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%