Standard and Poor' Gets Religion

S & P, one of a handful of international rating agencies, has downgraded America’s status based on its $14 trillion national debt and $1.6 trillion 2011 deficit and the political inability to do anything about it. This is rich coming from an outfit that gave top rating to every toxic, junk-status mortgage backed security that came its way before the crash. It’s to be expected that you give a high rating to someone who’s paying you to rate them, otherwise they’ll find someone else to pay off for their Triple-A. All that aside, being craven and duplicitous most of the time doesn’t totally detract from your voice if you happen to get it right once in a while, so let’s take it from there.

Both parties objected to S &P’s downgrading, insisting they have plans to tackle the deficit. The Repugs want to save $400 billion a year by eviscerating, emasculating and slashing to the bone every federal program that has anything to do with helping anybody but the top few percent of income earners, who in fact get a tax cut. How cutting taxes for people who already have far more than they know what to do with can be part of a deficit reduction plan is something only a true believer Repug can understand. We know they are full of crazy, but that’s who the people elected, so that’s where the US is at.

Obama wants to save $360 billion a year by reinstating income tax rates for everybody earning over $250,000 that were in place before the Bush tax cuts. Either way that only deals with a quarter of the deficit. The Repug plan projects a deficit of $23 trillion in 2021, Obama’s plan about the same. Moreover, both plans are wildly optimistic in projecting a far healthier economy than anybody outside of government and in their right mind would dare to, but that’s part of the game.

Neither side wishes to deal forthrightly with the problem because nobody in politics wants to take credit for raising taxes. It’s not hard to understand why since it’s far easier to borrow to make the economy temporarily look good than tell the truth to the American people and be voted out of office at the next election. Sure, everything will look hunky-dory when you are spending borrowed money, but it’s like heroin addiction. You feel really great when you are high so that in contrast everyday life is hard to deal with so you cannot stop, you have to have more. You also build up a tolerance, so need ever increasing doses. At a certain point, the only thing that can save your life or sanity is cold turkey.

So instead of being realistic or practical it’s all left to the future to sort out. Think about that number, $23,000,000,000,000. Interest rates are relatively low now, but the US government and the Fed are making every possible move in the direction of increasing rates. That isn’t their stated purpose, but when you print shiploads of money and issue vast amounts of debt you lessen its value and increased interest rates is the only logical, possible outcome. So, figure a modest average of 5% interest on the debt and you come up with $1.25 trillion a year in debt service. If the administration’s (seeming) goal of cheapening the value of the dollar jacks up interest rates an additional two or three percent then service of the debt will amount to half of the current budget and an obviously untenable situation.

There are four, more or less equal parts to America’s $1.6 trillion budget deficit. The first is the military. Since 2000 the defense budget has doubled, amounting to about $400 billion. Obama recently announced, to great fanfare, a $78 billion reduction in military spending; except when you looked at the fine print it didn’t actually reduce the amount spent, only the projected increase was less than planned. So clearly not serious about deficit reduction.

A second part is health care spending – Medicare, Medicaid and prescription drug benefits. That one’s easy; single payer would save about $400 billion in overall health spending. Admittedly, not all of that is direct federal savings but a lot of it is.

The third part is Bush’s tax cuts. Obama wants to end the cuts for the wealthiest Americans, that’s another $400 billion. But really, there’s so much money sloshing around at the top, the entire deficit could be erased if corporations and the wealthy were obliged to pay their fair share of the tax burden. A combination of raising the top rate for millionaires and billionaires, a financial transaction tax, taxing capital gains the same as ordinary income, a corporate income tax which corporations actually paid and a wealth tax on the richest Americans would easily and painlessly completely eliminate the deficit. Considering the top 1% is sitting on assets of $19 trillion, just an 8% wealth tax alone would balance this year’s budget deficit of $1.6 trillion.

Finally, there’s the recession which has reduced tax revenue. Yes, corporate profits and the stock markets (headed for soon-to-burst bubble territory) are way up but they don’t pay much in taxes so that doesn’t help the budget much. There’s nothing on the horizon which suggests an end to the recession in the next few years, but at $400 billion that’s a deficit charge that’s relatively easy to sustain. Besides, that’s the only part of the deficit that is legitimate, the rest is all based on a lack of political will and common sense combined with cockamamie wingnut anti-tax insanity.

Instead of actually doing something to rein in the deficit, Obama and the Repugs will take a chainsaw to slash Social Security, Medicare and every program that benefits everybody below the top few percent. Why do I group Obama with the Repugs? Of the two people he chose to head his bi-partisan deficit commission, one, former senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming, positively despises Social Security, the other, Erskine Bowles, the nominal Democrat who served in the Clinton administration, is a fellow traveler. So even though SS has absolutely nothing to do with the deficit, they suggested serious cutbacks to the program. With $2 trillion in the bank, SS has all the money it needs for another 25 years and a little tweaking of tax rates will carry it decades further in the future. Obama talks about taking a stand to protect SS and other programs, but I don’t believe him for a minute. The only things he is good at are oratory and compromise.

The US is blithely and obliviously headed for a morass of its own making that could ultimately destabilize the whole world economy.

Fukushima Casualties

Fukushima Casualties

There are two socio-economic casualties of the Fukushima aside from the obvious spread of radiation. First a few comments on that. It’s disingenuous to compare CT scans and X-rays to atmospheric radiation since a one time zap is completely different than having a radioactive particle lodged in your body. Once ingested each different element migrates to a specific part of the body – radioactive Iodine, for instance, goes to the thyroid – and continually and cumulatively discharges its carcinogens.

We also often find exposure compared to background radiation, as if it’s no big deal. What they don’t mention is that most background radiation is a result of nuclear testing; it’s not something people have always lived with, and, as mentioned previously, there is no safe level of exposure. All radiation causes cancer; minimal exposure causes minimal cancers, but since it’s all cumulative, every little bit increases your chances of developing the disease.

One casualty of Fukushima is globalization itself. The concept of globalization encourages manufacturers to scour the globe for the cheapest and best possible location for fabricating and/or assembling each individual part of a complex whole. This has caused a lot of grief for Toyota, which has had to stop or slow production of its vehicles in plants around the world because of the earthquake/tsunami. Sometimes a part is manufactured in only one location and if that one plant gets washed away in a giant tsunami, well everything shuts down.

Toyota also pioneered just-in-time manufacturing. Instead of producing and then storing parts in warehouses for eventual use, parts are delivered to the assembly line just minutes before they are to be used. As a result there is no leeway, if any part of the supply chain breaks down the whole edifice shuts down. It’s a very efficient method of manufacturing, but as we see subject to total breakdown when things don’t go exactly according to plan.

The other casualty is the Nuclear Renaissance, the return to the purportedly ‘green’ energy source, which has been dead in the water for decades because of a multiplicity of factors. Fukushima won’t stop China and other countries, rich and poor, from building nukes but it will certainly slow the process. It will also increase dependency on fossil fuels just when we are approaching peak oil crunch time.

As we are now seeing, in the frantic attempt to sustain the endless growth paradigm, ever more delicate, difficult and dangerously placed reserves are being developed. While BP was guilty of gross negligence in the Gulf of Mexico blowout, the proliferation of drilling around the world in those marginal areas will almost certainly result in additional catastrophic pollution events. That’s in addition to the damage done in some processes even when all goes according to plan, as in the poisoning of groundwater that results from using hydraulic fracturing in extraction of gas from shale deposits.

All in all the environment is in for some serious thrashing and trashing.

Obama the Disappointer

Obama has declared his candidacy for the 2012 elections... and it’s only 18 months before the poll takes place. America’s excruciatingly long and drawn out election season is one of the tell-tale signs of American political ossification. The process is hopeless; I can’t see anything good or reasonable or logical coming out of the congress or the president today. To do it right there needs to be regional primaries so candidates can focus on one area instead of wasting time and energy jetting back and forth across the country. One per month for four months starting in May of election year would allow campaigning to start at the beginning of 2012 instead of spring of 2011. Makes too much sense so can’t happen.

Mr O has three things going for him. For one, he’s a great ambassador to the world. He’s a very calm, steady and likeable guy and, as a representative of a long exploited and repressed minority, a great testament to the potential of American democracy. Compared to Bush in this regard, he’s a minor deity.

He’ll appoint decent people to the judiciary. If a Repug gets elected, it’ll mean another generation or two of feed the rich, starve the poor decisions from the bench.

Finally, most of his competition ranges from the laughable to the risible. The ones that are halfway reasonable and/or competent will have a difficult time getting through the tea-party electoral gauntlet. If a thoughtful, charismatic, moderate Repug showed up he or she’s likely to be toast.

At this point, I can’t see many thinking progressive people voting for Obama; rather, as true of every election for decades, they’ll be voting against the fearsome and/or cartoony right-wing opposition. I can’t think of a single major political initiative or stance that Obama’s taken that meets my standard of forward looking or compassionate. After compromising and kowtowing to the opposition while slamming and slandering his base, the people who worked for and voted for him, the so-called enthusiasm gap is wider than ever. Once again, Democrats, progressives, people who care will have a choice between crap and disaster.

The epitome of Obama’s disconnect from the reality of the common folk, the people who elected him was his choice of Jeffery Imelt, CEO of General Electric, to head his commission on jobs and competitiveness. GE is good at creating jobs, only most are in other countries, not in the US. The one area they have been hiring in is accountants who jobs it is to find legal loopholes to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. And at that they’ve been doing a great job. GE enjoyed profits of over $14 billion last year – five million earned in the US - but not only isn’t pay any taxes but getting a $3 billion refund.

There are all kinds of reasons why the US government thinks it needs to subsidize one of the largest, most profitable corporations in the world, but none of them are good. All of them are based on the wholesale purchase of government by the wealthy and powerful. They have their cockamamie supply-side theories and arguments for feeding the rich – they’ll create more jobs – but that has repeatedly shown to be ridiculously off the mark. Right now the country’s wealthiest citizens are sitting on $19 trillion of assets, while the corporations have nearly $2 trillion of cash reserves. How shoveling more money at them is suddenly going to create jobs is a conundrum only a wingnut teabagger could grasp.

GE also got billions from the bailout money since at one point they were making half their profits from financial services. So, funding for food stamps, Medicaid for the poor, Pell grants to enable more people to attend college, relief for people suckered into taking out mortgages they couldn’t afford to pay back, aid to the states who are in dire financial straits? Nope, we just don’t have the cash. Welfare for the world’s richest corporations and tax breaks for the already fantastically wealthy when the government is running a deficit equal to 12% of GDP; no problem, they obviously deserve it.

If deficit reduction is one’s goal, there is no way any amount of cutbacks on programs for the people at large can make up for the wealthy and corporations not paying their fare share of the cost of government. Neither can any amount of economic growth make up the difference without raising taxes on those who can afford to pay. Moreover, it’s living in Fantasyland to think the US can continue to run huge budget and trade deficits while printing oceans of money without the bill someday coming due.

Since I began writing this post Obama has gotten populist. Just after he declares his candidacy he says we’re going to tax the rich. (Where’s he been since his election in 2008?) We’re going to reduce the deficit by $4 trillion in 12 years, he says. Why stretch it out over 12 years, you ask, why not just say $340 billion a year? Well, I guess, because $340 billion doesn’t sound like much against a $1.6 trillion deficit, not even 25%, in fact.

Obama’s not leveling with the people – he obviously thinks it’s not politically tenable to tell the truth, assuming he does understand the situation – but that’s not anywhere near enough to tackle the deficit. Concurrently, deficits are also good for politicians since they make it seem the economy is doing a lot better than it really is. I mean, if I could borrow ten thousand dollars to gild my lifestyle, I’d be feeling great... until the bill came due. At this point the bill will not only be a crushing debt burden but a wholesale crash of the economy.

The catalyst for the coming financial implosion will come from rising commodity prices. As the value of the dollar slides, the price of commodities, since they are priced in dollars, will rise and increase inflation in America. As the price of oil, the largest component of America’s trade deficit, also moves up because of instability in producing regions combined with resource depletion, those rises will be intensified and the US will run hard up against an intractable, unsustainable situation. Rising inflation, according to current economic thinking, will require rising interest rates which will then increase the burden of servicing America’s huge debt.

Obama’s now only tinkering with the problem when the situation is just dire, which only makes it worse in the long run. When the situation becomes catastrophic, because it wasn’t dealt with when only dire, nothing less than great sacrifice on everyone’s part will make a difference. For every dollar of ease gained from borrowing, there’ll be equivalent pain in paying it back.

There only alternative to repaying loans is printing money and thus cheapening its value, which then brings an inflation death spiral. 2012 will be a tough year economically and an albatross around Obama’s electoral neck, but the Repugs will only have their failed policies of the past to cling to and thus look even worse than Obama.

The one thing the Repugs are good at is stealing elections and since no prominent Dumbocrat has ever had the courage or commonsense to call them to account for their thievery, not even those who’ve had elections stolen right out from under them, you can bet if the election is close the Repug will win.

I’m not optimistic. My cynicallity quotient is in the stratosphere. I’d hardly vote for Obama because he’s a likable guy and will appoint a few judges. Better to give the whole government to the Repugs and hope for a revolutionary backlash. If the people of Yemen can rise up, why not Americans?

Fukushima Going Down

Excessive radiation has been found 50 kilometers from the plant, the exclusion zone, however, is only 20 k. If they expand to 40 k, 170,000 people will have to be evacuated, probably permanently. The exclusion Zone around Chernobyl is half the size of New Jersey. Moreover that excessive radiation found outside the Fukushima exclusion zone would be over the limit allowed inside the Chernobyl zone. In other words, they are being very lax about their citizens’ safety.

Previously Japan’s sacrificial plant workers were limited to 100 millisieverts of exposure. At that level, one in a thousand will develop cancer. At the new limit of 250, that proportion goes down to one in four hundred. That’s not bad odds, or wouldn’t be if it was the only toxin people were subject to in their daily lives. But add up all the nasties in water, food and air and give them a couple of decades to do their damage and the proportion goes down to 1 in 7. It wouldn’t be such a big deal if cancer was a quick and easy death, rather than the long drawn out and debilitatingly painful one that it is. However, the plant workers are being compensated; previously earning $100 to $200 per day, they are now receiving $4000 per day. Hopefully they’ll live long enough to enjoy their new found riches.

In the process of dousing the stricken reactors with large amounts of water, one thing they are doing is creating radioactive steam, evidently able to spread far and wide. They’ve also been creating contaminated water, part of which they need to store and somehow dispose of safely, another part is seeping into groundwater and a lot of it is draining into the sea.

Three hundred thirty meters from shore the water was, at last report, more than 4000 times over the limit and that number is growing every day. That seems very far from shore to be so contaminated and must entail a gusher of a leak. Radiation twice the limit has been found 40 kilometers from the shore so a massive contamination of the sea. No problem, the authorities say, the ocean will dilute it. Yes but how many mutant fish will emerge in the meantime?

Latest news is they found a crack in one of the containment vessels which might be the source of the leak, or maybe at least one source. They really don’t know for sure where it’s coming from. And it’s too dangerous to be able to spend the time, get up close and really find out why it’s leaking. It may go on for a long time. It may render a large part of the Japanese coast off limits to fishing on a permanent basis.

If a country wished to take a chance on permanently polluting its land, that would be their choice, but radiation knows no national boundaries. If Japan, one of the world’s most technologically advanced nations can’t keep it together, how can the world possibly be safe with a whole bevy of developing countries embracing nukes?

To me, nuclear power is emblematic of the idiocy and insanity of modern corporate life and its sway over government of all stripes. Nukes are now more expensive than wind. It takes five to ten years to bring one on line compared to one year for wind. There isn’t a single privately financed nuke in the entire world, because no deep pocket financial institution in its right mind would put up the money without 100% guarantees from government. There isn’t a single insurance company that will cover the full costs of a nuclear meltdown. There is still no way to permanently dispose of nuclear waste and though the radiation in spent fuel is just as dangerous as that in nuclear cores, the spent fuel is housed in tin sheds rather than the foot thick steel walls of the containment vessel for the nuclear core.

There’s no CO2 produced in a nuke, but a large amount is produced in the mining and processing of Uranium and the people who work in that area have a much greater risk of cancer than the general population.

It doesn’t make any sense and it never has, but still, even after Fukushima, there are a lot of people who’re still pushing for nukes and a lot of countries that’ll continue to pursue the ultimate disaster of nuclear power.

Tsunami Warning

I haven’t had much time to keep up with the blog lately as I’ve been working on a new book, Hitchhiker’s Guide to Enlightenment, but I had to take a little time off to comment on the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown in Japan.

It’s ironic that Japan, the country that’s suffered most from radiation has relied so heavily - 30% of its electricity - on nuclear power. It is also, of all countries, most subject to strong earthquakes. Something like 20% of all earthquakes over magnitude 6 on the Richter scale happen in Japan. As you’d expect, with that background, Japan is, relatively speaking, very well prepared for quakes. Forty story buildings in Tokyo swayed like palm trees but didn’t crumble.

However, at 9.0 that was the 4th strongest quake recorded since 1900, and the strongest in Japan in 300 years. It moved the entire country 4 meters to the east. That was not something you’d ever expect, at least not in your lifetime, so not something Japanese officials cared to plan for. But they do happen and with the consequences of nuclear meltdown so grave, even a 1000 year event should’ve been taken into account.

Moreover, with the very word tsunami derived from the Japanese, that’s also something they should’ve considered. There again, this wave was so outsized nobody there would’ve believed it could’ve ever happened. Nevertheless, when dealing with nuclear meltdown, the worst case scenario has to be part of the calculation. It’s not like when a windmill crashes and all you have to do is recycle the metal.

The government had been saying that radiation releases have been small and not dangerous, but now they are admitting spikes of unhealthy levels of radiation. One slick move made by the Japanese government was to lower standards for allowable radiation exposure when workers at the plant were getting over the maximum limit, otherwise they would’ve had to stop working. No big deal unless you’re one of the workers who might die from that exposure. More recently, they announced levels of radiation in food produced in the general area that were over allowable limits, but then said it wasn’t dangerous. Then why have a limit if there’s no harm in going over it? Some people feel there is no safe limit, that any amount is harmful.

The conventional wisdom has it that there was little radiation released at Three Mile Island and nobody died from it, in spite of the fact that cancers in the area spiked for a whole generation. It boggles the mind how the industry and their government enablers either believe their own lies or don’t care as long as there are profits to be made. After all, they have to breathe the same contaminated air as everyone.

Moreover, the industry, aligned with western governments is pushing nukes all over the world. Turkey, China, Pakistan, Vietnam, Indonesia, India, amongst several other countries, are all planning on developing nukes, so further meltdowns are inevitable. Take India for instance, it’s a great country with a lot going for it, but they haven’t been able to figure out how to provide toilets for more than half their population so those people just shit around, even in the big cities, so how the hell could they be trusted to safely operate a nuke?

Fortunately, this will force a rethink of nuclear power plans around the world, though many countries are certain to go ahead with them anyway. Not one single nuke would exist in the world today without government subsidies and exemption from full liability insurance in case of an accident. Not one single bank or investor in the entire world will finance a nuclear power plant without 100% guarantees. They take 6 to 10 years to build and cost a fantasic amount of money and now their power is more expensive than wind power. Still, many countries will continue to build them.

Meanwhile, four different units in the Fukashima complex have experienced serious explosions. The great irony is that the problem stemmed from the breakdown of the conventional pumping systems. The tsunami wiped out the electricity used to operate the pumps as well as the backup diesel generators. Now they are dumping in sea water. These are Hail Mary passes, acts of desperation, last ditch attempts to avoid meltdowns because once the containment vessel is covered in sea water it’s toast as a power facility. Billions of dollars down the drain and the country is experiencing rolling black outs because they now have a shortage of power.

Having four reactors out of control at the same time also seriously complicates matters because it’s hard to work on any one of them with the others so close by spewing their nasty stuff all around you. Moreover, the greatest danger comes not from the reactor cores themselves but the spent fuel rods. They may be spent for the purposes of use in the reactor, but they still contain a lot of radioactivity and generate a lot of heat and require water to be constantly circulating to keep them cool. And further, the spent fuel rods are not enclosed in thick steel containment vessels as the reactor core is and thus in case of overheating will spread their radiation very easily.

There area around those plants will become a permanent exclusion zone. Without protective clothing, nobody will be able to safely go near those plants as far in the future as one can imagine.

There’s been a feeling on the part of climate scientists for several years that global warming could have an impact on earthquake activity. If you remove heavy land ice in places thus lightening up those areas, while adding water to the oceans making them heavier, that may well increase frequency and intensity of quakes. I’m also convinced that withdrawing vast amounts of fossil fuels and water from the earth’s crust has an impact. Finally, the latest natural gas extraction technology – hydraulic fracturing – has shown to be exacerbating earthquake tendencies. The idea is to break up layers of shale to get the gas out. If you take a strong solid shale formation and shatter it into a lot of pieces it has to be destabilizing.

So it can only get worse. The world should prepare, however much it’s possible, for a wave of 100 year, 500 year, 1000 year natural events. And tough luck if you gamble on nuclear power and lose.

Revolution is in the Air

Revolution is in the Air

Nobody would’ve believed just a couple months ago that protests demanding freedom and democracy would erupt across the Middle East, and that two long time dictators would be driven out of power with more to come. As it happens both were aided in their tyranny and kleptocracy by US approval and assistance but it isn’t just America’s long time ‘friends’ and promoters of ‘stability’ who are feeling the heat.

Changes in Tunisia and Egypt have inspired Libya’s people to try to end their 42-year-long nightmare with Gaddafi and Iran’s theocratic rulers are also facing demands for reform, the institution of fundamental human rights we all purport to believe in. The same freedoms America doesn’t mention much when the despised tyrant is our friend and is willing to do our bidding. Now that the people of Bahrain are clamoring for democracy you have the amazing spectacle of uprising in one of the richest countries in the area. So consider Bahrain, Yemen, Jordan, Algeria, Libya, Morocco, in addition to Egypt and Tunisia, the two who are already down, and you have rich and poor, secular and theocratic, Arab and non-Arab, almost the entire Middle East in flux.

Moreover there should be no doubt that the people of Iraq would also be deposing Saddam if Bush and Blair hadn’t jumped the gun. Instead of the few hundred Saddam would’ve killed trying to maintain power, Western action to stop the threat of non-existent WMD’s cost a million Iraqi lives and displaced another four million. To be fair, one should also take into account the number, probably in the thousands, of Iraqis who would’ve suffered in one way or another over the eight years since Saddam was ousted, but still, that doesn’t compare much to the million who died, or maybe even the numbers who are still dying nearly every day from insurgent attacks and suicide bombers.

Just two months ago the conventional wisdom had it that the Arabs weren’t ready for democracy, or interested in electing their leaders; that they were better off with autocratic rulers. Israel could also tout itself as the only democracy in the area, though that’s not really true since Lebanon is governed by elected leaders and the Palestinians held free and fair elections in 2006. The reason why the Palestinians don’t have a legitimate democratic leadership now is that Hamas, the party they chose back in 2006 by a wide margin, didn’t meet with the approval of the US or Israel, thus began the purposeful economic and political squeezing and strangulating of the Palestinian people.

Moreover, the word democracy can only be applied very loosely to what takes place in Israel. In the first place, while Arabs make up 20% of Israel’s population they hold only 5% of the seats in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. That’s not to say democracies have to be perfect, as anomalies are frequent. The US Senate in particular is one of the most glaring examples of inequality since a senator from California represents 70 times more people than one from Wyoming. But at least in the US there are some checks and balances. There are also countries like Malaysia where one group, the indigenous Malays, receive a lot of benefits from the state which the Chinese and Indians, though they they’ve lived in the country for more than a century and make up 40% of the population, don’t receive, but that’s not a true democracy, and neither is Israel’s. True democracy absolutely requires that all citizens have equal citizenship rights. It’s not possible for a democracy to have second class citizens as the Arabs are in Israel.

It is not possible, as far as I’m concerned, for any country based on a single religion or race to be a true democracy. America’s founding fathers understood that more than two centuries ago. They put an impenetrable (at least in theory) wall of separation between church and state and placed an absolute prohibition of a religious test for leadership or citizenship. There can be no exceptions: either all human beings are entitled to the same rights or they are not; there’s no such thing as a part democracy or sort of democracy or a democracy for one group while others are discriminated against or subjugated.

Meanwhile in the midst of clamor throughout the Middle East for freedom and democracy, the US once again comes down on the wrong side of history in vetoing a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israel for continued settlement building in the West Bank. The resolution was sponsored by 130 countries; the Council vote was 14-1 against Israel. America’s UN rep said we too condemn settlement construction, we just don’t think this is the place to bring it up. Bullshit. Pure cowardice. Once again a light shining on America’s hypocrisy. We believe in all that human rights and stuff… but only when it suits us politically. As long as we are beholden to and afraid of Jewish donors and the right wing Jewish lobby, then humanity be damned.

What a terrible message to send to all those millions on the streets, all those people putting their lives on the line for freedom to say justice for Palestinians is not important, that protecting Israel from censure for acts that arrogantly flout international law and norms and that are almost universally disdained if not despised around the world is necessary and correct in a craven political calculation even if it’s not politically correct. The US used intense pressure to try to stop the Palestinians from bringing the measure up before the Security Council because Obama didn’t want to be shamed and embarrassed by vetoing it, but at this point the Palestinians have nothing to lose. Every day they see their land being usurped and colonized and their opportunity for a viable state diminished.

It took a long time for Apartheid to be vanquished but it had to end because it was fundamentally unfair, an affront to humanity. Israel is in the process of making a two state solution impossible so its Jews will eventually wind up with a single state they will have to share with the Arabs. It won’t come soon or easy, but there is becoming no other option. Apartheid was brought down by world pressure in the form of sanctions, boycotts and divestment. The same will happen to Israel.

On another topic, I have to bring up the case of Raymond Davis the American ‘diplomat’ who killed two ‘thieves’ in Pakistan and is being held in that country on a murder charge in spite of America insisting he has diplomatic immunity and wide ranging threats if he isn’t released into America’s custody.

In the first place, it is widely known outside America that the two ‘thieves’ were Pakistani intelligence agents who were trailing him. Also, in one account I read he shot them in the back so hardly self-defense. He had lots of spy devices on his person when arrested including a GPS that was used to designate targets for drone attacks. Two days before the incident the US embassy sent Pakistan a list of employees for the record, something they are required to do by law. Davis’ name wasn’t on the list. The day after the incident, the embassy sent Pakistan a revised list with his name on it. So hardly eligible for diplomatic immunity. In fact, he’s a security contractor. Besides, there is no immunity for serious crimes; diplomats don’t get away with murder.

To bring a personal threat from Obama demanding his release into US custody means the US is deathly afraid of what Pakistan will learn from him. So great fun as far as I’m concerned.

Palestine Papers and Arab Revolutions

The latest revelations to come from Wikileaks involve secret negotiations in the Middle East peace process. Two points in particular were revealed.


The first has to do with a breathtaking and unconscionable betrayal of the Palestinian cause by the leaders of the PLO who are in control in the West Bank. They just about gave away the farm in a futile effort to please and placate the Israelis. They offered to give up the right of return of Palestinian refugees. The right of return is enshrined in international law. Refugees must always have the right to return to their former homes.


They agreed to accept nearly all of the illegal Jewish settlements in Jerusalem. All settlements are illegal in international law. It would be very hard to have their capital in East Jerusalem if it was surrounded by Jewish settlements.


They collaborated with the Israeli secret police in the murder of their own citizens who happened to be their political opponents. The idea, I guess, being that if Israel feels more secure it’d be more likely to agree to an independent Palestinian state.


None of those concessions had the slightest impact on Israeli intransigence. Thus the other half of the revelations gave lie to the incessantly repeated Israeli mantra that they have no partner for peace; that they really want peace but the Palestinians are not interested. The Papers show that no matter how far the Palestinians went it wasn’t far enough for Israel. The reason is simple: Israel cannot agree to a viable Palestinian state because they’ve populated the West Bank with hundreds of thousands of fanatic fundamentalist Jews who will fiercely and violently object to being removed. One has only to look back at what happened in Gaza when Sharon removed the settlers from there. Though Gaza has no significance in Jewish history the 8000 Jews living there acted like their hearts were being ripped out and fed to swine. There were 8000 Jews living on 40% of Gaza, 1.5 million Arabs on 60%; for most Israeli Jews it was a perfectly reasonable and fair division of land.


Just in the last 20 years Israel has built homes in occupied Palestine for nearly 400,000 Jews. Forty percent are economic settlers; they are there because Israel subsidizes the cost of settlement housing to encourage Jews to move there. Why would they purposely want to encourage Jews to settle on stolen land? That construction has taken place under so-called left wing governments as well as right wing. They’ve spent billions of dollars colonizing Judea and Sumeria, Israel’s name for the West Bank, how could they walk away now?


This is all happening because 3000 years ago God said it belonged to the Jews. Presumably, He also implied that in securing the land for Jews it didn’t matter how mean, nasty or ruthless they had to be or how many other non-chosen people had die or have their lives ruined or how far they had to veer from basic human standards of justice or fairness. God must also have stated somewhere in the Old Testament, though I’ve never come across the actual passages, that they could set aside any thought of love, compassion or righteousness in the pursuit of their amassing of real estate.


As far as I can tell what they want Palestinians to accept is either to move to Jordan or some other country, maybe someplace in South America as Secretary of State Clinton suggested in the leaked papers, or to allow themselves to be herded into three small Bantustans in the West Bank where they have no international borders and so can ever remain under the thumb of Israel, not to mention provide a cheap labor source for the jobs Jews don’t want to do. They would effectively be third class citizens of Israel. The 1.2 million Arabs who live in Israel proper are, to all intents and purposes, second class citizens. They are not even equivalent to blacks living under segregation in the American south since in segregation there was at least the pretense of ‘separate but equal’ treatment. I’ve already detailed the institutionalized discrimination of Arab citizens of Israel so I won’t bore you with more repetition.


Meanwhile, Israel exonerated itself in the killing of nine Turks, including one who had dual Turkish/American citizenship, of any wrongdoing in the raid on the Gaza aid flotilla last year. Of course it was a totally impartial investigation. No need for an international commission, they would always be hopelessly biased against Israel. The commandos who participated in the raid were not allowed to testify, but that’s not important since we all know they have the utmost respect for the lives of all people, even the non-chosen.


Meanwhile, America’s best friend and bulwark of stability in the Arab world, Mubarak of Egypt, who’s become adept at Bush-type elections over the past 30 years he’s been in power, is having a few problems inspired by the revolution in nearby Tunisia. It seems in spite of his consistently winning elections by wide margins, the people at large actually despise him. But he’s America’s friend, so what’s a few stolen elections between allies?


A week after the start of protests it looks like Mubarak’s end is certain. The Egyptian army has said it won’t fire on protesters, so there’s nothing to stop the anti-government growth. The Tunisians called their uprising the Jasmine Revolution but a more apt term would be Facebook Revolution because it’s the young, secular and world-minded who made it happen. Same in Egypt. While it’s true that Islamicists will gain power in true democracies in those countries, the major Islamic parties have stated clearly that theirs is a moderate way on the order of Turkey, where a religious party rules but the state remains staunchly secular and democratic.


Protests have also spread to Yemen, Sudan, Algeria and Jordan so we may be seeing a 1989 Berlin Wall movement. Amazing, fantastic, heartening; history in the making.


The biggest loser in these changes will be Israel. Netanyahu has already raised the dreaded specter of Islamic terrorists taking over Egypt and that the world therefore should get behind Mubarak. They are already talking about possible war with Egypt, but the reality is far more mundane. The first thing that would happen in a democratic Egypt is that they would no longer collaborate with Israel in the strangulation of Gaza. There probably aren’t a handful of Egyptians outside of Mubarak’s ruling clique who support that policy. Just the opposite, they’d probably open the border wide so Gazans could start to rebuild their shattered infrastructure and live like human beings again. They wouldn’t start a war with Israel but would no longer be the greatest of friends either. One more plank in the international isolation of Israel. In the past few weeks several South American countries have recognized Palestine as an independent state in defiance of Israeli wailing and gnashing of teeth.


Once again the US has been on the wrong side of history, supporting hated dictatorships for simple craven political purposes. The US Coddles friendly dictatorships, castigates enemies for not being democratic. Hypocrisy at its best.


One last thought on the wrong side of history front. It looks like the Haitian government will let Jean-Bertrand Aristede back into the country. He was elected by landslides twice, deposed and exiled by US backed coups twice. His party wasn’t allowed to stand in recent elections but he would have won in a landslide if it had. There may be hope for Haiti after all.