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Archive: POLITICS >please note: some links may no longer be active.
The TARP Visualized I wish that it wasn't so likely to prove accurate! Click here
The Economic Crisis: Eastern Europe in Peril East Europe is about to blow. If it does, it could take much of the EU with it. It’s an emergency situation but there are no easy solutions. The IMF doesn’t have the resources for a bailout of this size and the recession is spreading faster than relief efforts can be organized. Finance ministers and central bankers are running in circles trying to put out one fire after another. It’s only a matter of time before they are overtaken by events. If one country is allowed to default, the dominoes could begin to tumble through the whole region. This could trigger dramatic changes in the political landscape. The rise of fascism is no longer out of the question. The UK Telegraph’s economics editor Edmund Conway sums it up like this: A “second wave” of countries will fall victim to the economic crisis and face being bailed out by the International Monetary Fund, its chief warned at the G7 summit in Rome. . . . But with some countries’ economies effectively dwarfed by the size of their banking sector and its financial liabilities, there are fears they could fall victim to balance of payments and currency crises, much as Iceland did before receiving emergency assistance from the IMF last year. Foreign capital is fleeing at an alarming rate. Nearly two-thirds gone in matter of months. Deflation is pushing down asset prices, increasing unemployment, and compounding the debt-burden of financial institutions. It’s the same everywhere. The economies are being hollowed out and stripped of capital. Ukraine is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary have all slipped into a low-grade depression. The countries that followed Washington’s economic regimen have suffered the most. They bet that debt-fueled growth and exports would lead to prosperity. That dream has been shattered. They haven’t developed their consumer markets, so demand is weak. Capital is scarce and businesses are being forced to deleverage to avoid default. All of Eastern Europe has gotten a margin call. They need extra funds to cover the falling value of their equity. They need a lifeline from the IMF or their economies will continue to crumble. The UK Telegraph’s economics correspondent Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has written a series of articles about Eastern Europe. In “Failure to Save East Europe Will Lead to Worldwide Meltdown” he says: "Austria’s finance minister Josef Pröll made frantic efforts last week to put together a €150bn rescue for the ex-Soviet bloc. Well he might. His banks have lent €230bn to the region, equal to 70pc of Austria’s GDP. "A failure rate of 10pc would lead to the collapse of the Austrian financial sector,” reported Der Standard in Vienna. Unfortunately, that is about to happen. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) says bad debts will top 10pc and may reach 20pc . . Stephen Jen, currency chief at Morgan Stanley, said Eastern Europe has borrowed $1.7 trillion abroad, much on short-term maturities. It must repay — or roll over — $400bn this year, equal to a third of the region’s GDP. Good luck. The credit window has slammed shut. Almost all East bloc debts are owed to West Europe, especially Austrian, Swedish, Greek, Italian, and Belgian banks. Plus, Europeans account for an astonishing 74pc of the entire $4.9 trillion portfolio of loans to emerging markets. They are five times more exposed to this latest bust than American or Japanese banks, and they are 50pc more leveraged (IMF data). An economic crisis is quickly turning into a political crisis. Riots have broken out in capitals across Eastern Europe. Mr. Geithner had better be paying attention. The prospects for political upheaval are growing. Public anxiety can spill out onto the streets at a moments notice. Governments must act quickly and with resolve. These countries need hard currency and guarantees of support. If they don’t get help, the simmering public fury will turn into something much more lethal. more from Mike Whitney at Dissident Voice
the Heart of the Matter
It's hard for me not to use analogies when talking about the current economic crisis. Since I work in the medical field, my want is to liken the crisis to a patient with multiple problems. Not all are fatal, but many are contributory to the serious situation the patient faces – that of impending death. When a person's heart stops, it's game over. In medicine we call this a “code”. Sure, there are a handful of things we can try to get the heart going again, but all of these start basically from the premise of having nothing to lose because the patient is technically already dead. We can use various medications, electricity, blood and IV fluids all in an attempt to maintain perfusion, but unless the underlying issue is treated, we just won't succeed. No matter how much time and energy we pour into revival efforts, if we can't get at the core issue (getting the heart to pump effectively), the patient is lost. The financial system today faces this same situation. It has not yet “coded”, but the heart rate is very slow and not moving enough blood to maintain perfusion. Treatment begins by addressing the most life-threatening symptoms and then assessing as rapidly as possible why they began in the first place. We have already dumped lots of blood and fluids into the patient (cash, guarantees, and TARP funds) – but so far not much good has come of that. There's enough fluid in the body, it's just not getting where it needs to be. Now what? Is the heart beating effectively enough? Is it pumping the blood out to the body systems? The heart can go into a very disorganized rhythm called ventricular fibrillation. When this happens, the ability to circulate blood is so ineffective that death is very quick indeed. The best thing to do at this point is to use a shock from a defibrillator and allow the heart to reset its electrical conduction system from zero, which may allow it to come back into a normal and effective pattern. This is often done more than once and in conjunction with medications to increase the likelihood of it working. This is the big gun for us. If medications and electricity can't get the heart going after a short period, we call the code (pronounce the patient dead). Nationalization of the banking system is like using the defibrillator. It will allow a reset to occur in the financial industry, if possible. If it does not work, we can call the code – game over. But until we try it, we will not give the patient perhaps the best chance to reset and begin to function normally. And even if this works and the banks come back, we still need to examine and treat many other contributory factors (co-morbidities we call them) or we will end up back where we are today. Getting the heart working is one thing, figuring out why the patient had the heart attack in the first place is the longer and more complicated part. But sometimes you just don't get patients to be compliant with treatment until they face death. Sometimes they just have to learn the hard way that they need to be more responsible and take care of themselves – with the assistance of their physicians of course. Time's getting short to act, and despite what many people believe, seconds never count - but minutes always do. reprinted in its entirety from Medic's blog
It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning. – Henry Ford
Hudson on the Bailout Martin Wolf started off his Financial Times column for February 11 with the bold question: “Has Barack Obama’s presidency already failed?” The stock market had a similar opinion, plunging 382 points. Having promised “change,” Mr. Obama is giving us more Clinton-Bush via Robert Rubin’s protégé, Tim Geithner. Tuesday’s $2.5 trillion Financial Stabilization Plan to re-inflate the Bubble Economy is basically an extension of the Bush-Paulson giveaway – yet more Rubinomics for financial insiders in the emerging Wall Street trusts. The financial system is to be concentrated into a cartel of just a few giant conglomerates to act as the economy’s central planners and resource allocators. This makes banks the big winners in the game of “chicken” they’ve been playing with Washington, a shakedown holding the economy hostage. “Give us what we want or we’ll plunge the economy into financial crisis.” Washington has given them $9 trillion so far, with promises now of another $2 trillion– and still counting. A true reform – one designed to undo the systemic market distortions that led to the real estate bubble – would have set out to reverse the Clinton-Rubin repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act so as to prevent the corrupting conflicts of interest that have resulted in vertical trusts such as Citibank and Bank of America/Countrywide/Merrill Lynch. By unleashing these conglomerate grupos (to use the term popularized under Pinochet with Chicago Boy direction – a dress rehearsal of the mass financial bankruptcies they caused in Chile by the end of the 1970s) the Clinton administration enabled banks to merge with junk mortgage companies, junk-money managers, fictitious property appraisal companies, and law-evasion firms all designed to package debts to investors who trusted them enough to let them rake off enough commissions and capital gains to make their managers the world’s highest-paid economic planners. Today’s economic collapse is the direct result of their planning philosophy. It actually was taught as “wealth creation” and still is, as supposedly more productive than the public regulation and oversight so detested by Wall Street and its Chicago School aficionados. The financial powerhouses created by this “free market” philosophy span the entire FIRE sector – finance, insurance and real estate, “financializing” housing and commercial property markets in ways guaranteed to make money by creating and selling debt. Mr. Obama’s advisors are precisely those of the Clinton Administration who supported trustification of the FIRE sector. This is the broad deregulatory medium in which today’s bad-debt disaster has been able to spread so much more rapidly than at any time since the 1920s. The commercial banks have used their credit-creating power not to expand the production of goods and services or raise living standards but simply to inflate prices for real estate (making fortunes for their brokerage, property appraisal and insurance affiliates), stocks and bonds (making more fortunes for their investment bank subsidiaries), fine arts (whose demand is now essentially for trophies, degrading the idea of art accordingly) and other assets already in place. The resulting dot.com and real estate bubbles were not inevitable, not economically necessary. They were financially engineered by the political deregulatory power acquired by banks corrupting Congress through campaign contributions and public relations “think tanks” (more in the character of doublethink tanks) to promote the perverse fiction that Wall Street can be and indeed is automatically self-regulating -- a travesty of Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand.” This hand is better thought of as covert. The myth of “free markets” is now supposed to consist of governments withdrawing from planning and taxing wealth, so as to leave resource allocation and the economic surplus to bankers rather than elected public representatives. This is what classically is called oligarchy, not democracy. the rest of Michael Hudson's important piece can be accessed at CounterPunch
The Core of the Matter When it comes to lending, it is imperative for Congress and the US public to understand that it was irresponsible lending that created this mess so irresponsible lending cannot possibly be the cure. That is a heart to heart talk Obama needs to make. Sadly, neither Obama nor Geithner, nor most in Congress understands basic economics. What I fear most is a nationalization of banks with Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi and the other clowns in Congress planning to force more those banks into continued policies of irresponsible lending just to get "credit unfrozen". Credit is frozen for a reason: It makes little sense to lend. The only cure is time and price. Home prices need to fall to affordability levels that make sense, and a writeoff of the malinvestments of the last 10 years needs to happen before there can be a sustained recovery. read more of Mike "Mish" Shedlock's take on the current government bailout, and its appalling lack of transparency
Systemic Failure BILL MOYERS: I think you wrote that "The media stars in Washington almost never understand that there's anything wrong with the establishment of which they're a part." GLENN GREENWALD: That's right. I mean, if you were to say to normal Americans, and it's the reason why these issues resonated, and why Barack Obama made them a centerpiece of his campaign, that members of Congress leave office and make millions of dollars doing nothing other than essentially peddling influence to wealthy individuals who can have their way with Congress. Most people consider that to be corruption. That's what Barack Obama called it when he ran. Yet, to members of the media, who have spent their lives in Washington, who are friends and colleagues of the people who are engorging themselves on this corrupt system that is just the way of life. It's like breathing air or drinking water. It's not anything that's noteworthy, let alone controversial. JAY ROSEN: Well, what doesn't get considered, Bill, is that there could be anything radically wrong with Washington. That the entire institution could be broken. That there are new rules necessary. That idea, that the institutions of Washington have failed and need to be changed, doesn't really occur to the press, because as Glenn said, they're one of those institutions. And they're one of the ones that failed. watch or read the transcript of Moyers' excellent recent discussion with Rosen and Greenwald at PBS
Stiglitz on the Bailout
Josh Marshall's TPM
The Elephant in the Room Is it mandatory for the U.S. Government officials to lie about the fact that Israel has nuclear weapons? HELEN THOMAS: [D]o you know of any country in the Middle East that has nuclear weapons? PRESIDENT OBAMA: ...With respect to nuclear weapons, you know, I don't want to speculate. from last night's press conference
Excellent Idea . . . since the Geithner-Summers team seems to be looking for them. Why not say that all bank compensation above a baseline amount - say, $150,000 in annual salary - has to be paid in toxic assets off the bank’s balance sheet? Instead of getting a check for $10,000, the employee would get $10,000 in toxic assets, at their current book value. A federal regulator can decide which assets to pay compensation in; if they were all fairly valued, then it wouldn’t matter which ones the regulator chose. That would get the assets off the bank’s balance sheet, and into the hands of the people responsible for putting them there - at the value that they insist they are worth. Of course, the average employee does not get to set the balance sheet value of the assets, and may not have been involved in creating or buying those particular assets. But think about the incentives: talented people will flow to the companies that are valuing their assets the most realistically (since inflated valuations translate directly into lower compensation), which will give companies the incentive to be realistic in their valuations. (Banks could inflate their nominal compensation amounts to compensate for their overvalued assets, but then they would have to take larger losses on their income statements.) We can dream, can’t we? thanks to James Kwak at The Baseline Scenario
A Step In The Right Direction PRESIDENT Barack Obama has demanded that American defence chiefs review their strategy in Afghanistan before going ahead with a troop surge. There is concern among senior Democrats that the military is preparing to send up to 30,000 extra troops without a coherent plan or exit strategy. The Pentagon was set to announce the deployment of 17,000 extra soldiers and marines last week but Robert Gates, the defence secretary, postponed the decision after questions from Obama. The president was concerned by a lack of strategy at his first meeting with Gates and the US joint chiefs of staff last month in “the tank”, the secure conference room in the Pentagon. He asked: “What’s the endgame?” and did not receive a convincing answer. Larry Korb, a defence expert at the Center for American Progress, a Washington think tank, said: “Obama is exactly right. Before he agrees to send 30,000 troops, he wants to know what the mission and the endgame is.” more from TIMESONLINE (U.K.)
New Administration; Same Old Lies In his confirmation hearing before thee Senate Intelligence Committee, President Obama's pick to head the CIA, Leon Panetta, said he believed Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons -- contrary to the opinion of the intelligence community he is about to lead -- in this exchange with Senator Evan Bayh (D-IN), who had his own problems with the facts (and the views of international inspectors and the U.S. intelligence community): SEN. BAYH: There was a -- and this involves the National Intelligence Estimates. We had an unfortunate case -- I'm sure you're aware of -- with regard to Iran, where the way in which the National Intelligence Estimate was written highlighted the fact that apparently they suspended the weaponization aspect of their program. Then, in the footnote, it noted that they continued to pace with their attempts to develop fissile material and delivery capabilities and those kind of things, and in fact may have restarted their weaponization efforts. We just don't know. So I would encourage you -- just a comment -- to look very carefully how these things are written, because that really undermined our diplomatic efforts to gather our allies to put pressure on Iran to stop those kind of activities. So my comment, my question, is, is it your belief that Iran is seeking a nuclear military capability? Or are their interests solely limited to the civilian sphere? MR. PANETTA: From all the information that I've seen, I think there is no question that they are seeking that capability. There’s of course several problems with this exchange, but let’s begin with Bayh’s patently false assertion that the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran (NIE) declared in a footnote that Iran “may have restarted their weaponization efforts. We just don’t know.” Since Bayh, a member of the Intelligence Committee, can’t recall the actual findings of the NIE, perhaps we should recap for the confused senators that might be reading this: it declares on behalf of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies that “We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.” The footnote to that statement declares: For the purposes of this Estimate, by “nuclear weapons program” we mean Iran’s nuclear weapon design and weaponization work and covert uranium conversion-related and uranium enrichment-related work; we do not mean Iran’s declared civil work related to uranium conversion and enrichment. So, in fact, the ‘07 NIE (pdf) explicitly states with “high confidence” that Iran has ended its “nuclear weapons program”, defined as its “nuclear weapons design and weaponization work” -- decidedly not, as Bayh asserts, “that they may have restarted their weaponization efforts. We just don't know.” Those findings have been a thorn in the side of hawkish, fear-mongering politicians since it came out -- "an unfortunate case" in Bayh's words -- but it seems to have largely been forgotten or dismissed by America's elite politicians and journalists. more from Charles Davis at his excellent blog, False Dichotomy
Juan Cole On the Provincial Elections in Iraq No one in the U.S. mainstream media has come close to displaying the perceptiveness of University of Michigan Professor Juan Cole when it comes to the complex, and often confusing political landscape in Iraq. In his most recent blog entry, Cole neatly summarizes the recent Iraqi elections. The Iraqi provincial election results are out. They confirm what I said last Monday, that the parties who want a strong, united Iraq have come to the fore in these elections. Although Nuri al-Maliki's Da'wa Party got over a third of the votes in Baghdad and Basra, they clearly did not achieve a commanding position, and its share in the more rural Shiite provinces was signifcantly less.. The big story here is that the Shiite religious parties (and yes, the Da'wa or Islamic Mission Party is among them) again swept the Shiite south. However, those Shiite parties that won out this time want a strong central government, not a Shiite mini-state. There is nothing here to give comfort to those Americans who fear Iranian influence in Iraq. The Islamic Mission Party or Da'wa is just as committed to warm relations with Tehran as is the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. The Da'wa leaders were in exile in Tehran for years just like ISCI. Da'wa is more "lay" and less clerical than ISCI, but being "lay" means non-clerical, not secular. Da'wa wants an Islamic State. These election results raise severe questions about the viability of the Biden plan, which foresaw three decentralized super-provinces overseen by a weak central government. Most of the victors in this election are strong believers in a centralized civil bureaucracy. On the whole, I think these results are encouraging for Obama. The Sunni Arab ex-Baathist secular elites have reentered polities in the Sunni Arab areas. These election results put paid to the fantasies of Dick Cheney and John McCain that Sunni Arab Iraqis are pro-"al-Qaeda." Most of them would not even vote for a religious party, much less for a radical fundamentalist terrorist group. Cheney said that if the US left, al-Qaeda would take over Sunni Arab Iraq. That is highly unlikely given these election results. more from Cole here
Obama's New Bank Giveaway First, here’s the silhouette of the giveaway, as outlined Thursday in the New York Times: “Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said Wednesday the administration is working on a comprehensive plan to “repair the financial system.” … bank stocks surged on hopes the government was moving toward creating a “bad bank” to purge toxic assets from balance sheets that are rapidly deteriorating as the economy worsens… administration officials believe that trillions of dollars more may be needed to buy the majority of bad assets from banks. … “The concept of a bad bank has gained momentum in the financial industry as the economy deteriorates, slashing the value of risky assets on banks’ books and increasing the need for banks to hold capital against those losses. Shares in Citigroup and Bank of America, which both recently received a second taxpayer lifeline, surged 19 percent and 14 percent respectively as the stock market rose on optimism that the administration would relieve banks of money-losing assets.” After (1) threatening for eight years that the prospect of a trillion-dollar deficit spread over a generation or so is sufficient reason to stiff Social Security recipients and abolish debts to the nation’s retirees, and (2) after the Bush administration provided $8 trillion over the past three months in cash-for-trash swaps of good Treasury bonds for Wall Street junk derivatives, the Obama Administration is now speaking of (3) some $2 to $4 trillion more to be given in just the next week or so. Not a single Republican Congressman went along, just as Rep. Boehmer refused to support the Bush bailout on that fatal Friday when Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama debated each other over marginal issues not touching on the giveaway, which both candidates passionately supported. The Party of Wealth sees the political handwriting on the wall, for which the Party of Labor seems happy to take all responsibility. This probably is the only place where I’d like to see “bipartisanship.” Watch the campaign contributions flow for an index of how well this will pay off for the Democrats! How many families would like a “give-back” on every bad investment they’ve ever made? It’s like a parent coming to a child who has just broken a toy, saying “That’s all right. We’ll just go out and buy you a new one.” This from the apostles of “responsibility” for poverty, for mortgage debtors owing more than they can afford to pay, for people who get sick and can’t afford medical care, and for states and cities now left high and dry by the fiscal wipe-out that the Bush-Obama “cleanup” has foisted onto the economy. No do-over for anyone but the hundred or so billionaires who have just been endowed with enough free money to become America’s ruling elite for the rest of the 21st century. more from Michael Hudson at Counterpunch
Fueling the Cycle of Hate Israeli soccer matches were suspended during the assault on Gaza. When the games resumed last week, the fans had come up with a new chant: "Why have the schools in Gaza been shut down?" sang the crowd. "Because all the children were gunned down!" came the answer. Aside from its sheer barbarism, this chant reflects the widespread belief among Israeli Jews that Israel scored an impressive victory in Gaza – a victory measured, not least, by the death toll. Israeli pilots and tank commanders could not really discriminate between the adults and the children who hid in their homes or huddled in the UNRWA shelters, and yet they chose to press the trigger. Therefore, it is not at all surprising that the lethal onslaught left 1,314 Palestinians dead, of which 412 – or nearly one third of all of the casualties – were children. This latest assault underscores that Israel, not unlike Hamas, readily resorts to violence and does not distinguish between civilians and combatants (only the weapons at Israel's disposal are much more lethal). No matter how many times the Israeli government tries to blame Hamas for the latest Palestinian civilian deaths it simply cannot explain away the body count, especially that of the children. In addition to the dead, 1,855 Palestinian children were wounded, and tens of thousands of others have likely been traumatised, many of them for life. Every child has a story. A Bedouin friend recently called to tell us about his relatives in Gaza. One cousin allowed her five-year-old daughter to walk to the adjacent house to see whether the neighbours had something left to eat. The girl had been crying from hunger. The moment she began crossing the street a missile exploded nearby and the flying shrapnel killed her. The mother has since been bedridden, weeping and screaming, "I have let my girl die hungry". As if the bloody incursion was not enough, the Israeli security forces seem to be keen on spreading the flames of hatred among the Arab population within Israel. Hundreds of Palestinian citizens of Israel have been arrested for protesting at the Israeli assault and more than 200 of them are still in custody. One incident is enough to illustrate the psychological effect these arrests will likely have on hundreds more children. A few days after the ceasefire, several men wearing black ski masks stormed the home of Muhammad Abu Humus. They came to arrest him for protesting against the killings in Gaza. It was four in the morning and the whole family was asleep when the men banged on the door. After entering the house, they made Abu Humus's wife Wafa and their four children Erfat (12), Shahd (9), Anas (6) and Majd (3) stand in a corner as they searched the house, throwing all the clothes, sheets, toys, and kitchenware on the floor. With tears in their eyes, the children watched as the armed men then took their father away and left. Chance would have it that Abu Humus, a long-time peace activist and member of the Fatah party, is a personal friend of ours. In 2001, he joined Ta'ayush Arab-Jewish Partnership, and since then has selflessly organised countless peace rallies and other joint activities. During the past eight years, we have spent many hours at each other's homes and our children have grown up respecting and liking one other. It is hard to believe that just one month ago he attended the Bar Mitzvah of Yigal's son in a Jerusalem synagogue. Muhammad and Wafa Abu Humus have tried over the years to instil in their children a love and desire for peace, and while the security forces may not have destroyed this, the hatred they have generated in one night cannot be underestimated. Indeed, what, one might ask, will his children think of their Jewish neighbours? What feelings will they harbour? And what can we expect from those children in Gaza who have witnessed the killing of their parents, siblings, friends and neighbours? We emphasise the Palestinian children because so many of them have been killed and terrorised in the past month. Yet it is clear that Israeli children are suffering as well, particularly those who have spent long periods in shelters for fear of being hit by rockets. The one message that is being conveyed to children on both sides of this fray is that the other side is a bloodthirsty monster. In Israel, this was instantly translated into gains for the hate-mongering Yisrael Beytenu party headed by the xenophobic Avigdor Lieberman, who is now the frontrunner in mock polls being held in many Jewish high schools, with the hawkish Binyamin Netanyahu coming in second. Hatred, in other words, is the great winner of this war. It has helped mobilise racist mobs, and as the soccer chant indicates it has left absolutely no place for the other, undermining even basic empathy for innocent children. Israel's masters of war must be happy: the seeds of the next wars have certainly been sown. Yigal Bronner teaches in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Neve Gordon is chair of the department of politics and government at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and author of Israel’s Occupation (University of California Press, 2008). reprinted in its entirety from Counterpunch
Behind the Madoff Scandal In 2000, Harry Markopoulos, a Greek-American leading expert on derivatives, wrote to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's Boston office to inform the federal watchdog of markets that Bernard L. Madoff was running "the world's largest hedge fund fraud." He stipulated that his "name not be released to anyone other than the Branch chief and Team Leader in the New York region, without my express permission." Markopoulos was worried about his safety and that of his family. He said his report was written solely for the SEC's internal use. He was clearly afraid of assassination. But his red flag was only one of 28 such warnings to the SEC in the first eight years of the 21st century. A Greek-American friend of Markopoulos, now in Switzerland, wrote in his blog, "He nailed Madoff, listing the back-door marketing and financing schemes as if he were an insider. But the SEC did not respond. Powerful political voices ordered the SEC not to proceed. I am not naming names because libel laws mostly favor the criminal in Europe, and their names will never get past libel lawyers. The largest investors were not Jewish charities as was reported by New York newspapers, but French, Spanish and Swiss private banks." Markopoulos predicted the implosion of all the main funds (which he named) that dealt with Madoff four years before they imploded. That nobody listened or did anything about it is an even bigger scandal. A total mental meltdown of 3,000 SEC bureaucrats, each presumably endowed with average mental faculties, and a headquarters festooned with red flags taxes credulity. more from Arnaud de Borschgrave at UPI
Israel’s Lies Western governments and most of the Western media have accepted a number of Israeli claims justifying the military assault on Gaza: that Hamas consistently violated the six-month truce that Israel observed and then refused to extend it; that Israel therefore had no choice but to destroy Hamas’s capacity to launch missiles into Israeli towns; that Hamas is a terrorist organisation, part of a global jihadi network; and that Israel has acted not only in its own defence but on behalf of an international struggle by Western democracies against this network. I am not aware of a single major American newspaper, radio station or TV channel whose coverage of the assault on Gaza questions this version of events. Criticism of Israel’s actions, if any (and there has been none from the Bush administration), has focused instead on whether the IDF’s carnage is proportional to the threat it sought to counter, and whether it is taking adequate measures to prevent civilian casualties. Middle East peacemaking has been smothered in deceptive euphemisms, so let me state bluntly that each of these claims is a lie. Israel, not Hamas, violated the truce: Hamas undertook to stop firing rockets into Israel; in return, Israel was to ease its throttlehold on Gaza. In fact, during the truce, it tightened it further. This was confirmed not only by every neutral international observer and NGO on the scene but by Brigadier General (Res.) Shmuel Zakai, a former commander of the IDF’s Gaza Division. In an interview in Ha’aretz on 22 December, he accused Israel’s government of having made a ‘central error’ during the tahdiyeh, the six-month period of relative truce, by failing ‘to take advantage of the calm to improve, rather than markedly worsen, the economic plight of the Palestinians of the Strip . . . When you create a tahdiyeh, and the economic pressure on the Strip continues,’ General Zakai said, ‘it is obvious that Hamas will try to reach an improved tahdiyeh, and that their way to achieve this is resumed Qassam fire . . . You cannot just land blows, leave the Palestinians in Gaza in the economic distress they’re in, and expect that Hamas will just sit around and do nothing.’ The truce, which began in June last year and was due for renewal in December, required both parties to refrain from violent action against the other. Hamas had to cease its rocket assaults and prevent the firing of rockets by other groups such as Islamic Jihad (even Israel’s intelligence agencies acknowledged this had been implemented with surprising effectiveness), and Israel had to put a stop to its targeted assassinations and military incursions. This understanding was seriously violated on 4 November, when the IDF entered Gaza and killed six members of Hamas. Hamas responded by launching Qassam rockets and Grad missiles. Even so, it offered to extend the truce, but only on condition that Israel ended its blockade. Israel refused. It could have met its obligation to protect its citizens by agreeing to ease the blockade, but it didn’t even try. It cannot be said that Israel launched its assault to protect its citizens from rockets. It did so to protect its right to continue the strangulation of Gaza’s population. Everyone seems to have forgotten that Hamas declared an end to suicide bombings and rocket fire when it decided to join the Palestinian political process, and largely stuck to it for more than a year. Bush publicly welcomed that decision, citing it as an example of the success of his campaign for democracy in the Middle East. (He had no other success to point to.) When Hamas unexpectedly won the election, Israel and the US immediately sought to delegitimise the result and embraced Mahmoud Abbas, the head of Fatah, who until then had been dismissed by Israel’s leaders as a ‘plucked chicken’. They armed and trained his security forces to overthrow Hamas; and when Hamas – brutally, to be sure – pre-empted this violent attempt to reverse the result of the first honest democratic election in the modern Middle East, Israel and the Bush administration imposed the blockade. the rest of (Rabbi) Henry Siegman's powerful piece can be read in the LRB
A Second (Crisis) Wave For a picture of the US real estate crisis, imagine New Orleans wrecked by Hurricane Katrina, and before the waters even begin to recede, a second Katrina hits. The 1,120,000 lost US retail jobs in 2008 are a signal that the second stage of the real estate bust is about to hit the economy. This time it will be commercial real estate--shopping malls, strip malls, warehouses, and office buildings. As businesses close and rents decline, the ability to service the mortgages on the over-built commercial real estate disappears. The over-building was helped along by the irresponsibly low interest rates, but the main impetus came from the slide of the US saving rate to zero and the rise in household indebtedness. The shrinkage of savings and the increase in debt raised consumer spending to 72% of GDP. The proliferation of malls and the warehouses that service them reflect the rise in consumer spending as a share of GDP. Like the federal government, consumers spent more than they earned and borrowed to cover the difference. Obviously, this could not go on forever, and consumer debt has reached its limit. Shopping malls are losing anchor stores, and large chains are closing stores and even going out of business altogether. Developers who borrowed to finance commercial ventures are in trouble as are the holders of the mortgages, derivatives and other financial junk associated with the loans. The main source of the economic crisis is the infantile belief of US policymakers that an economy could be based on debt expansion. As offshoring moved jobs, incomes, and GDP out of the country, debt expanded to take the place of the missing income. When the offshored goods and services were brought back to be sold to Americans, the trade deficit rose, adding another level of financing for an economy that consumes more than it produces. The growth of debt has outpaced the growth of real output. Yet, the solution offered by Obama’s economic team is to expand debt further. This is not surprising as Obama’s economic team consists of the very people who brought on the debt crisis. Now they are going to make it worse. The unexamined question is: Who is going to finance the next wave of debt? more from Paul Craig Roberts at Counterpunch
Some Thoughts on the "War"
On Saturday December 27, the latest US-Israeli attack on helpless Palestinians was launched. The attack had been meticulously planned, for over 6 months according to the Israeli press. The planning had two components: military and propaganda. It was based on the lessons of Israel's 2006 invasion of Lebanon, which was considered to be poorly planned and badly advertised. We may, therefore, be fairly confident that most of what has been done and said was pre-planned and intended. Noam Chomsky's full article can be read on Znet For three weeks barbarism has been on show before a universal public, which has watched, judged and with few exceptions rejected Israel’s use of armed terror against the one and a half million inhabitants blockaded since 2006 in the Gaza Strip. Never have the official justifications for invasion been more patently refuted by the combination of camera and arithmetic; or the newspeak of ‘military targets’ by the images of bloodstained children and burning schools. Thirteen dead on one side, 1360 on the other: it isn’t hard to work out which side is the victim. There is not much more to be said about Israel’s appalling operation in Gaza. Except for those of us who are Jews. In a long and insecure history as a people in diaspora, our natural reaction to public events has inevitably included the question: ‘Is it good or bad for the Jews?’ In this instance the answer is unequivocally: ‘Bad for the Jews’. the rest of Eric Hobsbawm's piece can be read in the LRB It is commonplace to talk about the ‘fog of war’, but war can also clarify things. The war in Gaza has pointed up the Israeli security establishment’s belief in force as a means of imposing ‘solutions’ which result in massive Arab civilian suffering and solve nothing. It has also laid bare the feebleness of the Arab states, and their inability to protect Palestinian civilians from the Israeli military, to the despair and fury of their citizens. Almost from the moment the war began, America’s Arab allies – above all Egypt – found themselves on the defensive, facing accusations of impotence and even treason in some of the largest demonstrations the region has seen in years. Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary general of Hizbullah in Lebanon, reserved some of his harshest criticism for the Mubarak regime; at Hizbullah rallies, protesters chanted ‘Where are you, Nasser?’ – a question that is also being asked by Egyptians. The Egyptian government and its Arab allies – Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco – responded to the war much as they responded to the 2006 invasion of Lebanon: by tacitly supporting Israel’s offensive in the hope of weakening a resistance movement which they see as a proxy for Iran and Syria. When the bombing began, Egypt criticised Hamas over the breakdown of the reconciliation talks with Fatah that Cairo had brokered, and for firing rockets at Israel. The implication was that Hamas was responsible for the war. Refusing to open the Rafah crossing, the Mubarak government pointed out that Israel, the occupying power, not Egypt, was responsibile for the humanitarian situation in Gaza under the Fourth Geneva Convention. Egypt’s concern is understandable: ever since it recovered the Sinai in 1982, it has worried that Israel might attempt to dump responsibility onto it for the Strip’s 1.5 million impoverished residents, a fear that has grown as the prospects of ending the occupation have receded. But its initial refusal to open the crossing to relief supplies, medical personnel and reporters made it difficult for Cairo to deny charges that it was indifferent to Palestinian suffering, and that it valued relations with Israel and the US (its main patron) more highly than the welfare of Gaza’s people. Since Hamas came to power in Gaza in 2006, Egypt’s press has been rife with lurid warnings – echoed in conservative Lebanese and Saudi newspapers, as well as Israeli ones – about the establishment in Gaza of an Islamic emirate backed by Iran. Cairo’s distrust of Hamas is closely connected with internal politics: Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brothers, the country’s largest opposition movement; and it came to power in Gaza in the kind of democratic elections that Mubarak has done everything to prevent. (He is likely to be succeeded by his son, Gamal, after sham elections.) When there still seemed hope of a Palestinian Authority (PA) coalition government between Fatah and Hamas (which would have diluted the latter’s power), Egypt was careful to appear balanced. But after the deep split in Palestinian politics that followed the Hamas takeover of Gaza in 2007, Egypt tilted increasingly against Hamas. The division of occupied Palestine into two PAs – a Fatah-ruled West Bank and a Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, both without sovereignty, jurisdiction or much in the way of authority – was seen in Cairo as a threat to domestic security: it promised greater instability on Egypt’s borders, jeopardised the negotiated two-state solution with Israel to which Egypt was committed, and emboldened allies of the Muslim Brothers. the rest of Rashid Khalidi's piece can also be accessed in the LRB
Blind, and in Lockstep Not a good combination, as you might imagine. But that is exactly how the highest level American politicians – with virtually no exceptions – have reacted to the Israeli attack on Gaza. Glenn Greenwald dissects the issue with typical precision: In most of the world, the Israeli attack on Gaza is viewed as an intensely controversial act and, more commonly, an excessive, unjustifiable, and brutal assault on a trapped civilian population. But not in the United States—at least not among America’s political and opinion-making elite. Here one finds a bipartisan consensus as simplistic as it is unquestioned: Israel’s bombing campaign and invasion of Gaza are right and just, and it is the duty of the U.S. to support these actions unequivocally. From the moment Israel began dropping bombs on Gaza, leaders of America’s two major political parties rushed to announce their total support, competing to see who could most fulsomely praise the offensive. So complete was the agreement that they all seemed to be reading from the same script. While other Western governments issued even-handed statements condemning both Israel and Hamas and their diplomats worked furiously to forge a ceasefire agreement, America’s political leaders stood on the sidelines, cheering with increasing fervor. When it comes to Israel’s various military actions, there is far more dissent within Israel, where one commonly finds prominent, vehement criticism of the Israeli government, than there is within the U.S., where such criticism is all but nonexistent. Indeed, in the U.S. Congress, there is far more unqualified support for Israel’s wars than for America’s own. The refusal of our political leaders to deviate even slightly from this ritual reached its zenith during the week of Jan. 5, when events in Gaza heightened worldwide opposition to the Israeli attack. The Palestinian death toll exceeded 800, with more than 3,000 wounded. The UN reported that roughly a third of the dead and wounded were children, that Gaza was on the verge of collapse, that its residents were on the brink of mass starvation. Israel bombed a school where the UN had established a shelter, killing 40 refugees hiding there in terror. The Israeli Defense Force initially claimed that Hamas militants had shot from a rooftop of the school and Israel merely returned fire. But the following day, when the UN investigated and found that claim to be false, Israel was forced to acknowledge that no such provocation occurred. Instead, the IDF said, the bombing of the school was merely an accident. The next day, the Red Cross, which for a full week had been prevented by the IDF from entering Gaza, unveiled a gruesome discovery: numerous children, too emaciated even to stand up, had spent days in an apartment complex lying next to the corpses of their parents and other relatives as the IDF blocked ambulances from reaching them. The same day, the UN suggested that Israel had committed war crimes, citing an appalling incident in which the Israelis ordered some 110 civilians to enter a house and stay there, then proceeded to shell the building, killing 30 civilians inside. Though the IDF physically prevented journalists from entering Gaza, even in the face of a week-old order from the Israeli Supreme Court directing them to allow access, documented stories began emerging of large extended families in Gaza—parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts, and small children—extinguished by Israeli attacks. The world recoiled in horror. Angry street demonstrations erupted in Europe, and condemnations of Israel from the UN and Red Cross were unusually strident. It was at this moment that the American Congress inserted itself—and, in effect, the United States—into the war, and did so in the most one-sided manner possible. As the Palestinian body count and international anger mounted, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.) introduced a non-binding resolution that expressed unequivocal American support for the Israeli attack and formally declared that all blame for the war and all responsibility to end it rested with Hamas—none with Israel. the rest of Glenn's piece can be read at The American Conservative
60 Years Ago, at the Beginning Essay written and published in America by King Abdullah I of Jordan six months before the Israeli/Arab war of 1948: Palestine is a small and very poor country, about the size of your state of Vermont. Its Arab population is only about 1,200,000. Already we have had forced on us, against our will, some 600,000 Zionist Jews. We are threatened with many hundreds of thousands more. Our position is so simple and natural that we are amazed it should even be questioned. It is exactly the same position you in America take in regard to the unhappy European Jews. You are sorry for them, but you do not want them in your country. We do not want them in ours, either. Not because they are Jews, but because they are foreigners. We would not want hundreds of thousands of foreigners in our country, be they Englishmen or Norwegians or Brazilians or whatever. Think for a moment: In the last 25 years we have had one third of our entire population forced upon us. In America that would be the equivalent of 45,000,000 complete strangers admitted to your country, over your violent protest, since 1921. How would you have reacted to that? Because of our perfectly natural dislike of being overwhelmed in our own homeland, we are called blind nationalists and heartless anti-Semites. This charge would be ludicrous were it not so dangerous. No people on earth have been less "anti-Semitic" than the Arabs. The persecution of the Jews has been confined almost entirely to the Christian nations of the West. read the rest here via my friend Abbas Raza at 3 Quarks Daily
Excellent Question This almost irrational absolute support for Israel in both the legislative and executive branches of the U.S. government occurs while a chorus of international condemnation of Israel for using excessive force includes calls by some United Nations officials and respectable non-governmental organizations to investigate whether Israel has committed “war crimes.” Israel is using the two arsenals it is most comfortable with -- military force to kill, injure, terrorize and displace thousands of Palestinian civilians, and the equivalent political overkill to bludgeon the American political establishment into total submission. After six decades of trying, Israel has been unable to turn Palestinians into vassals and subservient slaves -- but it has succeeded in transforming an otherwise impressive American political governance system into a herd of castrated cattle who cower before the threats that Israel’s Washington-based henchmen and hit men hold over them. Gaza will get its ceasefire soon, but will Washington ever find relief from the choking stranglehold of Israel’s political thugs? more from Rami G. Khouri at Agence Global
Inappropriate Indeed New York Jews are widely perceived to be well-educated, liberal, and compassionate. Max Blumenthal interviews some of them about the attack on Gaza at a recent Manhattan rally, and the answers couldn't be more – how shall I put this? – eloquent. Chuck Schumer also comes away as an impressive figure, no? I mean, as Dennis Perrin puts it "...had Al-Qaida warned the workers at the World Trade Center on 9/10 what was coming the next morning, people like Schumer would've doubtless applauded the gesture. It's how civilized people communicate.".
Not In My Name Sderot is the small Israeli town most widely associated with, and directly affected by the Qassam rockets launched from Gaza. Here is a poignant reminder that – contrary to what the mainstream American media would have us believe – not even all of those whose lives are threatened by those rockets support the current massacre of innocent Palestinians. Sderot War Diary Nomika Zion, Sderot, 8.1.09 "I talk with Sderot people and everyone's cheeks are rosy again", boasted Fuad on the war's second day [Fuad is Benjamin Ben Eliezer, a long-time centrist Labor minister - Assaf]. "The heavier the blow we deliver - the wider the hearts get". Hey Fuad, not everyone. Even if I was the only one around Sderot feeling differently - and I am not - my voice should be heard. Not in my name and not for me you went to war. The current bloodbath in Gaza is not in my name and not for my security. Destroyed homes, bombed schools, thousands of new refugees - are not in my name and not for my security. In Gaza there is no time for burial ceremonies now, the dead are put in refrigerators in twos, because there is no room. Here their bodies lay, policemen, children, and our nimble reporters play acrobatically with Hasbara strategies in view of "the images that speak for themselves". Pray tell me, what is there to "explain"? [Hasbara literally means "explanation" - Assaf] What is there to explain? I got myself neither security nor quiet from this war. After such an essential calm, that helped all of us heal emotionally and mentally and experience some sanity again [Nomika is referring here to the first 5 months of cease-fire, which were observed by both sides - Assaf] - our leaders have brought us back to the same wounded, anxiety-ridden place. To the same humiliating, terrified sprinting to shelter. Don't mistake me. Hamas is an evil, terrible terror organization. Not just for us. First and foremost to its own citizens. But beyond that wretched leadership there are human beings. With hard labor, ordinary people on both sides build small bridges of human gestures. This is what the Kol Aher, a group of people from Sderot and elsewhere on the Gaza border of which I am a member, has been doing. We have tried to lay down a human route to the hearts of our neighbors. While we have won a five-month calm, they continued to suffer under the siege. A young man told us he does not wish to marry and have kids, because in Gaza there is no future for children. A single airplane bomb drowns these human gestures in depths of blood and despair. Qassams scare me. Since the war started, I almost didn't dare cross the street. But even more frightening is the monolithic tone in our public sphere and our media, the unbreachable wall of jingoism. It scares me when my Kol Aher colleague is assaulted by other Sderotis, as he is interviewed and criticizes the war - and later receives anonymous phone threats and is afraid to return to his car. It scares me how little room there is for another voice, and how difficult it is to express it here. I am willing to pay the price of social isolation, but not the price of fear. It scares me to see my city light up, celebrate and put up flags, and cheerleader squads hand out flowers on the streets, and people honk in glee at every one-ton bomb dropped on our neighbors. It scares me to hear the resident who happily admits that he has never been to a concert, but IDF's bombing of Gaza is the best music he has ever heard. I am scared by the smug reporter interviewing him, who doesn't challenge him even one bit. It scares me that under the screen of Orwellian words, and the children's corpses blurred on TV as a public service to us, we are losing the human ability to see the other side, to feel, to be shocked, to feel empathy. Under the codename 'Hamas', the media has created for us a huge dark demon with no face, no body and no voice. A million and a half people with no name. A deep, dark stream of violence flows into the veins of Israeli society like a deadly disease, and it gets stronger from war to war. It has no smell and no shape, but we feel it very clearly here. It is a type of euphoria and trigger-happiness and joy of revenge and power-drunkenness and love of Mars, and the burial of the noble Jewish commandment: "when your enemy falls - do not celebrate". Our morality is so polluted, so soiled now that it seems no washing will be able to remove the stains. Our democracy is so fragile, that you have to weigh every word in order to safeguard yourself. The first time I felt the state is really protecting me, was when they got the ceasefire. I am not responsible for Hamas, and therefore I ask our own leaders: have you turned every stone in order to continue the calm? To extend the ceasefire? To use it to get a long-term agreement? To resolve the border-crossing and siege issues before they blow the whole thing up? Have you gone to the ends of the world looking for the right mediators? And why did you wave away, unblinkingly, the French ceasefire initiative after the war started? And why do you keep rejecting, to this very moment, every possible offer of negotiations? Do you think we have not reached our maximum Qassam quota here, that we can stand some more? That we have not yet reached the quota of killed Palestinian children that the world can stomach? And who guarantees that Hamas can be toppled? Haven't we tried this trick elsewhere? And who will come in its place? Global fundamentalist organizations? Al Qaeda? And how, from the heaps of rubble and hunger and cold and dead bodies, will moderate voices of peace grow? Where are you leading us? What future are you promising us here in Sderot? more from Daily Kos
Contrary to the Holocaustology that sees all Israel's enemies as the second coming of Adolf Hitler, Hamas is not the problem; it is a symptom. Treating it as the problem only prolongs the crisis. The problem is political and historical: the dispossession of Palestinians and the ongoing Israeli occupation of their land. Until that fundamental problem is resolved – and the hour when it can be resolved by a two-state solution may already have passed – Israel and America's attempts to bludgeon Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims into submission will only generate more hatred, more violence and ever more extremism. – Gary Kamiy
If Only TheY had Listened Our right to defend ourselves from extermination does not give us the right to oppress others. Occupation entails foreign rule. Foreign rule entails resistance. Resistance entails repression. Repression entails terror and counter-terror. The victims of terror are mostly innocent people. Holding on to the occupied territories will turn us into a nation of murderers and murder victims. Let us get out of the occupied territories immediately. – Shimon Tzabar (extracted from a declaration published in Ha'aretz, together with 11 co-signatories, protesting the incipient occupation after the Six Day War in 1967)
Israel and Gaza: An Overview Former Israeli soldier, and now professor of international relations at the University of Oxford, Avi Shlaim, puts the vicious Israeli attack on Gaza in perspective: The only way to make sense of Israel's senseless war in Gaza is through understanding the historical context. Establishing the state of Israel in May 1948 involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians. British officials bitterly resented American partisanship on behalf of the infant state. On 2 June 1948, Sir John Troutbeck wrote to the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, that the Americans were responsible for the creation of a gangster state headed by "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders". I used to think that this judgment was too harsh but Israel's vicious assault on the people of Gaza, and the Bush administration's complicity in this assault, have reopened the question. I write as someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders. What I utterly reject is the Zionist colonial project beyond the Green Line. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the June 1967 war had very little to do with security and everything to do with territorial expansionism. The aim was to establish Greater Israel through permanent political, economic and military control over the Palestinian territories. And the result has been one of the most prolonged and brutal military occupations of modern times. Four decades of Israeli control did incalculable damage to the economy of the Gaza Strip. With a large population of 1948 refugees crammed into a tiny strip of land, with no infrastructure or natural resources, Gaza's prospects were never bright. Gaza, however, is not simply a case of economic under-development but a uniquely cruel case of deliberate de-development. To use the Biblical phrase, Israel turned the people of Gaza into the hewers of wood and the drawers of water, into a source of cheap labour and a captive market for Israeli goods. The development of local industry was actively impeded so as to make it impossible for the Palestinians to end their subordination to Israel and to establish the economic underpinnings essential for real political independence. Gaza is a classic case of colonial exploitation in the post-colonial era. Jewish settlements in occupied territories are immoral, illegal and an insurmountable obstacle to peace. They are at once the instrument of exploitation and the symbol of the hated occupation. In Gaza, the Jewish settlers numbered only 8,000 in 2005 compared with 1.4 million local residents. Yet the settlers controlled 25% of the territory, 40% of the arable land and the lion's share of the scarce water resources. Cheek by jowl with these foreign intruders, the majority of the local population lived in abject poverty and unimaginable misery. Eighty per cent of them still subsist on less than $2 a day. The living conditions in the strip remain an affront to civilised values, a powerful precipitant to resistance and a fertile breeding ground for political extremism. In August 2005 a Likud government headed by Ariel Sharon staged a unilateral Israeli pullout from Gaza, withdrawing all 8,000 settlers and destroying the houses and farms they had left behind. Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement, conducted an effective campaign to drive the Israelis out of Gaza. The withdrawal was a humiliation for the Israeli Defence Forces. To the world, Sharon presented the withdrawal from Gaza as a contribution to peace based on a two-state solution. But in the year after, another 12,000 Israelis settled on the West Bank, further reducing the scope for an independent Palestinian state. Land-grabbing and peace-making are simply incompatible. Israel had a choice and it chose land over peace. The real purpose behind the move was to redraw unilaterally the borders of Greater Israel by incorporating the main settlement blocs on the West Bank to the state of Israel. Withdrawal from Gaza was thus not a prelude to a peace deal with the Palestinian Authority but a prelude to further Zionist expansion on the West Bank. It was a unilateral Israeli move undertaken in what was seen, mistakenly in my view, as an Israeli national interest. Anchored in a fundamental rejection of the Palestinian national identity, the withdrawal from Gaza was part of a long-term effort to deny the Palestinian people any independent political existence on their land. read the rest of Shlaim's piece in The Guardian (U.K.). And while you're at it, juxtapose this contexual history with what has been available in the mainstream American media.
People would rather feel safe than be free. – H. L. Mencken
Oh, That Liberal NY Times... On December 30, 2008 the New York Times published its first editorial on the recent bombings of Gaza. The editors open their text with the following claim: “Hamas must bear responsibility for ending a six-month cease-fire this month with a barrage of rocket attacks into Israeli territory.” While the editors assign the blame conveniently and squarely on Hamas, this nevertheless remains a factually erroneous statement contradicting reporting by Israeli newspapers (in both Hebrew and English), the British press, Amnesty International and – perhaps curiously enough – November 2008 reporting by the NYT itself. On November 12, the paper’s Jerusalem reporter, Isabel Kershner, wrote: “At least six Palestinian militants were killed in a clash and an Israeli airstrike on Nov. 4 after an Israeli force entered Gaza for the first time in five months.” Therefore, the rockets into Israeli territory after nearly six months of cease-fire followed – rather than preceded – the Israeli invasion into, and the killings of Palestinians inside, the occupied Gaza Strip. On November 14, the paper’s Jerusalem Bureau Chief, Ethan Bronner, re-stated the same facts reported by Kershner; he additionally voiced them in his accompanying interview on NYT radio – both can be read/heard here. More crucially, Israeli and international sources from the first week of November 2008 – sources that are scholarly (and otherwise) more reliable than the NYT – shed further light on the misleading claim by the NYT editors. the rest of Shiko Behar's damning piece can be read at 3 Quarks Daily
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