimidated I'll withdraw to my watery cave in a cloud of squiddish ink. But not before saying again that we must change the *nature* of our primarily relationship in the Near East, i.e., we must determine to manage it first and foremost according to our interests and global responsibilities. And if we haven't learned that from 9/11 and the wars in the region we're close-on to deserving them.
Surely the GOP-symps who conspired against our own people in Benghazi have committed crimes. What's the FBI for? These disgusting traitors need to be prosecuted. And their political connections need to be exposed relentlessly. Why is the Administration so delicate about these things? That's what has me worried.
These observations from the inside are fine indeed. I especially liked the stream of consciousness riff from a few days ago. It all rings true. Don't tell anyone, but you write very well. I don't know what you're doing today but I hope you're keeping busy.
"If there is a nuclear weapons program, I seriously doubt it was engineered to exchange for coming in from the cold."
I doubt it too. If it exists it is far more likely to have been created to deter Israel's nuclear program and to enhance Iran's regional power and influence.
I couldn't figure it out either. For a while I thought it might denote the spread of Syrian refugees.
Sorry, forgot to paste in the more recent interview:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5s2gwKsgYk
"We're not afraid of them. They should be afraid of us." Brave as were the refuseniks and the wives of the 1825 rebels, if you listen closely to what these women are saying about Russia, it's pure Custine.
Alas, poor Russia:
"Russia is a nation of mutes; some magician has changed sixty million men into automatons."[6]
"Nations have always good reasons for being what they are, and the best of all is that they cannot be otherwise."
"The love of their country is with them only a mode of flattering its master; as soon as they think that master can no longer hear, they speak of everything with a frankness which is the more startling because those who listen to it become responsible."
"I came here to see a country, but what I find is a theater... The names are the same as everywhere else... In appearances everything happens as it does everywhere else. There is no difference except in the very foundation of things."
"I don't reproach the Russians for being what they are; what I blame them for is their desire to appear to be what we [Europeans] are.... They are much less interested in being civilized than in making us believe them so... They would be quite content to be in effect more awful and barbaric than they actually are, if only others could thereby be made to believe them better and more civilized."
Quotations are from George F. Kennan, The Marquis de Custine and his Russia in 1839, Princeton University Press, 1971, via Wiki. My copy of Custine's Russia letters contains an introduction by General George Marshall written as I recall during the early Cold War in which he opines that should one wish to understand the Russians of the last half of the 20th Century, the best possible book to read is Custine's "A Journey for our Time" written in 1839. Clearly it continues to be as true in the 21st as it was then.
WE, in the form of the Government of the United States under President George W. Bush and Vice President Cheney, "morphed" the War in Afghanistan into a 12 year catastrophe all by ourselves. It did not grow like topsy.
Why did we do it? It's not credible that such decisions were driven by the conduct of Mullah Omar leading up to 9/11. I don't buy it. It doesn't pass the smell test. The American people couldn't gain a thing by it but pain, suffering and bankruptcy. It had to have been the result of something else, something more anyway, in the air in Washington.
The point I'm trying to make is that irrespective of a secondary and factually tenuous war crimes case against a few individual Afghan leaders, we had no palpable national interest in invading and occupying the country and subduing the Afghan people, but we *did it anyway*. We did precisely the same thing in Iraq, urged on by Israel's neocon partizans and its all-smothering Lobby and with falsified intelligence from an office next door to Mr. Netanyahu's in Israel. All I could see regarding motivation was neoconservative influence, the Lobby, and an attempt to enhance Israel's strategic position in the region, in the proverbial tough neighborhood. I still can't see anything else.
I hope you fellows will address what I'm saying here. With appropriate, verifiable facts and cogent argument I'll be happy to change my mind. In the meantime I think both wars to have been field tests of neoconservative ideology which in turn was concocted for the sake of Israel, not the United States.
Criminal complicity? Unfortunately we Americans are familiar with that. Far more so than are the Afghans. We've been complicit in ongoing crimes in the Near East for over forty years and too self-righteous to admit it even to ourselves. And we've done it under the heading of self-defense too, another country's alleged right of self-defense used primarily to justify colonial oppression..
So let's say for the sake of the argument that we had a right to subdue and occupy Afghanistan. Does that right oblige us to actually do such a ridiculous thing? Clearly not, so why did we do it if it wasn't in our interests? Can we discuss that in the open or is it too sensitive? Might we have done it in an effort to improve the quality of life in a tough neighborhood? For whom? Did we do it for ideological reasons even though it didn't meet any pragmatic standard? And whose ideology might that have been? The neocons' perhaps? Is there a better explanation for such an absurdity?
Bill,
I'll edit a few lines from above and then add a few more. You misunderstood my thesis.
It was that after a century of dishing out the fear and indiscriminate terror of modern war on other continents from behind our ocean barriers, we suddenly experienced them ourselves for the first time at the level of three thousand dead in one primitive stroke. "Shock and awe" had actually been brought to our shores and our unseasoned response became undisciplined, disproportionate, somewhat like what happens in a stirred-up anthill.
I wasn't judging the legitimacy of America's entry into the great wars of the 20th Century. Far from it. I was speaking of the fear and terror we as a nation had NOT experienced in that time due to the protection offered by our location. When the phenomenon of modern war finally reached us with its "shock and awe" we were not hardened to it. We weren't steady. We didn't handle the fear and terror of it well. The result was panic fraught legislation which is far more dangerous to us in the long run than 3,000 dead and three collapsed buildings. And there were other awful stupidities. Our counter-offensive absurdly became the attack, occupation and ultimate failure to subdue two Muslim countries which had not attacked us on 9/11. We were stampeded off to war before the American people even understood it.
"That guns in America kill many more each year than the 9/11 attacks demonstrates the need for more gun control. Nevertheless, it is a non-sequitur as a discussion point regarding counter-terrorist measures and their constitutionality."
Isn't it interesting to contrast our responses to different categories of domestic carnage. Fifty thousand or so dead a year on the highways doesn't so much as cross our minds. Concern about gun dead is a little more elevated because of mass murders, but really doesn't strike fear in our hearts. We don't believe we as individuals will be victims and the reform movement suffers from entropy. But after a century of dishing it out on other continents from behind our ocean barriers, we suddenly experience real fear at the level of "only" three thousand. War can actually be brought to our shores and our response becomes disproportionate, somewhat like what happens in a stirred-up anthill.
Fear is fine. It's healthy, constructive. It's our response to it which is out of proportion. We haven't been steady under fire. With the first round of incoming we immediately designate as "patriot" programs which couldn't be better designed but to destroy our liberties over the long haul.
We've got to think this through more carefully. In sum, we've got to be willing to accept some casualties in the defense of who and what we are. We do it in war on other peoples' turf. But here?
Yes it will, but I'd like to see the ACLU involved. They work hard at seeing Constitutional problems in context and with an eye to the long haul. They must be really focused on this. We live in interesting times.
Without a pardon he most probably wouldn't see the light of day for another 40 years. What he's done is infinitely more important than any other whistle blowing I'm aware of. Prison is not a platform for continuing to fight the good fight. I think it's really important that he be able to join the struggle following up his disclosures.
The SC is only marginally right wing in US parlance. We have no more ability to judge the outcome in advance than we did with the Health Care Act. In fact the NSA's surveillance programs should raise huge issues for that branch of "conservatism" usually labeled Libertarian.
I'm curious, do you see *any* dangers in an Orwellian universal domestic surveillance system such as we speak of here being built into our government fabric without even so much as a sunset provision while we're still arguably a free people? I sure as hell do. No government, not even our own, can be trusted implicitly . Our 18th Century founders understood it and did their best. But it's an iron law and circumstances change. It doesn't even need systematic demonstration. It's intuitively obvious. Power corrupts, etc. That's why we've got to avoid the slippery slope the best we can. You know damned well that's precisely what the ACLU is trying to do.
Obviously necessary reforms are already in the pipeline. Obama saw to it in timely fashion. It will likely change the shape of the outcome. Judge Pauley appears to have kicked the entire problem upstairs. Did he do it to buy time for the appeal to become moot? Or, perhaps, so that the court system can provide guidance? I don't know those answers. But change is in the wind no matter what shape it will take.
That the NSA's program is the government's "counterpunch" isn't relevant to its constitutionality. Neither is how full of himself Snowden is.
Yes, the right to privacy is a doctrine of the Supreme Court which it necessarily deduced from the nature of the Bill of Rights.
One hopes that Mr. Obama will end Snowden's time on the cross with a pardon. Can anyone doubt that it is deserved more, for example, than was Nixon's? Or that it would benefit Obama by bringing the matter further toward closure with only a slight touch of humiliation? He must see and say publicly that the tendency was wrong and that the Snowden crisis brought that fact to his attention.
In principle the NSA struggle reminds me of the great crisis of the Bolshevik Revolution when Spiridonova, bitter enemy of the Bolsheviks and finally undisputed leader of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, the peasants' party, then planning a revolt, confronted Lenin and Trotsky on the stage of the packed Bolshoi theater. The issue there was similar, how to formulate the rights of the Russian people then facing the exportation of the Cheka police state (and the red terror) from a small archipelago of cities to the countryside where eighty-five percent of them lived. The SR revolt was put down quickly and the peasantry was engulfed in the early stage of "revolutionary" violence to be completed later by Stalin.
I don't think many will see any analogy for the present day, but here we are, creating secret institutions and universal domestic spying procedures aimed at our entire population in a time of ostensible liberal democratic governance which fit an authoritarian or even totalitarian police state perfectly. It's a terrible tendency which Joe Sixpack is not going to give a damn about because he hasn't spent his spare time reading European history.
The 20th Century in Europe without much question provides the benchmarks with which to judge these dangerous consolidations of knowledge and power and where they are likely to lead in the form of further, and even ultimate, consolidations.
The prospect of Muslim terrorism is a tiny matter in comparison to what is at stake over time for the American people.
In another thread it was said that there is a lie behind every crime. Ilan Pappe explains why in Israel they are so common:
http://www.heraldscotland.com/comment/guest-commentary/essay-of-the-week-what-drives-israel-1.1032971
"Why do you stay in prison
When the door is so wide open?”
― Rumi, The Essential Rumi
During my tour long ago General Butler was formally lionized in training and that was long after his retirement and writing of that famous essay which I encourage everyone to read because historically it's the truth. I can't imagine that he is not still Saint Smedley inside the U.S.M.C. They obviously didn't give a damn about his post-retirement politics then. Why should they now? It didn't have anything to do with his leadership in the banana republics and China.
As to Van Riper's problem, you can attribute that to the Navy. The Marines are not especially invested in aircraft carrier battle groups.
And yes, however irrational it may be, the juices continue to flow pretty strong far outside of politics. Accordingly, whatever you think of it, it works.
But don't worry, I won't thank you for anything.
Don't jump to conclusions about the Marine Corps.
http://forward.com/articles/189761/israel-hopes-to-undermine-iran-nuclear-thaw/?p=all
Can one even imagine how amoral and destructive the Lobby is when it blatantly sabotages efforts by an American President to resolve our most critical issues of war and peace?
Just think about it. We have this egregious interference with our government's most important operations, and, of course, we also have the law specifically designed to stop it (The Foreign Agents Registration Act) but our leaders are too intimidated to use it. It's shocking that our government can't even enforce the law for fear of the Israel Lobby. AIPAC can and should be shut down.
Regarding the invasion of Afghanistan Hunter said:
"At that point (when both the Taliban and al Queda had been routed) why did we do it? Surely not our need for oil. What else was there unrelated to our obsessional connection with Israel?
And Joe said:
Iran. China. Central Asia. The Indian subcontinent. Pakistan.
I'm sorry, my friend, but you have the burden on that one. At a point when America had no interests in Afghanistan how did our interests in these other countries mandate the invasion? Without an explanation we have no idea what you mean.
joe from Lowell said:
"I think you define American geopolitical interests too narrowly when you insist that everything comes down to Israel."
It doesn't and that's inherent to the problem. It's quite the opposite. American geopolitical interests and responsibilities are probably more broad than those of any other country. That's precisely why they frequently conflict with those of Israel which is a tiny regional power.
The nature of the relationship, which oddly enough is grossly humiliating, has cost us much of our potential for leadership at the global level and earned us the contempt of the entire Muslim world, and justly so. That's quite an accomplishment for a country of six million people. It boils down to the fact that we have no choice but to enable enable her in her oppression of Muslim peoples, and at the same time can neither influence nor part from her. Her Lobby has our political class in a state of abject paralysis. There has never been anything like it in our entire history.
"My point was not to claim that US action played no role in the fall of the Taliban, but to point out that there were two different actions taken: toppling the Taliban/routing al Qaeda took place in 2001. The invasion of Afghanistan took place after that."
The Devil's in the details. Thanks for pointing this out. So, the full-blown attack and occupation occurred after the justifications for it according to Bill's analysis were no longer applicable.
So at that point in time the U.S. no longer had an interest in the invasion of the country but did it anyway.
At that point, why did we do it? Surely not our need for oil. What else was there unrelated our obsessional connection with Israel?
Perfect, Clif. Unfortunately I did not read your post until I had sent mine.
"The answer to your question, Mr. Watson, is had it not been for 9/11 we would have had no interest in Afghanistan."
Okay, that's settled. It's crucial too. Let's proceed to look at the nature of our interests in Afghanistan created by a terror attack in Manhattan perpetrated by a Saudi. Did that attack make it cost effective to occupy the country and to subject it to a decade of warfare? Neoconservatives with obvious conflicts of interest might think so, but if the American people had fully understood it do you think their love of video games would have trumped their common sense?
" After 9/11, however, the U.S. response was not to wreak “vengeance” on Afghanistan;"
Do you think the Afghans could tell the difference when that is objectively what we did in response to 9/11, what we did to a primitive peasant society in whose land and culture you acknowledge we had no national interest, call it what you will.
The victims were the entirely innocent Afghan and American and to some extent Pakistani people with the last part of it continuing today. That can't be said to have been done in our interests, especially long term. It was either vengeance with 'bring 'em on' Bushian macho or the clearly Zionist doctrine of neoconservatism. One can take his pick. I don't think there is another legitimate explanation.
We vastly exceeded the doctrine of "hot pursuit" and mounted a general invasion and occupation of the country totally out of proportion with any legitimate beef we may have had with the Afghan statesman, Mullah Omar, and a few of his colleagues.
As always, no Israeli warriors were included despite what we knew about the motivations of the Saudi, bin Laden, and al Queda ideology in attacking us from Afghanistan.
"... it was to root out Al-Qaeda and the Taliban leaders who granted him a base of operations for his terrorist activities."
Anyone can express the Bush/Cheney hasbara political line while disregarding both their behavior and the national interest, but it doesn't take the larger picture into account. A single example is neoconservative doctrine then ascendant in the Whitehouse.
"In granting Al-Qaeda this base, Mullah Omar was fully implicated in Bin Laden’s terrorist activities. The attacks on 9/11 were acts of war that fully justified the U.S. response. (Israel, by the way, had nothing to do with our response to the 9/11 attacks.)"
"Fully implicated, justified, nothing to do, etc." No offense, Bill, but this is hopelessly superficial and thus gives the wrong impression. When you have no discernable national interest there, you don't invade and occupy a nation wholesale because you failed to capture a couple of criminals. That's what the limits in the hot pursuit doctrine are about.
But more than anything the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan disregarded our obvious national interests. And if on nothing else, that judgement is based on the history of the Afghan response to invasions by outsiders to say nothing of any rational cost/benefit analysis. Our leadership screwed it up, but why?
Bush and Cheney were acting out neoconservative theory and that go it alone fanaticism had everything to do with Israel and virtually nothing to do with the welfare of the American people.
During the dozen years between the collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1989 and 9/11, what compelling national interest did we have in Afghanistan? The answer, damn it, is none.
In fact, if one discounts the prospect of Soviet imperialism, did we ever before 9/11 have such an interest in that country? Again, the answer is no.
Right or wrong the British had an empire to defend in that region. We did not. And the idea that we might nevertheless assume such responsibilities just for the hell of it makes no sense whatever.
More particularly, after 9/11 what interest did we have in Afghanistan other than the "hot pursuit" of bin Laden, a Saudi? Punishing the Taliban for Al Queda's crime meant, of course, subduing the entire country and that led to nation building. How, pray tell, was that in our national interest?
Okay, let's look.. Was Afghanistan a threat to our access to Persian Gulf oil? As a matter of fact, no.
What did Bush, Cheney and the neocons think they were doing regarding Afghanistan other than protecting the Gulf region and the interests of Israel against the rest of the Muslim World? I believe it to be fair to reject the crack brain theory that we had to defend "our" oil pool from control by other great powers. And that leaves Israel at the top of the heap of our motivations. We were to deliver an improvement of conditions in the neighborhood, flatten them all and let the Zionists sort 'em out in terms of hegemony in the region. And in fact that's exactly what was being talked about inside the Administration regarding both Iraq and Afghanistan, that we were doing it to protect Israel's position in the region. (It is discussed in 'The Israel Lobby' by Mearsheimer and Walt)
The Muslim World is gigantic and strategically located. Unlike tiny Israel, we Americans do have national and global interests in that immense region as a whole. Israel, a tiny regional power, does not. So, what else is there in the mix except taking vengeance for 9/11 in a fashion which would benefit Israel, our "ally" (cough, choke, gasp) by by visiting destruction and terror on her Islamic neighbors far and near? After all it's been Iraq I, Afghanistan, Iraq II and now the pressure is to attack Iran and syria. And of course the USA is to do the attacking. In whose interest is all this mayhem? Certainly not ours.
We've become numb to it.
They look pretty depressed to me.
Good rant, Charley. Only one thing we all ought to know. The doctrine that corporations are the legal equivalent of persons goes back long before I started law school in 1968.
Thank you Mr. Steward. That is a breath of fresh air.
------------
While I'm here perhaps I can ask knowledgeable people how an arrest for underpayment of wages could EVER result in a strip search and cavity examination? I thought that such things were reserved for drug smuggling arrests and other contraband.
Someone above mentioned probable cause as a requirement. Can one imagine that it is not? And if it is how can we judge this situation without knowing what the probable cause for the "search" consisted of?
Do you suppose that the prospective Elysiumites will be able to avoid the armed millions declining to go softly into the night?
I still think that the public is going to have to mobilize on far more than an individual basis , and to a greater extent than it did in the sixties which is the only peacetime precedent. These critiques address the momentum of the problem, not its existence or direction.
It's existential. One wants to loosen up the corporate types this way while the kids take to the streets in Washington. Master litigator Mike Cherry of Chicago led the fight against the Palisades Nuclear Plant on Lake Michigan and then later at Midland, the home of Dow Chemical:
http://www.cherry-law.com/pdfs/Wall_Street_Journal_03_10_78.pdf
Do we have time? Jamail is ominous. If the movement is plant by plant, state by state, do have a chance of getting there before we've passed the tipping point? That alone is a huge organizational decision.
The Federal Government has the authority. Washington can in fact be shut down by protesters. That is feasible if the young with the most at stake come out as they did back in the day. Wouldn't a piecemeal approach be doomed to failure?
Back in the 1960s and 70s, the green and salad days of the environmental movement, I was a pretty committed activist. We organized a chapter of the Sierra Club and the University's Environmental Law Society. Over the years we participated in some epic fights regarding a nuclear power plant being built on Lake Michigan , a massive pulp mill planned for the south shore of Lake Superior, and protection of Michigan's wild rivers, the test being the lower reaches of the Au Sable. Those were the days of the passage of Michigan's Environmental Protection Act and the bottle and can deposit legislation, and later we worked on questions of zoned protection for a part the Lake Superior shoreline.
Some of this work was quite successful. Some was not, but I imagined myself to have made a contribution to the commonweal. Now that I've read this report by Mr. Jamail, I'm beginning to wonder whether I should have spent all that time in an Ashram contemplating my navel.
So where do our young people who are fit for the struggle go now?
Sumner Redstone, owner of CBS, once said about his media and entertainment businesses: "Content is King." Might that apply to the 60 Minutes broadcast?
The ASA boycott, doubtless the result of an anonymous ballot, is a very welcome victory though it could have taken place decades ago had it not been for an inchoate *fear* of individual retribution even among tenured academics.
The same thing is true even if much more intense where it really counts, at the governmental level, and this, years after the publication of the diagnosis in 'The Israel Lobby and American Foreign Policy'.
This giant oppression of our more or less democratically elected government is a humiliation which seeps down through the population itself in more concrete forms: 35,000 casualties among the cannon fodder underclass, multiple tours of duty, near bankruptcy, actual unemployment of something like 14%, giant contractor fraud associated with the wars. And if one thinks that there is no connection, well, it should be talked about in the open.
Lest the argument from fear seem overreaching or even hysterical, we should think about the fact that AIPAC, the spearhead of our woes in Washington, is an illegally operating unregistered foreign lobby. More specifically it violates FARA, the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and yes, Virginia, American citizens who lobby for a foreign country must register and stay out of electoral politics under that act. The last time the enforcement process was even begun was under Robert Kennedy's Justice Department and we recall what cut it short.
Why, we may ask, has it not been done since? It's still fear, of course, in various forms even at that level where the power is immense and that fear may be primarily about the next election.
So what do we do? Surely the problem is not without a solution, but what what the hell is it? And why must it be left to to civil society?
I think he may have joined the RAF as an enlisted man.
So the arch-colonialist took the high road on colonialism.
I'm reading Burton's Arabian memoir now. It's free on Gutenberg. As it turns out my faded memory from decades ago was of C.M. Doughty's 'Travels in Arabia Deserta'.
Thanks again.
We'll never know what would have happened, but as long as we're in the what-if mode and the Balfour Declaration has been invoked, I suggest we posit that if the colonial period had ground to a halt well before WWI instead of well after WWII, there would have been no Balfour Declaration, certainly not one naming Palestine, which by that time would have had an indigenous government.
I see Balfour as a tragic mistake in the real world made on the altar of little more than a utopian political theory. We watched those constructs, all of which were designed to give privileged insight into the future, crash and burn over and over again in the 20th Century.
Thanks, Bill. Much appreciated.
Wonderful. Thank you for that quote.
Auda Abu Tayi was my favorite figure too when I first read Seven Pillars as a teen ager. To my taste then Faisal seemed a bit aristocratic and remote.
Whatever their faults, both the book, a classic in the great 19th Century English travel/adventure/exploration tradition, and the wonderful film, served what seemed to me to be Lawrence's purpose, to depict the dignity and basic gravitas of the Arab people.
I'm a layman. Can anyone help me remember the great English traveler who did indeed pass for Arab wandering about alone in Arabian Peninsula in the 19th Century. He even visited Mecca, essentially in disguise. It was a display of raw courage in the service of intellectual curiosity which I think equalled that of Lawrence.
Many thanks to Professor Cole for this article.
Oil as the source of all evil in the Middle East is grossly overrated. It's a fungible product on a world market and its producers happily sell to all comers without scruple. How can they be expected to deny themselves the short term extractive windfalls for ideological or political reasons?
Were there no Christian extremists pulling triggers under the protection of Sharon at Sabra and Shatila?
Look us in the eye, Julia.
I know it's fantasy but can't quite say why. Help me out, please. I've been thinking about the huge artificial harbors the Brits built and assembled on the coast of Normandy for the invasion of occupied France. Why shouldn't the western great powers build one on the beach at Gaza and end the suffering?
Can you explain why we can't do such a thing?
Bill, do you join me in believing that the Europeans are waiting for decisive American leadership and the political cover that will provide? It's up to us to break the paralysis and they will happily help us. It will be irresistible. But we're not likely to have a better shot at it than during this, Mr. Obama's lame duck term. If he is going to follow-up on what he and Mr. Kerry have done so far, I hope he doesn't wait until after the midterm elections. He is very cautious.
"We need to remember that the crimes that Israel commits in the West Bank originate in Tel Aviv. We should not only boycott Israeli settlers we should also boycott all of Israel."
Yes, of course. But our statesmen can't conceive of running the personal risks of even discussing such a thing in public. How are they going to send their kids to Harvard if they have been driven from office by the Lobby, their careers are destroyed and they've been labeled with the social kiss of death: anti-Semite!?
Reports of the death of the two state solution are premature.
They originated on the Zionist side of the equation and are suspect if only on grounds of conflict of interest. Note that our President and Secretary of State have not embraced this sort of defeatism. It is not American policy even though one would not know it from de facto American behavior since, say, 1967.
We Americans must at minimum think of it in terms of our actual interests which are so profoundly divergent from those of the ideological Likud coalition and its fierce American poodle, AIPAC.
What do we face if Israel proceeds to any of the theoretical alternatives to an independent Palestine so trenchantly outlined by John Mearsheimer a few years ago? Every one of them would be disastrous for us because we simply can not distance ourselves from Israel. We can not pressure her effectively. Our politics has become so corrupted by the Lobby and our fanatical right that we have lost control of the process by which our interests are protected in Middle Eastern policy.
I read somewhere yesterday that it is now estimated that the out-of-pocket costs for the American people of "securing the Persian Gulf region" has risen to something like eight trillion. It's obvious that but for the supine nature of our relationship with Israel it simply could not have been anything like that. It's just flat-out impossible.
The bantustans option, the apparent Israeli choice, means that in reality the grossly illegal Occupation will be permanent and that we Americans will not be able escape our historic association with it. It will enshrine the essential criminality of the resultant Jewish State. Will we have a choice but to continue to nanny the Israelis nevertheless? Our pusillanimous behavior since the Kennedy era argues that we will behave as if we do not. It's humiliating, insufferable.
All politics is highly intuitive in addition to being truly organized.
Will the Boddingtons ever simply tell us where they are coming from and what their political allegiances are regarding the great issues in the Middle East? Of course not, so we summon up our intuitive powers, connect the dots and draw our own conclusions. They don't like it.
And now comes fear at the individual level. Constant monitoring by Big Brother is corrosive. The next step is a doctrine defining enemies of the people.
So, Mr. Bodden, you do want the United States to intervene in the Syrian civil war. And you argue it based on a fondness for the history of American and British interventions in the region. Please explain to us how such a thing is in the American national interest as opposed to that of the Israelis. We really have to distinguish the two if we're to think clearly about this endless regional crisis.
Mr. Bodden:
Your treatment of our President is remarkably ugly, and incoherent too. You have no basis for asserting that Mr. Obama has been given some sort of illicit 'assignment' by any interests. You have no basis for speaking of him as if he were a criminal with a "modus operandum". Many young and coming politicians are given chances to speak at both Democratic and Republican Conventions. It's ridiculous for you to whine about his having been a success there. Were you offended by that success at the time? The Daley "machine" no longer exists and irrespective of that, of course he had many friends in his hometown, Chicago, who supported his rise. What's wrong with that? Is that sort of thing unknown to Republicans? And just what, pray tell, are you talking about regarding alleged conflicts between his actions and his rhetoric back in 2008? How can you deny that hope has been rewarded by change? The Affordable Care Act alone is a nearly unprecedented accomplishment. And then there is that final slander that he is motivated in decision-making while in office by considerations of a post-presidential career. You've got a lot of chutzpah when you treat this forum as if it were a usenet snake pit.
"Obama did not veto an American military intervention in Syria, unless you call first his threat to lob cruise missiles into Syria and then his abrupt about face to take the issue to Congress a “veto.”"
"To everyone else, it appeared to be vacillation and indecision. The Russians, of course, saved the day by pulling his irons out of the fire."
I acknowledge having used the word loosely. And he did vacillate. I'll settle for his simply not having invaded or bombed Syria as of yet coupled with the belief that he won't do so. But what's the difference what word is used as Congress wasn't going to go to war in Syria in any event. By referring it to Congress he killed it as if it had been vetoed. And he had political cover for it.
The Russians helped by suggesting a solution to the Syrian chemical weapons problem which defused Israeli pressure for another war. In any event we have not chosen to impose a military solution on Syria. And Putin's intervention was very smart and timely. Our interests happen to have overlapped on that one. What a pleasure given our history with them!
"Regarding a “nuclear agreement” with Iran, it remains to be seen how far that will go. One hopes a satisfactory agreement will be reached, but it is far too early to get excited just because initial talks have occurred."
I'm not inclined to believe that because things may go wrong they will. And I'm not searching for our President's faults. Both are counter-productive. And though I've been disappointed at times, I still feel that President Obama is by far our best bet for getting a settlement in Palestine. He's a lame duck and the Israelis have given him a very hard time. He's looking at his historical record. The American people will love it. He has all the motivation necessary.
Wouldn't getting all private money out of the electoral process by penalty of law set us on the right track? Or did the infamous Supreme Court decision base itself on the the personhood of corporations? The news reports made me so depressed that I could never bring myself to read it.
Perfect. The truth of it is displayed by the memory of the Soviet Union wherein fear at the individual level was the central principle of governance. We recall that she limped along, blustering, grossly distorted and militarized for decades and then abruptly collapsed, leaving the worn-out Russian people a terrible legacy which is nowhere near overcome thirty-two years later.
Indeed he did! And Gandhi was the nonviolent man of action who made it work in practice. Equal laurels to these two great men.
Okay, good. We'll both do so in good cheer.
Best,
Hunter
I'm not familiar with those blogs but will certainly look when I can. Feel free to re-post anything I write here wherever you think it might do some good. I appreciate the compliment.
You framed the issue yourself in this fashion: "When Obama’s State Department bans Israelis who make equally egregious statements, they might reach the level of President Bush’s State Department under Baker." We have to live with what we write.
John, I share the frustrations, but you slip past fundamental questions of the Constitutional breadth of Presidential authority and leap immediately to the ends we both desire.
Was not the justification of means by ends the very tendency which turned the 20th Century into the unprecedented slaughterhouse of nations it had become by the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union? It's true that Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus and FDR took over the manufacturing economy in wartime. But those existential crises were not precedents for what you propose. As a people we need the political institutions we have created gradually since the 18th Century. When they work poorly we need to reform them with deliberation; we can't permit ourselves the thrill of throwing them out with the bath water by executive fiat. We Americans are not immune to what JF Revel called the totalitarian temptation.
"When Obama’s State Department bans Israelis who make equally egregious statements, they might reach the level of President Bush’s State Department under Baker."
What you describe is an interpersonal spat over a display of bad manners by a man infamous for them. It had nothing to do with matters of strategic policy in today's version of the great game.
What our President has done is to stop Netanyahu's drive for an American attack on Iran in its tracks and put in its place a diplomatic alternative which is consistent with American and other great power interests. It shows signs of initial success. He has also vetoed an American military intervention in Syria and has fundamentally deemphasized the importance of the entire region to American global concerns through the pivot toward Asia.
These are matters of great significance to our responsibilities as the greatest of great powers, not mere trifles of personality such as the event you describe. I sense that there are more in the pipeline. Do you despite your distaste for President Obama?
Do you remember the days when we were forbidden by Israel and her Lobby to have direct contact with groups like Hamas and Hezbollah on the theory that they were terrorists? Now we *negotiate* a multilateral agreement on nuclear arms with Iran, the supposed arch-terrorist state and bitter enemy of Israel, without even keeping Netanyahu in the loop. We ignore his daily saber rattling and go about the pursuit of *our * national interests with the views of this tiny regional power put in their correct context.
There are other indicators too. AIPAC seems to have gone silent on its support of Israel's demand that we attack Iran. What after all can they do about it through the further oppression of our Congress? Not much it appears. Obama is using the power of the Executive Branch to accomplish these things. Earlier Presidents could have done it too. By and large they did not for reasons that interested laymen can now understand quite clearly with the help of scholars who have much broader audiences than in the past.
You may be sure that 'all the President's men' read Juan Cole and the other fine realists such as Stephen Walt.
All professional politicians are willing participants in the game despite the fact that it is indeed very difficult to effect systemic change. But 'very difficult' is not impossible.
The passage of the Affordable Care Act was was hard indeed, having been pending since the time of Harry Truman. It was driven home over fanatical opposition and the struggle is not yet resolved. The outcome is not fully certain but there will be no fundamental retreat by Obama. He will make the system work as if life itself depended upon it.
No President since Jack Kennedy (with his equally courageous brother Robert) has been willing to exert so much pressure on the Israeli Zionists as Barack Obama. The Palestinian issue is not resolved, but there is no sign that he is going to cut and run here either. I believe that's shown by what follows here.
If one thinks of the context the sense of crisis must be intense for Netanyahu and his men, perhaps the most incompetent big stakes gamblers since the autumn of 1939. Time is no longer on their side. An example is the rush to implement the apparently criminal Prawer Plan before it is too late.
Then there is the fundamental change in our military orientation reflected by the pivot of our deployments in the direction of East and Southeast Asia. This is certainly not without political significance, especially in regard to the Middle East with which we have had a fatal and self-defeating fascination for decades.
And then in the same time frame comes the so far successful multilateral negotiations with the new Iranian regime on containment of their nuclear weapons program, if any.
These things happened without effective input by the Israel Lobby or our supine Congress. I don't think it is over and believe that the pressure on the Israelis is going to mount inexorably. They were simply presented with accomplished facts well within executive powers.
Having only escaped the century of the NKVD and the Gestapo by the skin of our teeth, all of us ought all to be able to know it when we see it as does Professor Cole with such clarity.
As to our President , there is a heavy sense of tragedy. An admirable man as potentially 'great' as any American leader during that awful time, he appears to be trapped in this giant system which he struggles to master on a daily basis in the most poisonous atmosphere we have experienced since, perhaps, the Civil War.
Are the United States governable today in a fashion consistent with our liberties?
This spat is profoundly trivial.
Hostile foreign elements don't fall upon us because they dislike the cut of our jib or the nature of our spiritual lives. That would be far too expensive and dangerous. They have lives to live and families to care for like anyone else. They attack us because of noxious things we do in their parts of the world.
Those who, for example, attempt to convince us that we must war against Islam per se (!) because its adherents have terror in their very blood streams are deranged or have interests which conflict with ours. A primary source of it is, excuse me for saying so, Israeli hasbara, i.e., propaganda. The purpose is quite simply to keep us embroiled militarily in their drive to be a dominant regional power with sole possession of nuclear weapons.
But why on earth should those be American goals? From our perspective they're prima facie absurd. We can't possibly benefit from their attainment.
For the most part we create the hostile animus and thus the terror ourselves, needlessly. We then set about oppressing our own people to defend against them. The circle is vicious indeed.
We'll never be completely without potentially violent adversaries, but it's in our interests to make far fewer of them and to make none needlessly.
The classic example of our folly is how we went about squandering the 'peace dividend' at the end of the Cold War by immediately becoming embroiled in the Middle-East. In sum it was and remains breathtakingly stupid when viewed in light of our actual interests. Thanks to Juan we now know that we've squandered eight trillion in our effort to "secure" the Persian Gulf region. That's not chump change. For whom and why did we engage in the struggle? For ourselves? Hardly. Had we declined the honor it would have prevented the accumulation of our present foreign accounts problem at a single stroke. We were sold a bill of goods without full disclosure in reliance on the essential provincialism of the American people. We bought it and it was a disaster for all of us. For whom and why was it done? Perhaps we should leave that for another time. But it's critical that we think about it if we're going to choose the correct path going forward.
There are obvious places to begin in changing our attitude toward the outside world. The first is to indirectly impose a settlement on the Israelis, i.e., with appropriate sugar coating to bring them to heel. Their understanding of their own interests is even inferior to ours.
The way we act out our missionary impulses must be reconsidered. Stephen Walt for Secretary of State precisely because, though a clear-eyed realist, he is not an isolationist.
We need to reconsider our default determination to project military power on a global scale without a palpable need for it. Plans and simultaneous funding for two or three front foreign wars?! Ridiculous. We're the only people in the entire world who do such things. Our paranoid attitude toward national defense is killing us.
It's pretty mundane. The business of America is business and the quality of life of our people. Success in these rather than the squandering of our substance in unnecessary foreign military adventures is where real power and influence comes from. Not one of the world's other great powers does what we do militarily, not even in proportion to their populations. Accordingly it is obvious that WE don't have to do it either. Is that isolationism? Not any more than what is practiced by our great power peers. We need a fundamental reassessment of how to run our foreign affairs.
It would be interesting to know the proportion of the eight trillion which is fairly attributable to the nature of our relationship with Israel.
Aw, snap! I had just applied duct tape.
"To return again to social media and technology. Traditionally, academics have published their work in academic journals and books, given lectures to classes and seminars, and presented papers to conferences. I am by no means a proponent of eliminating peer-review and rigorous oversight. On the contrary. However, the increasingly commodified way in which we publish our material, in particular the ways in which journals take free labor – paid for, in fact, by universities – and convert this labor into large profits, should make us consider some alternative venues for publication and public discourse. We should attempt to take advantage of the public channels available to us, in addition to the increasing number of open-access journals."
We show up on college campuses as fresh faced kids and for years live in an extremely stimulating hot house world of scholars and students who are almost all cuts above, and if curious by nature we genuinely live what for each of us as individuals is the life of the mind and it's a very passionate time. Then one day it ends and we leave that world, the memory of it live for the rest of our lives. And if it "took" we were changed forever. But suddenly it dawns on us that we no longer have access to the University libraries, not even to the journals. We've been cast into the wilderness and lost our connection with that wonderful hothouse. We no longer deal with it. We deal with very expensive publishing houses.
Surely there is a duty or at least a great value in a democratic republic for universities and professors to inform the public in ways which help the people to perform their duties as citizens and also in ways which help them lead more rewarding lives. I don't know how the system could be changed in a fashion fair to everyone involved, but think it should be.
Thank you, Travis. First rate. Everyone here ought to read this.
John, you seem to forget that the litany of his derelictions is not exclusively sexual. It appears that his first loyalty has been, contrary to his congressional oath, to a foreign country, the state of Israel over there in Asia. We Americans have an obligation to object to that behavior.
Nationalism is a bit out of fashion today but men in public office have an obligation not to set another country's interests against those of their own.