Merchants of Death

Frida Berrigan in FPIF:

During the Bush administration, Israel received over $21 billion in U.S. security assistance, including $19 billion in direct military aid under the Pentagon's Foreign Military Financing (FMF) program. Through the FMF program, Israel remains the single largest recipient of U.S. military aid each year, which they use to purchase U.S. weapons.

Hardware continues to flow in, despite the fact the Arms Export Control Act (AECA) requires nations receiving U.S. arms to certify the weapons are used for internal security and legitimate self-defense, and that their use doesn't lead to an escalation of conflict. During 2008 alone, the United States made over $22 billion in new arms sales offers to Israel, including a proposed deal for as many as 75 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, worth up to $15.2 billion; nine heavy transport aircraft, worth up to $1.9 billion; four Littoral Combat Ships and related equipment, worth as much as $1.9 billion; and up to $1.3 billion in gasoline and jet aviation fuel.

One lone congressman - Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) - raised concerns about Israel's possible violations of the AECA. He hasn't had a response from the State Department. What use are our laws if they are not followed?

The last time the United States cut off military aid and weapons transfers to Israel was in 1981. During Israel's incursion into Lebanon, the Reagan administration cut off U.S. military aid and arms deliveries for 10 weeks while it investigated whether Israel was using weapons for "defensive purposes," as required under U.S. law.

The Guardian reports:

The Pentagon has suspended the delivery of a shipload of munitions to Israel after international concern that it could be used by Israeli forces in Gaza.

Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman, said that the contract for the munitions had been arranged last summer and approved in October. He said the munitions were due to be delivered to a US pre-positioning depot in Israel for US forces. But he added: "If the government of Israel requests munitions they can do so direct to the US government under the Foreign Military Sales programme." ...

Amnesty's Middle East and North Africa programme director, Malcolm Smart, said: "The last thing that is needed now is more weapons and munitions in the region, which is awash with arms that are being used in a manner which contravenes international law and is having a devastating effect on the civilian population in Gaza."

The Problem with Democratic Imperialists

The Guardian reminds us of the true legacy of JFK:

Kennedy... came to power with the complacent 1950's illusion that America's social and economic problems were largely solved. The only challenges lay abroad, with the threat of Soviet Communism and the danger that countries moving away from European colonial control would fail to "take off", as Kennedy's appalling academic guru Walt Rostow warned him. Kennedy won election largely on the basis of a fraud - the false charge of a "missile gap" which Eisenhower had allegedly permitted, leaving the USSR ahead of the US. Kennedy's inaugural was all about foreign affairs, and the only domestic reference (which was added at the last minute) was to say that America was committed to human rights "at home and around the world".

The black struggle for civil rights was already underway and the first Freedom Rides were to start four months after Kennedy became President, yet he seems to have been unaware of them. Later, when the movement became impossible to ignore, neither he nor his attorney-general brother Robert brought in significant reforms or legislation. They had the opportunity to appoint liberal federal judges, but failed. No wonder that the civil rights movement sang a sarcastic verse that went: There's a town in Mississippi called Liberty, there's a department in Washington called Justice.

...

Obama, we are told, has been re-reading books on Lincoln. I would recommend he goes through a forgotten book called The Kennedy Promise, by the British commentator (and one-time Observer reporter) Henry Fairlie. Published in 1973 with the sub-title "The politics of expectation", it is a brilliant demolition of the frenetic Kennedy governing mystique of crisis management and group-think. It points out that the constant talk of "challenges" and the need for US leadership tend to encourage confrontation and war.

That warning is apposite today. In his acceptance speech in Chicago Obama already told us "a new dawn of American leadership is at hand". Let us hope phrases of this kind do not appear in his inaugural address.

AIPAC and the CBC

Glen Ford is editor of Black Agenda Report, on the power of the Israel lobby in the Congressional Black Caucus:

It appears the old John Conyers has left the scene without those of us who used to know him having had a chance to say goodbye. The Israeli lobby has that kind of effect on erstwhile progressives and anti-war folks. The Zionist ideology, and especially the chilling effect of Zionist power, is probably the second-greatest impediment to creation of a sustained American peace movement - the first obstacle being the ideology of American Manifest Destiny, which is in practice quite compatible with Zionism.
However, African Americans are least susceptible to the Manifest Destiny/Zionist Mythology combo. Both ideologies wreak of racism, and most Black people know it. The Congressional Black Caucus knows it, too, but they are terrified of offending Israel's innumerable political hit men.

In moments like these, the true nature of Zionism and the Zionist state reveal themselves.

Obama's Admiral

Keep your eyes on the soft, cuddly guy heading the CIA, but whatever you do, don't look too closely at the record of DNI Admiral Blair. Allan Narin and historian Bradley Simpson report on the skeletons in Blair's closet.

Global Social Democracy?

Sociologist Walden Bello critiques the Global Social Democracy (GSD) discourse as a successor to the neo-liberal Washington Consenus.

In his view the model of GSD proposed by European leaders is just another short-term, cyclical fix for what is ultimately a structural and systemic problem. In Bello's view GSD does not even begin to address capitalism's inherent contradictions:

GSD, while critical of neoliberalism, accepts the framework of monopoly capitalism, which rests fundamentally on deriving profit from the exploitative extraction of surplus value from labor, is driven from crisis to crisis by inherent tendencies toward overproduction, and tends to push the environment to its limits in its search for profitability. Like traditional Keynesianism in the national arena, GSD seeks in the global arena a new class compromise that is accompanied by new methods to contain or minimize capitalism’s tendency toward crisis. Just as the old Social Democracy and the New Deal stabilized national capitalism, the historical function of Global Social Democracy is to iron out the contradictions of contemporary global capitalism and to relegitimize it after the crisis and chaos left by neoliberalism. GSD is, at root, about social management.

Patrick Bond, an eco-economist and the director of the Centre for Civil Society in Durban, South Africa makes a similar critique:

Those who declare that the Great Crash of Late 2008 heralds the end of free market economic philosophy - "neoliberalism" for short - are not paying close enough attention... Indeed, neoliberalism may have another breath of life, with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation applied from above by Barak Obama or the IMF. Much stronger pressure is needed from below to resist. Until grassroots forces again gather their strength to mount an assault, national-scale challenges to global financial power are the only ways forward given adverse global-scale power relations.

He then draws on Keynes and Marx to argue for national solutions to global problems:

In his famous 1933 article on national self-sufficiency, John Maynard Keynes cautioned against nationalistic "silliness, haste and intolerance", yet argued forcefully for the national not global scale of economic revival: "I sympathize, therefore, with those who would minimize, rather than with those who would maximize, economic entanglement among nations. Ideas, knowledge, science, hospitality, travel--these are the things which should of their nature be international. But let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible, and, above all, let finance be primarily national."

For those (like myself) aiming for a society left of Keynes, it is still the case that, as Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto, "The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie." The national scale is where the most power lies, and where strategies against commodification and corporate globalization have the best chance of success.

Silencing the Now: Shhh, the Israelis are Shooting

Obama on 12/30/08: "Shhh, the Israelis are shooting"

As Gaza burns, Obama plays golf. Boy, the New Boss, feels quite bit like the Old Boss.

The Gaurdian cautions that as al-Jazeera broadcast images of Obama taking in the "back 9" juxtaposed with images of murder and mayhem in the streets of Gaza, Obama is "losing a battle of perceptions among Muslims that he may not realize has even begun... The danger is that when he finally peers over the parapet on January 21, the battle of perceptions may already be half-lost."

How should we interpret silence? Historians of Palestine are well-trained in this art given that the history of Palestine has been largely silenced by Zioinist claims to "A Land without a People for a People without a Land." And as historians such as Gabi Pitterburg point out, the discursive erasure of Palestinians is an essential prerequisite to their their psychical removal (or "Transfer" as its known) and dispossession.

Is there any doubt that Obama will reach out and grasp that Faustian hand with full enthusiasm? Will Obama avoid rocking the proverbial boat on Palestine, the Middle East, and "National Security" issues writ large in the interest of getting his "domestic agenda" passed? Perhaps he should step back from all the FDR/ Great Depression analogies for a moment and remind himself of the fate of LBJ's Great Society. The point being that all the best laid plans for "domestic reform" can come to naught if one lacks the courage to stand up to monsters at home. LBJ thought that if he would give the Southern Dems in Congress, and the JFK foreign policy Establishment (Rostow, the Bundy Brothers, and Rusk) the War they wanted, he would get his Great Society at home- Guns and Butter for all. The problem with Faustian bargains is that they rarely turn out as expected. Trading on the backs of Palestinians may by be a time-honored Beltway tactic - but it produces consistently disastrous results for all concerned- but mostly for Palestinians. It is the Palestinians who pay the price for our cowardice at home. We lack the capacity to confront our own monsters- our own violent pathologies that lead us offer up endless human sacrifice to our Gods of the Military Industrial Complex (Boeing, Raytheon, etc), and so we project that violence outward. And then if that were not enough our Pundits have the audacity to suggest that it is Arab and Muslim political culture that is prone to spates of irrational violence. There is no single more prolific purveyor of violence than the United States. Until we muster the the courage to mount a real social revolution capable overturning the corrupt and defunct system of cruelty we will remain captives of that system. We may avert our eyes form the destruction caused by our own cowardice and we may indulge in yet more narcissistic orgies of self-congratulation for electing Barack Obama (if I see one more advertisement for a human interest special on Obamas or the "historic nature" of elec-sham '08, I think I am going to throw up), but while we dither, and avoid a confrontation with our own ruling class, the world burns. What will be left for our children to inherent? The rubble in Gaza offers one suggestion.