Israel's Netanyahu Says He Can Work With Obama

Tuesday 31 March 2009

by: Richard Boudreaux

The Obama administration wants a freeze on settlement growth, a line that points to a serious potential conflict. Netanyahu's coalition includes the ultranationalist Israel Is Our Home party, which agreed to join his government in return for the promise of 3,000 new homes in the West Bank and the appointment of its leader, Avigdor Lieberman, as Israel's foreign minister. ...

Netanyahu served in [Ehud] Barak's elite commando unit in the 1970s, and the two get along well. Barak supports such U.S. interests as an engagement with Syria and a cease-fire with Hamas.

But Barak reinforces a view that could lead Netanyahu to a clash with Washington. The two former commandos share a conviction that Iran's nuclear program and regional ambitions pose an existential threat that could well prompt Israel to take military action if diplomacy fails.

Syria Calling

The Obama Administration’s chance to engage in a Middle East peace.

by Seymour Hersh

A senior White House official confirmed that the Obama transition team had been informed in advance of Carter's trip to Syria, and that Carter met with Obama shortly before the Inauguration. The two men-Obama was accompanied only by David Axelrod, the President's senior adviser, who helped arrange the meeting; and Carter by his wife, Rosalynn-discussed the Middle East for an hour. Carter declined to discuss his meeting with Obama, but he did write in an e-mail that he hoped the new President "would pursue a wide-ranging dialogue as soon as possible with the Assad government." An understanding between Washington and Damascus, he said, "could set the stage for successful Israeli-Syrian talks."

The Obama transition team also helped persuade Israel to end the bombing of Gaza and to withdraw its ground troops before the Inauguration. According to the former senior intelligence official, who has access to sensitive information, "Cheney began getting messages from the Israelis about pressure from Obama" when he was President-elect. Cheney, who worked closely with the Israeli leadership in the lead-up to the Gaza war, portrayed Obama to the Israelis as a "pro-Palestinian," who would not support their efforts (and, in private, disparaged Obama, referring to him at one point as someone who would "never make it in the major leagues"). But the Obama team let it be known that it would not object to the planned resupply of "smart bombs" and other high-tech ordnance that was already flowing to Israel. "It was Jones"-retired Marine General James Jones, at the time designated to be the President's national-security adviser-"who came up with the solution and told Obama, ‘You just can't tell the Israelis to get out.' " (General Jones said that he could not verify this account; Cheney's office declined to comment.)

U-20: Will the Global Economy Resurface?

by Walden Bello

The current crisis is a grand opportunity to craft a new system that ends not just the failed system of neoliberal global governance but the Euro-American domination of the capitalist global economy, and put in its place a more decentralized, deglobalized, democratic post-capitalist order. Unless this more fundamental restructuring takes place, the global economy might not be worth bringing back to the surface.

Obama's Domino Theory

by Juan Cole

The U.S. is not, contrary to what the president said, mainly fighting "al-Qaida" in Afghanistan. In blaming everything on al-Qaida, Obama broke with his pledge of straight talk to the public and fell back on Bush-style boogeymen and implausible conspiracy theories.

Debunking the Rationale for War in Afghanistan

by Gareth Porter

Three Bad Assumptions

Why the Geithner Plan Will Fail

By PATRICK MADDEN

Robert Brenner:

The basic source of today’s crisis is the declining vitality of the advanced economies since 1973, and, especially, since 2000. Economic performance in the U.S., Western Europe, and Japan has steadily deteriorated, business cycle by business cycle, in terms of every standard macroeconomic indicator -- GDP, investment, real wages, and so forth. Most telling, the business cycle that just ended, from 2001 through 2007, was -- by far -- the weakest of the postwar period, and this despite the greatest government-sponsored economic stimulus in U.S. peacetime history.

Madden sums it up:

The coming year will witness three interrelated pressures put on the dollar. The first will be the current account gap, the second the enormous expansion of the money supply that will result from the bailout plan, and the third are the gargantuan budget deficits projected by the Obama administration- already estimated at $1.75 trillion for 2009.

The Geithner plan assumes that the toxic assets that the banks hold can be detoxified to re-start lending; it assumes that there is no problem with the fundamentals of the global economy; and it assumes that China and the rest of the world will have the patience and the political will to allow the US to print money at astonishing rates in order to keep the system afloat. Maybe this is not impossible, but it is extremely unlikely.

The Real Economy

People of Color and the Depression:

Our Collapsing Economy

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

Real unemployment rate is closer to 18%

Some say foreign policy is made on the op-ed page of the NYT...

The Fierce Urgency of Peace

By ROGER COHEN

Pressure on President Obama to recast the failed American approach to Israel-Palestine is building from former senior officials whose counsel he respects...

The 10 signatories — of both the four-page letter and the report — include Volcker himself, former national security advisers Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, former Senator Chuck Hagel, former World Bank President James Wolfensohn, former U.S. Trade Representative Carla Hills, former Congressman Lee Hamilton and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Thomas Pickering.

My understanding is their thinking coincides in significant degree with that of both George Mitchell, Obama’s Middle East envoy, and Gen. James Jones, Obama’s national security adviser who worked on security issues with Israelis and Palestinians in the last year of the Bush administration, an often frustrating experience.

DEA raids pot dispensary in SF

Rachel Gordon, Chronicle Staff Writer

Federal agents raided a medical marijuana dispensary in San Francisco Wednesday, a week after U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder signaled that the Obama administration would not prosecute distributors of pot used for medicinal purposes that operate under sanction of state law.

U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents raided Emmalyn's California Cannabis Clinic at 1597 Howard St. in San Francisco's South of Market district mid-afternoon...

Thirteen years ago, California became the first of more than a dozen states to legalize medical marijuana, although federal law still prohibits its use.

The Fall of the Towers of Wall Street

Capitalism From the Standpoint of Its Victims

By M. SHAHID ALAM

My students – like most Americans – have been conditioned to look at capitalism from the standpoint of the winners in global capitalism. Because of the accident of birth, they have been the beneficiaries of the wealth and power that global capitalism concentrates at the nodes of the system. They cannot conceive how a system that has worked so well for them could produce misery for others in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
...

Americans have been subjected to acts of ‘terrorism’ whose final human toll will make September 11 look like a tea party. The perpetrators of this terror are all homegrown; they were trained not in the mountains of Afghanistan but at Harvard, Yale and Stanford; the bankers, executives and legislators who preyed on Americans are the crème de la crème of American society.

...

As growing segments of high-wage workers in the rich countries become the new victims of capitalism, will they slowly learn to see capitalism from the standpoint of its victims? In this new emerging reality, will orthodox economics migrate from its old centers in London, Cambridge and Chicago to new centers in Bangalore and Beijing?

A curious world this will be when seen from the old centers. In truth, this will only be a long-delayed correction to two centuries of unequal development, dominated by Western centers. Sadly, the correction will not go far enough: it will leave much of the world mired in poverty and disease.

America Is in Need of a Moral Bailout

by Chris Hedges

We live in an age of moral nihilism. We have trashed our universities, turning them into vocational factories that produce corporate drones and chase after defense-related grants and funding. The humanities, the discipline that forces us to stand back and ask the broad moral questions of meaning and purpose, that challenges the validity of structures, that trains us to be self-reflective and critical of all cultural assumptions, have withered. Our press, which should promote such intellectual and moral questioning, confuses bread and circus with news and refuses to give a voice to critics who challenge not this bonus payment or that bailout but the pernicious superstructure of the corporate state itself. We kneel before a cult of the self, elaborately constructed by the architects of our consumer society, which dismisses compassion, sacrifice for the less fortunate, and honesty. The methods used to attain what we want, we are told by reality television programs, business schools and self-help gurus, are irrelevant. Success, always defined in terms of money and power, is its own justification. The capacity for manipulation is what is most highly prized. And our moral collapse is as terrifying, and as dangerous, as our economic collapse.

Theodor Adorno in 1967 wrote an essay called "Education After Auschwitz." He argued that the moral corruption that made the Holocaust possible remained "largely unchanged." He wrote that "the mechanisms that render people capable of such deeds" must be made visible. Schools had to teach more than skills. They had to teach values. If they did not, another Auschwitz was always possible.

No Return To Normal

Why the economic crisis, and its solution, are bigger than you think.

by James K. Galbraith

For these protégés of Robert Rubin, veterans in several cases of Rubin's Hamilton Project, a key preconception has always been the budget deficit and what they call the "entitlement problem." This is D.C.-speak for rolling back Social Security and Medicare, opening new markets for fund managers and private insurers, behind a wave of budget babble about "long-term deficits" and "unfunded liabilities." To this our new president is not immune. Even before the inauguration Obama was moved to commit to "entitlement reform," and on February 23 he convened what he called a "fiscal responsibility summit."

The Big Takeover: How Wall Street Insiders are Using the Bailout to Stage a Revolution

The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power.

by Matt Taibbi

As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren't hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system - transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.

Zunes on the Freeman affair:

Neocons 1, Obama 0

Water Scarcity "Now Bigger Threat Than Financial Crisis"

Gates Readies Big Cuts in Weapons

Paul Craig Roberts on Freeman

The Charles Freeman Ordeal and the Decline of American Power

Jews, Israelis, and Israeli Jews do not speak with one voice on matters of Israeli policy

Chas Freeman nails it on Zakaria's show. Zakaria did his best to discredit Freeman, but I believe Freeman got the best of the interview:

FREEMAN: Well, the "Israel lobby" is a term that's in general use. I think it isn't a terribly accurate name. It probably should be called the Likud lobby, or the Yisrael Beiteinu lobby. It's the far right wing of the Jewish community here in alliance with the far right wing in Israel.

And I don't think that I've been in any respect excessively or unreasonably critical of Israel. I think I have been critical of Israeli policy. And the atmosphere is such in this country now, that whereas Israelis in Israel routinely criticize policies they think may prove to be suicidal for their country, those who criticize the same policies here for the same reasons are subject to political reprisal.
...
ZAKARIA: Do you feel that the lobbies, the groups that reflect American Jews' concerns about Israel, that may reflect Israeli policy, have too much influence in public policy in the United States today?

FREEMAN: Well, I think the right-wing elements that I referred to, which are loosely called the Israel lobby -- as I said, I'd prefer the term Likud lobby -- in fact have a hammerlock on both public discussion and policy.

And the objective of their campaign against me was to reinforce that hammerlock, to enforce the taboo against any critical discussion of Israeli policies and what they might mean for Israel's future or the future of the United States as affected by Israel's future; to ensure that this group -- which is a very well-organized group, as can be readily discerned from their messages crowing about how they organized this campaign -- to reinforce their veto power over appointments to the government; to ensure that analysis was not value- free, but pro-Israel in orientation and, to some extent, anti-Arab; and finally, to ensure that the policy process remains supportive of whatever it is that whoever is in power in Israel demands.

In searching for these transcripts I was reminded of this little blast from the past. On June 8, Zakaria asked Henry Kissinger: "Is Barack Obama sufficiently pro-Israel for Jewish voters?"
Very revealing.

AIPAC's Waterloo?

They may have gone a bridge too far this time...

Is the Israel Lobby Running Scared?

Or Killing a Chicken to Scare the Monkeys

by Robert Dreyfuss

"Sanctity of Contracts" you say??

"Sanctity of Contracts," "Nation of Laws" .... Whatever you say dear prof. Summers....

The Sanctity of AIG's Contracts

by Glenn Greenwald

A Time for Falcons?

TomDispatch wonders:

Shouldn't somebody consider, for instance, whether the principle found in so many individual martial arts -- that defense, and even striking reserves of power, can be found not in meeting force with blunt force, but in giving way before force -- might apply to more collective situations? Don't such groups as the Taliban and al-Qaeda feed off of, thrive and recruit off of, military action against them as well as the human destruction and the attention that goes with it?

Shooting Film and Crying

Ursula Lindsey

March 2009

(Ursula Lindsey is an M.A. candidate in Near Eastern studies at New York University. She writes on Middle Eastern arts and culture on the blog www.arabist.net.)

Freeman on why he withdrew:

I do not believe the National Intelligence Council could function effectively while its chair was under constant attack by unscrupulous people with a passionate attachment to the views of a political faction in a foreign country.... I am saddened by what the controversy and the manner in which the public vitriol of those who devoted themselves to sustaining it have revealed about the state of our civil society. It is apparent that we Americans cannot any longer conduct a serious public discussion or exercise independent judgment about matters of great importance to our country as well as to our allies and friends.

Juan Cole: Chas Freeman forced by Israel Lobies to withdraw from NIC Chairmanship

Charles Freeman, Roger Cohen and the Changing Israel Debate

by Glenn Greenwald

Juan Cole: Chas Freeman forced by Israel Lobies to withdraw from NIC Chairmanship

Trouble in Camelot

AIPAC does not like Admiral Blair's pick for head of the National Intelligence Council:

Chas Freeman for NIC: Lots at Stake

by Robert Dreyfuss

This is very cool:

Reimagining Socialism

Rising to the Occasion

By Barbara Ehrenreich & Bill Fletcher Jr.

Other Contributions to the Forum

Immanuel Wallerstein, "Follow Brazil's Example."

Bill McKibben, "Together, We Save the Planet."

Rebecca Solnit, "The Revolution Has Already Occurred."

Tariq Ali, "Capitalism's Deadly Logic."

Statelessness

Juan Cole on Palestinian statelessness:

Palestinian statehood is important because currently over half the world's some 9 million Palestinians are stateless,including those in Gaza and the West Bank. Statelessness is a severe disability in the contemporary world, because the state guarantees basic political and civil rights. No stateless Palestinians enjoy the basic rights and freedoms granted Americans by the US Bill of Rights, because their occupiers or hosts will not grant them and the Palestinians have no state representation of their own. (The Palestine Authority is essentially an extension of the Israeli occupation authority and lacks the prerogatives and sovereignty of a state).

"The Ultimate Aim is the Transfer of Arab-Israelis"

Ethnic Cleansing and Israel

http://www.counterpunch.org/hallinan03032009.html

Conn Hallinan reports on growing support for ethnic cleansing among Jewish Israelis. Only in Israel would a party founded by Ariel Sharon be considered "centerist":

Kadima spokesperson Maya Jacobs said, “Balad aims to exterminate Israel as a Jewish state and turn it into a state for all its citizens.”

Tom Hayden is encouraged:

Partial Peace, Looming War

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/03/02-10

"Obama is requesting $130 billion for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan during 2010 plus a $75 billion supplemental request for the wars during 2009. This $205 billion is on top of $534 billion for the Pentagon in 2010, for total military spending of $739 billion."

http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts03022009.html