Israel as a Rogue State 97

New on REDRESS INFORMATION & ANALYSIS website:

TWO  ARTICLES:

ARTICLE 1 - "The boycott of Israel is "gaining speed".

LOCATION (URL) -
http://www.redress.cc/palestine/ldavidson20100909

SYNOPSIS - Lawrence Davidson outlines the reasons why the boycott of Israel is
gaining speed, from “the horrors of the Israeli occupation and its
ghettoizing of the people of Gaza”, to the segregation and economic and
social discrimination against Israel’s non-Jewish population, to the
corrupting influences of Zionism on policy-making institutions of Western
governments, especially those of the United States.
--

ARTICLE 2 - “Iran’s President Ahmadinejad should desist from harmful
rhetoric."

LOCATION (URL) -
http://www.redress.cc/global/pjballes20100909

SYNOPSIS - Paul J. Balles argues that Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric on Israel and the US is pointless and
counter-productive: “While one may sympathize with the reasons for his verbal
attacks, Ahmadinejad would do well for himself, the Gulf and the world if he
bit his tongue occasionally and restrained his inordinate pride.”

--

Redress Information & Analysis
Website  - http://www.redress.cc
Newsblog - http://redressnewsblog.blogspot.com
YouTube channel - http://www.youtube.com/redressvideo
blip.tv channel - http://redress.blip.tv
Twitter channel - http://twitter.com/redress

Redress Information & Analysis is dedicated to exposing injustice,
disinformation and bigotry and to providing thought-provoking interpretations
of current affairs.

Amnesty International 2

Bij Amnesty International in Nederland raakt men steeds meer in verwarring. Leest u dit eens:

r.dewijs@amnesty.nl  aan mij, info, w.lankamp, A.Hooijsma, k.vanlieshout

Aan Stan van Houcke en Karel van Broekhoven

Geachte heren, 

Ik werd vorige week geattendeerd op het bericht hieronder door Wim Lankamp. Hierin lijkt AI positief te adviseren over hotels in Israël/ Westbank w.o.  Kibbutz Kalia. Ik heb onze website doorgekamd, maar kan dit bericht nergens vinden onder onze vaste rubrieken. Kunt u mij meer info geven m.b.t. de bron (bijv. een uitgebreide URL) van dit bericht.

 Ik wil dan onmiddellijk informeren in Adam over hoe dit bericht ooit vanuit AI geplaatst heeft kunnen worden. Het is zeker geen AI beleid om zulke advertenties te plaatsen onder de AI-logo.

Bij voorbaat dank voor uw medewerking. 

Ik kom z.s.m. terug op deze zaak.

Met vr. groet,

Ruth de Wijs

Landenspecialiste Israël/Bezette Gebieden/Palestijnse Autoriteit

email: r.dewijs@amnesty.nl

tel. 033-4614334

mob. 06-53615768

r.dewijs@amnesty.nl aan info, mij, w.lankamp, A.Hooijsma, k.vanlieshout
details weergeven 07:11 (2 uren geleden)
Afbeeldingen worden niet weergegeven.
Afbeeldingen hieronder weergeven - Afbeeldingen van r.dewijs@amnesty.nl altijd weergeven
Beste Karel,

Hieronder een reactie van onze Midden-Oosten coördinator, Koen van Lieshout i.z. de hotel aanbevelingen m.b.t. locaties op het door Israël bezet gebied.
Zoals je kunt lezen, schijnt het om een fondswerving methode te gaan. Helaas wellicht niet zo goed doordacht i.z. adressen in de Oost- Mediterraan, waar de door Israël bezette gebieden liggen.
Koen en ons hoofd van Externe Zaken, Lars van Troost, zijn bezig met een onderzoek naar de achtergrond van deze actie. Ik ben bang dat het hier om een ondoordachte actie gaat dat op een of andere manier zonder autorisatie van de directie op de website is gekomen.

Je wordt op de hoogte gehouden.

Met vriendelijke groet,

Ruth de Wijs

-----Doorgestuurd door Ruth de Wijs/NL/Amnesty International op 09/08/2010 12:45PM -----
Aan: Ruth de Wijs/NL/Amnesty International
Van: Koen van Lieshout/NL/Amnesty International
Datum: 09/08/2010 11:34AM
cc: Alexander Hooijsma/NL/Amnesty International
Onderwerp: Re: Fw: via Amnesty een hotel boeken - urgent!

Dag Ruth en Alexander,

...

Zojuist sprak ik Lars over dat gebeuren met het hotel. Het is dus niet zo dat AI specifiek hotels in Israël aanbeveelt, maar blijkbaar is er met oog op fondsenwerving een deal gesloten met bookings.com. Ik ben met jullie eens dat de associatie met een hotel in een nederzetting echt niet kan. Nu is de vraag of we uberhaupt in zee moeten gaan met zo'n website. Lars neemt dit op met de afdeling die dat heeft georganiseerd. Mochten er nog vragen komen dan houd het er maar op dat we de associatie met Kibbutz Kalia onwenselijk vinden en dat hieraan gewerkt wordt. Neem aan dat er een contract is gesloten met bookings.com, dus ben benieuwd of we daar zomaar onderuit kunnen. Ik houd jullie op de hoogte.

......

Gr.,
Koen




Tot zover Amnesty.

Vooral deze zin is opmerkelijk: 'Nu is de vraag of we uberhaupt in zee moeten gaan met zo'n website.' Sinds wanneer is het een vraag voor Amnesty om al dan niet mee te doen aan een actie die lijdt tot deelname aan het schenden van mensenrechten? Mijn advies is te stoppen met steun aan deze mensenrechten organisatie totdat men daar beseft dat het meedoen aan het schenden van mensenrechten niet meer kan.

The Empire 652

Racialized Memories and Class Identities - Thinking About Glenn Beck's and Rush Limbaugh's America

Tuesday 07 September 2010

by: Henry A. Giroux, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

(Image: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: Gage Skidmore, Karl Schmeck 1, 2)

As a young kid growing up in Providence, Rhode Island, I was always conscious of what it meant to be a white male. Whiteness was a defining principle shaping how I both named and negotiated the class and racial boundaries that my friends and I traveled when we went to school, played basketball in gyms throughout the city and crossed into "alien" neighborhoods. Whiteness and maleness were crucial markers of our individual and collective identities; yet, we were also working class and it was largely the interface of race and class that governed how we experienced and perceived the world around us. Of course, we hadn't thought deeply about race and class in a critical way; we simply bore the burdens, terrors and advantages such terms provided as they simultaneously named the world and produced it. We were immersed in a culture infused with the markings of a racially and class marked society, but had no language to either name it or reflect on it in a serious way. We simply accepted the notion that such divisions were part of human nature, something we had to both live with and negotiate in the limited terms given to us by the dominant society.

In my working-class neighborhood, race and class were performative categories defined in terms of the events, actions and outcomes of our struggles as we engaged with kids whose histories, languages and racial identities appeared foreign and hostile to us. Race and class were not merely nouns we used to narrate ourselves; they were verbs that governed how we interacted and performed in the midst of "others," whether they were white middle class or black youths. Most of the interactions we had with others were violent, fraught with anger and hatred. We viewed kids who were black or privileged from within the spaces and enclaves of a neighborhood ethos that was nourished by a legacy of racism, a dominant culture that condoned class and racial hatred, and a popular culture that rarely allowed blacks and whites to view each other as equals, except of course, in athletics. Everywhere we looked segregation was the order of the day. Community was defined within racial and class differences and functioned largely as spaces of exclusion - spaces that more often than not pitted racial and ethnic groups against one another. Solidarity was mostly based on the principles of exclusion, and race and class identities closed down the promise of difference as central to any notion of democratic community.

When college students walked through my Smith Hill neighborhood from Providence College to reach the downtown section of the city, we taunted them, fought with them on occasion, but always made it clear to them that their presence violated our territorial and class boundaries. We viewed these kids as rich, spoiled, privileged and different from us - a reminder of how little we counted in a society which seemed more concerned about punishing us than providing us with the resources that spoke to a more humane future. We hated their alleged arrogance and despised their Pat Boone-type music. Generally, we had no contact with middle-class and ruling-class kids until we went to high school. Hope High School (ironically named) in the 1960s was a mix of mostly poor black and white kids, on the one hand, and a small group of wealthy kids on the other. School authorities and administrators did everything they could to make sure that the only space we shared was the cafeteria during lunch hour. Generally black and working-class white kids were warehoused and segregated in that school. Because we were tracked into dead-end courses, school became a form of dead time for most of us - a place in which our bodies, thoughts and emotions were regulated and subjected to either ridicule or swift disciplinary action if we broke any of the rules. We moved within these spaces of hierarchy and segregation deeply resentful of how we were treated, but with little understanding and no vocabulary to connect our personal rage to either larger social structures or viable forms of political resistance. We were trapped in a legacy of commonsensical and privatized understandings that made us complicitous with our own oppression. In the face of injustice, we learned to be aggressive and destructive, but we learned little about what it might mean to unlearn our prejudices and join in alliances with those diverse others who were oppressed in different and sometimes similar ways.

Rather, the everyday practices that shaped our lives were often organized around rituals of harsh discipline, rigid regulation and ongoing acts of humiliation. For instance, the working-class black and white kids from my section of town entered Hope though the back door of the building, while the rich white kids entered through the main door in the front of the school. We didn't miss the point and we did everything we could to let the teachers know how we felt about it. We were loud and unruly in classes, we shook the rich kids down and took their money after school, we cheated whenever possible, but more than anything, we stayed away from school until we were threatened with being expelled. While race was a more problematic register of difference, class registered its difference through a range of segregated spaces. Along with the black kids in the school, our bodies rather than our minds were taken up as a privileged form of cultural capital. With few exceptions, the teachers and school administrators let us know that we were not bright enough to be in college credit courses, but were talented enough to be star athletes or do well in classes that stressed manual labor. Both working-class whites and blacks resented those students who studied, used elaborate, middle-class language and appeared to live outside of their physicality. We fought, desired, moved and pushed our bodies to extremes, especially in those few public spheres open to us. For me, as a white youth, that meant the race track, the basketball court and the baseball diamond.

As a working-class white kid, I found myself in classes with black kids, played basketball with them and loved black music. But we rarely socialized outside of school. Whiteness in my neighborhood was a signifier of pride, a marker of racial identity experienced through a dislike of blacks. Identities were viewed as fixed, unchanging and defined within complex notions of privilege. Unlike the current generation of many working-class kids, we defined ourselves in opposition to blacks and, while we listened to their music, we did not appropriate their styles. Racism ran deep in that neighborhood and no one was left untouched by it. But identities are always in transit: they mutate, change and often become more complicated as a result of chance encounters, traumatic events or unexpected collisions. The foundation of my white racist identity was shaken while I was in the ninth grade in the last year of junior high school.

I was on the junior high basketball team along with a number of other white and black kids. The coach had received some tickets to a Providence College game. Providence College's basketball team had begun to receive extensive public attention because it had won a National Invitation Basketball tournament; moreover, the team roster included a number of famous players such as Lenny Wilkens and Johnny Egan. We loved the way in which these guys played and we tried to incorporate their every move into our own playing styles. Getting tickets to see them play was like a dream come true for us. Having only two tickets to give away, the coach held a contest after school in the gym to decide who would go to the game. He decided to give the tickets to the two players who made the most consecutive foul shots. The air was tense as we started to compete for the tickets. I ended up with two other players in a three-way tie and we had one chance to break it. As I approached the foul line, Brother Hardy, a large black kid, started taunting me as I began to shoot. We exchanged some insults and suddenly we were on each other, fists flying. Suddenly I was on the floor, blood gushing out of my nose; the fight was over as quickly as it started. The coach made us continue the contest and ironically, Brother Hardy and I won the tickets, shook hands and went to the game together. The fight bridged us together in a kind of mutual esteem we didn't quite understand, but respected. Soon afterward, we started hanging out together and became friends. After graduating from junior high school, we parted and I didn't see him again until the following September when I discovered that he to also was attending Hope High School.

Stay informed with free Truthout updates delivered straight to your email inbox. Click here to sign up.

I made the varsity team my sophomore year; I never knew why, but Brother Hardy never bothered to try out. We talked once in a while in the school halls, but the racial boundaries in the school did not allow us to socialize much with each other. But that soon changed. The second month into the school year, I noticed that every day during lunch hour a number of black kids would cut in front of white kids in the food line, shake them down and take their lunch money. I was waiting for it to happen to me, but it never did. In fact, the same black kids who did the shaking down would often greet me with a nod or "Hey, man, how you doin?" as they walked by me in the corridors as well as the cafeteria. I later learned that Brother Hardy was considered the toughest black kid in the school and he had put out the word to his friends to leave me alone.

During the week, I played basketball at night at the Benefit Street Club, situated in the black section of the city. I was one of the few whites allowed to play in the gym. The games were fast and furious and you had to be good to continue. I started hanging out with Brother Hardy and on the weekends went to the blues clubs with him and his friends. We drank, played basketball and rarely talked to each other about race. Soon, some of my friends and myself were crossing a racial boundary by attending parties with some of our black teammates. Few people in our old neighborhood knew that we had broken a racial taboo and we refrained from telling them.

I couldn't articulate it in those formative years, but as I moved within and across a number of racially defined spheres it slowly became clear to me that I had to redefine my understanding of my own whiteness and the racism that largely informed it. I had no intention of becoming a black wannabe, even if such an option had existed in the neighborhood in which I grew up and, of course, it didn't. But at the same time, I began to hate the racism that shaped the identities of my white friends. My crossing of the racial divide was met at best with disdain and at worst with ridicule. Crossing this border was never an option for Brother Hardy and his friends; if they had crossed the racial border to come into my neighborhood they would have been met with racial epithets and violence. Even in the early sixties, it became clear to me that such border crossings were restricted and only took place with a passport stamped with the legacy of racial privilege. My body was relearning the lessons of race and identity because I was beginning to unlearn the racist ideologies that I took for granted for so long. But I had no language to question critically how I felt nor did I understand how to reject the notion that to be a working-class white kid meant one had to be a racist by default.

The language I inherited as a kid came from my family, friends, school and the larger popular culture. Rarely did I encounter a vocabulary in any of these spheres that ruptured or challenged the material relations of racism or the stereotypes and prejudices that reinforced race and class divisions. It was only later, as the sixties unfolded, that I discovered in the midst of the civil rights and antiwar movement, the languages of dissent and possibility that helped me to rethink my own memories of youth, masculinity, racism and class discrimination.

In many ways, much of my work has been an attempt to engage in a form of memory work - exploring how I was positioned and how I located myself within a range of discourse and institutional practices - in which it has become clear that racial and class differences fueled by bigotry, intolerance and systemic inequality were the disruptive forces in my life. My own sense of what it meant to be a white male emerged performatively through my interactions with peers, the media and the broader culture. The identifications I developed, the emotional investments I made and the ideologies I used to negotiate my youth were the outcome of educational practices that appeared to either ignore or denigrate working-class people, women and minority groups. Popular culture provided the medium through which we learned how to negotiate our everyday lives, especially when it brought together elements of resistance found in Hollywood youth films such as "Blackboard Jungle" (1955) or the rock n' roll music of Bill Haley and the Comets, Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Etta James, and other artists. Moreover, working-class street culture provided its own set of unique events and tensions in which our bodies, identities and desires were both mobilized and constrained. We were the first generation of working-class kids for whom popular media such as television played a central role in legitimating not only our social roles, but also the limited range of possibilities through which we could imagine something beyond the world in which we lived. The trauma I associated with negotiating between the solidarity I felt with Brother Hardy and my white working-class friends suggested that education works best when those experiences that shape and penetrate one's lived reality are jolted, unsettled and made the object of critical analysis.

In looking back on my experience of moving through the contested terrains of race, gender and class, it is clear to me that power is never exerted only through economic control, but also through what might be called a form of cultural pedagogy, what C. Wright Mills called the cultural apparatus and Pierre Bourdieu called the privileging of certain forms of cultural capital as forms of symbolic power and privilege. Racism and class hatred are learned activities, and, as a kid, I found myself in a society that was all too ready to teach them. Biography only takes us so far, but when connected to history, it offers an important narrative for linking the personal to the political while at the same time enabling one to translate private issues into public considerations. And it is these personal memories of my own experience with the indignities and power structures of race and class that bear so heavily on how I now mediate those forces at a much different period in my life.

Today, I find the racism that shaped my youth has resurfaced with a vengeance and, yet, seems to be abstracted from any sense of the past, the civil rights struggles that fought for racial justice and the emergence of a new racist cultural pedagogy that became visible, if note celebrated, with the infamous Willie Horton political ad run by George H. W. Bush during the 1988 presidential campaign. Racism today has been both reconfigured and made invisible with regard to its real victims. In the first instance, racism now represents an attack on white people who see themselves as on the receiving end of black power structures and black politicians. This is most obvious in the remarks of a number of infamous politicians and media celebrities. For example, Glenn Beck recently claimed that President Obama was "a racist" who has "a deep-seated hatred for white people" and compared his administration to the "Planet of the Apes." Rush Limbaugh has called Obama a "halfrican American" and repeatedly played a song on his radio show unapologetically titled "Barack the Magic Negro." All the while the dominant media says little about how these comments are symptomatic of a vile racism that has gained increasing respectability since the 1980s. When the notable talk-radio host Dr. Laura Schlessinger went out of her way to use the N-word 11 times in 15 minutes in order to largely humiliate a black female caller, the press largely focused on the event as an expression of unfortunate and erratic behavior for which Dr. Laura later apologized. In the face of Dr. Laura's decision to retire from her radio program, Sara Palin used Twitter to fire off some advice to her: "don't retreat ... reload." This up front support for a racial slur coupled with a metaphor for violence does more than mimic the worse elements of the Jim Crow South, it also points to how the legacy of racism is both forgotten and simultaneously updated.

It appears that much can be forgiven in a society where it is increasingly believed that white men are now under attack by black people, largely embodied in the image of a black president who allegedly is a Muslim in disguise. The all too obvious and troubling claim being made daily by right-wing politicians and others that the public sphere is primarily the preserve of white Christians is too easily equated with a defense of nation, citizenship and patriotism; unfortunately, this monstrous claim is rarely challenged in the dominant media. Instead, racism becomes exclusively the preserve of language and utterly privatized as a result. Hence, foul racist remarks are treated as jokes, indiscreet humor, bad taste or a harmless species of opinion and largely removed from even a hint of the structural racism and accompanying power relations that have become increasingly visible in the United States. One obvious example of this strategy can be found in the way in which the current intense racism directed against Muslims, exemplified in numerous remarks made by conservative politicians and talk-radio hosts, is viewed as simply an expression of anger rather than a species of virulent racism.

Echoes of racism now present themselves in multiple forms and are spreading across the country like a highly contagious virus. This is obvious in terms of a racist cultural pedagogy spread largely through a right-wing cultural apparatus. But its traces and effects can also be found in acts of real violence that now run like a highly charged electric current through the mainstream media, which both reproduces representations of racist violence while failing to comment on it critically. Hence, when right-wing journalists, bloggers and politicians make comments about Obama instituting death panels, concentration camps, mass round ups and a socialist government, such comments are either dealt with as simply individual opinions or individual prejudices. Individual free speech now trumps any claim to social and racial justice. At the same time, state and structural racism are no longer viewed as significant forces in shaping contemporary American society and is now safely ensconced in a market-driven discourse that imagines itself free of racism, legitimated by the election of the first African-American president. Not surprisingly in this alleged era of a post-civil rights society, as politics becomes more racialized, the discourse about race becomes more privatized, reduced to the realm of psychology, emotive disorders, individual responsibility and that old line of defense, free speech.

Any talk about the political and material transformation of a deeply racial social order is largely off the radar for the mainstream media, if not for most of the American public. Consequently, it comes as no surprise that the dominant media has largely refused to connect the racism characteristic of the current debate and resistance to building a Mosque near ground zero to a more comprehensive political and cultural agenda or even the escalating and brutal burning of Mosques and violence being waged against Muslims in other parts of the country. The barely disguised racism at work in this controversy is simply treated as another opinion, an expression of post-9/11 anger, legitimated by the principle of free speech. What is disturbing about this controversy is that it registers both an alarming growth of racism in the United States and it indicates how the escalating of racist name calling and proliferation of racist representations easily moves into a nightmarish siege mentality brimming with the threat, if not actual practice, of violence. As insecurities and anxieties grow among the American public in the midst of an economic recession and the failure of state and federal governments to offer substantive reforms, race, religious, cultural and class hatred become convenient scapegoats for allowing right-wing corporate and religious drones to promote their ideological and political agendas while enhancing their celebrity status and raking in large profits.

Growing up in the fifties and sixties, I witnessed how egregious acts of racism such as the killing and torture of Emmett Till, the beatings of civil rights demonstrators and the humiliation suffered by Rosa Parks sparked major demonstrations, mobilizations and social movements dedicated to fighting racism. Racism was brutally exercised, but did not escape the public shame the country rightly felt about it. There is no shame over racism today because it is no longer viewed as a social problem, but merely an individual issue, and when its poisonous rhetoric and policies emerge, we seem to lack any vocabulary for addressing it, except through the discourse of those fanning the flames of racial injustice.

How else to explain the willingness of many Americans to accept Beck's claim that he is appropriating the civil rights movement while at the same time spewing out daily the most offensive racial commentaries? What are we to make of NBC's Brian Williams revisiting Katrina on a heavily promoted Dateline special, "Hurricane Katrina: the First Five Days," and focusing largely in a self-congratulatory manner on how well the media then covered the event? Lost in his analysis was any commentary on the racist policies that defined the Bush administration's response to Katrina or the racist brutality exercised in the aftermath of the storm by elements of the New Orleans Police Department. Instead, he reinforced the myth Katrina was a natural tragedy rather than a political one and that violence was out of control in the days following the tragedy - a myth that has been exposed by none other than the new Orleans Times-Picayune. But, of course, the media in this instance did not merely fail to adequately report on the events and response leading up to Katrina, but, instead, became complicit in once again suggesting that African-American culture is largely a culture of violence. We need to pay attention to how race is being spoken in our dominant media and everyday language just as we need to examine the cultural and social formations that benefit from class and racial injustices. We need to remind ourselves about how race and class injustices undermine the fabric of democracy.

As a child growing up in the midst of severe racial segregation, there were spaces of resistance where the gap between America's democratic ideals and the realities of class inequality and racial injustice were made visible. There were oppositional spaces, movements and a trace of democratic idealism running through the sixties and President Lyndon Johnson's image of the "Great Society." While such idealism often covered over a host of injustice, it did provide a political and ethical referent for thinking about the gap between the existing democracy and the promise of a substantive democratic polity. I think that idealism has turned to cynicism in America. The gap between the rich and poor and the powerless and powerful is larger than ever and the deepening inequalities and misery and human suffering these gaps produce are growing out of control. Moreover, everywhere we turn, the shadow of Jim Crow is engulfing the policies, practices and discourses about race in America. The racial segregation of public schooling is greater today than in the sixties; racism is on full display in the increasing collective anger waged against Muslims; the prison has become the pre-eminent public space for black youth; poor minorities of class and color are now viewed by politicians, the dominant media and the general public as largely disposable, a drain on the public coffers and unworthy of social protections. Similarly, the racially specific burdens of poverty, unemployment and despair and the emergence of a neoliberal market driven order suggests a new era in racial violence and a dangerous moment in the proliferation of multiple forms of racism. America has lost its capacity to bear witness as the avatars of racism are now treated in the dominant media as just another ideological position or, even worse, just one opinion among many. The pathology of racism and the growing inequality impacting those marginalized by class and age suggest the emergence of a society in which we no longer believe in the humanity of the other; instead, too many Americans increasingly believe and support the notion that humanity has lost its claim on democracy and is no longer worth fighting for. The deeper causes of class inequality and racial injustice have been drowned out by the shouting and demagoguery of a group of radical authoritarians who control the cultural apparatuses in America and make any form of legitimate politics dysfunctional. They speak of a new American dream and civil rights movement, but they lack either the imagination or the ethics to be taken seriously, especially given how much they despise democracy, thrive on racist and class-based social relations and disdain any vestige of the social state.

If we are going to take democracy seriously, it is time for social movements, parents, unions, intellectuals and elements of the new media to address rigorously the need to contest individually and collectively this new form of racism and class inequality head on as part of a new post-civil rights struggle. This means fighting for public services, emboldening the social state, waging a cultural war in which progressive opinions and democratic values can be heard, connecting various independent struggles as part of one larger movement for a radical democracy. Central to such a struggle is the fight for ideas and power. Structures of power, whether they be in the realm of economics, politics or the cultural realm, will not change by themselves. The struggle for ideas, subjectivities, desires, minds and different modes of agency signify that pedagogy and education and the public spheres that make them possible have to become primary to any form of politics that believes in the merging of reason and freedom. We are at a watershed in American history and dark clouds are forming on the horizon. The price to be paid for living in this increasingly privatized, consumer-oriented and corporate-dominated culture is almost too bleak to imagine. But we have to both imagine it and then organize in every way possible to prevent it.

Maybe it is time to stop the wars abroad and focus on a new war, one that takes seriously those anti-democratic forces ready to plunge America into the grip of authoritarianism.[1]

1. On this issue, see Susan Searls Giroux, "Between Race and Reason: Violence, Intellectual Responsibility and the University to Come" (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).

http://www.truth-out.org/racialized-memories-and-class-identities-thinking-about-glenn-becks-and-rush-limbaughs-america63035

The Mass Media

MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media


September 7, 2010

MEDIA ALERT: BEYOND HIROSHIMA - THE NON-REPORTING OF FALLUJAH'S CANCER CATASTROPHE


Compassion is sometimes a central theme of media reporting. On August 25, journalists across the UK described how a British woman, Mary Bale, had been filmed dropping a cat into a wheelie bin. The cat was later released unharmed. The Guardian reported and commented on the story on August 24 and 25. Matt Seaton wrote:

“OK, there are lots of acts of random cruelty involving humans on humans every day, but this was somebody's pet, for Pete's sake. Who would do such a thing?” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/24/coventry-cat-wheelie-bin)

On August 26, the Guardian followed up with a report describing how animal protection charities were considering whether to prosecute Bale. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/aug/26/rspca-woman-cat-wheelie-bin)

On August 27, Alexander Chancellor devoted a section of his Guardian column to the story. On August 28, Michele Hansen also wrote an article focusing on the cat and on cruelty to animals more generally. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/28/cat-litter-pets-protected-and-persecuted)

On August 29, almost a week after the Guardian had first reported the incident, Euan Ferguson commented:

“The same Facebook, the same Britain, that ‘named and shamed’ Mary Bale is the one that had over 30,000 followers for Raoul Moat RIP, who was a killer. Do we love animals more than people?” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/aug/29/mary-bale-cat-fluffy-animal)

Good question. According to our LexisNexis search (September 7), two articles appeared on the cat story in the Independent and two in the Independent on Sunday. The Daily Telegraph mentioned it in three articles; the Times in seven. The Observer had one article, the Mirror and Sunday Mirror had a total of ten articles. More than 170 articles have so far mentioned Mary Bale in the UK press.


Fallujah - Genetic Stress Beginning 2004

One month earlier, the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, a leading medical journal, published a study, ‘Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth Sex-Ratio in Fallujah, Iraq 2005–2009,’ by Chris Busby, Malak Hamdan and Entesar Ariabi. As Noam Chomsky has commented, the study’s findings are “vastly more significant” than the Wikileaks Afghan ‘War Diary’ leaks (http://www.zcommunications.org/wikileaks-and-coverage-in-press-by-noam-chomsky). After all, the cancer crisis reported in the study is impacting thousands of people in one of Iraq's largest cities and is so severe that local doctors are advising women not to have children.

In the Independent, Patrick Cockburn wrote:

“Dramatic increases in infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, which was bombarded by US Marines in 2004, exceed those reported by survivors of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, according to a new study.” (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/toxic-legacy-of-us-assault-on-fallujah-worse-than-hiroshima-2034065.html)

The survey of 4,800 individuals in Fallujah showed a four-fold increase in all cancers and a 12-fold increase in childhood cancer in under-14s. It found a 10-fold increase in female breast cancer and significant increases in lymphoma and brain tumours in adults. Researchers found a 38-fold increase in leukaemia. By contrast, Hiroshima survivors showed a 17-fold increase in leukaemia. According to the study, the types of cancer are “similar to that in the Hiroshima survivors who were exposed to ionising radiation from the bomb and uranium in the fallout”. (Ibid.)

Infant mortality was found to be 80 per 1,000 births compared to 19 in Egypt, 17 in Jordan and 9.7 in Kuwait.

The study’s authors commented:

“These results support the many reports of congenital illness and birth defects in Fallujah and suggest that there is evidence of genetic stress which appeared around 2004, one year before the effects began to show.” (http://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/7/7/2828/pdf)

Dr Chris Busby, a visiting professor at the University of Ulster and one of the authors of the survey, said it was difficult to identify the exact cause of the cancers and birth defects. But, he said, “to produce an effect like this, some very major mutagenic exposure must have occurred in 2004 when the [US] attacks happened”. (Cockburn, op.cit.)

US troops launched a major attack on Fallujah in March 2004 and then joined with British forces to storm the city in a much bigger offensive, Operation Phantom Fury, in November of the same year. On November 30, 2004, the UN's Integrated Regional Information Network reported the aftermath:

“Approximately 70 percent of the houses and shops were destroyed in the city and those still standing are riddled with bullets.” (‘Fallujah still needs more supplies despite aid arrival,’ www.irinnews.org, November 30, 2004)

In January 2005, an Iraqi doctor, Ali Fadhil, reported of the city:

“It was completely devastated, destruction everywhere. It looked like a city of ghosts. Falluja used to be a modern city; now there was nothing. We spent the day going through the rubble that had been the centre of the city; I didn’t see a single building that was functioning.” (Fadhil, ‘City of ghosts,’ The Guardian, January 11, 2005)

On March 3, 2005, Aljazeera reported:

“Dr. Khalid ash-Shaykhli, an official at Iraq’s health ministry, said that the U.S. military used internationally banned weapons during its deadly offensive in the city of Fallujah.” The official reported evidence that US forces had “used... substances, including mustard gas, nerve gas, and other burning chemicals in their attacks in the war-torn city.” (‘US used banned weapons in Fallujah - Health ministry,' March 3, 2005, http://www.aljazeera.com)

American documentary film-maker Mark Manning told of “American forces deploying - in violation of international treaties - napalm, chemical weapons, phosphorous bombs, and ‘bunker-busting’ shells laced with depleted uranium. Use of any of these against civilians is a violation of international law.” (Nick Welsh, ‘Diving into Fallujah,’ Santa Barbara Independent, March 17, 2005, http://www.independent.com/cover/Cover956.htm)

Despite this and copious other evidence, the BBC’s director of news, Helen Boaden, told Media Lens in March 2005 that her reporter in Fallujah, Paul Wood, had seen “no evidence of the use of such weapons”. Wood added, with considerable naivety:

“The character of the fighting that I saw was bloody, old-fashioned clearing of houses and buildings street by street, block by block, the kind of fighting which is done with little more than an M16 and a handful of grenades. It doesn't make sense to use mustard gas, nerve agents, other chemical agents or nuclear devices -- to quote the Al Jazeera story -- in such a small space also occupied by your own forces.” (Boaden, email to Media Lens, March 7, 2005)

See our previous alerts for details: http://www.medialens.org/alerts/05/050418_doubt_cast_on_bbc.php
http://www.medialens.org/alerts/05/050517_bbc_silent_on_fallujah.php
http://www.medialens.org/alerts/05/050524_bbc_still_ignoring_evidence.php

While the recent survey was unable to identify the weapons used by US forces, the extent of genetic damage suffered by residents in Fallujah suggests the use of uranium in some form. Dr Busby said: “My guess is that they used a new weapon against buildings to break through walls and kill those inside.” (Cockburn, op. cit.)

The authors concluded:

“This study was intended to investigate the accuracy of the various reports which have been emerging from Fallujah regarding perceived increases in birth defects, infant deaths and cancer in the population and to examine samples from the area for the presence of mutagenic substances that may explain any results. We conclude that the results confirm the reported increases in cancer and infant mortality which are alarmingly high. The remarkable reduction in the sex ratio in the cohort born one year after the fighting in 2004 identifies that year as the time of the environmental contamination.” (http://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/7/7/2828/pdf)


Media Performance

Whereas the story of the maltreated cat received heavy coverage for almost one week across the UK media, we (and activist friends in the United States) can find exactly one mention of the Fallujah cancer and infant mortality study in the entire UK and US national press - Patrick Cockburn’s article in the Independent. The story has simply been ignored by every other US-UK national newspaper.

The study +has+ been reported elsewhere. Cockburn’s piece was reprinted in The Hamilton Spectator in Ontario, Canada on July 24 and in the July 25 Sunday Tribune in Ireland. The July 27 Frontier Post in Pakistan ran an excellent piece on the US military’s use of depleted uranium in several theatres of war, including Fallujah. So did the July 30 Irish News. The August 3 edition of New Nation in Bangladesh also covered the issue. It is much more difficult for us to assess TV and radio performance. To its credit, the BBC did give the story some attention: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-10721562

The destruction of Fallujah is only one small item on an almost unbelievable list of horrors heaped by the United States and Britain on Iraq - crimes that are rarely considered individually and almost never as a whole. Readers might like to consider how often they can recall the mainstream media summing up the recent history of Iraq in the way that US dissident writer Bill Blum did last week:

"... no American should be allowed to forget that the nation of Iraq, the society of Iraq, have been destroyed, ruined, a failed state. The Americans, beginning 1991, bombed for 12 years, with one excuse or another; then invaded, then occupied, overthrew the government, killed wantonly, tortured ... the people of that unhappy land have lost everything — their homes, their schools, their electricity, their clean water, their environment, their neighborhoods, their mosques, their archaeology, their jobs, their careers, their professionals, their state-run enterprises, their physical health, their mental health, their health care, their welfare state, their women's rights, their religious tolerance, their safety, their security, their children, their parents, their past, their present, their future, their lives ...

“More than half the population either dead, wounded, traumatized, in prison, internally displaced, or in foreign exile ... The air, soil, water, blood and genes drenched with depleted uranium ... the most awful birth defects ... unexploded cluster bombs lie in wait for children to pick them up ... an army of young Islamic men went to Iraq to fight the American invaders; they left the country more militant, hardened by war, to spread across the Middle East, Europe and Central Asia ... a river of blood runs alongside the Euphrates and Tigris ... through a country that may never be put back together again." (http://killinghope.org/bblum6/aer85.html)

Mainstream journalists see things differently. The BBC’s correspondent Paul Wood reported from Iraq in June 2005:

“After everything that’s happened in Fallujah, the Americans aren’t going to find an +unambiguous+ welcome. But Fallujah +is+ more peaceful than it’s been in a long time. Its people like that.” (Wood, BBC 1, 18:00 News, June 22, 2005)


SUGGESTED ACTION

The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. If you do write to journalists, we strongly urge you to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.

Ask the following newspapers why they have not covered this credible evidence of a US-caused humanitarian catastrophe in Fallujah:

Write to Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian
Email: alan.rusbridger@guardian.co.uk

John Mulholland, editor of The Observer
Email: john.mulholland@observer.co.uk

Tony Gallagher, editor of the Daily Telegraph
Email: tony.gallagher@telegraph.co.uk

The Times letters page
Email: letters@thetimes.co.uk

We are grateful for donations received to date. The best way to support us is to send a monthly donation via PayPal or a standing order with a UK bank. If you currently support the corporate media by paying for their newspapers, why not support Media Lens instead?
http://www.medialens.org/donate

This media alert will shortly be archived here:
http://www.medialens.org/alerts/10/100907_beyond_hiroshima_the.php

The second Media Lens book, 'NEWSPEAK in the 21st Century' by David Edwards and David Cromwell, was published in 2009 by Pluto Press. John Pilger writes of the book:

"Not since Orwell and Chomsky has perceived reality been so skilfully revealed in the cause of truth."
http://www.medialens.org/bookshop/newspeak.php

Israel as a Rogue State 95

Israeli FM doubts peace possibility

Lieberman quoted as saying deal with Palestinians unattainable in a year or 'during the next generation'. Last Modified: 06 Sep 2010 08:23 GMT

Israel's government is under pressure from hard-right parties to end a freeze on settlement growth [Getty Images] Israel's foreign minister has been quoted by the country's army radio as saying he believes that peace with the Palestinians is unattainable in a year or "during the next generation". Avigdor Lieberman's reported comments come days after the first round of US-sponsored direct talks between Israelis and Palestinians commenced in Washington, with a declared goal of reaching an accord within one year. "I do not believe that a comprehensive agreement with the Palestinians is possible within a year, nor even during the next generation," Lieberman is quoted as telling members of his ultra-nationalist Yisrael Beitenu party at a function in advance of Wednesday's Jewish new year. "Since the Oslo accords 17 years ago, important politicians have made multiple pledges and statements that nothing ever came of. "We have not examined in depth the reasons why we have paid such a high price for each accord with the Palestinians which has had no results." The talks between Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, and Mahmud Abbas, the Palestinian president, will face their first major hurdle later this month when an Israeli settlement moratorium expires. Palestinians' demand The Palestinians have insisted that if Israel does not renew the partial freeze on settlement construction in the occupied West Bank when it expires on September 26, the peace process will come to an end. Netanyahu is under pressure from hard-right groups who dominate his ruling coalition to resume the construction, and has said settlements should be discussed alongside other core disputes that have hampered past attempts at peace, including the final status of Jerusalem and the fate of Palestinian refugees. Lieberman, in separate remarks broadcast by the private Channel 2 television, said "Abu Mazen (Abbas) will not sign a comprehensive agreement. That is why we should look for a long-term interim accord and concentrate on Israel's security". "The signing of a peace agreement does not mean the end of the conflict and of mutual demands as well as the recognition of Israel as the national state of the Jewish people." http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2010/09/20109654947618925.html

The Neoliberal Religion 10

  As Robert Kuttner notes in The American Prospect:  "For more than three
decades, the wages of American workers have been close to flat while
economic insecurity has risen massively.  Although the productivity of the
U.S. economy has doubled in a generation, most of those gains have not been
captured by workers.  And in the decade that began in 2001,
inflation-adjusted wages have fallen for all but the most affluent 3
percent of the population.
---------

Our Long National Nightmare Isn't Over, It's Just Beginning
by David Michael Green  Published on Sunday, September 5, 2010
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/09/05-0

  In the 1930s, the only thing we had to fear was fear, itself. Today, the
main thing we have to fear is us, ourselves.

  Looking out over the horizon, I'm starting to wonder just how many
shades of dark there are on the pallette.  Lately, I get the feeling that
we're about to find out.  I wish I could say that this society did our best
to fight our demons, but that the odds were simply insurmountable.  You
know.  Like we were just sitting there by ourselves on our remote little
Pacific island, a thousand years before telephones and radar when - bang -
the tsunami hit, no fault of our own.  And we bravely struggled heroically,
doing our mightiest to save as many lives as we could.

I mean, if you've got to crash and burn, better to go down with a little
dignity and honor, eh?

But, no, not for me, apparently.  I'm an American.  I live in a country -
nay, an empire! - that insists on destroying itself.  I'm part of the
generation of decline.  My people are the fools who perfected the fine art
of committing suicide by stupidity.

It's an astonishing act, and one of wide participation.

The nightmare of the right in America edges increasingly close to dragging
the country past the point of no return, over the cliff of violent
implosion.  At this point, there is already little that is missing save the
jackboots and broken glass.

The Republican Party was once a moderately conservative, pro-business
outfit, until it was highjacked by the oligarchy and turned into a full-on
predatory machine, hiding behind the facade of hate mobilizing issues like
bogus overseas threats abroad and uppity brown people and demanding women
at home.  Basically, any way that middle class white males could be
distracted from their sinking economic status - through the diversion of a
sense of superiority over others, or the supposed threat to that superior
status - was employed to cover for a party whose true agenda was to quietly
produce the greatest transfer of wealth in all of human history.

Having succeeded dramatically, they are back at it again.  It is now
transparent, for anyone who cares to look, that the ugly tea party movement
in America is an invention of the Koch brothers, Rupert Murdoch, Dick Armey
and their sick ilk, once again mobilizing a boatload of fools who are
angry, but too stupid to know quite why.  This explains their endless
rhetoric about the evils of the federal government, and their simultaneous
desire to keep their Social Security and Medicare benies.  It also explains
their unmatched idiocy in serving as tools for their own destruction.  If
they succeed, they fail.  If they get their champions elected, they lose
their government-provided (Shhhh!) goodies.  Brilliant.

In any case, the takeover of the GOP by Serious Money is now well into its
second stage.  Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, it is.
Seriously, what is the next step after this one fails to provide any
long-term solutions to what ails America, as most assuredly will be the
case?  For a decade or three now, regressives in America have been showing
that they are capable of anything.  Which more or less answers that
question, doesn't it?  If you're willing to savage military icons like John
McCain, Max Cleland and John Kerry in order to win elections - and
especially after you get away with it every time - you're willing to do
anything.  If you're willing to mock the 9/11 widows as scheming
opportunists, you're willing to do anything.  If you're willing to don a
tuxedo and joke about missing WMD at a press banquet in Washington, just as
you're telling the American military's adversaries in Iraq to "bring it
on", you're willing to do anything.

Looking at the rhetoric the right throws in the direction of our president
these days, questioning his very nationality (oh, did I mention that he's
black?), it's easy to see that they‘ve gone completely over the line.
But what's really out of control is what lies underneath this insanity
generated for the consumption of an ignorant hoi polloi.  And what that is
- what you see when you move the slime-infested rock away - is an
unfathomably monstrous greed.  Watching these folks in action, you could
easily get the impression that they had been impoverished their whole
lives.  That they had been denied everything, right down to food and water.
That they had been deprived through poverty especially of their dignity.
You know, like the real poor people of this world, the forty or fifty
percent of the Earth's population that survives on less than two dollars
per day.  Those folks.

Instead, we are talking about people who are already fantastically rich.
And who, despite this, are absolutely hell-bent on getting richer, even if
that means depriving hundreds of millions of people in the American middle
class of their middle classness, and in many cases, ultimately of their
lives.  How do we explain people like this?  Are they not essentially
sociopathic?  Are they not made of essentially the same stuff as those who
can kill without guilt or remorse?  Especially when you consider that even
the greediest among us reach a limit beyond which one can effectively make
use of the next dollar and the one beyond that, so that pushing others into
poverty is no longer even for purposes of your own benefit, but instead for
some kind of sick sport?  Aren't these the characters whose essential
sickness preachers and philosophers and shrinks have been trying to sort
out for millennia?

Whatever the explanation for such illness, the effects of their efforts are
certainly plain to see.  We're talking here about a class of Americans who
have been essentially offended by the diminishment of inequality produced
in America during the middle part of the twentieth century, due to the
national policies ranging from the New Deal to the Great Society,
Republican administrations included.  America's socio-economic structure
changed dramatically during that time, and almost entirely for the better.
A huge middle class that had never existed before came into being.
Anti-poverty programs took the worst sting out of living conditions for the
poor.  And America became the greatest economic dynamo since the Roman
Empire.  Meanwhile, by the way, the rich remained very, very rich.

But that was not enough.  So they have made a concerted effort over the
last generation or so to revert the country back to the bad old days of
Herbert Hoover and Calvin Coolidge.  Think about that for a second.  What
sort of elevated sickness, what sort parental deprivation in childhood,
what sort of total absence of conscience and consciousness is required to
produce a group of people with that mentality?

I wish I knew.  But I do know that their plan worked.  As Robert Kuttner
notes in The American Prospect:  "For more than three decades, the wages of
American workers have been close to flat while economic insecurity has
risen massively.  Although the productivity of the U.S. economy has doubled
in a generation, most of those gains have not been captured by workers.
And in the decade that began in 2001, inflation-adjusted wages have fallen
for all but the most affluent 3 percent of the population.

"This pattern of deepening inequality was well entrenched before the
financial collapse - which only made things worse. In 2006, economists at
Goldman Sachs, sounding almost Marxian, reported that ‘the most important
contributor to higher profit margins over the past five years has been a
decline in labor's share of national income.'  By 2006, wages as a
percentage of gross domestic product were already at their lowest share -
45 percent - since government began keeping statistics in 1947.  In the
past three years, the decline in worker earnings has only intensified, as
worker bargaining power has been undermined by very high unemployment.  As
the economy has stumbled toward a feeble recovery, corporate profits and
executive bonuses have rebounded smartly, but salaries and wages have not.

"In the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, wages and productivity moved upward in
lockstep.  Beginning in the 1970s, as government regulation of labor
conditions faltered, trade with nations that exploited their own workers
increased, and corporations declared open war on unions, the lines
diverged.  Productivity kept increasing, while median wages were nearly
flat."

This is the successful agenda of the right in America, though it has been
cleverly masked by the politics of resentment.  This has been the real
‘class warfare' in the United States these last decades - not, as
pouncing regressives instantly scream out in an effort to silence truth,
the very occasional and even more feeble attempts by the odd Democratic
politician who slips up and mentions what has actually happened.  And, as
Warren Buffett is honest enough to point out, the war is over and his side
won.  As Robert Reich noted in a recent New York Times op-ed, the richest
one percent of Americans have gone from taking in nine percent of the total
national income right before the Reagan era began, to nearly one-fourth of
it today.  As Reich also reminds us, the last time this happened was in
1928.  I would rush to say, "Hey, remember how that one turned out?", but
it's pretty unnecessary to crack the history books for that reference,
since we're now living it.  As just about the stupidest society that ever
was, we've decided to get together to explore the fun and exciting
question, "What would happen if America had a devastating economic downturn
once again, boys and girls?!?!"

There is one big difference between today and the 1930s, however.  Once
there was a political party in America - the one that did the New Deal and
the Great Society - that stood up a bit for the middle class and the poor.
But Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have led the Democrats down a different
path.  Now the party stands for a slightly weaker version of the GOP's
plutocracy protection service.  And, seemingly, for getting its face
bitch-slapped bright red at every possible juncture.  Both aspects of the
New Democrats are a puzzle, but particularly the latter.  What sort of
psychology of the self-loathing explains how a Clinton or an Obama can be
so passive, even when getting handed their heads by the most scurrilous of
creeps on the political landscape, pieces of (allegedly) human garbage who
could be destroyed with the slightest show of self-defense, let alone a wee
assertion of political courage?

The current White House is such a failure that I am sometimes left
scratching my head in understanding why that is the case.  The puzzle
becomes especially acute if one considers how transparently intelligent
Barack Obama is, and how strategically clever they were in running their
presidential campaign.  It's true, of course, that there are different
kinds of smart.  Jimmy Carter understood nuclear physics, but not the
presidency.  George W. Bush understood the presidency, but was otherwise as
intellectually vacuous as a mud pie.  Still, Obama has shown serious
evidence that he has keen political smarts.  Until he became president,
that is.

One obvious explanation for this puzzle is that the guy, like Clinton
before him, is just another flavor of corporate tool.  Ya got yer
Republican Wall Street marionettes, see, and ya got yer Democratic Wall
Street marionettes...  That much is clear, but it still doesn't explain why
this White House has been as inept as it has.  Another claim that some
people make is that he just wants one term, and will take the money and
prestige and run.  The problem with that theory is that he already had the
money.  And, quite arguably, he could have done better financially by
simply writing a third book than by sitting in the Oval Office earning a
mere half mil per year.  What is absolutely clear, unless there is some
radical and nearly unimaginable change of course, is that he will leave the
presidency as one of history's great losers, which again suggests to me
that he would have been better off just sitting it out.  Not to mention all
the stress and ever-present death threats he could avoid by just hanging on
the sidelines.

Whatever the explanation, the effect could not be clearer.  Obama came into
his presidency with more wind in his sails than perhaps anyone since
Johnson in 1964, and this for a black man with an Islamic name, no less.
He then blew it, utterly and completely.  The indications of this are
everywhere, starting with all the subsequent by-elections which he has
turned into ‘bye' elections for candidates from his party.  Meanwhile,
there are Democrats running for Congress today who are literally running TV
ads dissing Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi.  And even those who are not
mostly don't want the president showing up in their districts before this
election.

Now the latest polls are showing Republicans with a ten percent lead in
generic congressional ballots.  This is the biggest they've ever had in the
68 year history of polling.  Meanwhile, half of Republican voters are
enthusiastic about voting this November, while only one-fourth of Democrats
are.  On top of everything else, Republicans are doing this well despite
offering nothing in terms of a plan for solving the problems that are
upsetting voters.  They will cut taxes on the rich.  That's it.  The
entirety of the rest of what they stand for is simply "NO!!!" to all things
Demon Obama.

Now, think about this for a second, and bear in mind that when it comes to
the GOP we are talking about a political party that the very same polls
show voters still hating.  How astonishingly inept do you have to be to
turn the world upside down on its axis and hand not only resurrection but
in fact control of Congress to such thugs, and hugely despised ones at
that?  What kind of a full-blown multiple-car crash of a politician do you
have to be to make the party of Bush, Cheney, Boehner and McConnell seem
preferable to the public, by a wide margin?

Wait.  Don't answer yet.  It gets worse from there.  In 2003, the ratio of
Democratic to Republican identifying/leaning voters was about 50 to 40
among young voters, known as the Millennial generation.  By 2008, via a
combination of the effects of both George W. Bush and (candidate) Barack
Obama, that ratio had moved an astonishing distance to provide a whopping
gap of 62 to 30.  Now, less than two years into the rule of Mr. We Are The
Ones We've Been Waiting For, it is back to 54 to 40.  These are incredible
swings in identities that are usually far more stable.  And they are
incredibly important, because there is good evidence to suggest that voters
who select a given party over a series of elections in the early part of
their lives wind up keeping that party ID for life.  In other words,
Democrats had an opportunity here to lock in with an entire generation of
voters a hugely disproportionate preference to continue voting for them.
Imagine the difference this would have made in elections for the next
seventy(!) years, especially over time as these Millennials replaced older,
more conservative, voters in the electorate, and as they themselves came to
turn out in larger proportion each election cycle, as every generation does
when it ages.  Democrats could have come close to locking up control of
American government for the coming half-century, just as they essentially
did after 1932.  Instead, the party's leaders have alienated this
generation so much that they have returned the identification numbers to
the period when George Bush and his party were highly popular.  That's a
real achievement, folks.

Dan Pfeiffer, Obama's communications director, recently averred that "The
public is rightly frustrated and angry with the economy".  So far so good,
Dan.  Very perceptive for a guy in the Obama White House.  You should have
stopped there, though.  Instead, Dan went on to say that, "There is no
small tactical shift we could have made at any point that would have solved
that problem".  You know, I don't really know who Dan Pfeiffer is, but I
would say that anyone making this claim should be removed from office, and
fast.  Indeed, right now I would say that anyone who has the title of
Obama's communications director should probably just be taken out back and
shot, on account of gross incompetence and lethal negligence.  I'm sorry,
but these fools are so clueless.  This could have turned out so
differently, and, moreover, that was obvious in January of 2009 to anyone
who had paid attention to American politics for the last thirty years.
This White House was not praiseworthy for seeking to be bipartisan.
Rather, it was embarrassing for not even knowing who its enemies were.

The worst, though, is what is to come.  Obama and the Democrats will get
slaughtered in November.  This will happen not so much because of the
socialist crimes they are alleged by the right to have committed - which
are of course utter nonsense - but simply because of what they have not
done, which is to solve the country's problems.  Yet, because of the
socialist, big-spending, freedom-crushing narrative that regressives have
successfully fomented and that the administration (including - Hello! -
paging COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR DAN PFEIFFER!!) has been completely inept
about countering, and because the other post-election option of actually
getting it right would appear to be (and would be vociferously made to
appear to be, by Republicans) an act of spiteful spitting in the public's
eye, the administration will have no option after the election but to tack
yet further to the right in the ensuing two years.

That will be disastrous for Obama, for Democrats and for the country.  (I
could care less about the first two, who deserve it, and frankly I'm
leaning that same way for number three on the list as well.)  Like Clinton
before him, Obama will try to placate voters and Republican monsters with
their sponsoring oligarchy by moving to the right.  Of course, there is
absolutely nothing there except tax cuts for the wealthy (he is already
proposing tax cuts for the bottom 98 percent).  The Republicans have no
other solutions for the economy (or anything else, for that matter), though
these dam-busting boondoggles for the fiscally obese are, of course, no
solution either.  And, like Clinton before him, Obama will be relentlessly
hounded by congressional investigations into every manner of bogus scandal
that the fevered minds of the closeted perverts on the right can dream up
to keep the administration reeling.

Unlike Clinton, however, there will be one big difference.  I often said,
back in the day, that the only thing that kept the American public from
immolating Wild Bill, and the only thing that kept the Senate from
convicting him in his impeachment trial, was that the economy was jumping
at the time and Americans were therefore fat, dumb and happy.  Today,
however, they're merely fat and dumb, and even the fat part isn't a good
thing in this case.  The public could not possibly be more surly - apart
that is, from how surly they'll be in a year or two.  Obama has been as
idiotic a president as could be created if you sat down with the intention
of making one, and they will be happy to watch him get savaged him when
they have a chance.  By bringing timidity and compromise with criminals to
bear against multiple severe crises, and by refusing to fight for anything,
he has launched a vicious cycle that is sucking him inexorably down, and us
with him:  He fails to solve the problems, the public gets angry and
frustrated, his party loses elections, the right accuses him of everything
from being a socialist to a fascist, he says nothing in response, the
public gets angrier and more frustrated, his party loses more elections,
they are then even more unable to govern than before, the public is about
to explode in anger and frustration, he moves to the right and thereby
offers even less of a solution to these crises than the non-solutions
already on display, and ... so on.  And so on, again.  Rinse and repeat.

Obama and the rest of the cowardly and corrupt members of his party have
guaranteed their own destruction, that's for sure, but that is likely the
least unkind thing that history will say about them.  If we think about
where this all goes next, it becomes clear what these shallow punks are
trading away for their pathetic self-interest and unwillingness to fight
against treasonous criminals.  Democrats will be smashed in the next two
elections, and the right will gain full control of the government and full
responsibility for the state of the country.  At that point, Republicans
will have to put up or shut up.  Since they will have no remotely viable
way to solve the problems people face - since, indeed, their real mission
is to make those problems worse, because that is necessary to further
enrich their sponsors - they will reach for ever greater means of
distraction to keep the public's attention elsewhere.  All I can say is,
"Watch out, third world countries everywhere".

We know what these people are capable of, though Cheneyism has only hinted
at how bad it could ultimately get.

History will record - if there are historians left to record it - that this
was a moment of monsters, cowards and indolents:  those being the right,
the supposed left, and the public, respectively.

It's the worst of all worlds, and the combination is likely to be
catastrophic.

Given the magnitude of the crises we face and the ability of those who
would govern us - and those who would be governed by them - to do anything
whatsoever in pursuit of their own, narrow, short-term interest, it could
well be far worse than catastrophic.
It could be entirely lethal.
---------
David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra
University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to
his articles (mailto:dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time
constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be
found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net.

The Neoliberal Religion 9

10 Practical Steps That You Can Take To Insulate Yourself (At Least
Somewhat) From The Coming Economic Collapse

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/10-practical-steps-that-you-can-take-to-insulate-yourself-at-least-somewhat-from-the-coming-economic-collapse

Most Americans are still operating under the delusion that this "recession"
will end and that the "good times" will return soon, but a growing minority
of Americans are starting to realize that things are fundamentally changing
and that they better start preparing for what is ahead. These "preppers"
come from all over the political spectrum and from every age group.  More
than at any other time in modern history, the American people lack faith in
the U.S. economic system.  In dozens of previous columns, I have detailed
the horrific economic problems that we are now facing in excruciating
detail.  Many readers have started to complain that all I do is "scare"
people and that I don't provide any practical solutions.  Well, not
everyone can move to Montana and start a llama farm, but hopefully this
article will give people some practical steps that they can take to
insulate themselves (at least to an extent) from the coming economic
collapse.

But before I get into what people need to do, let's take a minute to
understand just how bad things are getting out there.  The economic numbers
in the headlines go up and down and it can all be very confusing to most
Americans.

However, there are two long-term trends that are very clear and that anyone
can understand....

#1) The United States is getting poorer and is bleeding jobs every single
month.

#2) The United States is getting into more debt every single month.

When you mention the trade deficit, most Americans roll their eyes and stop
listening.  But that is a huge mistake, because the trade deficit is
absolutely central to our problems.

Every single month, Americans buy far, far more from the rest of the world
than they buy from us.  Every single month tens of billions of dollars more
goes out of the country than comes into it.

That means that every single month the United States is getting poorer.

The excess goods and services that we buy from the rest of the world get
"consumed" and the rest of the world ends up with more money than when they
started.

Each year, hundreds of billions of dollars leave the United States and
don't return.  The transfer of wealth that this represents is astounding.

But not only are we bleeding wealth, we are also bleeding jobs every single
month.

The millions of jobs that the U.S. economy is losing to China, India and
dozens of third world nations are not going to come back.  Middle class
Americans have been placed in direct competition for jobs with workers on
the other side of the world who are more than happy to work for little more
than slave labor wages.  Until this changes the U.S. economy is going to
continue to hemorrhage jobs.

The U.S. government has helped to mask much of this economic bleeding by
unprecedented amounts of government spending and debt, but now the U.S.
national debt exceeds 13 trillion dollars and is getting worse every single
month.  Not only that, but state and local governments all over America are
getting into ridiculous amounts of debt.

So, what we have got is a country that gets poorer every single month and
loses jobs to other countries every single month and that has accumulated
the biggest mountain of debt in the history of the world which also gets
worse every single month.

Needless to say, this cannot last indefinitely.  Eventually the whole thing
is just going to collapse like a house of cards.

So what can we each individually do to somewhat insulate ourselves from the
economic problems that are coming?....

1 - Get Out Of Debt: The old saying, "the borrower is the servant of the
lender", is so incredibly true.  The key to insulating yourself from an
economic meltdown is to become as independent as possible, and as long as
you are in debt, you simply are not independent.  You don't want a horde of
creditors chasing after you when things really start to get bad out there.

2 - Find New Sources Of Income: In 2010, there simply is not such a thing
as job security.  If you are dependent on a job ("just over broke") for
100% of your income, you are in a very bad position.  There are thousands
of different ways to make extra money.  What you don't want to do is to
have all of your eggs in one basket.  One day when the economy melts down
and you are out of a job are you going to be destitute or are you going to
be okay?

3 - Reduce Your Expenses: Many Americans have left the rat race and have
found ways to live on half or even on a quarter of what they were making
previously.  It is possible - if you are willing to reduce your expenses.
In the future times are going to be tougher, so learn to start living with
less today.

4 - Learn To Grow Your Own Food: Today the vast majority of Americans are
completely dependent on being able to run down to the supermarket or to the
local Wal-Mart to buy food.  But what happens when the U.S. dollar declines
dramatically in value and it costs ten bucks to buy a loaf of bread?  If
you learn to grow your own food (even if is just a small garden) you will
be insulating yourself against rising food prices.

5 - Make Sure You Have A Reliable Water Supply: Water shortages are popping
up all over the globe.  Water is quickly becoming one of the "hottest"
commodities out there.  Even in the United States, water shortages have
been making headline news recently.  As we move into the future, it will be
imperative for you and your family to have a reliable source of water.
Some Americans have learned to collect rainwater and many others are using
advanced technology such as atmospheric water generators to provide water
for their families.  But whatever you do, make sure that you are not caught
without a decent source of water in the years ahead.

6 - Buy Land: This is a tough one, because prices are still quite high.
However, as we have written previously, home prices are going to be
declining over the coming months, and eventually there are going to be some
really great deals out there.  The truth is that you don't want to wait too
long either, because once Helicopter Ben Bernanke's inflationary policies
totally tank the value of the U.S. dollar, the price of everything
(including land) is going to go sky high.  If you are able to buy land when
prices are low, that is going to insulate you a great deal from the rising
housing costs that will occur when the U.S dollar does totally go into the
tank.

7 - Get Off The Grid: An increasing number of Americans are going "off the
grid".  Essentially what that means is that they are attempting to operate
independently of the utility companies.  In particular, going "off the
grid" will enable you to insulate yourself from the rapidly rising energy
prices that we are going to see in the future.  If you are able to produce
energy for your own home, you won't be freaking out like your neighbors are
when electricity prices triple someday.

8 - Store Non-Perishable Supplies: Non-perishable supplies are one
investment that is sure to go up in value.  Not that you would resell them.
You store up non-perishable supplies because you are going to need them
someday.  So why not stock up on the things that you are going to need now
before they double or triple in price in the future?  Your money is not
ever going to stretch any farther than it does right now.

9 - Develop Stronger Relationships: Americans have become very insular
creatures.  We act like we don't need anyone or anything.  But the truth is
that as the economy melts down we are going to need each other.  It is
those that are developing strong relationships with family and friends
right now that will be able to depend on them when times get hard.

10 - Get Educated And Stay Flexible: When times are stable, it is not that
important to be informed because things pretty much stay the same.
However, when things are rapidly changing it is imperative to get educated
and to stay informed so that you will know what to do.  The times ahead are
going to require us all to be very flexible, and it is those who are
willing to adapt that will do the best when things get tough.