I have always been revolted by the outward equanimity of the power elite. It sits smiling atop domestic and global institutions that produce monumental human suffering like evening produces darkness.
The dawning of the Age of Obama will not change this.
GOOD TIMES ON CAPITOL HILL
A picture, the saying goes, is worth a thousand words. On the front page of last Tuesday’s New York Times, you can see United State House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi sitting with a giant grin between a smiling President-Elect and the grinning Republican Representative John A. Boehner. U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid gazes into the distance with a look of contentment and victory.
They had gathered to discuss what Mr. Equanimity himself, Barack Obama, called a “very sick” economy. They would never say it but their subject was a state-capitalist corporate system acting in accord with its institutional DNA by inflicting enormous material pain on working and lower class people. Many of those people – already in precarious straits before the onset of the latest recession (this one truly “epic” ((See Jack Rasmus, “Epic Recession Revisited,” Z Magazine (January 2009): 29-34. Rasmus lays out 10 points that make the current recession atypically “epic” and therefore capable of deepening into a legitimate depression: duration, depth, debt, deflation, defaults, financial credit instability, monetary policy, fiscal policy, currency instability, synchronized globality.)) two Decembers ago – are being pushed into destitution by a system Obama (a leading Wall Street bailout-supporter who proclaims that “I love free markets”) and the rest of the political class are sworn and duty-bound to defend.
Meanwhile, the rich and powerful Few who provide most of the above politicians’ campaign funding – like George W. Bush in 2004, presidential candidate Obama received just a quarter of his campaign finance haul from small donors – continue to enjoy lives of spectacular opulence. The world is mired in savage socioeconomic disparity and plutocracy, careening toward an intimately related ecological collapse because the Few want it that way. ((See Herve Kempf, How the Rich Are Destroying the Earth (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2007), dedicated among other things to the proposition that we cannot meaningfully defend our gravely threatened biosphere (livable ecology) without confronting the deadly and unjust concentration of economic and political power in the hands of the Western capitalist oligarchy.))
The smiles are even bigger on p. A15, where Times photographer Doug Mills captured millionaires Obama, Joe Biden, and Reid appearing to enjoy an especially delicious inside joke. Good times on Capitol Hill.
On p. A16 we see a bemused looking Bill Richardson speaking to reporters about the collapse of his bid to head the plutocratic U.S. Commerce Department.
On p. A17 it’s a smiling Obama again, standing next to his smiling wife Michelle while talking to their daughters about their first day at the posh private Sidwell Friends School .
Below this photo there’s a story reporting that Mr. Equanimity “has raised more than $24 million for his inauguration so far, much of it with single checks of $25,000 or $50,000 from executives from Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Hollywood as from former supporters of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.” We see pleasant photos of four top donors, including international mega-billionaire George Soros, Hollywood uber-mogul Stephen Spielberg, and Hollywood superstar Halle Berry.
“While the inauguration committee bars money from corporations,” the Times reports, “it accepts money from corporate executives …Top executives from Microsoft, for example, have given $300,000 and those from Google have given $150,000.”
Nice. More good times are on the way for the powers that be. But something tells me that a large number of social workers and related nonprofit human service providers could think of some better uses for $24 million right now in America ’s many poor communities.
THREE SMALL CHILDREN “KILLED BY AN ISRAELI TANK SHELL”
There were some different imagery and information to process on page A8 in last Tuesday Times. Down at the bottom, that page contained a disturbing picture snapped by Mahmud Hams of the Agence France-Presse in the open-air prison that is the Gaza Strip, where 80 percent of the population subsists on less than $2 a day under apartheid and siege conditions imposed by Israel .
Hams’ shot makes me want to wipe the self-satisfied grins off the faces of Obama, Reid, Pelosi and the countless other U.S. politicians who underline “support for Israel ” on their ruling-class resumes.
It shows a Palestinian man being restrained by two other men. He is kneeling over the dead bodies of three very small children – his two sons and a nephew. The children, the photo caption matter-of-factly reports, were “killed by an Israeli tank shell early Monday.” Note the deletion of murderous human agency: the ordnance did the dirty work, not the state of Israel and its U.S. sponsor and supplier.
An accompanying Times story briefly and bloodlessly reports how a Palestinian family was ordered last Sunday by Israeli troops to evacuate their building for another one. This they did, moving in with relatives. Tragically, eleven members of their extended family were killed at six on Monday morning when “a missile fired by an Israeli airplane struck the relatives’ house.” Again note the omission of human and political agency.
Above this sickening story – just one small part of a U.S.-supported Israel attack that has butchered many hundreds of Palestinian civilians ((There are many other terrible incidents. Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported one Gaza story from shortly before midnight on Sunday, December 28. That’s when “Israeli warplanes fired one or more missiles at the Imad Aqil mosque in Jabalya, a densely populated refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip. The attack killed five of Anwar Balousha’s daughters who were sleeping in a bedroom of their nearby house: Jawaher, 4; Dina, 8; Samar , 12; Ikram, 14; and Tahrir, 18… ‘We were asleep and we woke to the sound of bombing and the rubble falling on the house and on our heads,’ Anwar Balousha told Human Rights Watch.”
An hour or so after, an Israeli Blackhawk fired two missiles into the Rafah refugee camp. One struck the home of the al-Absi family, killing three brothers – Sedqi, 3, Ahmad, 12, and Muhammad, 13 – and wounding two sisters and the children’s mother. See Human Rights Watch, “Israel/Hamas: Civilians Must Not be Targets,” December 30, 2008.)) – we see a picture taken by Mohammed Salem of Reuters. Its shows two discouraged Palestinian women who “took refuge in a United Nations school as Israel ’s offensive continued with artillery, helicopter and tank fire.” Was this perhaps the same UN school that Israel demolished on Tuesday, killing more than 40 children?
Obama absurdly maintains that “institutional constraints” prevent him from commenting on the Gaza situation (“one president at a time”) even as he gives televised proto-presidential speeches on the economy.
THE NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL BOARD TIMES WEIGHS IN
Last Tuesday, the New York Times editorial board (NYTEB) said that it “sympathized” with Israel ’s goal of silencing “Hamas rockets that have terrorized its people for years.” The NYTEB blamed Hamas for “ending a six month cease-fire.”
But Israel , as the Israeli dissident group Gus Shalom noted, broke the truce by firing missiles into Gaza on the evening of the U.S. presidential election. ((Gush Shalom, “The War in Gaza – Vicious Folly of a Bankrupt Government,” (December 29, 2008).))
As the Times could never acknowledge, moreover, Israel is a much bigger terrorist than Hamas. It has killed 600 or more Palestinians in less than a week while just 17 Israelis have been killed by Palestinian rockets over the last seven years. The “Israel-Palestine conflict” is a rather asymmetrical affair.
The NYTEB worried that Israel ’s assault, if not tempered, could increase Hamas’ popularity and alienate “moderate Arab states” (“moderate” is an interesting description to apply to the arch-repressive neo-feudal U.S. client-state Saudi Arabia ).
The NYTEB expressed “understand[ing]” for “Mr. Obama’s decision to leave the current crisis to President Bush.”
The NYTEB was concerned, finally, that the attack “will also make it harder for President-elect Barack Obama to pick up the pieces of peacemaking when he takes office on January 20.”
The NYTEB voiced no concern over the immoral criminality of Israel ’s absurdly disproportionate response. It said nothing about:
- The four ways in which Israel’s policies and actions violate the Geneva Convention: (i) the imposition of collective punishment on the whole Gaza population for actions of a few militants; (ii) the targeting, both explicit (as with schools, police stations and television broadcast centers) and inadvertent (but unavoidable), of civilians; (iii) disproportionate “response;” iv) failing to ensure adequate food and medical supplies to the subject population – a leading requirement of occupying powers ((Marjorie Cohn, “Israel ’s Collective Punishment of Gaza,” ZNet Commentary (January 7, 2008).))
- The continuing siege and starvation of many of Gaza’s 1.5 million ghettoized inhabitants, who live in conditions of abject misery that make “anti-Israel” “extremism” less than surprising within and beyond the occupied territories of Palestine.
- Israel ’s criminal interference with the Palestinians’ right to choose their own elected officials.
- How the U.S. Human Rights and Security Assistance Act requires ending military aid to states that consistent violate internationally recognized human rights.
- How the U.S. Arms Export Control Act prohibits U.S. weapons from being used for any purpose other than national self-defense inside the borders of the arms-receiving nation (Israel has done much of its Arab-killing with weapons supplied by its leading sponsor and protector the United States, which provides its top Middle East client state with F-16s, Black Hawk Attack Helicopters and other materials).
The Times also expressed no concern over the fact that Obama would seem to be a poor candidate for even-handed “peacemaking” in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Mr. Equanimity’s pronounced reluctance to rock the imperial boat and question conventional U.S. foreign policy wisdom ((See Paul Street, Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008), Chapter 4, titled “How ‘Antiwar?’ Obama , Iraq , and the Audacity of Empire;” Paul Street, “There is No Peace Dividend: Reflections on Empire, Inequality, and ‘Brand Obama,’” Z Magazine (January 2009): 24-28.)) has been sharply evident in his statements and actions relating to Israel-Palestine. As a U.S. Senator and presidential candidate, Obama has gone to practically grotesque lengths to demonstrate support for Israel’s government on nearly every important policy matter (including Israel’s aerial murder of more than 800 people, mostly civilians, in Lebanon in the summer of 2006) relating to Palestinian issues. ((For details, see Stephen Zunes, “Barack Obama and the Middle East,” Foreign Policy in Focus, January 10, 2008;
Ali Abunimah, “How Barack Obama Learned to Love Israel,” Electronic Infitada (March 4, 2007);
Ali Abunimah, “What Obama Missed in the Middle East,” Electronic Intifada, 24 July 2008;
Paul Street , “Obama-Gaza: No Surprise,” ZNet Sustainer Commentary (January 4, 2009);
“Prepared Text of Barack Obama’s Speech for the AIPAC Policy Forum,” March 2, 2007; Obama Letter to UN Ambassador (January 2008);
Agence France-Presse, “Jerusalem Must Remain the Undivided Capital of Israel: Obama,” June 4, 2008.))
DAVID BROOKS’ “GAME” AND THE “RECUPERATIVE POWER OF DEMOCRACY”
Last Tuesday’s New York Times also included a despicable opinion piece by the Republican Obama-fan and Times columnist David Brooks. ((David Brooks, “The Confidence War,” New York Times, January 6, 2009, A21.)) “By trial and error,” Brooks proclaimed, “ Israel is learning to keep an even keel” – a nauseating statement (typically enough for Brooks) amidst that nation’s ongoing butchery in Gaza .
Brooks considered the Israel-Hamas “game” – yes, his term: “game” – to be not “a war of attrition. It’s a struggle for confidence, a series of psychological exchanges designed to shift the balance of morale. The material destroyed in an episode can be replaced, but the psychological effects are more lasting. What is really important is how each episode ends, because the ending defines the meaning – who mastered events and who was mastered by them.”
Brooks praised “Israeli leaders” for having “adjusted to the new game with the new rules. The initial incursion into Gaza was an effective display of prowess. According to The Jerusalem Report, in the first wave, 80 Israeli planes hit more than 100 targets and nearly all of the Hamas military compounds within 3 minutes 40 seconds. The I.D.F. has clearly addressed many of the weaknesses exposed by the Winograd Commission, ((The Winograd Commission was an Israeli government-appointed agency set up to investigate the failures of Israeli military policy during Israel’s savage bombing of Lebanon in the summer of 2006 – an action that was widely understood to have damaged Israel’s status in the Middle East and the world.)) showing the recuperative powers a democracy is capable of.”
Yes, what a wonderful testament to “the recuperative powers” of “democracy” that “even-keel[ed]” Israel could launch a monumentally criminal assault on poor and defenseless Arabs it was already starving to death!
I wonder if Brooks would like to talk to the grieving parents of Palestinian children murdered by Israel about how “material destroyed in an episode can be replaced.”
Would he like to discuss with them “the lasting psychological effects” of seeing your children blown to bits by U.S.-delivered F-16s piloted by Top Guns from the Israeli “Defense” Forces?
David Brooks is an offense against humanity, thanks in part to blithering, egg-headed equanimity with which he relentlessly transmits the deadly doctrines of the rich and powerful. Still, he is representative of the establishment institutions that employ him (the New York Times and the “Public” Broadcasting System) and of the broader political class of which he is a dutiful and smiling part.
One of our many jobs as citizens is to wipe the happy know-it-all smiles off our privileged masters’ faces. Their oblivious sense of composure is offensive in light of the stunning misery they inflict at home and abroad. Still, it’s our fault to no small extent. We the People let them take pleasure in illegitimate wealth and power when we should be preparing their abolition and otherwise scaring the living Hell and equanimity out of them.