On November 10 Presidential Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that anybody who says Obama has made a decision “doesn’t have in all honesty the slightest idea what they’re talking about. The president’s yet to make a decision” about troop levels. I read that as an effort to encourage the antiwar folks who continue to think kindly of Obama that just maybe he’ll do the right thing and withdraw.

The fact that former general and current U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry recommended against a buildup of forces given the widespread corruption in the Hamid Karzai regime in a memo last week, and that the memo was allowed to leak to the press, may also be a sop to the rational forces calling for an end to the war.

Obama says he’s angrier that Robert Gates about the leak and wants whoever is responsible fired. But the fact that Obama says he will make the decision “with a few weeks” and that NATO has announced that its regular Brussels meeting to discuss troop levels in Afghanistan has been postponed from November 23 to sometime next month suggests that the president may indeed be experiencing some internal conflict about this war he has repeatedly called a “war of necessity.”

That’s really been Obama’s defining foreign policy thesis. For a man without “foreign policy experience” (which of course from a common-sense point of view is not a bad thing) Obama felt from the get-go that he needed to balance his stand against the Iraq War, which was never really more than objection to a “strategic blunder,” with a macho, ringing defense of the imperialist occupation of Afghanistan as a “war of necessity”–the war that George Bush blew by diverting troops and resources to Iraq.

So long as Afghanistan was the Good War to Iraq’s Bad War that may have been a rational political strategy. As recently as his Cairo speech in June Obama told the world that while the Iraq War had been a “war of choice” (a significant admission for the head of state of the aggressor nation in a still ongoing war) Afghanistan was a war of necessity caused by the 9-11 attacks. But since then his own intelligence services have assured him that al-Qaeda has left Afghanistan and U.S. forces aren’t fighting the 9-11 perpetrators there. The U.S. forces and diminishing numbers of demoralized NATO and other allies fight Pashtun nationalists fired up by jihadist spirit. They have gotten stronger with each passing year of the eight year war, and more effective in killing U.S. troops unclear about their mission.

Obama could back off from his defining foreign policy thesis and say, “I was wrong. Actually this war wasn’t necessary at all and I’m pulling out.” He could point out the obvious: that it is an inherited conflict, not his war; that it has lost the support of the American people; that the Afghan regime for which the U.S. fights is hopelessly corrupt and unpopular; that the Afghans want the foreigners out, with Karzai himself calling for a timetable for withdrawal; that the war is dangerously destabilizing nuclear Pakistan and causing the people there as well as Afghanistan to hate the U.S. which is just very dangerous for everyone concerned.

It would be so easy, and there would be enormous support for a clear statement of a withdrawal plan. But it’s widely predicted that Obama will bow to the demand of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, U.S. commander in Afghanistan, for tens of thousands of more troops, raising the issue of who really runs this country and what issues are really involved in Afghanistan. Does the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India natural gas pipeline from the Caspian Sea to the Indian Ocean, bypassing both Russia and Iran, have anything to do with it?

All the wrestling with the arguments about the absence of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and the increase in U.S. forces actually strengthening the Taliban and the distastefulness of having American soldiers dying for Karzai’s bogus regime ends when the pale cast of thought turns to serious imperialist geopolitics. Forgive my language but Obama is a traditional bourgeois politician who with his State Department identifies corporate U.S. interests as “national” interests and probably can be persuaded that they’re worth fighting for. Or rather, using U.S. troops to fight and die for.

Whether he gives McChrystal the 40,000 he wants or a smaller force, it will be doomed to contribute to the current 922 military fatality figure. Soon 1000 will have died fighting illiterate tribesman deeply angered at their presence in their valleys which have resisted countless ill-considered incursions for over 2300 years. Will the standard-bearer of change and hope still be pacing his office, wrestling with the question then?

But there are troubling signs that Obama has joined the ranks of the deficit hawks and is planning a policy-reversal that will pitch the economy into a nosedive. Here’s what he said on his tour through Asia:

“I think it is important to recognize if we keep on adding to the debt, even in the midst of this recovery, that at some point, people could lose confidence in the U.S. economy in a way that could actually lead to a double-dip recession.”

So it’s true. Obama has aligned himself with the faux-prophets and dollar demagogues who think that the end is nigh. But trimming the deficits now (when they should be expanding) will lead to a viscous cycle of debt deflation that will push-down asset prices, increase defaults, force more layoffs, slow consumer spending, lower earnings and send the economy into a downward spiral. The president is paving the way to a double-dip recession, a slump that could be worse than the first.

Has Obama perused the jobless figures lately? Has he noticed the Fed shoving more than a $1 trillion under the collapsing housing market with no sign of improvement? Has anyone told our blinkered accountant-in-chief that the entire financial system is propped-up with $11.4 trillion of dodgy scaffolding that could buckle in the first big gust?

Obama has either taken leave of his senses or he’s spending too much time listening to the cheerless Jeremiahs on the Internet. He needs break their spell and seek the counsel of the experts who get paid to crunch the numbers—real economists. Cutting government spending and raising taxes–the two ways that deficits are paid off–is the fast-track to disaster. Don’t go there.

If Obama needs more proof that the economy is still flatlining, he should thumb through Fed chair Ben Bernanke’s speech to the Economic Club of New York which was delivered on Tuesday. The presentation was a sobering snapshot of lingering depression with precious few glimmers of light. Here’s an excerpt:

The flow of credit remains constrained, economic activity weak, and unemployment much too high. Future setbacks are possible….How the economy will evolve in 2010 and beyond is less certain….

Access to credit remains strained for borrowers who are particularly dependent on banks, such as households and small businesses. Bank lending has contracted sharply this year, and the Federal Reserve’s Senior Loan Officers Opinion Survey shows that banks continue to tighten the terms on which they extend credit for most kinds of loans…

Household debt has declined in recent quarters for the first time since 1951. For their part, many small businesses have seen their bank credit lines reduced or eliminated, or they have been able to obtain credit only on significantly more restrictive terms. The fraction of small businesses reporting difficulty in obtaining credit is near a record high, and many of these businesses expect credit conditions to tighten further.

The demand for credit also has fallen significantly…. Because of weakened balance sheets, fewer potential borrowers are creditworthy, even if they are willing to take on more debt. Also, write-downs of bad debt show up on bank balance sheets as reductions in credit outstanding. Nevertheless, it appears that, since the outbreak of the financial crisis, banks have tightened lending standards by more than would have been predicted by the decline in economic activity alone.

Many securitization markets remain impaired, reducing an important source of funding for bank loans. In addition, changes to accounting rules at the beginning of next year will require banks to move a large volume of securitized assets back onto their balance sheets. Unfortunately, reduced bank lending may well slow the recovery by damping consumer spending, especially on durable goods, and by restricting the ability of some firms to finance their operations.

The best thing we can say about the labor market right now is that it may be getting worse more slowly.¹

Is this really Bernanke speaking, or is the Fed chief channeling Roubini?

Okay, so credit is tight. Consumers aren’t borrowing and banks aren’t lending. Unemployment is rising and deflation is pushing down asset prices while the burden of personal debt is rising in real terms. Bleak, bleak, bleak. The only sign of improvement is that “things are getting worse more slowly”. Now that’s encouraging.

What the economy needs is a hefty dose of stimulus aimed at job creation and strengthening demand. Only the government can provide sufficient resources to rev up economic activity and put people back to work. Unfortunately, the TARP bailout soured the public on deficit spending due to the shabby (and possibly criminal) way it was handled. That will make it harder to do what is necessary. The political support for more stimulus on Capital Hill has vanished. But, without it, another hard landing is certain.

Despite rumors in the media, stimulus works. It speeds up recovery, minimizes unemployment and stops asset prices from overshooting on the downside. Here’s an excerpt from a scholarly analysis of stimulus:

Where tried, fiscal policy was effective in the 1930s…. The details of the results differ, but the overall conclusions do not. They show that where fiscal policy was tried, it was effective.

Our estimates of its short-run effects are at the upper end of those estimated recently with modern data….This is, in fact, what one should expect if one believes that the effectiveness of fiscal policy is greatest when interest rates are at the zero bound, leading to little crowding out of private spending. It is what one should expect when households are credit constrained by a dysfunctional banking system. Given similar circumstances in 2008, this underscores the advantages of using 1930s data as a source of evidence on the effects of current policy.²

Stimulus works in multiple ways. It also helps increase inflation expectations which is necessary to get people spending again. In a deflationary environment, consumers shut-down and stop spending. The Fed tries to spur economic activity by convincing people that the dollars they hold will be worth less tomorrow. That’s why Bernanke keeps pointing out that the Fed will keep rates at zero indefinitely. Regrettably, only the goldbugs take him seriously, which is why gold prices have zoomed to the stratosphere. Personal savings rates are still rising. There’s been a sharp drop-off in consumption. Bernanke’s psychological experiment has flopped. The masses still believe we’re in recession. Without a gigantic fiscal expansion to jolt the economy out of its lethargy, the severe contraction could drag on for a decade or more. We’re becoming Japan.

Obama’s deficit cutting plan is madness. It offers no hope at all. It draws from the half-baked theories of amateur economists on the Net who think that massive liquidation and years of bitter retrenchment and high-unemployment are the path to recovery. They’re wrong.

1. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke Speech Before Economic Club of New York.
2. Miguel Almunia, Agustin S. Bénétrix, Barry Eichengreen, Kevin O’ Rourke, and Gisela Rua, “The effectiveness of fiscal and monetary stimulus in depressions,” 18 November 2009, Vox.

They reflected the fact that many if not most peoples of the nations of the world (so-called ordinary folk) are becoming increasingly fed up with Israel’s arrogance of power, its contempt for international law and its appalling self-righteousness and, also, are beginning to see the Zionist state for what it really is – the prime obstacle to peace, because of its preference for more and more land rather than peace.

Could it be that in the quietness of his unspoken mind, President Obama is counting on this growing anti-Israel sentiment, if and when it takes hold in America, to give him the freedom to respond to Netanyahu’s two-fingered gestures by taking on the Zionist lobby’s stooges in Congress?

Put another way, is it possible that Obama can live for the time being with the humiliation Netanyahu is heaping upon him because he believes that the Zionist state will so overplay its hand that it will alienate even Americans, enough of them to make it possible for him to do whatever is necessary to oblige Israel to be serious about peace on terms virtually all Palestinians and most other Arabs and Muslims everywhere could accept?

On this occasion, I’m not answering the question. Only asking it.

Assuming that the committee truly believed that the Obama presidency would signal a meaningful change in American nuclear policy, they did not have long to wait for a clear refutation of that thesis. Having learned in advance that Obama would be visiting Japan ahead of last week’s APEC summit in Singapore, the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki extended formal invitations for Obama to visit their cities. Had he done so, he would have become the first U.S. president to visit the cities since they were the victims of the world’s first nuclear attacks. However, Obama turned down the requests, citing scheduling concerns and offering vague promises to visit the cities sometime in the future.

While such a move may come as a surprise to the Nobel committee, it is decidedly less shocking to those who have been studying American nuclear policy for decades. One such man is Motofumi Asai, the President of the Hiroshima Peace Institute, who noted in a recent interview with The Corbett Report that, while surprised that Obama says he intends to visit Hiroshima one day, “anyhow, it is clearly not now.”

“In a very long historical term, his speech in Prague in April may be remembered as a departure from the nuclear century to the non-nuclear century,” Asai said about the nuclear rhetoric that won Obama the Peace Prize. But, he added, “I am rather sober about the prospects of a change of U.S. nuclear policy.”

Observers of the Obama administration’s actions on the nuclear front would indeed have good reason to be ’sober’ about the prospects of Obama living up to his nuclear disarmament rhetoric. As the Washington Times reported last month, the Obama administration has reaffirmed an unspoken decades-old U.S. policy to officially ignore Israel’s nuclear stockpile. This support ensures that Israel does not have to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which would require them to relinquish their hundreds of nuclear bombs. As the Washington Times report makes explicit, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu accidentally revealed in a television interview that Obama’s rhetoric about a nuclear-free world is not meant to apply to America or its allies:

“It was utterly clear from the context of the speech that he was speaking about North Korea and Iran,” the Israeli leader said. “But I want to remind you that in my first meeting with President Obama in Washington I received from him, and I asked to receive from him, an itemized list of the strategic understandings that have existed for many years between Israel and the United States on that issue. It was not for naught that I requested, and it was not for naught that I received [that document].”

The report exposing Obama’s nuclear hypocrisy was printed just one week before he received the Nobel Prize for his valiant efforts to bring about a “nuclear-free world”. Even Obama’s most logical political allies have questioned the sincerity of his “commitment” to the abolition of nuclear weapons. As Joseph Gerson wrote on CommonDreams.org earlier this year:

…there appears to be less to Obama’s ‘perhaps not in my lifetime’ commitment to nuclear weapons abolition than the adoring press has let on. It is no accident that in his message to the NPT Preparatory Conference earlier this month that he made no reference to abolition. Similarly, the subject did not arise when President Obama and former Secretary of State George Shultz spoke with the press following their meeting at the White House.

Now Obama’s most fervent supporters are noting that his actual actions on nuclear disarmament so far have amounted to a series of token gestures and empty platitudes. Even basic steps like affirming a no-first strike nuclear policy have not been forthcoming. Obama’s nuclear promise, it seems, can be added to the bonfire of dashed hopes along with his broken promise to end warrantless wiretapping, his broken promises to close Guantanamo and end secret detentions, his broken promise to not use signing statements, his broken promise to allow voters time to read legislation before it gets signed, and his broken promise not to appoint lobbyists to his administration.

Sadly, this is not the first time the Nobel committee has erred so badly in its judgement of a world leader promising nuclear eradication. In 1974, Japan’s Prime Minister Eisaku Sato won the prize for his formulation of the so-called Three Non-nuclear Principles that every Japanese government has paid lip service to since they were first adopted by the Diet in 1971: that Japan will neither develop nor possess nuclear weapons, nor allow them in their territory.[16] It has since come to light that Sato himself broke the third principle when he negotiated secret agreements with the Nixon administration that allowed the U.S. to bring nuclear weapons into Japanese territory.

Now, with President Obama’s nuclear abolition rhetoric turning out to be more hot air, it seems the Nobel Peace Prize committee once again has egg on its face. Unless of course it is the intention of the committee not to reward Obama for his non-nuclear words, but to shame his administration into living up to its lofty language. Perhaps the Nobel committee is in fact using their prize as a tool for offering an ultimatum to the Obama administration: Follow through on your promises or be exposed as a fraud for all the world to see. If this is indeed the case, then Obama’s White House should be shamed into peace and disarmament. The fact that this “man of peace” is in fact every bit the warmonger his presidential predecessor was presents perhaps the largest chink in his fast-disintegrating corporate media-supplied “president of the world” armour. Those who are truly interested in bringing about a nuclear-free world can start simply enough by condemning Obama for his failure to visit Hiroshima.

But the latest report on Iran’s nuclear programme by the agency appeared to reject Iran’s account of how and when it had decided to build the Qom enrichment plant and implied that it believed Iran was hiding the construction of other facilities.

The report provides new evidence that the Qom enrichment facility was constructed on one of many sites where tunneling had been prepared as early as 2002 to protect various kinds of facilities from a possible U.S. air attack.

The apparent Iranian decision to begin preparations for a U.S. attack on Iran in 2002 came after President George W. Bush had declared in his Sep. 20, 2001 speech to a joint session of Congress that any nation that “continues to harbor or support terrorism” would be regarded as a “hostile regime” and then named Iran as part of the “Axis of Evil” with Iraq and North Korea in January 2002.

The new evidence contradicts the U.S. charge that Iran had been working on constructing a covert enrichment plant for several years – well before March 2007, when Iran announced that it would no longer inform the agency of new facilities as soon as the decision had been made to construct them.

The Iranian account documented in the report puts the decision to build the Qom enrichment facility in mid-2007.

The report quotes from an Oct. 28 Iranian letter to the IAEA stating, “As a result of the augmentation of the threats of military attacks against Iran, the Islamic Republic of Iran decided to establish contingency centers for various organizations and activities…[elipses in original].”

No date is cited for that decision, but the IAEA report refers to satellite imagery of the site indicating construction began at least as early as 2002. The agency said it had “informed Iran that it had acquired commercially available satellite imagery of the site indicating that there had been construction at the site between 2002 and 2004, and that construction activities were resumed in 2006 and had continued to date.”

The IAEA apparently intended to convey the idea that this was construction on a second enrichment plant. In a story published Nov. 13 – three days before the report was circulated to IAEA Governing Council members – Associated Press reporter George Jahn reported unnamed diplomats as saying Iran had started building the plant in 2002, that the construction had paused for two years in 2004 because of Iran’s suspension of enrichment and had resumed in 2006, when enrichment had been resumed openly.

Independent analysis of satellite imagery has shown, however, that those earlier images were of construction on the general purpose “contingency centres” rather than an enrichment facility. Paul Brannan, a satellite imagery analyst for the Institute for Science and International Security who has analysed imagery of the same site from 2004 and 2005, concluded in a Sep. 29 report that it was probably a tunnel facility for a purpose other than an enrichment facility.

Brannan noted that the Qom site was only one of “many throughout the country” with similar characteristics. Contrary to the IAEA’s account, he observed that construction had continued between June 2004 and March 2005, although it was at a slow pace.

Brannan’s analysis is consistent with the account in the Iranian letter of Oct. 28 of a decision to construct a whole system of “contingency centres” for various purposes in the event of a U.S. air attack.

The Iranian letter quoted by the IAEA said Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency had requested one of the already constructed centres for a “contingency enrichment plant”, which would assure continuation of enrichment should the Natanz Enrichment Plant be attacked. The Qom tunnel facility was made available for that purpose in the second half of 2007 and construction on the enrichment facility then began, according to the letter.

Contradicting the Jahn story, however, the IAEA report says “a number of Member States” have “alleged that design work on the facility had started in 2006″. If design work was only started in 2006, the construction work seen in the earlier years obviously could not have been on an enrichment facility.

A senior official of the Barack Obama administration charged in the Sep. 25 briefing on the Qom site that actual construction of the facility had begun before March 2007. The language of the new report indicates for the first time that the United States has taken a much more nuanced approach to the history of the Qom site in its communications with the IAEA.

The IAEA report seems to imply that it does not believe the Iranian account that construction began on the enrichment facility only in 2007. It said the agency has “indicated that Iran’s declaration of the new facility reduces the level of confidence in the absence of other nuclear facilities under construction and gives rise to questions about whether there were any other nuclear facilities in Iran which had not been declared to the Agency.”

Iran has told the IAEA it has no other nuclear facilities “currently under construction or in operation that had not been declared to the Agency”, according to the report. But it has not yet responded to a Nov. 6 letter from the agency asking whether it is planning to build any other nuclear sites.

The report, which is the last to be published under outgoing Director General Mohamed ElBaradei, appears to reflect his waning influence over the agency’s political position on Iran in relation to the director of the Safeguards Department, Olli Heinonen.

After IAEA inspectors had visited the Qom site and discussed the background of its construction, ElBaradei had commented Nov. 5 that they had found “nothing to be worried about” and that the facility was indeed a backup to the Natanz plant as Iran had maintained. “It’s a hole in a mountain,” ElBaradei said.

The spin in the report itself takes the opposite approach from ElBaradei’s suggestion that the Qom facility is not a threatening development.

It also appears to reflect a common Western view that treating the Qom site as evidence of a covert nuclear weapons-related programme is useful to increase the pressure on Iran to reach agreement with the West to give up the bulk of its low enrichment uranium (LEU) supplies until they could be replenished through more enrichment nearly a year later.

After senior officials of the Obama administration had briefed reporters Sep. 25 on the allegation that Iran had been working on the site secretly for several years, U.S. officials said the discovery of the site would give the United States “leverage” in the talks with Iran that were to start in Geneva Oct. 1.

Western governments proposed at the Oct. 1 meeting that Iran agree to ship up to 80 percent of its LEU to Russia in return for eventual shipments of 20 percent enriched uranium to fuel a small medical reactor in Tehran. That would have allowed the Obama administration to declare a diplomatic victory in regard to Iran’s nuclear capabilities and tamp down Israeli pressures to allow it to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities.

At negotiations in Vienna last month under IAEA auspices, outgoing IAEA Director General ElBaradei presented a draft agreement based on that Western proposal. Iran has effectively rejected that deal, however, and made a counterproposal that would allow it to husband its LEU supplies.

Pres. Obama warned Iran on Sunday, “We are now running out of time,” in regard to negotiations on the ElBaradei draft. The United States and other negotiating partners have ignored Iran’s counterproposal.

President Barack Obama plans to announce in next year’s State of the Union address that he wants to focus extensively on cutting the federal deficit in 2010 – and will downplay other new domestic spending beyond jobs programs, according to top aides involved in the planning.

The president’s plan, which the officials said was under discussion before this month’s Democratic election setbacks, represents both a practical and a political calculation by this White House.¹

Er, now who exactly is telling Obama that raising taxes or cutting spending in the middle of a severe economic contraction is a good idea?

This clip from Politico tells us more about the people surrounding Obama, than it tells us about Obama himself. Clearly, his chief lieutenants are just as committed to savaging Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security as their GOP counterparts. This is obvious by the way they’ve handled the fiscal stimulus. Where are the jobs programs, the boost to Green Technology, the massive infrastructure rebuild?

Nowhere. Because the industry-reps and bank lobbyists who fill out the Obama roster adhere to the same pro-business credo as the members of Team Bush, that is, that all public assets and resources should be strip-mined from their rightful owners and transferred to the robber barons at the top of the economic food-chain. There’s no way that Geithner, Summers and the rest of the Wall Street insiders would ever dream of rebuilding the public safety net they’ve been trying to destroy for the last decade or more. That’s not in their interests at all.

The administration’s announcement is tantamount to a stealth-attack on Social Security in the name of “fiscal responsibility”. It’s another public relations ploy intended to enrich the parasite class by stealing crusts of bread from penniless retirees. Surely, there must have been a quid pro quo between the two-year Illinois senator and his political backers about how they planned to deal with “entitlements problem”. In other words, Obama must have given the green light to the party bosses who wanted to purloin the last few farthings in the Social Security trust fund.

So, how will Obama’a attack on Social Security etc. effect the so-called “jobless recovery”?

For one thing, it makes a double-dip recession unavoidable. After all, (according to Goldman Sachs) last quarter’s surge in GDP to 3.5% was entirely a result of government stimulus. Take away the stimulus, and the economy slips right back into to recession. Is that what Obama wants, another stretch of negative growth, plunging economic activity, lower demand and higher unemployment? Why? To satisfy the GOP “deficit hawks”?

All the hand-wringing over deficits is just more gibberish from the same people who brought us the Iraq War. The deficits are about as big a problem as the fictional WMD, maybe less. Here’s a clip from an article by Marshall Auerback which sheds a bit of light on the deficit fiasco:

Large deficits are not the problem…. Let’s all take a deep breath here: Whilst the dollar index has fallen some 15% from the high sustained earlier this year, it is still above the lows sustained at the height of the credit crisis reached about a year ago. Secondly, there seems to be a fear that the current fall in the dollar could well engender inflation, and create a panicked response from policy makers where the Fed actually does raise rates and the Treasury begins to reduce government spending. Given high prevailing debt levels and the weak state of the consumer’s personal balance sheet, this would be an unmitigated disaster.

It is true that excessive government deficit spending can be inflationary, and could therefore cause some impact on exchange value of dollar. But this can’t be viewed in some sort of vacuum. The size of the deficit is irrelevant in itself. There is no meaning in the terms ‘large deficit’ or ’small deficit.’ You have to relate them to the extent of labor and capital underutilization, which is a human measure of the aggregate demand deficiency. The fact that labor underutilization is now in excess of 16 per cent in the US (combined unemployment, underemployment and hidden unemployment) and capacity utilization is in the 60-65 per cent range rather than 90 per cent range sends one very clear message — the deficit is not large enough.

So the correct policy response is to spend until we get to full employment. That is the only consequence of excessive deficits — insolvency is not possible. Your social security check will never bounce in a country issuing debt in its own freely floating non-convertible currency.²

The best way to restore economic well-being is to increase the fiscal stimulus, expand the deficits and put the country back to work. There’s no chance of inflation until unemployment drops to roughly 5%, which could be a decade away. And don’t believe the doomsayers about the dollar either. It’s a bunch of malarkey. Check this out:

As I have shown in two recent papers, even very large currency depreciations in developed economies have no effect on inflation unless they are caused by policies that attempt to hold an economy’s unemployment rate below its equilibrium level. With US unemployment currently at 10 percent, there is no chance that inflation will rise in the near term. Whether inflation rises in the longer run will depend on whether US monetary and fiscal policy stimulus is withdrawn appropriately as the economy recovers (and tighter macroeconomic policies would tend to support the dollar).³

The dollar is dropping because the Fed is doing everything in its power to push it downwards. “It’s the policy, stupid.” A falling dollar increases exports and speeds up recovery. But once the Fed stops printing money via quantitative easing, (which is set for the end of 1st Q 2010) watch out. The dollar will rebound. Here’s an excerpt from an article in the Economist:

This dollar declinism is overblown. It exaggerates the scale of the slide and misunderstands its cause. Much of the recent weakness simply reverses the earlier safe-haven flight to dollars, a sign of investors’ optimism about riskier assets rather than their fears about America’s currency. On a trade-weighted basis the dollar today is close to where it was before Lehman failed. Yields on Treasuries have not risen and spreads on riskier dollar assets continue to shrink. If investors were growing leerier of dollars, the opposite should have occurred.⁴

When the financial crisis broke out two years ago, investors around the world flocked to the dollar for safety. Now that the crisis has (somewhat) abated, those same investors are less risk-adverse, which means they are putting that money in other assets (stocks, bonds, commodities). Naturally, that is weakening the dollar, but it is not a sign of impending collapse. And while it is true that the greenback faces stiff headwinds in the long-term–due to the US’s deteriorating fiscal situation–the dollar is in no immediate danger of losing its position as the world’s reserve currency. That will take a decade or more.

The growing fear about the dollar and the deficits is understandable given the amount of money that is being hurled at the financial system. But that shouldn’t dissuade reasonable people from doing what needs to be done. The dollar and the deficits are NOT the issue. The issue is jobs, jobs, jobs. Here’s an excerpt from an article by Henry Liu which sums it up perfectly:

An economy that has collapsed under the burden of excessive debt cannot recover until such debt has been extinguished. And debt can only be extinguished by wealth creation, not by creating more debt with easy credit. And wealth can only be created by employment and not by financial manipulation.⁵

Bingo. The Fed is bailing out unproductive speculators, while tossing the “creators of the nation’s wealth,” the workers, a few table scraps. That’s why we need a different policy which focuses on jobs programs, fiscal stimulus, and more deficit spending so households can rebuild their tattered balance sheets and the “engine of global growth” (the US middle class) can be re-energized. We don’t need more belt-tightening, as Obama seems to think. That is precisely the wrong approach.

Henry Liu again: “Thus we have financial profit inflation with price deflation in a shrinking economy. What we will have going forward is not Weimar Republic type price hyperinflation, but a financial profit inflation in which zombie financial institutions turning nominally profitable in a collapsing economy.”

Right again. The soaring stocks and commodities prices prove that central bank policies can create asset bubbles even during periods of severe deflation. (like now) Fed chair Ben Bernanke’s policies have had no material effect on households, consumers or workers. This is why credit contraction is in its 8th straight month and jobless claims continue to mushroom.

Bernanke–a disciple of Milton Friedman–has taken the monetarist “trickle down” approach throughout, which is why stocks are surging even though the broader economy is still flat on its back. The Fed chief is doing what he’s always done, stimulate demand by creating more bubbles. Only this time it’s not working because liquidity is unable to flow through the clogged credit system. The administration needs to bypass the credit system altogether and provide direct relief via state aid, tax cuts and jobs programs to jump-start the economy and reduce the widening output gap. What’s needed is more stimulus and an aggressive reform agenda aimed at putting the country back to work. Here’s Paul Krugman:

“It’s truly amazing, and depressing, how completely deficit-phobia has swept the field in Washington. The economy remains in deeply dire straits… Yet the respectable thing, all of a sudden, is to claim that we can’t possibly afford to spend any more money on job creation.

History says differently… Other advanced countries have been substantially deeper in debt without either defaulting or having runaway inflation…

I’d be a little more forgiving of the nonsense if all the people screaming about the deficit were sincere. And some are. But many, if not most, are perfectly happy to incur huge unfunded liabilities for the wars they want to fight, and/or to eliminate inheritance taxes for the heirs of multimillionaires. It’s only deficits incurred to help working Americans that get them all moralistic.

The point is that the economy desperately needs more help — and yes, we can afford to provide it.”⁶

Yes, we can afford it. We just need to shrug off the deficit hawks and the dollar demagogues and provide the necessary resources to get the job done. It’s that simple.

Here’s more from Marshall Auerback:

The Administration … must free themselves from the discredited dogmas of neo-liberalism and channel the spirit of FDR’s bold experimentation. We need less deficit terrorism. Fiscal policy must be much more oriented to personal balance sheets, not bank balance sheets. We need to turn around the private sector and begin to produce more tax revenue, so that the large deficits would be short-lived.

If we continue down the current path, we slow recovery and court large budget deficits for many years to come. Far better to spend now to create jobs and get the private sector growing again.⁷

Economists know what it will take to put the country back to work; debt relief, loan modifications, wage growth and full employment. But it will require a fundamental shift in ideology; a rejection of neoliberalism and a strong commitment to rebuild the middle class. Obama can either help in that process or follow the beggarly path to early retirement. So far, there’s no reason to be hopeful.

1. politico.com.
2. Marshall Auerback, “The US Dollar – Don’t just do something, stand there!” newdeal2.0.
3. Joseph Gagnon, “Who’s Afraid of a Falling Dollar,” Baseline Scenario.
4. ”The Diminishing Dollar,” The Economist.
5. Federal Reserve Power Unsupported by Credibility; part 1 “No Exit” Henry Liu.
6. Paul Krugman, “Fiscal Perspective,” New York Times.
7. Marshall Auerback, “New Agenda for America: How to Start Anew,” newdeal 2.0.

It made headlines, a fact which tells us more about the role of media as an outlet for government press releases than in communicating genuine news.

Obama’s was hardly a brave or innovative act when you consider that it is a universally-condemned military junta keeping Aung San Suu Kyi penned up.

But when you appreciate the full context of Obama’s call, you may agree with me that it was more a cowardly act than anything else.

A year ago, after eight years of mind-numbing stupidity, countless public lies and bloody war crimes, Obama’s arrival on the American political scene thrilled the world. His intelligence, his grace, and his sense of decency were striking. His like as an American politician, quite apart from his race, had not been seen in the lifetime of many.

But the hopes raised by Obama, like so many flickering little candles in a fierce wind, already are largely extinguished. This polished, educated, liberal-minded and decent man, after only one year in office, has been overwhelmed by America’s military-industrial complex, a terrible machine which grinds on night and day, chewing people in its gears, no matter who is elected ostensibly to be in charge of it.

Much as I resent Burma’s treatment of Aung San Suu Kyi, it shines as genuinely humane compared to America’s treatment of Omar Khadr.

The key facts in the case of this young man, a prisoner at Guantanamo, are easily told.

Omar Khadr was born to a fundamentalist Muslim, highly political family whose father knew and died fighting for Osama bin Laden. In an era whose ruling myths are a clash of civilizations and a war on terror, Omar would seem to have been doomed from birth.

Under intense pressure from his family, fifteen-year old Omar went to fight in Afghanistan when America invaded it. In doing that, he was doing nothing that tens of thousands of Americans hadn’t done, both as idealists for causes and as soldiers of fortune in countless wars from the Spanish Civil War to the Cuban Revolution or the turmoil of the Congo.

Omar’s experience reminded me a little of American Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July, a story where the need for maternal approval helped drive his destructive participation in America’s Vietnam holocaust (three million Vietnamese slaughtered, many hideously with napalm, and the legacy of soil saturated with Agent Orange and littered with millions of landmines more than justifies that term).

The American claim against Omar is that he shot an American soldier, a medic no less, a fact seemingly almost designed to increase his infamy.

The story, as I heard it in an interview a few years ago with an American soldier, a friend of the dead medic’s, was that after a small firefight, Omar hid himself, then leapt up, heartlessly killing the medic whose only interest was the wounded. Omar was then captured and eventually sent to Guantanamo.

Even were that story true, and it is not, there would still be no excuse for sending a fifteen-year old child to Guantanamo. That act violated all international conventions on the treatment of child soldiers, but then almost everything America has done over the last eight years has violated international conventions, international laws, common decency, and the spirit of its own Bill of Rights.

For years, Omar, like hundreds of inmates at Guantanamo, was held incommunicado: he was allowed no contact with his family, he was allowed no visits from the International Red Cross (again in contravention to international conventions) and he was allowed no legal counsel. Omar was allowed no rights of any kind: being kept shackled in a secret prison ninety miles offshore was considered adequate to efface the entire spirit and meaning of America’s own rights and laws.

We now know that the soldiers who captured Omar, in fact, shot him twice in the back as the frightened boy tried to run. Despite life-threatening wounds and his young age, Omar was consigned to years of imprisonment and torture at Guantanamo. Indeed, his worst torturer, a soldier with a reputation at Guantanamo as perhaps its most vicious interrogator, deliberately contrived his sessions with Omar so that the boy had to sit in a position which pulled at his slowly-healing and painful wounds.

We also know now, evidence having just been published in Canadian newspapers, that Omar could not possibly have killed the medic: Omar was photographed hiding under a pile of rubble as the soldiers passed.

So who killed the medic? One perhaps should recall the case of Pat Tillman, an American football player killed by his own forces in Afghanistan, a case at first covered up the military, but even now full of unanswered questions.

And why did the Americans shoot Omar, twice, in the back? One simply cannot avoid the suggestion that the American soldiers involved acted with cowardice and savagery.

Some readers may object that American soldiers are incapable of such behaviour, but let’s go back to that time in Afghanistan, reviewing some things we now know as facts, and think about what they suggest about the ethos prevailing there when a fifteen-year old was shot in the back and sent to be tortured.

America’s carpet bombing in Afghanistan was destructive beyond anything Americans have ever been told. Just as was the case in the First Gulf War when uncounted tens of thousands of poor Iraqi recruits were bulldozed into the desert after having been literally pulped into tailing ponds of human bits and fluids by B-52s, the true horror of what massive bombing did in Afghanistan was understandably not well advertised..

The public has been led to believe that, compared to the horrors inflicted upon Iraq, the invasion of Afghanistan was almost bloodless. But I learned recently from an expert journalist — an American no less — with many years of experience in that country that a great deal of blood was shed. In Kabul alone, fifty to sixty thousand Afghans died in America’s brutal bombing and artillery cover for its Northern Alliance proxy army, itself a gang of thugs many of whom are not one wit more ethical or civilized than the Taleban.

We knew too, those who cared to search, of the brutal tactics of American special forces in the mountains after the initial “victory”: tales of heavily-armed goons marching into remote towns, throwing stun grenades, breaking down the doors of homes, holding women and children at gunpoint while their male family members were marched away with no explanation. The men were often kept for considerable periods to be “questioned.”

At the least suspicion, air strikes were called in, and in dozens and dozens of cases, those air strikes wiped out whole families or groups of villagers who had done nothing to oppose Americans. They were the victims, thousands of them, of young Americans filled with irrational resentments over 9/11, anxious to prove how good they were with their high-tech killing machines, and let loose on someone else’s country.

And we knew, at least again those who cared to search, the story of America’s hideous treatment of Taleban prisoners in the early days of occupation, of Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld’s Nazi-like public demand that all prisoners should be killed or walled away forever. One of America’s ghastly allies of the Northern Alliance, General Dostum, took Rumsfeld in deadly earnest: he had his men round up three thousand prisoners, seal them in vans and drive them out onto the desert to suffocate in the heat. The bodies were then buried in shallow mass graves. All this was watched by American soldiers who somehow failed to act the way Jimmy Stewart did in war movies. Instead they picked their noses or smoked cigarettes as they gawked.

We also knew of the terrible tales of boys being raped while American troops never lifted a finger to help them. In a strict fundamentalist country like Afghanistan, where young women are kept guarded and almost hidden, the sexual behaviour of men often takes on the character of that common in prisons everywhere: that is, young and vulnerable men are brutally raped and often treated as “bitches” by older, tougher prisoners.

Only recently, I heard the horrible stories of a Canadian soldier with post traumatic stress who told of seeing a boy with blood running down his legs as two Afghan allies raped him. The soldier could do nothing and was told later only to buck it up. He told too of a translator, a hired Afghan, gleefully relating to him about the way he liked to use a knife on boys he raped.

We all saw the ghastly pictures from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Only now we know far uglier pictures and recordings have been suppressed, images and sounds of young Iraqis being raped and sodomized by American soldiers at the prison.

Those facts give us some realistic sense of the atmosphere in Afghanistan when American soldiers shot Omar in the back, falsely accused him of killing a medic, and sent a fifteen-year old boy off to years of torture.

Omar remains a prisoner in Guantanamo, although the torture mercifully has stopped, but it was announced only a couple of days ago that he would be among those who would stand trial in New York.

Trial for what? For trumped-up charges of murder? Trial for acts in war? Trial for being an abused child soldier? Trial under American laws which never applied to Afghanistan? A trial where every scrap of government evidence is tainted with years of torture and human-rights abuse? Where the government doing the trying itself has acted against countless laws and treaties in invading and occupying two countries?

If there were one breath of decency left in America’s establishment, Omar and the other abused prisoners would all be released and allowed to live the rest of their lives in peace. They are no threat to anyone, most did nothing deserving imprisonment, and those who may have committed something we would regard as a crime have been viciously punished already.

Only days ago, Obama’s White House Counsel Greg Craig was let go. Craig, an old friend of the President’s, had promised to make his administration the most transparent in history. Craig was the main force behind the Obama’s promise to close Guantanamo in one year.

Well, there is no sign Guantanamo is to be closed any time soon, and the policy’s chief advocate is gone. But more importantly, when we speak of American torture chambers, it is easy to forget that Guantanamo is only the most publicized of many. What horrors go on at places like America’s secret base at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean or at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, or in a number of other locations, all part of the CIA’s vast international torture gulag, is anybody’s guess.

Obama has not uttered a whimper about the CIA’s euphemistically-named extreme rendition, a practice whereby thousands of people have been kidnapped off streets and sent bound to some of the world’s hell-holes for months of torture. Afterwards, having been discovered innocent of anything, they find themselves dumped in some obscure place like Bosnia without so much as an apology for their treatment.

Obama told people repeatedly during his campaign that American forces in Iraq would be withdrawn promptly, saying “you can bank on it,” and people believed him because Obama did not vote in the Senate for that illegal war, but most of America’s soldiers remain there still.

Obama appointed a commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, who has a background swirling with suggestions of black operations and dirty business, and now that ghastly man has said he needs forty-thousand more troops.

American Predator drones, guided by buzz-cut, faceless men with computer screens in locked rooms in America, now frequently invade Pakistan’s airspace. One can just imagine them hooting and pumping their arms like young men playing a computer game when one of their terrible Hellfire missiles strikes its target, the home of someone not legally charged with anything, killing everyone who happens to be nearby.

No, I only wish the ugly stain on America’s flag was keeping a dissident under house arrest.

As with much of Obama’s rhetoric, it is difficult to discern whether the President’s Cairo speech was sincere or a cynical maneuver intended to provide cover under which the status quo would be maintained. In any case, expectations were raised even higher when Obama followed up the Cairo speech by appointing the venerable George Mitchell as his chief negotiator and demanding that Israel immediately freeze all settlement building as a condition precedent to a resurrected “peace process” leading to the creation of a contiguous and viable Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

As remarkable as Obama’s Cairo speech was, no less remarkable was the speed of Obama’s retreat from its lofty rhetoric when confronted with political realities.

Under the leadership of newly re-cycled right wing hardliner Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, Israel predictably responded to Obama’s demand by raising its middle finger to Israel’s only remaining benefactor, by authorizing the construction of 455 new Jewish-only housing units in and around Jerusalem and announcing that some 3000 units under construction would be completed regardless of any hypothetical moratorium.

Even the cynical Netanyahu must have been amazed at the ease with which the Obama government backed down from his settlement freeze demand in a series of remarkable genuflections notable mostly for the unctuousness with which they were delivered. To gain a full picture of the scope of Obama’s capitulation to the Israel Lobby, we must consider the timeliness of Judge Richard Goldstone’s report on war crimes committed during Israel’s most recent massacre in Gaza, during Operation Lead Cast in January 2009.

Goldstone’s 575-page report meticulously documenting Israel’s various crimes was released on September 15, 2009, just as the Netanyahu government was concocting new ways to placate its settler-based constituency by expressing its contempt for Obama’s peace initiative. Thus, by virtue of its timing, the public release of the Goldstone report provided a perfect opportunity for Obama to play hardball with Bibi.

Obama could have threatened to simply allow (or even support) Judge Goldstone’s recommendation – that the report be referred to the United Nations Security Council and possibly to the International Criminal Court should Israel refuse to undertake a genuine investigation of its findings – to be implemented unless Israel agreed to a freeze of all settlement activity, including Jerusalem. Given the importance to Israel of preserving its reputation as a civilized member of the “international community” (meaning, the West), such a strategy might well have succeeded, and would have allowed the Obama administration to avoid the more serious political implications of resorting to the most obvious exercise of America’s leverage – cutting off loan guarantees that are used to subsidize Israel’s illegal settlement building, a threat that would surely provoke a full-blown rebellion from AIPAC-infested U.S. Congress.

Instead, Obama immediately dispatched UN Ambassador Susan Rice to vacuously express Obama’s “serious concerns” over the “unbalanced, one-sided and basically unacceptable” work of the Goldstone commission, without of course identifying any specific flaws in the report’s findings, logic or conclusions. Worse yet, by means of some behind-the-scenes arm-twisting, Obama forced the hapless Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, to in effect adopt the Likud-endorsed, grotesquely Orwellian formulation that to hold Israel accountable for its war crimes would deal a “fatal blow” to the peace process.

“Israel will not be able to take further steps and take risks for peace if it is denied the right of self-defense”, said Netanyahu on October 1, affirming that the right to commit crimes against humanity with absolute impunity is an essential weapon in Israel’s peace arsenal. Threatened by the Netanyahu-Obama axis with who-knows-what dire consequences if he failed to fall into line, Abbas was forced to agree, and withdrew the Palestinian Authority’s demand that the Goldstone report be sent to the UN General Assembly for possible action.

This was the first of the self-inflicted wounds visited upon Obama’s feckless peace initiative, which, like its equally feckless predecessors, depends on identifying and propping up a Palestinian “partner for peace” to participate in chimerical negotiations: On the day following Abbas’ announcement, the “Arab street” erupted in protests, marches and statements of condemnation, not only from his Hamas rivals, but from human rights groups, intellectuals and media pundits all over the world (except of course the United States). Abbas quickly reversed course and re-affirmed the PA’s commitment to having the Goldstone report referred to the UN Security Council. It was too little, too late, to salvage Abbas’ credibility.

The second and fatal blow – to Abbas’ viability with his own people and thus to Obama’s Cairo agenda – was landed when in late October, Obama’s loathsome Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, told reporters that Netanyahu’s patently meaningless offer to “restrain some” (as opposed to “freeze all”) settlement activities in the West Bank amounted to an “unprecedented restriction” on Israel’s colonization project. (Clinton’s assertion was true in the trivial sense that notwithstanding numerous commitments to freeze settlement activities, most recently at George W. Bush’s 2007 Annapolis conference and before that in the 2003 Road Map agreement, in practice Israel has never significantly “restrained” its settlement activities at any time; however, insofar as it in effect congratulated Netanyahu for Israel’s bad faith in rejecting the most basic request issued by her own boss, Clinton’s statement was thoroughly false in a deeper sense.)

The Clinton episode was the last straw for Mr. Abbas, who promptly announced that he would withdraw his candidacy for the coming presidential election in the Palestinian Authority. It is not readily apparent who will replace Abbas, assuming he is serious about his decision to cede the leadership role to someone more willing to play the patsy role in the absurd charade known as the American-sponsored “peace process.” What is clear, however, is that Obama’s inability to back up his Cairo rhetoric with even the semblance of spine in dealing with Israel’s intransigent leadership has consigned the latest Middle East peace initiative to failure, exactly like the similar initiatives of every American President since Jimmy Carter.

Obama’s gamesmanship vis-à-vis Mahmoud Abbas nicely illustrates the paradox of Israel’s relationship to Palestinian leadership generally:

Israel complains (in the words of Ehud Barak) that it cannot negotiate because it has no Palestinian “partner for peace.” But to the extent that any hand-picked Palestinian leader is acceptable as a “partner” – to that extent the Palestinian leader invariably lacks credibility with his own people, and for that reason cannot legitimately represent the popular Palestinian position in any negotiation. Thus, the hand-picked Palestinian leader cannot negotiate because he has no real power, and Israel is once again able to complain about having no partner for peace.

This cycle suits Israel fine, because postponement of the “peace process” means preservation of the status quo, and preserving the status quo serves (apparent) Israeli interests for one reason: the status quo allows, or more accurately consists in, the constant, never-ending, incremental construction of yet more Jewish-only settlements on stolen land, and the consequent incremental dispossession of Palestinian populations and their increasing isolation in ever-shrinking disconnected ghettos.

(Just as the space of the occupation is less a container within which events unfold than the medium for the events themselves (see Eyal Weizman, The Hollow Land), so the temporality of the occupation should be understood as part of its implementation: The occupation’s end (via agreement on final status) is constantly, interminably, forever deferred, and in the meantime, everything that occurs (the building of settlements and “outposts”, military “incursions” and “operations”, agreements, understandings, cease fires, checkpoints, barriers, suspensions of law and rights in the name of security, etc.) is characterized as temporary, conditional, of “interim status”, allowing the nearly imperceptible creation of “facts on the ground” that incrementally but permanently alter reality, rendering any possible agreement or negotiated solution moot.)

Martin Indyk of the Brookings Institute, an advisor to George Mitchell, recently remarked that with Abbas exiting the scene, “we are entering a new era.” In this new era, the challenge for the next Palestinian leader will be to resist the “peace process” altogether, based on a clear understanding that the United States cannot, now or ever, play a constructive role in bringing about a just outcome to the conflict.

As Sara Roy has demonstrated, the function of the “peace process” is to permanently remove the conflict from the framework of international law, as expressed in the well-established international consensus regarding its resolution based on UN Resolution 242, a consensus consistently blocked over the past 30 years by Israel and the United States. This removal is accomplished by creating and sustaining the illusion of a genuine “negotiation” of land for peace, but the concept of negotiation assumes the existence of two more or less equal parties, each of whom runs the risk of palpable loss should negotiations fail.

This assumption does not apply in this case, because all the power is on one side, and the relationship between the parties is that of domination: The Palestinians have nothing to give that Israel can’t take by force, and Israel has nothing to lose should negotiations fail. The only real restraint on Israel’s actions in the occupied territories is its public image in the United States Congress, which provides the money, the weapons and the legal cover for Israel’s ongoing colonization project. There are limits to gullibility, even inside the Beltway, and the day when Israel is no longer able to portray itself as the victim rather than the aggressor will be the day Israel will agree to negotiate in good faith. That is why the Goldstone report is so very dangerous from the Israeli government’s perspective.

At this point, the only possible outcome of the peace process – certain to be resurrected in some form by the Obama administration – is to force the Palestinian leadership accept national existence within a network of isolated, walled-in enclaves and call it a “state”, while lacking that most basic characteristic of any genuine state, namely, sovereignty (over borders, defense, airspace, resources, etc.). The longer the Palestinians resist that outcome, the greater the pressure on Israel to conform to its public image in the United States as a liberal democracy – by offering equal political rights, including the right to vote, to the 4 million Arabs under its rule.

As the sun sets on the two-state solution, that pressure is already well on its way to becoming intolerable – in Israel, with the growing domination of the political scene by extreme right-wing ethnic nationalists like Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, in the United States with the rise of AIPAC alternatives such as the J-Street organization, and in the rest of the world with the inability of functionaries like Barack Obama to bury the Goldstone report and with it, the truth.

As it happened, Obama cancelled his scheduled contribution to the proceedings in order to address the memorial service for the 13 who were killed in the shooting on the U.S. Army base at Fort Hood in Texas. (At the risk of giving offense where none is intended, I have to say that I think the conference agenda could easily have been re-arranged to provide the President with an alternative podium slot if he had wanted it. He did, in fact, put in an appearance at a reception for Jewish leaders attending the conference, but he didn’t talk about foreign policy. Instead he delivered a 20-minute homily on Jewish values of charity and the importance of health care reform).

Obama’s place as the main speaker was taken by his chief of staff (and Zionism’s number one minder in the White House) Rahm Emanuel. Reviewing his address to conference as a whole, I saw no reason to disagree with what Paul Craig Roberts wrote. Emanuel “surrendered for his boss”.

It would seem that a very similar thought was in the mind of Uriel Heilman who wrote an analysis piece for the JTA (Jewish Telegraph Agency). Under the headline “Obama shifts to Israel’s corner, but tries not to show it,” Heilman noted that “when the chief of staff took to the podium… he sounded almost exactly like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a day earlier”.

It’s true that Emanuel did say that “Israel must halt settlement construction on the West Bank” (not the occupied West Bank, just the West Bank); but in the context of his whole speech, that was mere lip-service to a presidential call that had been rejected by Netanyahu and served only to confirm that it’s Zionism’s stooges in Congress who call the policy shots on Israel/Palestine, not the White House.

According to Emanuel, Israel seeks a lasting peace. The truth telling of that day was left to French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner. He said, in Paris, “Israel’s desire for peace seems to have completely vanished.” (That, of course, is not completely true. Israel does want peace, but not on terms virtually all Palestinians and most other Arabs and Muslims everywhere could accept).

Emanuel went on: “Make no mistake, the path toward peace is not one that Israel should be asked to walk alone” (my emphasis added). That, it seemed to me, was the chief of staff’s coded way of saying, “The Arabs are to blame for the fact the President’s efforts to kick-start a peace process are going nowhere”.

At the time of writing there are signs that the growing despair of the occupied and oppressed Palestinians will trigger a third intifada at a not too distant point in a foreseeable future.

In terms of realpolitik, there’s a case or saying that could be a good thing to the extent that Israel’s brutal suppression of it would probably inspire more global sympathy and support for the Palestinian claim for an acceptable amount of justice. But there’s a much stronger case for saying that it could be catastrophic for the Palestinians. A third intifada could give Zionism’s in-Israel mad men the pretext they will one day invent if they are not presented with it on a plate to complete the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

The price of President Obama’s refusal to tell truth to Jewish power might well be blood and destruction on a scale not yet seen in Israel/Palestine and far beyond.

Investigative journalist Declan McCullagh revealed that the “change” administration’s legal eagles issued an order that required the “Philadelphia-based Indymedia.us Web site ‘not to disclose the existence of this request’ unless authorized by the Justice Department, a gag order that presents an unusual quandary for any news organization.”

Kristina Clair, IndyMedia’s Linux administrator, told CBS she was shocked to have received the subpoena with its flawed demand not to disclose its contents.

The subpoena from U.S. Attorney Tim Morrison in Indianapolis demanded “all IP traffic to and from www.indymedia.us” on June 25, 2008. It instructed Clair to “include IP addresses, times, and any other identifying information,” including e-mail addresses, physical addresses, registered accounts, and Indymedia readers’ Social Security Numbers, bank account numbers, credit card numbers, and so on. (Declan McCullagh, “Justice Dept. Asked for News Site’s Visitor Lists,” CBS News, November 10, 2009)

Talk about intrusive! While grand jury subpoenas of news organizations and journalists are not unprecedented, under long-standing guidelines these subpoenas are supposed to receive special handling given their sensitive nature, thus ensuring that even the appearance of prior restraint of a journalist’s ability to report the news is avoided.

In IndyMedia’s case however, DOJ’s ham-handed stipulation amounted to government meddling clearly prohibited by the First Amendment. Not that any of this seems to matter to an administration hell-bent on defending–and expanding–every illegal program of the previous regime.

McCullagh writes that one section of the guidelines state that “no subpoena may be issued to any member of the news media” without “the express authorization of the attorney general,” in this case, the secret state’s newest “best friend forever” Eric Holder.

Indeed, these draconian writs must be “directed at material information regarding a limited subject matter.” The government’s demand however, for virtually every piece of information held by IndyMedia on their contributors and readers hardly qualifies as “limited” even in today’s bizarro world of “national security” driftnet surveillance and data mining.

When queried by CBS as to what criminal investigation prompted their draconian demand for IP addresses “and any other identifying information” on IndyMedia users, U.S. Attorney Tim Morrison emailed CBS with a curt reply: “We Have no comment.”

But before proceeding further, let’s be clear on one thing: since the 1970s, the federal grand jury system where the prosecutor reigns supreme, has been an instrument wielded by the secret state to target dissent and to ensnare left-wing government critics in open-ended “investigations” whose sole purpose is to harass if not prosecute alleged “troublemakers.”

As the late, great defender of civil liberties, Frank Donner, described in his landmark work on America’s political intelligence system, during the lawless rampage against the left launched by the Nixon administration:

A new attack [on dissent] would have to be secret, clothed with a more plausible justification than the [red-hunting congressional] committees’ claimed legislative purpose, and aimed inwardly at the group and its members.

The White House entrusted the grand jury offensive to the Internal Security Division (ISD) of the Department of Justice. This unit, which had languished during the post-McCarthy years, was now enlarged from a complement of six to sixty as part of a master plan to deploy all available resources against the new dissenters. …

The secrecy of the grand jury proceeding cloaks abuses. Although secrecy historically served to protect the independence of the grand jury by insulating it from the pressures of the Crown, there can be little doubt that in the Nixon years grand jury secrecy became an instrument of the very evil it was intended to prevent. (Frank Donner, The Age of Surveillance, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980, pp. 355, 357)

Today, with antiwar groups, anarchists, socialists, animal rights and environmental activists clearly focused in the secret state’s cross hairs, one can speculate that the DOJ’s reticence to reveal what “crime” they were allegedly investigating in all probability related to information surreptitiously obtained by a paid informant or provocateur.

This hypothesis is all the more compelling when one considers that DOJ attorney’s threatened Clair with obstruction of justice if she disclosed the existence of the subpoena, claiming it “may endanger someone’s health” and would have a “human cost.”

But shortly after receiving the onerous warrant Clair’s shock turned to anger, and the sysadmin contacted the San Francisco-based civil liberties group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), who agreed to take on the government.

On November 9, EFF published a whitepaper outlining the shadowy nature of the secret state’s latest moves to subvert our constitutional rights. According to EFF’s senior staff attorney Kevin Bankston,

Secrecy surrounds law enforcement’s communications surveillance practices like a dense fog. Particularly shrouded in secrecy are government demands issued under 18 U.S.C. § 2703 of the Stored Communications Act or “SCA” that seek subscriber information or other user records from communications service providers. When the government wants such data from a phone company or online service provider, it can obtain a court order under the SCA demanding the information from the provider, along with a gag order preventing the provider from disclosing the existence of the government’s demand. More often, companies are simply served with subpoenas issued directly by prosecutors without any court involvement; these demands, too, are rarely made public. (”From EFF’s Secret Files: Anatomy of a Bogus Subpoena,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, November 9, 2009)

Undeterred by the quickly broken promises of the Obama regime to “restore the rule of law,” like their Bushist predecessors, Obama’s Justice Department is the golden shield that hides from public view the high crimes and misdemeanors of America’s corporatist police state.

Readers of Antifascist Calling are urged to read EFF’s well-written analysis. It meticulously dissects the lawless behavior of administration attorneys who, without skipping a beat, attempted to brow-beat a news organization into submission, thus preventing them from doing what they do best: informing the public, not as court stenographers but, as the heroic Israeli journalist Amira Hass has averred by “monitoring the centers of power.”

Readers are also urged to read the government’s subpoena in its entirety, an exercise in overreaching and a clear violation of the state’s own guidelines governing the issuance of these onerous warrants.

Grand jury subpoenas are very easy for the government to get–they are issued directly by prosecutors without any direct court oversight. Therefore, the SCA limits what those subpoenas can obtain, in contrast to a search warrant or other court order. Under the SCA’s 18 U.S.C. § 2703(c)(2), grand jury subpoenas can only be used to get basic subscriber-identifying information about a target–e.g., a particular user’s name, IP address, physical address or payment details–and certain types of telephone logs; any other records require a court order or a search warrant. …

However, with the Indymedia subpoena, the government departed from the text of the law and the Justice Department’s own sample subpoena by inserting this demand: “Please provide the following information pursuant to [18 U.S.C. § 2703(c)(2)]: All IP traffic to and from www.indymedia.us” for a particular date, including “IP addresses, times, and any other identifying information.”

In other words, the government was asking for the IP address of every one of indymedia.us’s thousands of visitors on that date–the IP address of every person who read any news story on the entire site. Not only did this request threaten every indymedia.us visitor’s First Amendment right to read the news anonymously (particularly considering that the government could easily obtain the name and address associated with each IP address via subpoenas to the ISPs that control those IP blocks), it plainly violated the SCA’s restrictions on what types of data the government could obtain using a subpoena. The subpoena was also patently overbroad, a clear fishing expedition: there’s no way that the identity of every Indymedia reader of every Indymedia story was relevant to the crime being investigated by the grand jury in Indiana, whatever that crime may be. (EFF, op. cit., emphasis in original)

CBS reported that EFF wrote a series of letters to the DOJ. The first detailed the flaws in the original subpoena while the second pointedly said that if the government needed to muzzle IndyMedia, it should apply for a formal gag order under the relevant section of federal law.

Hardly the sharpest knives in the drawer, DOJ higher-ups quickly caught on and realized that the group was about to challenge the law on First Amendment grounds. At that point, the state backed down and withdrew the subpoena. EFF wrote, “Obviously, that was a fight–and more importantly, a precedent–that the government wanted to avoid.”

The lesson here? When the state comes knocking, the first and best line of defense is to seek competent legal advice from the relevant civil liberties’ organization.

Handing over information that the government is not legally entitled to, or indeed, answering questions posed by federal investigators trained in subtle interview techniques without an attorney present can–and has–resulted in “obstruction of justice” or a “lying to federal government agents” indictment, a crime under Title 18, United States Code, § 1001. Silence is always an option.

A good place to start learning how to fight back against electronic spying practices is a working familiarity with EFF’s excellent handbook “Surveillance Self-Defense.”

Still, the conceiving of a tax-financed single-payer system, let alone a “socialized” one, is nowhere in sight. It still sounds bizzarre to people like myself, who live on the other side of the pond (where systems, it should be pointed out, differ both in terms of organization, financing and quality, but still rest on the principle of free, or almost free health care for all), that the largest economy in the world would choose not to grant what is considered as a right (generally enshrined in the Constitution) in most of the world’s advanced countries. Autocratic Germany passed the Health Insurance Bill in 1883, which was gradually extended to cover the entire population; Britain created the NHS in 1948; Italy officially created its in 1978, to make just a few examples. Too often have I listened to horror stories concerning many Americans (including personal friends) who developed serious illnesses and thanked fate for residing abroad, thus obtaining free health care in their new country of residence.

Now, the way this US bill was elaborated and passed represents, in my opinion, further corroboration of the fact that the US presidential system was devised, more than 200 years ago, to attain a specific goal: that is, preventing “radical” legislation from being passed by the political system. As I argue in my book The Roots of Contemporary Imperialism: The Founding Fathers, the U.S. Constitution, and 200 years of corporate dictatorship, the Founding Fathers were cunning enough to devise a system which would create “a path strewn with obstacles in the belief that it would encourage the kind of slow, deliberate politics that were their ideal,” as Daniel Lazare has argued; or, as Charles Beard has put it, “disintegration of positive action.” The political system they devised aimed at preserving the status quo, that is, domination by an already powerful business elite over the people. Only overwhelming popular pressure, extreme crises and the risk of implosion of the system have led to major legislative breakthroughs (or, rather, “concessions” from the elite), such as, to make just a few examples, the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, the Minimum Wage Act of 1938 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Indeed, as street riots or a widespread popular rebellion directed toward obtaining a national health care system appear as a remote possibility, the vicissitudes of the health care bill show the truthfulness of such assertions.

Constitutional engineering alone does not explain the shortcomings of the presidential system.

There are three additional elements, not strictly related to the US Constitution, which nevertheless overlap and help create a situation in which:

• party nominees are not necessarily their parties’ leaders (as a result of primaries), and thus their political platforms do not necessarily tally with their parties’;
• with very few exceptions, only those “eager to ‘go along to get along,’ ” as William Domhoff has put it, that is, those willing to accept massive corporate donations will win a Congress seat or the presidency, a phenomenon which is obviously not just Republican, but regards Democrats as well, thus further alienating Democratic voters as well as potential ones;
• the electoral system, in joint action with the size of the US territory, stimulates fragmentation and therefore party weakness, thus resulting in lack of party discipline, a situation made even more serious by the influence of corporate interests on elected politicians.

These three elements overlap with constitutional ones, such as the rigid separation of powers: two separate Houses, elected in different ways and at different times; and an executive (that is, the President), elected by a state-based electoral college. Thus, the President is not guaranteed a majority in one House, let alone in both; or, the President might have a majority for a limited time, and then lose it at mid-term elections; or, he may have a majority for his entire term of office, but that does not guarantee party discipline or a common plan on specific issues (with Democrats being a perfect example, supporting, for instance, emancipation in the North and Jim Crow in the South). Also, the President is not even allowed to introduce bills into Congress, and therefore has to rely on Congressmen for that; and Congress is fragmented into countless committees and sub-committees, which in most cases do all the work and leave just the final yea or nay to the whole Chamber. Besides, once a bill is passed by one House, the other House will not vote on the same bill, but present its own and, after voting on it, a conciliation committee will meet to find an agreement between the two Chambers (further delaying as well as watering down legislation). Such a complicated, fragmented system cannot help becoming a prey to lobbies. The same applies to the European Union, where the system is absolutely unintelligible even to experts, and the overlapping of different bodies and levels of governance complicates things, and has paved the way for massive lobbying by corporate interests. In my book, I argue that a parliamentary system might mitigate this phenomenon. That is not to say that lobbying and compromise would disappear, far from that. In many parliamentary systems, committees are very powerful and bills are elaborated in closed committee meetings; filibuster is common practice (for example, by introducing hundreds or thousands of amendments, both within a committee or on the floor of the House, or giving endless speeches on each one of these amendments); there are coalitions and minority governments, which may slow down a government’s action, as this would need to reach compromises with its majority partners or other parties in Parliament; lobbying and electoral financing may be aggressive; and often bills have to be passed by both Houses of Parliament, although often the Upper House can only delay the passing of the bill, but not prevent it, and the government needs the confidence of the Lower House alone). After all, the existence of economic pressures on the part of powerful interests influencing the work of elected bodies is inborn to capitalistic systems, whether they are parliamentary or presidential democracies. However, when a party or coalition of parties presents a clear platform before an election, and wins a majority, and has the power to present a bill, the government’s bill, and defend it on the floor of a House wherein parties, rather than individual MPs, are the leading actors, then, things will be more clear and responsibility for failing to pass a certain piece of legislation will be more easily ascribable.

Now, Obama used to be in favor of single-payer when he was a state Senator. In a Youtube video, apparently dating back to 2003, he claimed that “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health care program. I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its gross national product on health care, cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. And that’s what Jim is talking about when he says everybody in, nobody out. A single-payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. That’s what I’d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we’ve got to take back the White House, we’ve got to take back the Senate, and we’ve got to take back the House.” Apparently, he has changed his mind. Changing one’s own mind is legitimate, obviously. However, what is strange is that Obama became less and less convinced about single payer as his political career went on, first at the US Senate, then as a candidate for the Democratic Party’s primaries, and then as party nominee (source). Obama’s change of heart, however, does not sound too outlandish. Money certainly talks: insurance companies contributed with some $2.3 million for his electoral campaign, and the health sector with almost $19.5 million. In the end, Obama’s platform on health care fully reneged on what he had previously backed as an Illinois senator, that is, single-payer.

The bill’s history is particularly telling in order to show US presidentialism’s shortcomings.

When Bill Clinton was president, the business world was adamantly opposed to health care reform. Thus, Bill’s plan was knocked down even by wide sectors of his own party.

Obama’s plan, however, is not really clear, because the US presidential system does not allow presidents to bring forward a clear and final proposal, “take it or leave it or I’ll ask the President/King/Queen to dissolve Parliament and we’ll go to new elections”, as might be the case in a parliamentary system. Obama made some more or less clear proposals during the electoral campaign, sure. However, the bill, or, better, bills dealing with health care reform have sprouted like mushrooms, in different centers of power. Obama may talk to Congressmen, visit Congress in order to convince recalcitrant Democrats (as he did on 7 November, a pretty unusual move), but still, he can hardly impose his will (if he has one on the issue) on his Congress majority.

The New York Times has given a detailed account of the bill’s history.

Thus, at the end of March 2009, and with the consent of the insurance industry, concerned about the growing costs of health care, the (all) Democratic chairmen of five Congressional committees had reached an agreement on legislation requiring everyone to carry insurance that employers should be required to help pay for, and allowing the government to offer a public health insurance plan as an alternative to private insurance.

However, while House Democratic leaders introduced a bill on 14 June, “which in addition to a public plan included efforts to slow the pace of Medicare spending, a tax on high-income people and penalties for businesses that do not insure their workers,” the seven members of the so-called Blue Dog coalition, consisting “of fiscally conservative Democrats, threatened to block the House bill. After a 10-day impasse, an agreement was reached that would cut the bill’s cost and exempt many small businesses from having to provide health benefits to workers. The bill was passed by the House Committee on Energy and Commerce on July 31 by a vote of 31 to 28, with five Democrats joining all the panel’s Republicans in opposition”. The agreement still envisaged the creation by the government of “a public insurance plan to compete with private insurers, but would negotiate rates with health care providers instead of using Medicare fee schedules to pay doctors and hospitals. States could, in addition, set up nonprofit cooperatives to offer coverage to individuals, families and small businesses.”

In the meantime, the Senate went its own way, as “the Health, Education, Labor and Pension committee worked on a bill with a public insurance plan, while the Senate Finance Committee, led by Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, worked on a bill that sought to avoid one, which Mr. Baucus thought was necessary to gain bipartisan support.” The Health Committee’s proposal saw the light of day on 2 July: “employers with 25 or more workers would have to provide coverage or pay the government an annual fee of $750 for each full-time worker and $375 for each part-timer. The government would pay the start-up costs for the public insurance option as a loan to be repaid, and premiums would be set up so that the option was ultimately self-sufficient.” The bill was passed on 15 July. However, Senator Baucus introduced another bill at the end of August, which “did not include a new government insurance plan to compete with private insurers,” and, “unlike the other bills … would impose a new excise tax on insurance companies that sell high-end policies. The bill would not require employers to offer coverage. But employers with more than 50 workers would have to reimburse the government for some or all of the cost of subsidies provided to employees who buy insurance on their own.” This proposal was passed on 14 October.

In the meantime, Obama, the President and therefore Head of the government, limited himself to a speech to a joint session of Congress in September, and to the aforementioned visit to centrist Democrats on 7 November.

So, the bill was passed at the House. However, further compromises had to be reached before the House could actually give its approval. In order to assuage conservative Democrats’ fears of losing their Congress seats, it was decided that the public option plan “will have to negotiate rates just as private insurers do, rather than offering a rate set slightly above what Medicare pays,” and “the plan will also confront strict controls on abortion. After heavy lobbying by Catholic bishops, the measure was amended to tighten restrictions on abortion coverage in subsidized plans bought through the insurance exchanges, to insure that no federal money is used to pay for an abortion. Both changes angered Ms. Pelosi’s base of liberal Democrats, but they chose to support the bill nonetheless.”

What will happen next? Senate majority leader Harry Reid has already “finessed the difference between a health committee bill that included a public option and a Finance Committee bill that favored a system of co-ops by announcing that the merged bill would include a government plan that would let states “opt out.” A Republican filibuster, however, is not too remote an option, as independent Senators such as Joseph Lieberman have already announced opposition to any bill containing a public option, and support from conservative Democrats is not guaranteed. There is widespread fear that the reform will lie dormant in Congress for a long time to come.

The future of the health care reform in the US is therefore still unclear. Anything might happen: a different version might be passed, after further negotiations between the two Chambers; or the reform might even be put off till doomsday. Still, that is exactly the kind of chaos the Founding Fathers wanted in order to preserve order and stability. Whatever happens at the Senate, health care is not the first victim of US presidentialism, nor will it be the last.

Ironically, most wealthy capitalists will themselves be destroyed in this looming Jungle.

Capitalists need government almost as badly as we do, but they will not admit it. As Adam Smith taught long ago, capitalism and capitalists can survive only with a rule of law controlling private property rights and business promises, a government to enforce those laws, and a certain level of morality. He cannot be concerned with the common good lest some competitor captures his profit. Capitalist ideology thus prohibits capitalists from protecting their own common good. As we see from the daily news, no capitalist will speak out in support of regulation of Wall Street. Capitalists say that they will discipline themselves, but they have not, can not and do not.

We ordinary citizens and voters cling to an illusory idealistic assumption that we retain the right to govern ourselves, and that if we only work hard enough in the political process, we can change things through the ballot box. We cling to this false deadly assumption despite the vast accumulation of evidence that our political process is totally dominated and controlled by approximately 5000 very wealthy individuals acting through their ownership of their corporations and their mainstream advertising agencies, TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines. Thus in these desperate times, our government has given Trillions of our tax dollars to the big banks of the wealthy without any conditions, while our government has given little or nothing to create jobs for us. This money controlled government can afford to give Trillions to the wealthy, but this government cannot afford to provide VA hospitals and medical care for everybody. We citizens and voters are kept quiet and non-rebellious because of our own brainwashed state, fueled by our addiction to consumer goods, electronic gadgets, computers and TV.

Part of the trance and delusion is maintained by liberals. My definition of a “liberal” is one who vaguely wants a civilizing government and to make things right, but only if it does not deprive him of his standard of living. Thus a liberal will protest wealth inequality, the corruption of our elected leaders by money, imperialism, wars abroad, torture, rendition, and civilian collateral damage, but a liberal will not rebel, stop work, strike, picket, vigil or boycott. A liberal knows at some level that his material well being depends ultimately on these very evils that he protests against, specifically including torture. A liberal, like a conservative capitalist, cannot face the fact that he himself is in a dangerous suicidal trance. So he does not challenge the trance either.

Even under the best of circumstances, we have limited time and interest in governing ourselves. Our civic impulse is in very short supply. We see this in the low voter turnout and in the superficial slogans that lead many voters make up their minds. We see it also in political parties, local governments, charities, clubs and unions where aggressive individuals rise to power, and the ordinary person does not bother to attend meetings or to vote.

The blunt truth is that we are now ruthlessly governed by these few wealthy individuals who have accumulated their vast fortunes. One might almost say that we are “ungoverned,” but of course we are taxed to benefit these rulers, and to pay for their losses on their risky financial investments. The government is operated and controlled by and for these few wealthy individuals. For all practical purposes, it is if we are ruled by a selfish greedy king who rules us and taxes us for his own pleasure and his own benefit. This “king” has his royalist earls, dukes, nobles and toadies in the form of Presidents, Senators, elected officials, journalists, college professors and economists who fawn around him. These toadies tell the “king” what he wants to hear (however insane and stupid) hoping for his favor and crumbs from his table. President Obama himself is such a toady to the “king.” Obama’s economic advisors, former Harvard President Larry Summers and University of California Professor Christina Romer are perfect examples of such fawning advisors to the “king.” They study and report only what the “king” wants to hear.

The truth is that our capitalism and our self governing democracy are beyond repair or reform. Both are terminal, and dysfunctional. Our material well being is rapidly falling, and it will fall much further. Our trance prevents us from dealing with the death throes of capitalism, with the few wealthy individuals who control democracy with their wealth, with diminishing reserves of oil and gas, and with deadly global warming. This is not to say that we will find it easy to make changes even if we become aware of our trance. We will have to attend meetings and vote. We will have to accept a lower standard of living because of the depletion of oil and live like Cubans. Other civilizations in the past have fallen into dark ages because those in power did not recognize the falsity of their political-economic-cultural ideas, and did not take corrective action in time. Millions of us are destined to starve and those who do survive will be serfs allowed to grow a little food on the estates of the very rich. This is inevitable, unless we awaken and face the truth very soon.

I understand him.

He feels betrayed. And the traitor is Barack Obama.

A year ago, when Obama was elected, he aroused high hopes in the Muslim world, among the Palestinian people as well as in the Israeli peace camp.

At long last an American president who understood that he had to put an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, not only for the sake of the two peoples, but mainly for the US national interests. This conflict is largely responsible for the tidal waves of anti-American hatred that sweep the Muslim masses from ocean to ocean.

Everybody believed that a new era had begun. Instead of the Clash of Civilizations, the Axis of Evil and all the other idiotic but fateful slogans of the Bush era, a new approach of understanding and reconciliation, mutual respect and practical solutions.

Nobody expected Obama to exchange the unconditional pro-Israeli line for a one-sided pro-Palestinian attitude. But everybody thought that the US would henceforth adopt a more even-handed approach and push the two sides towards the Two-State Solution. And, no less important, that the continuous stream of hypocritical and sanctimonious blabbering would be displaced by a determined, vigorous, non-provocative but purposeful policy.

As high as the hopes were then, so deep is the disappointment now. Nothing of all these has come about. Worse: the Obama administration has shown by its actions and omissions that it is not really different from the administration of George W. Bush.

From the first moment it was clear that the decisive test would come in the battle of the settlements.

It may seem that this is a marginal matter. If peace is to be achieved within two years, as Obama’s people assure us, why worry about another few houses in the settlements that will be dismantled anyway? So there will be a few thousand settlers more to resettle. Big deal.

But the freezing of the settlements has an importance far beyond its practical effect. To return to the metaphor of the Palestinian lawyer: “We are negotiating the division of a pizza, and in the meantime, Israel is eating the pizza.”

The American insistence on freezing the settlements in the entire West Bank and East Jerusalem was the flag of Obama’s new policy. As in a Western movie, Obama drew a line in the sand and declared: up to here and no further! A real cowboy cannot withdraw from such a line without being seen as yellow.

That is precisely what has now happened. Obama has erased the line he himself drew in the sand. He has given up the clear demand for a total freeze. Binyamin Netanyahu and his people announced proudly — and loudly — that a compromise had been reached, not, God forbid, with the Palestinians (who are they?) but with the Americans. They have allowed Netanyahu to build here and build there, for the sake of “Normal Life”, “Natural Increase”, “Completing Unfinished Projects” and other transparent pretexts of this kind. There will not be, of course, any restrictions in Jerusalem, the Undivided Eternal Capital of Israel. In short, the settlement activity will continue in full swing.

To add insult to injury, Hillary Clinton troubled herself to come to Jerusalem in person in order to shower Netanyahu with unctuous flattery. There is no precedent to the sacrifices he is making for peace, she fawned.

That was too much even for Abbas, whose patience and self-restraint are legendary. He has drawn the consequences.

“To understand all is to forgive all,” the French say. But in this case, some things are hard to forgive.

Certainly, one can understand Obama. He is engaged in a fight for his political life on the social front, the battle for health insurance. Unemployment continues to rise. The news from Iraq is bad, Afghanistan is quickly turning into a second Vietnam. Even before the award ceremony, the Nobel Peace Prize looks like a joke.

Perhaps he feels that the time is not ripe for provoking the almighty pro-Israel lobby. He is a politician, and politics is the art of the possible. It would be possible to forgive him for this, if he admitted frankly that he is unable to realize his good intentions in this area for the time being.

But it is impossible to forgive what is actually happening. Not the scandalous American treatment of the Goldstone report. Not the loathsome behavior of Hillary in Jerusalem. Not the mendacious talk about the “restraint” of the settlement activities. The more so as all this goes on with total disregard of the Palestinians, as if they were merely extras in a musical.

Not only has Obama given up his claim to a complete change in US policy, but he is actually continuing the policy of Bush. And since Obama pretends to be the opposite of Bush, this is double treachery.

Abbas reacted with the only weapon he has at his command: the announcement that he will leave public life.

The American policy in the “Wider Middle East” can be compared to a recipe in a cookbook: “Take five eggs, mix with flour and sugar…

In real life: Take a local notable, give him the paraphernalia of government, conduct “free elections”, train his security forces, turn him into a subcontractor.

This is not an original recipe. Many colonial and occupation regimes have used it in the past. What is so special about its use by the Americans is the “democratic” props for the play. Even if a cynical world does not believe a word of it, there is the audience back home to think about.

That is how it was done in the past in Vietnam. How Hamid Karzai was chosen in Afghanistan and Nouri Maliki in Iraq. How Fouad Siniora has been kept in Lebanon. How Muhammad Dahlan was to be installed in the Gaza Strip (but was at the decisive moment forestalled by Hamas.) In most of the Arab countries, there is no need for this recipe, since the established regimes already satisfy the requirements.

Abbas was supposed to fill this role. He bears the title of President, he was elected fairly, an American general is training his security forces. True, in the following parliamentary elections his party was soundly beaten, but the Americans just ignored the results and the Israelis imprisoned the undesirable Parliamentarians. The show must go on.

But Abbas is not satisfied with being the egg in the American recipe.

I first met him 26 years ago. After the first Lebanon War, when we (Matti Peled, Ya’acov Arnon and I) went to Tunis to meet Yasser Arafat, we saw Abbas first. That was the case every time we came to Tunis after that. Peace with Israel was the “desk” of Abbas.

Conversations with him were always to the point. We did not become friends, as with Arafat. The two were of very different temperament. Arafat was an extrovert, a warm person who liked personal gestures and physical contact with the people he talked with. Abbas is a self-contained introvert who prefers to keep people at a distance.

From the political point of view, there is no real difference. Abbas is continuing the line laid down by Arafat in 1974: a Palestinian state within the pre-1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital. The difference is in the method. Arafat believed in his ability to influence Israeli public opinion. Abbas limits himself to dealings with rulers. Arafat believed that he had to keep in his arsenal all possible means of struggle: negotiations, diplomatic activity, armed struggle, public relations, devious maneuvers. Abbas puts everything in one basket: peace negotiations.

Abbas does not want to become a Palestinian Marshal Petain. He does not want to head a local Vichy regime. He knows that he is on a slippery slope and has decided to stop before it is too late.

I think, therefore, that his intention to leave the stage is serious. I believe his assertion that it is not just a bargaining ploy. He may change his decision, but only if he is convinced that the rules of the game have changed.

Obama was completely surprised. That has never happened before: an American client, totally dependent on Washington, suddenly rebels and poses conditions. That is exactly what Abbas has done now, when he recognized that Obama is unwilling to fulfill the most basic condition: to freeze the settlements.

From the American point of view, there is no replacement. There are certainly some capable people in the Palestinian leadership, as well as corrupt ones and collaborators. But there is no one who is capable of rallying around him all the West Bank population. The first name that comes up is always Marwan Barghouti, but he is in prison and the Israeli government has already announced that he will not be released even if elected. Also, it is not clear whether he is willing to play that role in the present conditions. Without Abbas, the entire American recipe comes apart.

Netanyahu, too, was utterly surprised. He wants phony negotiations, devoid of substance, as a camouflage for the deepening of the occupation and enlarging of the settlements. A “Peace process” as a substitute for peace. Without a recognized Palestinian leader, with whom can he “negotiate”?

In Jerusalem, there is still hope that Abbas’ announcement is merely a ploy, that it would be enough to throw him some crumbs in order to change his mind. It seems that they do not really know the man. His self-respect will not allow him to go back, unless Obama awards him a serious political achievement.

From Abbas’ point of view, the announcement of his retirement is the doomsday weapon.

Cowardice asks the question ‘is it safe’? Expediency asks the question ‘is it politic’? Vanity asks the question ‘is it popular’? But conscience asks the question ‘is it right’? And there comes a time when we must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but we must take it because our conscience tells us that it is right.

– Martin Luther King

On Saturday, November 8 the Democrat Congress gave us a corporate driven healthcare bill which amounts to nothing more than a de facto bailout of the healthcare insurance companies. The carnival conducted by the Democrats, masquerading as a debate around healthcare, demonstrates conclusively how craven are Barack Obama and the Congressional Democrats.

We have witnessed cynicism in other administrations but the Obama administration has as raised cynicism to a veritable science. Imagine promising the poor and desperate people of this country healthcare reform and passing legislation which will not only hurt the working class but strengthen the very forces which oppose real reform – the healthcare insurance companies!

The darling of the Democrats, Alan Grayson, voted in lockstep with most of the other so-called progressive Democrats to destroy any possibility for meaningful healthcare reform for the next 40 years. How easily the Democrat rank and file is impressed. Grayson only had to bad mouth the Republicans, something which should be part of the job description of any elected Democrat. For doing the bare minimum he is hailed as a hero. So far removed from real heroism have the Democrats traveled. So ineffective and slimy have the Congressional Democrats become in sucking up to their corporate pay masters so they can keep doing more harm to the American people, that they are praiseworthy simply for criticizing the opposition. Imagine! The Democrat rank and file is impressed by a Democrat Congressman who criticizes the Republicans but votes for a healthcare bill that will spread misery on national level! Only Dennis Kucinich remained steadfast in his opposition to a corporate welfare bill masquerading as a health care reform bill. Perhaps Kucinich does more harm than good by remaining in such a party. By remaining a Democrat he legitimizes the actions he opposes and keeps millions of well intended people from forming a truly progressive opposition party believing the myth that the Democrat Party can be changed form within.

All of the Congressional Democrats and even the successor to George Bush himself recognize that universal single-payer health care (Medicare For All) is the only meaningful solution to the health care crisis in America. But these Democrats have decided that keeping their jobs is much more important than saving the lives of 45,000 Americans. By passing this most cynical piece of legislation they have put their thumbs in the eyes of the American people while the silk tongued oratory of the successor to George Bush will praise this bill even as he delights in the idea of how many people will live in misery.

Obama is so ignominious that even in this miserable mockery of health care reform he will deny benefits to the slave population in the United States as well as to women who need abortions. Obama continues to refer to the slave population created by the heinous William Clinton as “illegal immigrants”. We have 13 million slaves; they are not illegal immigrants. They are economic refugees created by trade agreements like NAFTA which allowed companies like Archer Daniels Midland and ConAgra to ship billions and billions of tons of cheap corn into Mexico destroying the Mexican family farm. We are not talking about dirt poor farmers but farmers who employed 10-15 people. Having lost their farms, they wandered into the streets of Mexico City looking for jobs in those corporations that moved to Mexico thanks to the beneficence of that ever hated sperm stain, the successor to Ronald Reagan, who murdered a million innocent Iraqi men, women and children with bombs and sanctions.

When the US corporations closed up their plants in Mexico and moved off to China and Bangladesh where they could pay people $.50 an hour and $.35 an hour these former farm owners had the option of watching their families starve in the streets of Mexico or live as slaves in cardboard boxes in the underpasses of the United States. They have now become a new slave population, paying taxes and Social Security using phony identifications but denied even what would be considered hospitality anywhere else in the world – health care! Only the pro-slavery Democrats treat human beings in this way. Just as William, the stain, Clinton destroyed the women’s movement with his “Welfare Reform Act” which threw tens of thousands of single mothers into the streets and forced tens of thousands of others into the slavery of Wal-Mart like jobs, so also will Barry The Bomber’s healthcare reform continue pummeling the already staggering working-class American.

Here we have a health care bill which will not only drive up insurance costs but will not even permit the government to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies, thereby driving up pharmaceutical costs as well! The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that only 2% of Americans will be able to participate in this plan while 33% of Americans will remain either uninsured or underinsured. The bill even was stripped of the Kucinich amendment which would have permitted states to develop their own single-payer options. Americans will now be forced to buy health care plans from private insurance corporations. Forced!

Even a little arithmetic indicates what a horror show this nasty piece of legislation creates. Imagine a family at roughly 300% of poverty — around $55,000 a year. It will cost them in the neighborhood of $15,000 in taxes, $14,000 in mortgage or rent; close to $20,000 on childcare and they’ll need around $7,000 for food. That puts them in debt already! Now they will be forced to buy health care — forced! Under penalty of law! Even with government subsidies they will still be in debt! (There is not enough money in the bill to subsidize all the people who will need it). Now imagine a medical catastrophe. Even if caps are eliminated this family will be deeper in debt as the insurance companies increase their profits!

But wait! It gets better – worse if you please. The Congressional Budget Office also explained that one of the other reasons why so few people would be able to buy into this plan is that it “would typically have premiums that are somewhat higher than the average premiums for the private plans.” Yes, you read that correctly: “premiums that are somewhat higher”.

What about those people who don’t get coverage through their jobs or who have their health insurance dropped at work because there will now be an incentive to dump benefits? History already provides us the answer to that question. Most of the adults who tried to buy insurance on the open market never bought a plan because they could not afford it or they could not find a plan that met their needs. Now the prices will be higher! What a choice: buy insurance coverage or pay a penalty of hundreds or even thousands of dollars per family if they decide to forgo insurance.

LIEBERMAN TO THE RESCUE

The Senate version of health care reform is even more draconian than the House version, but the real hero of this tragedy, Joe Lieberman, promises to join a Republican filibuster! The independent senator from Connecticut, hated by liberal Democrats may yet save us! The senator told Fox News Sunday today that Democrats can certainly count him in the “no” column if they keep in a government-backed insurance plan. “If the public option is in there as a matter of conscience, I will not allow this bill to come to a final vote,” signaling as he has before that he would back a Republican filibuster — which Democrats need 60 votes to break.

While it is never morally acceptable to do something wrong even for a good reason (the ends never justify the means), it is always morally acceptable to do something right even for the wrong reasons! Lincoln, for example, did not free the slaves because it was the morally correct thing to do. He did it for political reasons but nevertheless he did do it and it was the right thing to do. We may not like Joe Lieberman and Max Baucus but ironically we may be in their debt if they join the filibuster to block this anti-working class, corporate welfare legislation. We should be castigating Conyers and Grayson because of their vote in the House while we may have to heave sigh of thanksgiving for people like Lieberman and Baucus if they are successful in preventing this very dangerous piece of legislation.

That is thanks to the cash handouts generously given out to them by the Goldman Sachs run administration in Washington. The Wall Street regime continues to make monetary policy over the heads of the electorate, devaluing the dollar purposely (in the name of ‘carry trade’ transactions) while bringing the erstwhile American economic powerhouse to its knees. An ailing economy, whose financial system has imploded like the twin towers, is now headed for an Argentinean style default and/or Weimar like hyper inflation. Casino not entrepreneurial capitalism still rules over us but the ideology is morally bankrupt. So gentlemen place your bets “rien n’est va plus” as the croupiers would say on Wall Street.

1989-2009: From the dislocation of Soviet Empire to today’s American decline

What brought down the Soviet Union was economic morass and industrial paralysis. Along with colonial adventurism in places like Angola and Afghanistan which drained the national treasury. A bloated bureaucracy and an inefficient gargantuan military industrial complex which also bled the federation’s resources. America today is in a symmetrical situation to the Soviet Union’s predicament in the late 1980s. Hence, 2009 maybe to the U.S what 1989 was to the late and somewhat great U.S.S.R. The U.S is entangled in two endless war of occupation one in the Middle East the other in central Asia.

These costly conflicts at a time of great economic distress which recalls the deprivations of the great depression era, have led to historic budget deficits. During the Bush neo con years ( the neocons being a ruthless clique driving foreign policy in the White House equivalent to the KGB apparatchiks who were influencing the Kremlin’s actions abroad) the federal government’s spent like there was no tomorrow and big government grew to monstrous proportions. Huge increases in the military spending added to this horrid fiscal nightmare. Barack Obama, the man of the moment or the “Gorbi” of our times, like the last Soviet leader, has inherited a huge mess which requires Herculean, if not superhuman capacity to clean up. And like the last leader of the Soviet empire, Obama enjoys huge popularity aboard, while being practically loathed, ridiculed and derided at home (especially on the radio airwaves). And now after the recent electoral gains of the Republicans in some key states, he’s wounded (perhaps fatally) politically.

Obama: The post modern “sun king” and absolutism American style

Obama’s pseudo or simulated “Glasnost” or the apparent policy of maximal publicity, openness, and transparency in the activities of all government institutions has led ironically to many Americans placing an absolute blind trust in the man who embodies “change”. There is an abdication of reason in the name of “yes we can”. A kind of collective hypnosis hangs over the nation. Meanwhile, there are some “hard core” pockets of dissent, made up of tea party patriots, who are denouncing his “socialist style” health care project. For its part, the zombie like mass media appears to be either asleep at the wheel to all this, or is willingly (in an insidious and complicit manner) allowing a Soviet style personality cult to take shape-mold the minds of millions and enthrall the masses.

The Obama Factor

The president’s inverted version of “perestroika” (that is the restructuring or retooling of the economy) has been fine tuned to meet the need of the oligarchs and corporate barons who support him and prompt him behind the curtains. Obama and his czar –commissars (and his adoring minions of PR spin operatives) have deftly in a brilliant slight of hand in one swift jest, effectively expropriating the entire financial and industrial sectors in America by means of massive taxpayer funded “bail outs”. These ploys have turned the essence of capitalism upside down, by rewarding cronyism and criminal behavior to the point where “crime pays” very handsomely indeed, and enables billionaires, fraudsters and financiers to obtain great gain almost without almost any pain or punishment. These perverse policies are likely to fail. In the end, Gorbachev’s policies although ostensibly well meaning, actually hastened the demise of the Soviet state. This later led to its fragmentation and disintegration of the communist superpower and its Eastern Empire. America’s current plight may lead to a similar outcome.

This latest move by the administration follows a pattern replicated countless times by Obama since assuming the presidency in January: denounce the lawless behavior of his Oval Office predecessor while continuing, even expanding, the reach of unaccountable security agencies that subvert constitutional guarantees barring “unreasonable searches and seizures.” EFF senior staff attorney Kevin Bankston wrote:

In a Court filing late Friday night, the Obama Administration attempted to dress up in new clothes its embrace of one of the worst Bush Administration positions–that courts cannot be allowed to review the National Security Agency’s massive, well-documented program of warrantless surveillance. In doing so it demonstrated that it will not willingly set limits on its own power and reinforced the need for Congress to step in and reform the so-called ’state secrets’ privilege. (Kevin Bankston, “As Congress Considers State Secrets Reform, Obama Admin Tries to Shut Down Yet Another Warrantless Wiretapping Lawsuit,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, November 2, 2009)

In June, Judge Walker dismissed EFF’s landmark Hepting v. AT&T lawsuit, when he ruled that the telecoms enjoyed immunity from liability after the Democratic-controlled Congress rammed through the despicable FISA Amendments Act (FAA) in July 2008.

That law, passed in response to citizen challenges to the state and their corporate partners in crime, granted the Attorney General exclusive power to require dismissal of the lawsuits “if the government secretly certifies to the court that the surveillance did not occur, was legal, or was authorized by the president,” the civil liberties’ watchdog group wrote in June.

In essence, it is not the co-equal and independent federal Judiciary that determines whether or not a crime has been committed that flaunts constitutional norms but rather, an unchallengeable assertion by an imperial Executive Branch.

As Antifascist Calling has averred many times, this craven capitulation by Congress to the Executive locks in place the statutory machinery for a presidential dictatorship, one where power is wielded with neither transparency nor accountability.

EFF’s Jewel v. NSA civil suit, brought on behalf of AT&T customers to halt the firm’s ongoing collaboration with the government’s illegal surveillance continues–for the moment.

In April however, taking a page from the Bush/Cheney playbook, the Obama administration argued that this lawsuit too, must be dismissed, claiming that should the litigation go forward it would require government disclosure of “privileged state secrets.”

Antifascist Calling reported at the time that the Obama administration has argued that under provisions of the disgraceful USA PATRIOT Act, the state is “immune from suit under the two remaining key federal surveillance laws: the Wiretap Act and the Stored Communications Act.”

Claiming “sovereign immunity” in practice, this means that under DoJ’s ludicrous interpretation of the Orwellian PATRIOT Act, the government can never be held accountable for illegal surveillance under any federal statute. As Salon pointed out:

In other words, beyond even the outrageously broad “state secrets” privilege invented by the Bush administration and now embraced fully by the Obama administration, the Obama DOJ has now invented a brand new claim of government immunity, one which literally asserts that the U.S. Government is free to intercept all of your communications (calls, emails and the like) and–even if what they’re doing is blatantly illegal and they know it’s illegal–you are barred from suing them unless they “willfully disclose” to the public what they have learned. (Glenn Greenwald, “New and worse secrecy and immunity claims from the Obama DOJ,” Salon, April 6, 2009)

The “change” regime’s cynical maneuver to have Shubert kicked to the curb is all the more remarkable considering that the Justice Department announced a month earlier that the administration will “impose new limits on the government assertion of the state secrets privilege used to block lawsuits for national security reasons,” The New York Times reported.

“Under the new policy,” investigative journalist Charlie Savage wrote, “if an agency like the National Security Agency or the Central Intelligence Agency wanted to block evidence or a lawsuit on state secrets grounds, it would present an evidentiary memorandum describing its reasons to the assistant attorney general for the division handling the lawsuit in question.”

According to the Times, “if that official recommended approving the request” it would be sent on to a high-level committee comprised of DoJ officials who would be charged “whether the disclosure of information would risk ’significant harm’ to national security.”

Under the new guidelines, Justice Department officials are supposed to reject the request to deploy the state secrets privilege to quash lawsuits if the Executive Branch’s motivation for doing so would “conceal violations of the law, inefficiency or administrative error” or to “prevent embarrassment.”

While Holder has claimed DoJ’s so-called “high-level committee” has reviewed the relevant material and concluded that disclosure would risk “significant harm” to “national security” if the case went forward, security analyst Steven Aftergood wrote in Secrecy News that “one aspect of the new policy that he did not address was the question of referral of the alleged misconduct to an agency inspector general for investigation.”

This is supposed to occur whenever “invocation of the privilege would preclude adjudication of particular claims,” as it certainly does in the Shubert litigation, particularly when the “case raises credible allegations of government wrongdoing.”

However as Aftergood avers, “somewhat artfully” (although this writer prefers a stronger phrase to describe the Attorney General’s actions) “the government denies that any such collection occurred ‘under the Terrorist Surveillance Program,’ implicitly allowing for the possibility that it may have occurred under some other framework.”

What that “other framework” is hasn’t been specified; however, in all probability it relates to other NSA above top secret Special Access Programs which haven’t come to light.

Whatever the secret state is continuing to do under Obama, a recent piece in InformationWeek provides striking details that it is massive.

The publication reports that the NSA “will soon break ground on a data center in Utah that’s budgeted to cost $1.5 billion.”

According to InformationWeek, the new facility will “provide intelligence and warnings related to cybersecurity threats, cybersecurity support to defense and civilian agency networks, and technical assistance to the Department of Homeland Security.”

The new data center will be located at Camp Williams, a National Guard training facility 26 miles from Salt Lake City in the conservative state of Utah. While providing few details on how NSA will use the 1.5 million square foot center, Glenn Gaffney, a deputy director of intelligence with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), claims that NSA will “protect civil liberties.”

“We will accomplish this in full compliance with the U.S. Constitution and federal law and while observing strict guidelines that protect the privacy and civil liberties of the American people,” Gaffney said.

As with other pronouncements by intelligence officials, Gaffney’s statement should be taken with the proverbial grain of salt.

The New York Times revealed in April and June that the ultra-spooky agency “intercepted private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress last year.”

Indeed, a former NSA analyst told investigative journalists James Risen and Eric Lichtblau that he was “trained in 2005 for a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans’ e-mail messages without court warrants.”

We do know that NSA’s STELLAR WIND and PINWALE intercept programs are giant data mining vacuum cleaners that sift emails, faxes, and text messages of millions of people in the United States. These programs are not, as the Bush and now, the Obama regime mendaciously claim, primarily “targeting al-Qaeda.”

As Cryptohippie points out in their analysis of current global surveillance trends, “an electronic police state is quiet, even unseen. All of its legal actions are supported by abundant evidence. It looks pristine.”

Answering those who claim they have “nothing to hide,” Cryptohippie argues that “state use of electronic technologies to record, organize, search and distribute forensic evidence” is primarily for use “against its citizens.”

Indeed, the information gathered by the secret state and stored in huge data warehouses scattered across the country “is criminal evidence, ready for use in a trial,” and “it is gathered universally and silently, and only later organized for use in prosecutions.”

In an Electronic Police State, every surveillance camera recording, every email you send, every Internet site you surf, every post you make, every check you write, every credit card swipe, every cell phone ping… are all criminal evidence, and they are held in searchable databases, for a long, long time. Whoever holds this evidence can make you look very, very bad whenever they care enough to do so. You can be prosecuted whenever they feel like it–the evidence is already in their database. (Cryptohippie, The Electronic Police State: 2008 National Rankings, no date)

How does this “quiet, pristine” system operate? As AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein revealed in a sworn affidavit that described how the company physically split and copied the traffic that flowed into its offices, NSA was virtually duplicating, sifting and storing the entire Internet. Klein wrote in his self-published book:

What screams out at you when examining this physical arrangement is that the NSA was vacuuming up everything flowing in the Internet stream: e-mail, web browsing, Voice-Over-Internet phone calls, pictures, streaming video, you name it. The splitter has no intelligence at all, it just makes a blind copy. There could not possibly be a legal warrant for this, since according to the 4th Amendment warrants have to be specific, “particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” …

This was a massive blind copying of the communications of millions of people, foreign and domestic, randomly mixed together. From a legal standpoint, it does not matter what they claim to throw away later in the their secret rooms, the violation has already occurred at the splitter. (Mark Klein, Wiring Up the Big Brother Machine… And Fighting It, Charleston, South Carolina: BookSurge, 2009, pp. 38-39.)

Klein’s revelations were confirmed by former NSA analyst and whistleblower Russell Tice, who told MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann in January that the NSA “had access to all Americans’ communications” and spied “24/7″ on domestic political activist groups and “U.S. news organizations and reporters and journalists.”

In demanding that the independent federal judiciary toss these cases, the Obama administration is asserting a broad interpretation of Executive Branch privileges that caused much outrage and hand-wringing by congressional Democrats–when they were out of power.

Under the “change” regime however, what were once viewed by Democrats and their supporters as prime examples of Bushist lawlessness and contempt for constitutional safeguards, are now deemed vital state secrets that “protect” the American people, even as the capitalist state wages an endless “War on Terror” to seize other people’s resources for geostrategic advantage over the competition. As Glenn Greenwald wrote:

That was the principal authoritarian instrument used by Bush/Cheney to shield itself from judicial accountability, and it is now the instrument used by the Obama DOJ to do the same. Initially, consider this: if Obama’s argument is true–that national security would be severely damaged from any disclosures about the government’s surveillance activities, even when criminal–doesn’t that mean that the Bush administration and its right-wing followers were correct all along when they insisted that The New York Times had damaged American national security by revealing the existence of the illegal NSA program? Isn’t that the logical conclusion from Obama’s claim that no court can adjudicate the legality of the program without making us Unsafe? (Glenn Greenwald, “Obama’s latest use of ’secrecy’ to shield presidential lawbreaking,” Salon, November 1, 2009)

Democrat or Republican, “liberal” or “conservative:” what matters most for all factions in Washington is the defense and preservation of the class privileges of the capitalist elite.

Criminality on such a scale requires that the armed fist of the state is mobilized and ever-vigilant; ready at the nonce to crush anyone who would challenge the prerogatives of our masters.

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

— Voltaire

Question: How many countries do you have to be at war with to be disqualified from receiving the Nobel Peace Prize?

Answer: Five. Barack Obama has waged war against only Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia. He’s holding off on Iran until he actually gets the prize.

Somalian civil society and court system are so devastated from decades of war that one wouldn’t expect its citizens to have the means to raise serious legal challenges to Washington’s apparent belief that it can drop bombs on that sad land whenever it appears to serve the empire’s needs. But a group of Pakistanis, calling themselves “Lawyers Front for Defense of the Constitution,” and remembering just enough of their country’s more civilized past, has filed suit before the nation’s High Court to make the federal government stop American drone attacks on countless innocent civilians. The group declared that a Pakistan Army spokesman claimed to have the capability to shoot down the drones, but the government had made a policy decision not to.¹

The Obama administration, like the Bush administration, behaves like the world is one big lawless Somalia and the United States is the chief warlord. On October 20 the president again displayed his deep love of peace by honoring some 80 veterans of Vietnam at the White House, after earlier awarding their regiment a Presidential Unit Citation for its “extraordinary heroism and conspicuous gallantry.”² War correspondent Michael Herr has honored Vietnam soldiers in his own way: “We took space back quickly, expensively, with total panic and close to maximum brutality. Our machine was devastating. And versatile. It could do everything but stop.”³

What would it take for the Obamaniacs to lose any of the stars in their eyes for their dear Nobel Laureate? Perhaps if the president announced that he was donating his prize money to build a monument to the First — “Oh What a Lovely” — World War? The memorial could bear the inscription: “Let us remember that Rudyard Kipling coaxed his young son John into enlisting in this war. John died his first day in combat. Kipling later penned these words:

    “If any question why we died,
    Tell them, because our fathers lied.”

“The Constitution supposes what the history of all governments demonstrates, that the executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war in the legislature.” — James Madison, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, April 2, 1798.

A wise measure, indeed, but one American president after another has dragged the nation into bloody war without the approval of Congress, the American people, international law, or world opinion. Millions marched against the war in Iraq before it began. Millions more voted for Barack Obama in the belief that he shared their repugnance for America’s Wars Without End. They had no good reason to believe this — Obama’s campaign was filled with repeated warlike threats against Iran and Afghanistan — but they wanted to believe it.

If machismo explains war, if men love war and fighting so much, why do we have to compel them with conscription on pain of imprisonment? Why do the powers-that-be have to wage advertising campaigns to seduce young people to enlist in the military? Why do young men go to extreme lengths to be declared exempt for physical or medical reasons? Why do they flee into exile to avoid the draft? Why do they desert the military in large numbers in the midst of war? Why don’t Sweden or Switzerland or Costa Rica have wars? Surely there are many macho men in those countries.

“Join the Army, visit far away places, meet interesting people, and kill them.”

War licenses men to take part in what would otherwise be described as psychopathic behavior.

“Sometimes I think it should be a rule of war that you have to see somebody up close and get to know him before you can shoot him.” — Colonel Potter, M*A*S*H

“In the struggle of Good against Evil, it’s always the people who get killed.” — Eduardo Galeano

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a Taliban leader declared that “God is on our side, and if the world’s people try to set fire to Afghanistan, God will protect us and help us.”⁴

“I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn’t do my job.” — George W. Bush, 2004, during the war in Iraq.⁵

“I believe that Christ died for my sins and I am redeemed through him. That is a source of strength and sustenance on a daily basis.” — Barack Obama.⁶

Why don’t church leaders forbid Catholics from joining the military with the same fervor they tell Catholics to stay away from abortion clinics?

God, war, the World Bank, the IMF, free trade agreements, NATO, the war on terrorism, the war on drugs, “anti-war” candidates, and Nobel Peace Prizes can be seen as simply different instruments for the advancement of US imperialism.

Tom Lehrer, the marvelous political songwriter of the 1950s and 60s, once observed: “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.” Perhaps each generation has to learn anew what a farce that prize has become, or always was. Its recipients include quite a few individuals who had as much commitment to a peaceful world as the Bush administration had to truth. One example currently in the news: Bernard Kouchner, co-founder of Medecins Sans Frontieres which won the prize in 1998. Kouchner, now France’s foreign secretary, has long been urging military action against Iran. Last week he called upon Iran to make a nuclear deal acceptable to the Western powers or else there’s no telling what horror Israel might inflict upon the Iranians. Israel “will not tolerate an Iranian bomb,” he said. “We know that, all of us.”⁷ There is a word for such a veiled threat — “extortion”, something normally associated with the likes of a Chicago mobster of the 1930s … “Do like I say and no one gets hurt.” Or as Al Capone once said: “Kind words and a machine gun will get you more than kind words alone.”

The continuing desperate quest to find something good to say about US foreign policy

Not the crazy, hateful right wing, not racist or disrupting public meetings, not demanding birth certificates … but the respectable right, holding high positions in academia and in every administration, Republican or Democrat, members of the highly esteemed Council on Foreign Relations. Here’s Joshua Kurlantzick, a “Fellow for Southeast Asia” at CFR, writing in the equally esteemed and respectable Washington Post about how — despite all the scare talk — it wouldn’t be so bad if Afghanistan actually turned into another Vietnam because “Vietnam and the United States have become close partners in Southeast Asia, exchanging official visits, building an important trading and strategic relationship and fostering goodwill between governments, businesses and people on both sides. … America did not win the war there, but over time it has won the peace. … American war veterans publicly made peace with their old adversaries … A program [to exchange graduate students and professors] could ensure that the next generation of Afghan leaders sees an image of the United States beyond that of the war.”⁸ And so on.

On second thought, this is not so much right-wing jingoism as it is … uh … y’know … What’s the word? … Ah yes, “pointless.” Just what is the point? Germany and Israel are on excellent terms … therefore, what point can we make about the Holocaust?

As to America not winning the war in Vietnam, that’s worse than pointless. It’s wrong. Most people believe that the United States lost the war. But by destroying Vietnam to its core, by poisoning the earth, the water, the air, and the gene pool for generations, the US in fact achieved its primary purpose: it left Vietnam a basket case, preventing the rise of what might have been a good development option for Asia, an alternative to the capitalist model; for the same reason the United States has been at war with Cuba for 50 years, making sure that the Cuban alternative model doesn’t look as good as it would if left in peace.

And in all the years since the Vietnam War ended, the millions of Vietnamese suffering from diseases and deformities caused by US sprayings of the deadly chemical “Agent Orange” have received from the United States no medical care, no environmental remediation, no compensation, and no official apology. That’s exactly what the Afghans — their land and/or their bodies permeated with depleted uranium, unexploded cluster bombs, and a witch’s brew of other charming chemicals — have to look forward to in Kurlantzick’s Brave New World. “If the U.S. relationship with Afghanistan eventually resembles the one we now have with Vietnam, we should be overjoyed,” he writes. God Bless America.

One further thought about Afghanistan: The suggestion that the United States could, and should, solve its (self-created) dilemma by simply getting out of that god-forsaken place is dismissed out of hand by the American government and media; even some leftist critics of US policy are reluctant to embrace so bold a step — Who knows what horror may result? But when the Soviet Union was in the process of quitting Afghanistan (during the period of May 1988-February 1989) who in the West insisted that they remain? For any reason. No matter what the consequences of their withdrawal. The reason the Russians could easier leave than the Americans can now is that the Russians were not there for imperialist reasons, such as oil and gas pipelines. Similar to why the US can’t leave Iraq.

Washington’s eternal “Cuba problem” — the one they can’t admit to

“Here we go again. I suppose old habits die hard,” said US Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, on October 28 before the General Assembly voted on the annual resolution to end the US embargo against Cuba. “The hostile language we have just heard from the Foreign Minister of Cuba,” she continued, “seems straight out of the Cold War era and is not conducive to constructive progress.” Her 949-word statement contained not a word about the embargo; not very conducive to a constructive solution to the unstated “Cuba problem,” the one about Cuba inspiring the Third World, the fear that the socialist virus would spread.

Since the early days of the Cuban Revolution assorted anti-communists and capitalist true-believers around the world have been relentless in publicizing the failures, real and alleged, of life in Cuba; each perceived shortcoming is attributed to the perceived shortcomings of socialism — It’s simply a system that can’t work, we are told, given the nature of human beings, particularly in this modern, competitive, globalized, consumer-oriented world.

In response to such criticisms, defenders of Cuban society have regularly pointed out how the numerous draconian sanctions imposed by the United States since 1960 have produced many and varied scarcities and sufferings and are largely responsible for most of the problems pointed out by the critics. The critics, in turn, say that this is just an excuse, one given by Cuban apologists for every failure of their socialist system. However, it would be very difficult for the critics to prove their point. The United States would have to drop all sanctions and then we’d have to wait long enough for Cuban society to make up for lost time and recover what it was deprived of, and demonstrate what its system can do when not under constant assault by the most powerful force on earth.

In 1999, Cuba filed a suit against the United States for $181.1 billion in compensation for economic losses and loss of life during the first 39 years of this aggression. The suit held Washington responsible for the death of 3,478 Cubans and the wounding and disabling of 2,099 others. In the ten years since, these figures have of course all increased. The sanctions, in numerous ways large and small, make acquiring many kinds of products and services from around the world much more difficult and expensive, often impossible; frequently, they are things indispensable to Cuban medicine, transportation or industry; simply transferring money internationally has become a major problem for the Cubans, with banks being heavily punished by the United States for dealing with Havana; or the sanctions mean that Americans and Cubans can’t attend professional conferences in each other’s country.

These examples are but a small sample of the excruciating pain inflicted by Washington upon the body, soul and economy of the Cuban people.

For years American political leaders and media were fond of labeling Cuba an “international pariah.” We don’t hear much of that any more. Perhaps one reason is the annual vote in the General Assembly on the resolution, which reads: “Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba”. This is how the vote has gone:

How it began, from State Department documents: Within a few months of the Cuban revolution of January 1959, the Eisenhower administration decided “to adjust all our actions in such a way as to accelerate the development of an opposition in Cuba which would bring about a change in the Cuban Government, resulting in a new government favorable to U.S. interests.”⁹

On April 6, 1960, Lester D. Mallory, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, wrote in an internal memorandum: “The majority of Cubans support Castro … The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship. … every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba.” Mallory proposed “a line of action which … makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”¹⁰ Later that year, the Eisenhower administration instituted the suffocating embargo.

1. The Nation (Pakistan English-language daily newspaper), October 10, 2009.
2. Washington Post, October 20, 2009.
3. Michael Herr, Dispatches (1991), p.71.
4. New York Daily News, September 19, 2001.
5. Washington Post, July 20, 2004, p.15, citing the New Era (Lancaster, PA), from a private meeting of Bush with Amish families on July 9. The White House denied that Bush had said it. (Those Amish folks do lie a lot you know.)
6. Washington Post, August 17, 2008.
7. Daily Telegraph (UK), October 26, 2009.
8. Washington Post, October 25, 2009.
9. Department of State, “Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958-1960, Volume VI, Cuba” (1991), p.742.
10. Ibid., p.885

Some might say I sound like a demagogue. When you are used to insipid soundbytes and P.C.-fluff, the truth starts sounding like demagoguery. The fact of the matter is that the truth is extraordinarily painful in this country ruled by a peculiar Victorian fetish of the marketplace. Nowhere in the civilized world could one imagine civic leaders fear mongering the populace about the evils of “socialized medicine” without getting laughed out of the country. Unfortunately, these goons of capitalist oppression seem to have been collectively laughed out of the civilized world and into Land of the Free.

Nonetheless, the problem is not this visceral minority. The problem lies in those that pretend to befriend progress: that grand, archaic organ of political oppression called the Democratic Party. This increasingly irrelevant union of crooks, hucksters and swindlers has betrayed the American people beyond recognition. Their failure to enact meaningful health care reform must be the last straw.

From the beginning of the current “health reform” debacle, the game was rigged. Immediately, the only meaningful reform, “single payer,” was taken off the table, and progressives were told to rally behind a “strong public option” by Democratic front groups like Moveon.org and Health Care for America Now (HCAN). These two NGO’s organized numerous “rallies” in order to command a feeble subservience to the Democratic leadership ahead of their caving to corporate interests on the issue.

Meanwhile, single-payer activists were placed in the precarious position of having to advocate against the meaningless and amorphous “strong public option” and the tea-baggers all at once. In a country so dominated by trivial soundbytes, you have to be either “for or against” everything: no shades of gray, no third way. Unfortunately, many progressives got caught in the trap and started rallying behind a bill (Obama’s Health Care Bill HR 3200) that no one knew anything about. This clever catch all was meant to accomplish exactly that: institute no meaningful reform while tricking a significant portion of progressives into thinking that we were now seeing “The change we can believe in.”

Nonetheless, single-payer activists were thrown a couple bones. One was a promise of a vote on the “Weiner Amendment” on the house floor. This amendment would have replaced the current bill with HR 676: the single-payer bill. The other, more meaningful bone was the “Kucinich Amendment,” which would have lifted loopholes that prevent individual states from enacting single-payer legislation. This approach seemed more tactically sound than expecting much of an up-down vote on single-payer on the house floor. The Canadian health system was enacted province-by-province, and it seemed reasonable to expect the same here: the more “enlightened” states lead the way, attract a significant spike in businesses fleeing other states so as to cut health expenses, and gradually the states fall like dominoes.

Kucinich told a crowd in Aurora, IL this summer to focus on his amendment. He informed us that the Single-Payer vote (Weiner Amendment) was a smoke screen doomed to failure because of the lack of adequate time to organize sufficiently for the vote.

I then attended several organizing meetings and stressed the need to emphasize the Kucinich Amendment as the most tactically prescient step forward for single-payer activists. I suggested that people not bite the Weiner amendment bait. As a veteran of the NGO industrial complex, I saw the Weiner Amendment for what it was: a chance for progressive Democrats and single-payer NGO’s to claim victory (just by bringing the issue to a vote), and to thus muster some fund-raising. I could picture the fund-raising letter: “Dear Single-Payer Activist, today we scored a major victory in the House of Representatives by bringing Single Payer Health Care to a vote for the first time. But there remains a lot of work to be done in order to win the vote in the future. Please help us in this mission by donating today.”

Unfortunately, many activists bit the bait. Action alert after action alert instructed people to call their reps and urge them on the Weiner Amendment.

In the end, both the Kucinich and Weiner amendments were removed from consideration by house leadership this past week. Meanwhile, Democratic cheerleaders have been trumpeting the success at instituting a “public option” in both the House and Senate versions of the health reform bill. The proposed public option will cover about 3% of the population, while roughly 33% of Americans are un- or under-insured. Many progressive democrats inform me that this is the best we can realistically do given the conservative dynamics of the American populace. I don’t understand what American populace they are talking about. As someone who goes out to the bungalow belt of Chicago to knock on doors practically everyday, I can say with full confidence that only an insignificant wacko minority is repelled by the thought of “Medicare for all.” Perhaps we can figure out a way to leave those few people out when we finally do institute a single-payer system.

Progressive leaders have fallen to the right of the American people. Americans crave and need meaningful health care reform in line with the remainder of the civilized world. They crave and need leadership in Washington that stands for the interests of their constituents: leaders that aren’t fearful of lifting their heads above the fray, pounding their fists on the podium and declaring “It is time we shut this racket down. Let us throw the insurance companies into the dustbin of history once and for all, and end this domestic terrorism that kills 45,000 Americans a year!”

Unfortunately, to get to this point, we are going to have to purge the Congress of almost every last one of its members, and stop thinking that the Democrats or the NGO industrial complex will ever bring Americans their cherished Medicare-for-all.

In the context of the conflict in and over Palestine that became Israel, what those best interests are can be summarised in two sentences. America, on account of its unconditional support for the Zionist state and its contempt for international law, has made enemies of many if not most of the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims. A change of American policy that required Israel to behave in accordance with international law would convert almost all Arabs and most other Muslims into friends and allies of America. (I agree that America’s unconditional support for Israel right-or-wrong is not the only cause of the hurt, humiliation and anger that drives Arab and other Muslim anti-Americanism, but the Palestine problem is the cancer at the heart of international affairs, and a cure for it would make many other problems more manageable).

From the perspective summarised above, it can be said that Jewish Americans, all of them not just the 25% or thereabouts who are cannon fodder for the Zionist lobby in its various manifestations, have real political power, actually more democratic power if those choose to exercise it than AIPAC can mobilize by playing the fear card. On 9 November, when he addresses the General Assembly of The United Jewish Communities (UJC), to be known from then on as The Jewish Federations of North America, President Obama has the opportunity to speak truth to that power (or at least a very significant number of its representatives).

If I was writing Obama’s speech for that occasion I would have him say this:

To make peace in the Middle East on terms that provide security for Israel and an acceptable amount of justice for the Palestinians, I need two irrevocable, good faith commitments of intent – one from the Arab and wider Muslim world, the other from Israel.

In headline terms, the irrevocable commitment I need from the Arab and wider Muslim world comes down to this. In return for an end to Israeli occupation of all Arab land captured in 1967, it will make a full and final peace with Israel and establish normal state-to-state relations.

The irrevocable commitment I need from Israel comes down to this. In return for the Arab and wider Muslim world’s commitment of intent, Israel commits to withdrawing its military forces and settlers to the borders as they were on 4 June 1967, to make the space, on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, for the creation of a viable Palestinian state.

Of course the headlines don’t tell the whole story. It includes the fact that there is a Saudi-inspired peace plan that’s been on the table since its adoption by an Arab summit in Beirut in 2002. It comes close to the irrevocable commitment I am seeking from the Arab and wider Muslim world, but Barack Obama the honest broker has to say this about it. Under two headings, that peace plan requires some clarification and amendment if it is to be transformed into the commitment I need.

1. The Arab peace plan calls for “the achievement of a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem to be agreed upon in accordance with UN General Assembly Resolution 194.” That resolution, passed on 11 December 1948, declares that all Palestinian refugees wishing to return to their homes and live in peace with their neighbours “should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date“. It also declares that “compensation should be paid for the property of those not wishing to return“.

Sixty years on it could be said, and I do say, that it’s more than reasonable for all Palestinians who were dispossessed of their homes, their land and their rights to have the expectation of returning in accordance with Resolution 194, which itself is in accordance with international law. But as things are today, it’s not a practical proposition. If there was no limit to the number of Palestinians who returned, the Jews of an Israel inside its borders as they were on 4 June 1967 would be out-numbered by Arabs; and, if Israel remained a democracy, it would be voted out of existence. As some might put it, an unlimited return would lead to the “de-Zionisation” of Israel, “the end of Zionism’s colonial enterprise”. No Israeli government is ever going to agree to that. I therefore suggest that the commitment of intent I am seeking from the Arab and wider Muslim world should declare that the Palestinian right of return will be limited to the Palestinian state of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and that those Palestinians wanting to return and who cannot be accommodated will be cash compensated.

I wish to add here my own recognition of the fact that such a solution to the Palestinian refugee problem would be far from ideal. It would require the Palestinians to settle for something considerably less than full and complete justice. But they have to be realistic.

2. The Arab peace plan calls for the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state “with East Jerusalem as its capital”. In the context of the history of the conflict and appropriate UN resolutions for a solution to it, that’s a perfectly reasonable proposition. However, a possible implication is that the Jerusalem of the peace the Arabs want will be divided. I think the prospects for a real and lasting peace would be best served by Jerusalem being an open, undivided city and the capital of two states. I would therefore like to see a statement to that effect in the commitment of intent I am seeking from the Arab and wider Muslim world.

Now let me share a private thought with you. During my presidency to date there have been moments when I wondered if I was naive and possibly even stupid to have had “Yes, we can!” as my campaign slogan. On some of the problems I am dealing with, the jury in my own mind is still out, but not on the matter of making peace in the Middle East. If I get the two commitments of intent I am seeking, I can and will do it!

I would also have the President anticipate and address one key question (actually the key question). Suppose you get the commitment you seek from the Arab and wider Muslim world but not from Israel. What will you do then?

I would have President Obama answer as follows.

When I met briefly with Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Abbas in September, I said to them, “We must all take risks for peace”. In the event of it becoming clear that Israel is the obstacle to peace, I would take a risk.

The first duty of any president is to protect America’s best interests. I have to tell you very frankly that it would not be in America’s best interests to go on giving unconditional support to an Israel that had been shown itself to be the obstacle to peace – peace on terms which, in my view, would be accepted with relief by any rational government and people in Israel. Some commentators have said that the name of the game is “saving Israel from itself”. In my assessment that’s not the whole game but it is an important part of it.

In the event of Israel not be willing, for a real and lasting peace, to commit to withdraw from all Arab land it occupied in 1967, I would seek to prevail upon Congress to enable me to use all the leverage the United States has to oblige Israel to do what is required of it by the spirit as well as the letter of UN resolutions representing the will of the organised international community and international law.

Though much denied, it is true that the lobby which supports Israel right-wrong has had enough influence in Congress to block policy initiatives that were not to Israel’s liking. If necessary I would seek to counter that influence by personally lobbying each and every member of Congress. I would ask them all a very simple question – Are you an American first or a supporter if only by default of a foreign power? And if still I was blocked, I would go over the heads of Congress and appeal directly to all my fellow Americans. I would ask them to play their part in calling and holding their elected representatives to account in order to make our democracy work for justice and peace.

If I had to go down that road, I would hope to have the support of the vast majority of my Jewish fellow Americans. Your response to me here today will give me a first indication of whether or not that hope would be justified.

Because I came to this meeting determined to be completely honest about my own thoughts and feelings, there is more I must say.

In my view there is no bigger threat to the security of America and all Americans than continuing and unending conflict in the Middle East and the hatreds it fuels in the region and far beyond. And that’s why national security adviser James Jones told “J” Street’s first conference that advancing the Israel-Palestinian peace process is the “epicenter” of U.S. foreign policy. He put it this way: “If there was one problem I could recommend to the president if he could solve only one problem, this would be it. Bringing about an Israel-Palestinian peace agreement would create ripples around the world. The reverse is not true. This is the epicenter.”

When I spoke recently in Hackensack I called for the cynics and skeptics to be cast aside to prove that “leaders who do what’s right and what’s hard will be rewarded not rejected”. On that occasion I was appealing for understanding of Jon Corzine in his bid for re-election to the governorship of New Jersey, and for him to be rewarded not rejected. Today I can tell you that the time may be coming when I will have to make that same appeal on behalf of myself. And this is why.

If it became apparent that Israel is the obstacle to peace, and if then I was prevented from using the necessary leverage to bring an intransigent Israel to its senses, I would resign. As I said earlier, the first duty of any president is to protect America’s best interests. If I was not allowed to do that, I would see no point in being president.

I wish to add only this. It’s time to stop regarding politics as “the art of the possible”. That’s a cover for the politics of expediency which are taking us and the whole world to hell. It’s also time to recognise that “Yes, we can” is not an urgent enough call to action. With a number of problems threatening the wellbeing and perhaps even the survival of humankind, we need to regard politics as the art of doing what must be done if our children wherever they live are to have a future worth having. And our call to action should be “Yes, we must!”

If anybody who reads what I have written above has a way of drawing it to President Obama’s attention, please do so.

Part 2 after Obama has spoken.

Footnote: As I prepare to post this article, Secretary of State Clinton, is saying that peace talks (about talks) will go ahead “with or without a freeze on settlements”. I find myself wondering if that is a two-fingered gesture from her to Obama as well as to the Palestinians.

Doppelganger theorists point out that Kim suffered a serious stroke in 2008. But since then, North Korean media reported 122 official visits he made to “factories, state-run farms, military bases and the rest… to prove, presumably, that Mr. Kim was alive and well and very much in charge.”

Which possibility is less likely? That Kim made a miraculous recovery and adopted a grueling ceremonial schedule? Or that a stand-in cut the ribbons and took the bows? Cynics point out that Mr. Clinton himself has not been real since sometime in the 1980s, when he was replaced by an unprincipled testosterone-driven opportunist.

We should not be surprised that international diplomacy is now the practice of surrogates. Many of our military functions are subcontracted to Blackwater, Halliburton and other branches of Murder, Inc. We outsource torture and invade countries with (often mis) guided missiles. We live in the wondrous age of clones and drones.

Our political discourse is as synthetic as the foods we eat, driven by a demagogic logic that bears scant relation to reality. Our print and broadcast pundits prefer to generate outrageous headlines for a quick ratings spike than to craft helpful or thoughtful commentary. Hence the (oxy)moronic “Fox News” network. Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly are as authentic and toxic as Kim Jong-il, alive or dead.

Television substitutes for millions of “personal” lives. Celebrities act as stand-ins for those who would rather watch than live. Sports and movie stars are grotesquely overpaid because mass audiences find it easier and more comforting to cheer and jeer for designated others than to puzzle out their own, less predictable, existences.

Our addictions to chemical additives and fast food in lieu of natural nutrients make us fat. Our addictions to trash talk and the mindless incitements of half-educated pundits and politicians degrade our mental and emotional functions. We are increasingly unable to differentiate garbage calories from natural energy or malignant chat from substantive civil discourse.

Advertisements once cautioned us to “Accept no substitutes.” But substitutes are mostly what we have now. Was the man who ran for president on a platform of positive change and moral responsibility abducted during his pre-inaugural trip to Hawaii? Was he replaced by the business-as-usual guy now in the White House, who bears an uncanny physical resemblance to Barack Obama?

Birthers who obsess about Obama’s citizenship are sniffing at the wrong fireplug. It’s not where Obama was born that matters, but where he went.

Alexis de Tocqueville warned in the 1830s that a standing army was a threat to democratic society. We now have one of the largest standing armies in world history. Military priorities supersede our increasingly critical social and civic needs. We squander our resources and terrorize innocent human beings by bombing Afghan villages instead of building schools and highways in our own country or providing health care for our citizens.

War is not a valid substitute for rational foreign or domestic policies. Where is the president, the politician or the pundit who will say so?

In a world of surrogates, substitutes and clones, a body-double for Kim Jong-il is not so scandalous. The original dictator – son of another dictator – did not seem all that fabulous a fellow anyway. So it’s hard to mourn his passing, or lament that phonies may be impersonating him.

In fact, maybe whoever’s pulling the strings could design a more humane model of Kim for the coming decades. Then we could follow their lead and improve all the ersatz bull dada which rules our own culture and our own lives.