Building a Different Middle East

By Joel Beinin

The Nation, Jan 2010

The mobilizations are rooted in the particular dynamics of each village and depend on the balance of local political forces, family dynamics and economic factors like the possibility of obtaining permits to work in Israel. Together they form a peasant-based social movement that is becoming increasingly conscious of its political significance and filling the void in Palestinian leadership created by the futile struggle between the Palestinian Authority, dominated by Fatah, and Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip.

Is this movement likely to contribute to a resolution of the conflict anytime soon? 'Ayid Mrar is doubtful. "I don't know when the occupation will end," he says. "Not in one or two years. Maybe in a hundred. If the Palestinian people achieve their freedom, we don't want relations of enmity with Israel. We want to build a different Middle East."

Signs of Liberal Dimensia

Frank Rich in the NYT: "Last year the president pointedly studied J.F.K.’s decision-making process on Vietnam while seeking the way forward in Afghanistan. In the end, he didn’t emulate his predecessor and escalated the war."

Don't Look Back
Just Walk Away From the Democrats

By RON JACOBS

"The left needs to organize the unorganized. The working people, the unemployed, the young, and the restless. The right wing has their core group of supporters who organize around fear of the other. The liberals have those who believe in the myth of American equality because they have no class analysis. The Left needs to organize the rest and they need to do so without the Democratic Party. It should be quite clear to almost every left-leaning American by now that the Democrats are nothing more than another wing of the party that works for Wall Street and the Pentagon. To continue to work for and elect their candidates is self-defeating. As the first year of the Obama presidency has clearly shown, not only do the Democrats support the right wing agenda, that support makes it easier for the right wing to put their candidates into power. Why? Because after promising progressive reforms and then failing to deliver, voters tend to either not vote or vote for the right wing candidates out of anger and frustration."

The Great Leap Sideways

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

"It’s actually some 30 years ago, but to me seems only yesterday that we were howling for Paul Volcker’s blood. As Fed chairman back in Carter-Reagan time he was the great deflator, ratcheting up interest rates and hurling widows and orphans out into the snow. And here he is now, the shining knight of the left, for months languishing in obscurity as head of the president’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, now mustered to Obama’s side to preside over the White House’s Great Leap Sideways into economic populism."

"Can Obama recover the initiative? This leap sideways in the direction of the left comes eleven months behind schedule, and politics is an unforgiving time-keeper. He should have been holding that Thursday press conference last February, when he still had favorable winds in his sails. Instead he wasted most of the year destroying all prospects for decent health reform. The best we can hope for now is rejection by the House of the Senate’s bill, with the whole awful package dumped in the shredder. Maybe the White House should try some new imaginative approach, like combining preventive health care with airline security. All people going through the TSA’s full body scans would get, gratis, a full diagnostic printout, from teeth to tumors and the right to free consultations at health clinics run by the Department of Homeland Security."

Robert Kuttner
A Wake Up Call

"But as I wrote in Obama's Challenge, in August 2008, it would be a huge mistake to try to get health care done right out of the box. Obama first needed to get his sea-legs, and focus like a laser on economic recovery. If he got the economy back on track, he would then have earned the chops to undertake more difficult structural reforms like health care."
….

"This battle should have been the president and the people versus the interests. Instead more and more voters concluded that it was the president and the interests versus the people."

Björn Kumm: The Tragedy of Toussaint L'Ouverture

C.L.R. James in his marvellous The Black Jacobins, published in 1938, suggests that Toussaint L´Ouverture in fact remained too much of a loyal French citizen. He wanted the formerly enslaved Haitians to become exemplary Frenchmen. He wanted to show the world that black men could build a civilized state. French should be spoken as correctly in Port au Prince as in Paris.

Class Clowns, Carl Finamore

"No one in history is more associated with this word than Karl Marx who was neither the first to coin the phrase nor the first to define it. But Marx did something which no one before had yet done and that was to precisely assert that analyzing different class interests between the rich and the poor explains political outcomes better than anything else. ... the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e. the class, which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force." "

The Guantánamo “Suicides”: A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle—By Scott Horton (Harper's Magazine)

"According to the NCIS documents, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously."

Civilian Casualties Soar; Key Afghan Metric Headed In Wrong Direction
CommonDreams.org

If You're Disillusioned with Obama, You Don't Understand How He Won | CommonDreams.org
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/01/18-11

" "Why as an intellectual did you believe in a God anyway," asked the Palestinian intellectual Edward Said after rereading The God That Failed, a book in which six prominent ex-communists relate their disillusionment with communism. "And besides, who gave you the right to imagine that your early disbelief and later disenchantment were so important?" Those who think they have been let down by a leftwing champion must answer for their own selective hearing."

Turning King’s Dream into a Nightmare
Chris Hedges
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/01/18-7
"Malcolm influenced King as deeply as King influenced Malcolm. These men each grasped at the end of their lives that the face of racism comes in many forms and that the issue was not simply sitting at a lunch counter with whites - blacks in the north could in theory do this - but being able to afford the lunch."

The Geography of a Recession

The Decline: The Geography of a Recession

latoya egwuekwe

http://latoyaegwuekwe.wordpress.com/2009/11/02/the-decline-the-geography-of-a-recession/

Why Obama’s Economic Plan Will Not Work—And a Better Plan

by Robert Freeman

"Seven million high-paying manufacturing jobs have been shipped overseas in the past decade, one third of all those in the entire economy. Twenty per cent of the nation's labor force - thirty million people - are idle or underutilized. Thirty percent of the nation's factory capacity is idle. Three quarters of the na......tion's home building capacity is idle. More workers are out of work longer that at any time since such statistics started being collected, in 1948. The results are cataclysmic."

How Corporate Branding has Taken Over America

Ten years after the publication of No Logo, Naomi Klein switches her attention from the mall to Barack Obama and discovers that corporate culture has taken over the US government

by Naomi Klein

Though it's too soon to issue a verdict on the Obama presidency, we do know this: he favours the grand symbolic gesture over deep structural change every time. So he will make a dramatic announcement about closing the notorious Guantánamo Bay prison - while going ahead with an expansion of the lower profile but frighteningly lawless Bagram prison in Afghanistan, and opposing accountability for Bush officials who authorised torture. He will boldly appoint the first Latina to the Supreme Court, while intensifying Bush-era enforcement measures in a new immigration crackdown. He will make investments in green energy, while championing the fantasy of "clean coal" and refusing to tax emissions, the only sure way to substantially reduce the burning of fossil fuels. Most importantly, he will claim to be ending the war in Iraq, and will retire the ugly "war on terror" phrase - even as the conflicts guided by that fatal logic escalate in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

This preference for symbols over substance, and this unwillingness to stick to a morally clear if unpopular course, is where Obama decisively parts ways with the transformative political movements from which he has borrowed so much (the pop-art posters from Che, his cadence from King, his "Yes We Can!" slogan from the migrant farmworkers - si se puede). These movements made unequivocal demands of existing power structures: for land distribution, higher wages, ambitious social programmes. Because of those high-cost demands, these movements had not only committed followers but serious enemies. Obama, in sharp contrast not just to social movements but to transformative presidents such as FDR, follows the logic of marketing: create an appealing canvas on which all are invited to project their deepest desires but stay vague enough not to lose anyone but the committed wing nuts (which, granted, constitute a not inconsequential demographic in the United States). Advertising Age had it right when it gushed that the Obama brand is "big enough to be anything to anyone yet had an intimate enough feel to inspire advocacy". And then their highest compliment: "Mr Obama somehow managed to be both Coke and Honest Tea, both the megabrand with the global awareness and distribution network and the dark-horse, upstart niche player."

Our role in Haiti's plight

If we are serious about assisting this devastated land we must stop trying to control and exploit it

Peter Hallward

What is already all too clear, ­however, is the fact that this impact will be the result of an even longer-term history of deliberate impoverishment and disempowerment. Haiti is routinely described as the "poorest country in the western hemisphere". This poverty is the direct legacy of perhaps the most brutal system of colonial exploitation in world history, compounded by decades of systematic postcolonial oppression.

The noble "international community" which is currently scrambling to send its "humanitarian aid" to Haiti is largely responsible for the extent of the suffering it now aims to reduce. Ever since the US invaded and occupied the country in 1915, every serious political attempt to allow Haiti's people to move (in former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide's phrase) "from absolute misery to a dignified poverty" has been violently and deliberately blocked by the US government and some of its allies.

US Companies Join Race on Iraqi Oil Bonanza

by Timothy Williams

"Iraq has little choice," said Joost R. Hiltermann, deputy program director for the Middle East and North Africa with the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit organization that aims to prevent deadly conflicts. "It is desperate to increase its revenues, almost all of which derive from the sale of oil. But the government has little capacity to monitor the many companies that will be involved in rehabilitating its ailing oil industry, or indeed its own operations. This is a recipe for massive corruption, but for Iraqi policy makers the cost will be worth it, given the expected massive returns."

Welcome to Orwell’s World

Obama's lies over the Afghanistan war remind us of the lessons of Nineteen Eighty-Four

by John Pilger

Barack Obama is the leader of a contemporary Oceania. In two speeches at the close of the decade, the Nobel Peace Prize-winner affirmed that peace was no longer peace, but rather a permanent war that "extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan" to "disorderly regions, failed states, diffuse enemies". He called this "global security" and invited our gratitude. To the people of Afghanistan, which the US has invaded and occupied, he said wittily: "We have no interest in occupying your country."

Ahmad: Shahid Alam on Israeli Exceptionalism

Ahmad: Shahid Alam on Israeli Exceptionalism

Ahrar Ahmad reviews M. Shahid Alam. Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 274 pp., for IC

Initially, the slogan “a land without a people for a people without land” was skillfully employed to encourage Jews to migrate, and to allay Western discomfort. Alas, as Alam points out insistently, this struggle for a Jewish homeland ignored the Arabs already there, who had been there for centuries, and who significantly exceeded the number of Jews who had migrated there during the entire 50 year period. In fact, even in 1948, they constituted almost two-thirds of the population, and occupied almost three-fifths of the land, in the mandate territories. Consequently, what the Zionist logic demanded was to delegitimize, indeed dehumanize, those Palestinians as nothing more than a pesky nuisance that merely complicated their own grand designs and obvious triumphs. The Arabs were dismissed as people unworthy of basic human dignity, devoid of moral agency, and incapable of having nationalist aspirations.

The Psychology of the Self and the Public Realm

The Healing Powers of Facebook

By MIKITA BROTTMAN

And creating impressions, of course, is what Facebook is all about. In many ways, the Facebook profile is a return to the Victorian portrait photograph, which was a way for the middle classes to present a version of themselves suitable to the public sphere. Popular until the 1920s among ladies and gents of a certain class, these daguerreotypes were a way of presenting a stage-managed version of themselves as they hoped to be seen (and measured) by others. In other words, their function was just as consciously performative and voyeuristic as the Facebook profile. Subjects would often be photographed wearing a very special item of clothing that they considered represented their essence—a characteristic fancy hat, for example, or an oriental parasol.

Avatar Obama and the United States of Hype

by: Ángel Luis Lara | La Jornada (Mexico)

French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari write that the meaning of a cultural good always exists in the connections that it establishes with its external image. With this in mind, "Avatar" can be looked upon not only as a movie, but as a metaphor for an entire country: the United States has become the greatest hype on the face of the earth.

"Not a Possibility?"

War on Yemen

By GARY LEUPP

The Obama administration, in the wake of the Underwear Bomber Affair, which it insists on closely linking to Yemen’s homegrown al-Qaeda, is pressuring its uncomfortable ally Saleh to accept more drone attacks, more military aid, more “advisors.” Both Obama and Saleh are walking into the trap, the former because he is the president of an imperialist country competing with other powers for control of the Indian Ocean, and a politician jockeying for position within an environment where neocon hawks retain a shocking degree of power and credibility, the latter because he has few options. Saleh cannot refuse U.S. drone strikes where the Pakistanis have failed to do so. The best he can do is persuade the U.S. to hit his own enemies among the Houthis and the adherents of the Southern Movement and hope al-Qaeda doesn’t flourish as a result of the consequent rage.

White Power USA: The Rise of Right-Wing Militias in America

Democracy Now!

Israel must unpick its ethnic myth

By Tony Judt

"If the Jews of Europe and North America took their distance from Israel (as many have begun to do), the assertion that Israel was “their” state would take on an absurd air. Over time, even Washington might come to see the futility of attaching American foreign policy to the delusions of one small Middle Eastern state."

One More Term Senator Dorgan, Please?

by Ralph Nader

Late last year, during the Senate debate on health insurance, Dorgan proposed and eloquently explained an amendment to reduce drug prices -- the highest in the world -- by allowing so-call drug reimportation from countries such as Canada under regulatory safeguards.

He expected Obama's active support since Mr. Obama promised to press for this needed competition in his presidential campaign. He figured wrong. The White House used none of its capital to get the few extra votes needed. For Mr. Obama had already cut a deal privately with the drug company chieftains.

That may have been the last straw for Senator Dorgan. He is not the only progressive Democrat in the Congress who is saying, "What does President Obama really stand for?"

Once More Into the Breach

Ussama Makdisi

December 2009

Makdisi reviews:

Rashid Khalidi, Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009)

Patrick Tyler, A World of Trouble: America in the Middle East (London: Portobello Books, 2009)

I had to laugh at this line:

"Even the most conservative type of history -- US diplomatic history, which has traditionally eschewed serious cultural analysis -- has belatedly embraced facets of Said’s thesis."

Khalidi is on point here:

"Khalidi’s book highlights some essential points necessary for an understanding of the US relationship to the Middle East. The first, and most obvious, is oil. The United States became interested in the region because of its strategic significance, which itself was largely a function of Saudi Arabia’s oil reserves. During the Cold War, therefore, the US formed the basis of its domination of the region. It did not so much compete with the Soviets as it did exert extraordinary negative influence over the area. Here Khalidi reverses a theme of American diplomatic history that has taken for granted: US policymakers’ obsession with containing the spread of Soviet influence, as if US imperial interests in the region were themselves defensive or a reflection of the natural order of things."

What an insult to Machiavelli:

"According to Khalidi, the United States, is a Machiavellian, yet often a shortsighted, great power."

President Obama's Muse?

Tuesday 22 December 2009

by: Melvin A. Goodman, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

(Image: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: Barack Obama)

"Since last week's Nobel Prize ceremony, Reinhold Niebuhr, the most influential American theologian of the 20th century, has been given insufficient attention from the mainstream media.

...

"Niebuhr warned against the "dangerous dreams of managing history." There is probably no better example of the global powers trying to manage history than Afghanistan, home of the "Great Game," where Alexander the Great, Queen Victoria, Leonid Brezhnev and, now, Barack Obama have tried to manage the ethnic and tribal communities of this region."

Are you serious?

Egypt: Rooftops Empower the Poor

Sunday 03 January 2010

by: Cam McGrath | Inter Press Service

"The solar water heater he built on the roof of his apartment in Darb El-Ahmar provided hot water for his family until the dilapidated building collapsed three months ago."

US Aid Tied to Purchase of Arms

by Anne Davies

Just before Christmas, the US President, Barack Obama, signed into law one of his country's biggest aid pledges of the year. It was bound not for Africa or any of the many struggling countries on the World Bank's list.

It was a deal for $US2.77 billion ($3 billion) to go to Israel in 2010 and a total of $US30 billion over the next decade.

Israel is bound by the agreement to use 75 per cent of the aid to buy military hardware made in the US: in the crisis-racked US economy, those military factories are critical to many towns.

The Ph.D. Problem

On the professionalization of faculty life, doctoral training, and the academy’s self-renewal

"Put in less personal terms, there is a huge social inefficiency in taking people of high intelligence and devoting resources to training them in programs that half will never complete and for jobs that most will not get. Unfortunately, there is an institutional efficiency, which is that graduate students constitute a cheap labor force. There are not even search costs involved in appointing a graduate student to teach. The system works well from the institutional point of view not when it is producing Ph.D.s, but when it is producing ABDs. It is mainly ABDs who run sections for lecture courses and often offer courses of their own. The longer students remain in graduate school, the more people are available to staff undergraduate classes. Of course, overproduction of Ph.D.s also creates a buyer’s advantage in the market for academic labor. These circumstances explain the graduate-student union movement that has been going on in higher education since the mid 1990s. "

Eliminate the Senate

All Check, No Balance

Eliminate the Senate

By WINSLOW T. WHEELER

"The filibuster is merely one of a thousand ways a small number of senators, even just one, can clog the system. Unlike the House of Representatives, the Senate was never intended to operate by majority rule; it was designed to operate by “unanimous consent.” That means, as we observed during the endless non-debate of the health care bill, that one senator can demand that the entire text of any bill or amendment must be read aloud – word by audible word – if one member simply utters the words “I object” at the appropriate moment. It also means that nominations, even bills, can be held up for days, weeks, even months before a majority leader tries to start what passes for debate in the Senate these days. And, it means any and all committee hearings must be shut down any time the Senate is in session – and a senator objects. The Senate rules are an almost endless opportunity for mischief, or worse, for any member or faction wanting to play the role – just like the racist Southern Democrats did in the 1960s when they stood, insistently and almost endlessly, in the way of civil rights bills."