From ths at psalience.org Mon Sep 26 12:13:04 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2011 12:13:04 +0200 Subject: [THS] Inside the Wall Street Protests: An Eyewitness Account of Police Crackdown Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110926121157.0822d7b8@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.alternet.org/story/152524/inside_the_wall_street_protests%3A_an_eyewitness_account_of_police_crackdown_on_peaceful_demonstrators?page=entire Inside the Wall Street Protests: An Eyewitness Account of Police Crackdown on Peaceful Demonstrators Protesters from the week-old "occupation" in New York's financial district were arrested, penned up, and Maced on Saturday when the NYPD showed up to their march. September 25, 2011 | Protester arrested by NYPD. Via @NYCRevMedia on Twitter. Photo Credit: @nycrevmedia on Twitter Deep in the belly of the beast, among the financial district?s skyscrapers, next to derivatives traders in business suits and Rolex watches, you will find a one-block large democratic society, governed by consensus, whose features include free food, free professional childcare, an arts and culture area, medical and legal teams, a media center, constant music, a library and a stand with refreshments for the many police stationed to supervise the area. This is the one-week-old occupation of Wall Street, located at Liberty Plaza Park. A group of protestors from the camp ventured outside the park and marched on Union Square Saturday morning, and around 100 of them were arrested. Police sprayed peaceful protestors in the face with pepper spray, threw them to the ground and assaulted them with elbows, dragged a woman around by the hair, jumped over barricades to grab and rough up young people, and, when all was said and done, laughed to themselves triumphantly. This is exactly the sort of violence and brutality American authorities routinely condemn when perpetrated against non-violent civilians demonstrating for democracy in Middle Eastern dictatorships, even as they employ horrifying cruelty right here. Filmmaker Marisa Holmes was recently in Egypt, documenting the revolutionary movement there in its attempt to transform the ouster of Hosni Mubarak into a democratic society. Inspired by the movement there, she became involved with the group organizing the Wall Street occupation, hoping to emulate the Egyptians? success in mobilizing the public to wrest their country from the brutal forces in power. Video shows police abusing her, confiscating her belongings and falsely alleging that she had resisted arrest. In the aftermath of the mass arrests, Liberty Plaza was gripped by an agitated nervousness. Would the cops move in on us in an attempt to seize the square? What was in store for our comrades? Some of them texted people back at camp, giving brief glimpses into the fate they were meeting ? a concussion incurred from police brutality on a marcher denied access to medical attention, a group locked in a van parked at Police Plaza, people clubbed about the head and chest with police batons. As the reports came in and people in the camp began to see video and photos of the violence, nervousness turned to anger. These were our friends who had been brutalized for no reason apart from their earnest desire to avail themselves of their guaranteed First Amendment rights in order to call for a more just, more humane, more equal America. One young man implored those assembled, ?There are people right now bleeding in handcuffs! Let?s march!? As tempers rose, the NYPD let us know that they were, as one friend put it, ?playing for keeps,? standing shoulder to shoulder and occupying every inch of the block of Broadway adjacent to the square, displaying the orange nets the same police force had used to corral demonstrators at 2004?s Republican National Convention. During a shift change, as the sun dropped behind the buildings to the west, dozens of cop cars, sirens and lights blazing, began to circle the plaza, intimidating its denizens. Rumors began to circulate that the cops were waiting for cover of dark to invade the square and avoid the watchful eye of the media. After all, they had targeted the internal media team in the arrests, capturing, among others, Marisa. That would have been bad enough, but the cops stationed at Liberty Plaza were also spotted harassing the mainstream media and prohibiting news vans from parking in convenient locations. (One candidate response to having been busted being sadistic and pitiless by the media is to stop being sadistic and pitiless; another is to eliminate the media). In a true democracy, though, knee-jerk reactions don?t happen. A consensus eventually emerged that a hastily-organized march to the precinct would divide the group, leave the marchers vulnerable to arrest and the camp vulnerable to seizure by the police, and heads began to cool and focus on the task at hand. A lawyer addressed the general assembly and reviewed the proper procedure for dealing with hostile police. Some campers volunteered to surround the media center to protect the livestream from potential police encroachment for as long as possible; an outreach committee went to work trying to recruit more occupiers. Community is a magical thing, and social solidarity is a reliable antidote to the aggressive impulse. As of today, most of those arrested have been released; the rest, including Marisa, await arraignment. But the mood back at camp is defiantly jovial. The occupation will not be intimidated by state violence, will not be suppressed by a hostile police force and will not be discouraged by snarky hack journalism like that in the New York Times. This group remembers that tea party dissenters were allowed to bring guns brazenly to town hall meetings, without being subjected to mace and arrest. Similarly, the crooked Wall Street thugs who obliterated the economy and then extorted the country for staggering sums of money have never faced police brutality or even justice. And the congress (a subsidiary of Wall Street), as it proposes huge budget cuts, is even jeopardizing the pensions of those cops whose batons bloodied my friends? face. If only they knew what really needed to be smashed. J.A. Myerson is the executive editor of The Busy Signal and a frequent contributor of Foreign Policy in Focus. From ths at psalience.org Mon Sep 26 12:26:23 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2011 12:26:23 +0200 Subject: [THS] USA - 7.9 MILLION arrests in 2010 for marijuana since 2000 Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110926121430.0822d3e0@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.alternet.org/story/152497/marijuana_arrests_driving_americas_drug_war_latest_fbi_report_shows [Although you might think that such a manifestly ridiculous scenario should be in practice easily counter-attacked, I'd strongly advise you think again. Especially in the USA, when anything political, military,... or anything at all involving lots of money and lots of jobs (here, for cops, DA's, lawyers, judges, et al.), gets this big, the momentum is irreversible. -ths] AlterNet / By Paul Armentano Marijuana Arrests Driving America?s ?Drug War,? Latest FBI Report Shows Marijuana arrests now comprise more than one-half (52 percent) of all drug arrests in the United States. September 21, 2011 | Police made 853,838 arrests in 2010 for marijuana-related offenses, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation?s annual Uniform Crime Report, released today. The arrest total is among the highest ever reported by the agency and is nearly identical to the total number of cannabis-related arrests reported in 2009. According to the report, marijuana arrests now comprise more than one-half (52 percent) of all drug arrests in the United States. An estimated 46 percent of all drug arrests are for offenses related to marijuana possession. ?Today, as in past years, the so-called ?drug war? remains fueled by the arrests of minor marijuana possession offenders, a disproportionate percentage of whom are ethnic minorities,? NORML Deputy Director Paul Armentano said in a prepared statement. ?It makes no sense to continue to waste law enforcements? time and taxpayers? dollars to arrest and prosecute Americans for their use of a substance that poses far fewer health risks than alcohol or tobacco.? Of those charged with marijuana law violations, 750,591 (88 percent) were arrested for marijuana offenses involving possession only. The remaining 103,247 individuals were charged with ?sale/manufacture,? a category that includes virtually all cultivation offenses. By region, the percentage of marijuana arrests was highest in the Midwest (63.5 percent of all drug arrests) and southern regions (57 percent of all drug arrests) of the United States and lowest in the west, where pot prosecutions comprised only 39 percent of total drug arrests. By contrast, the percentage of arrests for heroin and cocaine was lowest in the Midwest (14 percent of all arrests) and highest in the northeast (29 percent of all arrests). Overall, law enforcement agents nationwide arrested 1,638,846 people last year for drug abuse violations, surpassing arrests for all other crimes. Since 2000, law enforcement have reported making an estimated 7.9 million arrests for marijuana violations. Paul Armentano is the deputy director of NORML (the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws), and is the co-author of the book Marijuana Is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink (2009, Chelsea Green). From ths at psalience.org Mon Sep 26 12:37:56 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2011 12:37:56 +0200 Subject: [THS] Pepe Escobar: Fundamental Mistakes are Speeding Up America's Decline Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110926123348.0822cd78@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.alternet.org/story/152522/fundamental_political_and_economic_mistakes_are_speeding_up_america%27s_decline?page=entire Tomdispatch.com / By Pepe Escobar comments_image 5 COMMENTS Fundamental Political and Economic Mistakes are Speeding Up America's Decline The new American century was swiftly throttled in three stages: 9/11 (blowback); invasion of Iraq (preemptive war); and 2008 Wall Street meltdown (casino capitalism). September 25, 2011 | More than 10 years ago, before 9/11, Goldman Sachs was predicting that the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) would make the world economy?s top ten -- but not until 2040. Skip a decade and the Chinese economy already has the number two spot all to itself, Brazil is number seven, India 10, and even Russia is creeping closer. In purchasing power parity, or PPP, things look even better. There, China is in second place, India is now fourth, Russia sixth, and Brazil seventh. No wonder Jim O?Neill, who coined the neologism BRIC and is now chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, has been stressing that ?the world is no longer dependent on the leadership of the U.S. and Europe.? After all, since 2007, China?s economy has grown by 45%, the American economy by less than 1% -- figures startling enough to make anyone take back their predictions. American anxiety and puzzlement reached new heights when the latest International Monetary Fund projections indicated that, at least by certain measurements, the Chinese economy would overtake the U.S. by 2016. (Until recently, Goldman Sachs was pointing towards 2050 for that first-place exchange.) Within the next 30 years, the top five will, according to Goldman Sachs, likely be China, the U.S., India, Brazil, and Mexico. Western Europe? Bye-bye! A System Stripped to Its Essence Increasing numbers of experts agree that Asia is now leading the way for the world, even as it lays bare glaring gaps in the West?s narrative of civilization. Yet to talk about ?the decline of the West? is a dangerous proposition. A key historical reference is Oswald Spengler?s 1918 essay with that title. Spengler, a man of his times, thought that humanity functioned through unique cultural systems, and that Western ideas would not be pertinent for, or transferable to, other regions of the planet. (Tell that howler to the young Egyptians in Tahrir Square.) Spengler, of course, captured the Western-dominated zeitgeist of another century. He saw cultures as living and dying organisms, each with a unique soul. The East or Orient was ?magical,? while the West was ?Faustian.? A reactionary misanthrope, he was convinced that the West had already reached the supreme status available to a democratic civilization -- and so was destined to experience the ?decline? of his title. If you?re thinking that this sounds like an avant-la-lettre Huntingtonesque ?clash of civilizations,? you can be excused, because that?s exactly what it was. Speaking of civilizational clashes, did anyone notice that ?maybe? in a recent TIME cover story picking up on Spenglerian themes and headlined ?The Decline and Fall of Europe (and Maybe the West)?? In our post-Spenglerian moment, the ?West? is surely the United States, and how could that magazine get it so wrong? Maybe? After all, a Europe now in deep financial crisis will be ?in decline? as long as it remains inextricably intertwined with and continues to defer to ?the West? -- that is, Washington -- even as it witnesses the simultaneous economic ascent of what?s sometimes derisively referred to as ?the South.? Think of the present global capitalist moment not as a "clash," but a ?cash of civilizations.? If Washington is now stunned and operating on autopilot, that?s in part because, historically speaking, its moment as the globe?s ?sole superpower? or even ?hyperpower? barely outlasted Andy Warhol?s notorious 15 minutes of fame -- from the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union to 9/11 and the Bush doctrine. The new American century was swiftly throttled in three hubris-filled stages: 9/11 (blowback); the invasion of Iraq (preemptive war); and the 2008 Wall Street meltdown (casino capitalism). Meanwhile, one may argue that Europe still has its non-Western opportunities, that, in fact, the periphery increasingly dreams with European -- not American -- subtitles. The Arab Spring, for instance, was focused on European-style parliamentary democracies, not an American presidential system. In addition, however financially anxious it may be, Europe remains the world?s largest market. In an array of technological fields, it now rivals or outpaces the U.S., while regressive Persian Gulf monarchies splurge on euros (and prime real estate in Paris and London) to diversify their portfolios. Yet, with ?leaders? like the neo-Napoleonic Nicolas Sarkozy, David (of Arabia) Cameron, Silvio (?bunga bunga?) Berlusconi, and Angela (?Dear Prudence?) Merkel largely lacking imagination or striking competence, Europe certainly doesn?t need enemies. Decline or not, it might find a whole new lease on life by sidelining its Atlanticism and boldly betting on its Euro-Asian destiny. It could open up its societies, economies, and cultures to China, India, and Russia, while pushing southern Europe to connect far more deeply with a rising Turkey, the rest of the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa (and not via further NATO ?humanitarian? bombings either). Otherwise, the facts on the ground spell out something that goes well beyond the decline of the West: it?s the decline of a system in the West that, in these last years, is being stripped to its grim essence. Historian Eric Hobsbawm caught the mood of the moment when he wrote in his book How to Change the World that ?the world transformed by capitalism,? which Karl Marx described in 1848 ?in passages of dark, laconic eloquence is recognisably the world of the early twenty-first century.? In a landscape in which politics is being reduced to a (broken) mirror reflecting finance, and in which producing and saving have been superseded by consuming, something systemic comes into view. As in the famous line of poet William Butler Yeats, ?the center cannot hold? -- and it won?t either. If the West ceases to be the center, what exactly went wrong? Are You With Me or Against Me? It?s worth remembering that capitalism was ?civilized? thanks to the unrelenting pressure of gritty working-class movements and the ever-present threat of strikes and even revolutions. The existence of the Soviet bloc, an alternate model of economic development (however warped), also helped. To counteract the USSR, Washington?s and Europe?s ruling groups had to buy the support of their masses in defending what no one blushed about calling ?the Western way of life.? A complex social contract was forged, and it involved capital making concessions. No more. Not in Washington, that?s obvious. And increasingly, not in Europe either. That system started breaking down as soon as -- talk about total ideological triumph! -- neoliberalism became the only show in town. There was a single superhighway from there and it swept the most fragile strands of the middle class directly into a new post-industrial proletariat, or simply into unemployable status. If neoliberalism is the victor for now, it?s because no realist, alternative developmental model exists, and yet what it has won is ever more in question. Meanwhile, except in the Middle East, progressives the world over are paralyzed, as if expecting the old order to dissolve by itself. Unfortunately, history teaches us that, at similar crossroads in the past, you are as likely to find the grapes of wrath, right-wing populist-style, as anything else -- or worse yet, outright fascism. ?The West against the rest? is a simplistic formula that doesn?t begin to describe such a world. Imagine instead, a planet in which ?the rest? are trying to step beyond the West in a variety of ways, but also have absorbed that West in ways too deep to describe. Here?s the irony, then: Yes, the West will ?decline,? Washington included, and still it will leave itself behind everywhere. Sorry, Your Model Sucks Suppose you?re a developing country, shopping in the developmental supermarket. You look at China and think you see something new -- a consensus model that?s turning on the lights everywhere -- or do you? After all, the Chinese version of an economic boom with no political freedom may not turn out to be much of a model for other countries to follow. In many ways, it may be more like an inapplicable lethal artifact, a cluster bomb made up of shards of the Western concept of modernity married to a Leninist-based formula where a single party controls personnel, propaganda, and -- crucially -- the People?s Liberation Army. At the same time, this is a system evidently trying to prove that, even though the West unified the world -- from neocolonialism to globalization -- that shouldn?t imply it?s bound to rule forever in material or intellectual terms. For its part, Europe is hawking a model of supra-national integration as a means of solving problems and conflicts from the Middle East to Africa. But any shopper can now see evidence of a European Union on the verge of cracking amid non-stop inter-European bickering that includes national revolts against the euro, discontent over NATO?s role as a global Robocop, and a style of ongoing European cultural arrogance that makes it incapable of recognizing, to take one example, why the Chinese model is so successful in Africa. Or let?s say our shopper looks to the United States, that country still being, after all, the world?s number one economy, its dollar still the world?s reserve currency, and its military still number one in destructive power and still garrisoning much of the globe. That would indeed seem impressive, if it weren?t for the fact that Washington is visibly on the decline, oscillating wildly between a lame populism and a stale orthodoxy, and shilling for casino capitalism on a side street in its spare time. It?s a giant power enveloped in political and economic paralysis for all the world to see, and no less visibly incapable of coming up with an exit strategy. Really, would you buy a model from any of them? In fact, where in a world in escalating disarray is anyone supposed to look these days when it comes to models? One of the key reasons for the Arab Spring was out-of-control food prices, driven significantly by speculation. Protests and riots in Greece, Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Austria, and Turkey were direct consequences of the global recession. In Spain, nearly half of 16- to 29-year-olds -- an overeducated ?lost generation? -- are now out of jobs, a European record. That may be the worst in Europe, but in Britain, 20% of 16- to 24-year-olds are unemployed, about average for the rest of the European Union. In London, almost 25% of working-age people are unemployed. In France, 13.5% of the population is now officially poor -- that is, living on less than $1,300 a month. As many across Western Europe see it, the state has already breached the social contract. The indignados of Madrid have caught the spirit of the moment perfectly: ?We?re not against the system, it?s the system that is against us." This spells out the essence of the abject failure of neoliberal capitalism, as David Harvey explained in his latest book, The Enigma of Capital. He makes clear how a political economy ?of mass dispossession, of predatory practices to the point of daylight robbery, particularly of the poor and the vulnerable, the unsophisticated and the legally unprotected, has become the order of the day.? Will Asia Save Global Capitalism? Meanwhile Beijing is too busy remixing its destiny as the global Middle Kingdom -- deploying engineers, architects, and infrastructure workers of the non-bombing variety from Canada to Brazil, Cuba to Angola -- to be much distracted by the Atlanticist travails in MENA (aka the region that includes the Middle East and Northern Africa). If the West is in trouble, global capitalism is being given a reprieve -- how brief we don?t know -- by the emergence of an Asian middle class, not only in China and India, but also in Indonesia (240 million people in boom mode) and Vietnam (85 million). I never cease to marvel when I compare the instant wonders and real-estate bubble of the present moment in Asia to my first experiences living there in 1994, when such countries were still in the ?Asian tiger,? pre-1997-financial-crisis years. In China alone 300 million people -- ?only? 23% of the total population -- now live in medium-sized to major urban areas and enjoy what?s always called ?disposable incomes.? They, in fact, constitute something like a nation unto themselves, an economy already two-thirds that of Germany?s. The McKinsey Global Institute notes that the Chinese middle class now comprises 29% of the Middle Kingdom?s 190 million households, and will reach a staggering 75% of 372 million households by 2025 (if, of course, China?s capitalist experiment hasn?t gone off some cliff by then and its potential real-estate/finance bubble hasn?t popped and drowned the society). In India, with its population of 1.2 billion, there are already, according to McKinsey, 15 million households with an annual income of up to $10,000; in five years, a projected 40 million households, or 200 million people, will be in that income range. And in India in 2011, as in China in 2001, the only way is up (again as long as that reprieve lasts). Americans may find it surreal (or start packing their expat bags), but an annual income of less than $10,000 means a comfortable life in China or Indonesia, while in the United States, with a median household income of roughly $50,000, one is practically poor. Nomura Securities predicts that in a mere three years, retail sales in China will overtake the U.S. and that, in this way, the Asian middle class may indeed ?save? global capitalism for a time -- but at a price so steep that Mother Nature is plotting some seriously catastrophic revenge in the form of what used to be called climate change and is now more vividly known simply as ?weird weather.? Back in the USA Meanwhile, in the United States, Nobel Peace Prize laureate President Barack Obama continues to insist that we all live on an American planet, exceptionally so. If that line still resonates at home, though, it?s an ever harder sell in a world in which the first Chinese stealth fighter jet goes for a test spin while the American Secretary of Defense is visiting China. Or when the news agency Xinhua, echoing its master Beijing, fumes against the ?irresponsible? Washington politicians who starred in the recent debt-ceiling circus, and points to the fragility of a system ?saved ? from free fall by the Fed?s promise to shower free money on banks for at least two years. Nor is Washington being exactly clever in confronting the leadership of its largest creditor, which holds $3.2 trillion in U.S. currency reserves, 40% of the global total, and is always puzzled by the continued lethal export of ?democracy for dummies? from American shores to the Af-Pak war zones, Iraq, Libya, and other hot spots in the Greater Middle East. Beijing knows well that any further U.S.-generated turbulence in global capitalism could slash its exports, collapse its property bubble, and throw the Chinese working classes into a pretty hardcore revolutionary mode. This means -- despite rising voices of the Rick Perry/Michele Bachmann variety in the U.S. -- that there?s no ?evil? Chinese conspiracy against Washington or the West. In fact, behind China?s leap beyond Germany as the world?s top exporter and its designation as the factory of the world lies a significant amount of production that?s actually controlled by American, European, and Japanese companies. Again, the decline of the West, yes -- but the West is already so deep in China that it?s not going away any time soon. Whoever rises or falls, there remains, as of this moment, only a one-stop-shopping developmental system in the world, fraying in the Atlantic, booming in the Pacific. If any Washington hopes about ?changing? China are a mirage, when it comes to capitalism?s global monopoly, who knows what reality may turn out to be? Wasteland Redux The proverbial bogeymen of our world -- Osama, Saddam, Gaddafi, Ahmadinejad (how curious, all Muslims!) -- are clearly meant to act like so many mini-black holes absorbing all our fears. But they won?t save the West from its decline, or the former sole superpower from its comeuppance. Yale?s Paul Kennedy, that historian of decline, would undoubtedly remind us that history will sweep away American hegemony as surely as autumn replaces summer (as surely as European colonialism was swept away, NATO?s ?humanitarian? wars notwithstanding). Already in 2002, in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, world-system expert Immanuel Wallerstein was framing the debate this way in his book The Decline of American Power: the question wasn?t whether the United States was in decline, but if it could find a way to fall gracefully, without too much damage to itself or the world. The answer in the years since has been clear enough: no. Who can doubt that, 10 years after the 9/11 attacks, the great global story of 2011 has been the Arab Spring, itself certainly a subplot in the decline of the West? As the West wallowed in a mire of fear, Islamophobia, financial and economic crisis, and even, in Britain, riots and looting, from Northern Africa to the Middle East, people risked their lives to have a crack at Western democracy. Of course, that dream has been at least partially derailed, thanks to the medieval House of Saud and its Persian Gulf minions barging in with a ruthless strategy of counter-revolution, while NATO lent a helping hand by changing the narrative to a ?humanitarian? bombing campaign meant to reassert Western greatness. As NATO?s secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen put the matter bluntly, ?If you?re not able to deploy troops beyond your borders, then you can?t exert influence internationally, and then that gap will be filled by emerging powers that don?t necessarily share your values and thinking.? So let?s break the situation down as 2011 heads for winter. As far as MENA is concerned, NATO?s business is to keep the U.S. and Europe in the game, the BRICS members out of it, and the ?natives? in their places. Meanwhile, in the Atlantic world, the middle classes barely hang on in quiet desperation, even as, in the Pacific, China booms, and globally the whole world holds its breath for the next economic shoe to drop in the West (and then the one after that). Pity there?s no neo-T.S. Eliot to chronicle this shabby, neo-medievalist wasteland taking over the Atlanticist axis. When capitalism hits the intensive care unit, the ones who pay the hospital bill are always the most vulnerable -- and the bill is invariably paid in blood. Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times and a TomDispatch.com regular. His latest book is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). To listen to Timothy MacBain?s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Escobar reflects on the fate of the global economy click here, or download it to your iPod here. He may be reached at pepeasia at yahoo.com. From ths at psalience.org Mon Sep 26 12:39:00 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2011 12:39:00 +0200 Subject: [THS] 6 Ways the Rich Are Waging a Class War Against the American People Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110926123153.0822d150@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.alternet.org/story/152512/6_ways_the_rich_are_waging_a_class_war_against_the_american_people?page=entire AlterNet / By Joshua Holland comments_image 21 COMMENTS 6 Ways the Rich Are Waging a Class War Against the American People Denying the very existence of an entire class of citizens? That's waging some very real warfare against them. September 25, 2011 | There hasn't been any organized, explicitly class-based violence in this country for generations, so what, exactly, does ?class warfare? really mean? Is it just an empty political catch-phrase? The American Right has decided that returning the tax rate paid by the wealthiest Americans from what it was during the Bush years (which, incidentally, featured the slowest job growth under any president in our history, at 0.45 percent per year) to what they forked over during the Clinton years (when job growth happened to average 1.6 percent per year) is the epitome of class warfare. Sure, it would leave top earners with a tax rate 10 percentage points below what they were paying after Ronald Reagan's tax cuts, but that's the conservative definition of "eating the rich" these days. I recently offered a less Orwellian definition, arguing that real class warfare is when those who have already achieved a good deal of prosperity pull the ladder up behind them by attacking the very things that once allowed working people to move up and join the ranks of the middle class. But there's another way of looking at ?class war?: habitually vilifying the unfortunate; claiming that their plight is a manifestation of some personal flaw or cultural deficiency. Conservatives wage this form of class warfare virtually every day, consigning millions of people who are down on their luck to some subhuman underclass. The belief that there exists a large pool of ?undeserving poor? who suck the lifeblood out of the rest of society lies at the heart of the Right's demonstrably false ?culture of poverty? narrative. It's a narrative that runs through Ayn Rand's works. It comes to us in bizarre spin that holds up the rich as ?wealth producers? and ?job creators.? And it effects our public policies. In his classic book, Why Americans Hate Welfare, Martin Gilens found a striking disconnect: significant majorities of Americans told pollsters that they wanted public spending to fight poverty to be increased at the same time that similar majorities said they were opposed to welfare. Gilens studied a number of different opinion polls and concluded that the disconnect was driven by a widespread belief that ?most welfare recipients don't really need it,? and by racial animus ? ?perceptions that welfare recipients are undeserving and blacks are lazy.? That narrative ignores two simple and indisputable truths. First, contrary to popular belief, we don't all start out with the same opportunities. The reality is that in the U.S. today, the best predictor of a newborn baby's economic future is how much money his or her parents make. It also ignores the fact that living in an individualistic, capitalist society carries inherent risk. You can do everything right ? study hard, work diligently, keep your nose clean ? but if you fall victim to a random workplace accident, you can nevertheless end up being disabled in the blink of an eye and find yourself in need of public assistance. You can end up bankrupt under a pile of healthcare bills or you could lose your job if you're forced to take care of an ailing parent. Children ? innocents who aren't even old enough to work for themselves ? are among the largest groups receiving various forms of public assistance. Of course, there are always people who game the system, but they represent a tiny minority of recipients; a Massachusetts study found that fully 93 percent of all cases of ?welfare fraud? were committed not by the ?undeserving poor,? but by vendors ? hospitals, pharmacies, nursing homes, etc. Smearing those who face real structural barriers to achievement or who will inevitably face real and random misfortunes in a ?dynamic,? capitalist society ? that's some real class warfare. Here are six excellent examples of the form. 1. Registering the Poor to Vote is 'UnAmerican' Matthew Vadum is a very special wingnut. His current pre-occupation is attacking Zombie ACORN -- an organization that sane people know to have been killed off last year by James O'Keef's selectively-edited videos but which Vadum insists is alive and well and looking to undermine America by organizing poor communities. Vadum recently wrote a very special column in The American Thinker, in which he railed against efforts to get poor people registered to vote. What made the column noteworthy is that Vadum skipped the usual conservative blather about ?voter fraud? ? a problem that's virtually nonexistent ? and offered a refreshingly honest take on the subject. The problem, according to Vadum, is that ?the poor can be counted on to vote themselves more benefits by electing redistributionist politicians. Welfare recipients are particularly open to demagoguery and bribery.? Registering them to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals. It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country -- which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote. Rarely has so much wrongness been packed into so few words. Less than half of those receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) ? the most significant anti-poverty program remaining in our welfare system after the Clinton-era ?reforms? ? are unemployed. About a quarter work jobs that earn poverty wages, and the rest aren't in the workforce because they're disabled, caring for a relative or they're children. In fact, almost half (48.1 percent) of all TANF families receive benefits only for the kids, not the adults. It's true that children are, in strictly economic terms, ?nonproductive,? but they will be productive someday, and more so if they receive adequate nutrition, housing, health care and the like. The other problem with this argument is the idea that the poor vote for ?redistributionist politicians.? First, because all politicians are ?redistributionist? ? it's what government does ? and second, because, as Martin Gilens discovered, while Americans hate the word ?welfare,? large majorities ? 71 percent of Americans; not just the poor ? believe that spending on anti-poverty programs should be increased (as long as you don't call it welfare). Contrary to Vadum's beliefs, there is only a small number of true reactionaries who desire to live in a society that doesn't care for the poor and disabled, and it is in fact they who are ?profoundly antisocial.? 2. Unemployment Benefits Have Created a 'Nation of Slackers' Media Matters says, ?It's taken three years, but America has finally graduated from being 'a nation of whiners' in 2008 to 'a nation of slackers' in 2011 ? at least, that's what Rep. Steve King (R-IA) believes we've accomplished.? King, a right-winger's right-winger, took to the floor of the House to deliver this word-salad: The former speaker of the House, Speaker Pelosi, has consistently said that unemployment checks are one of those reliable and immediate forms of economy recovery, that you get a lot of bang for your buck when you pay people not to work, and they will go out and spend that money immediately, therefore we should pass out unemployment checks and stimulate the economy. That statement is ridiculous where I come from, Mr. Speaker. To pay people not to work, and somehow in that formula it stimulates the economy. The 80 million Americans that are of working age but are simply not in the workforce need to be put to work. We can't have a nation of slackers... We've gotta get this country back to work and get those people out of the slacker rolls and onto the employed rolls. Here, too, we have a shining gem of wrongness. And a common one ? the belief that unemployment benefits discourage people from working is widespread on the Right. Here's a simple reality-check: there are no jobs! According to the Economic Policy Institute, ?there are 6.9 million fewer jobs today than there were in December 2007.? Of course, the working-age population has grown by over 4 million in that same time. Do the math. As Mike Thornton noted on AlterNet, when you add people who are working a part-time gig but want a full-time job to the unemployed, you get 25.4 million workers vying for 3.2 million full-time job openings, ?or 8 unemployed or underemployed workers per job.? This is more of the same: King's painting a picture of the undeserving poor living the good life on the tab of hard-working Americans. So it's worth noting that among developed countries, the US offers some of the stingiest unemployment benefits around ? only two countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) replaced a smaller share of a worker's earnings than the U.S. in 2004, and only the Czech Republic offered unemployment coverage for a shorter time. In 2008, those unemployed Americans who qualified for benefits got $293 per week, or about 35 percent of their lost income, and that's why conservative spin that the jobless are living it up on their unemployment checks instead of trying to find work is so ludicrous. (There is, however, some evidence that this is actually true in places like Scandinavia, where people who lose their jobs still take in 70 percent or more of their income, and in some cases can do so for an unlimited amount of time.) King drives his point home using a classic tactic: take big numbers out of context to distort reality. There are in fact 85 million ?Americans that are of working age but are simply not in the workforce,? and he would have you believe they're all ?slackers.? But that figure includes stay-at-home spouses, people who live off of investment income rather than a job, entrepenuers, and of course the disabled and ill ? people who can't work. Back in January 2001, when the unemployment rate was just 4.2 percent, there were 69 million working-age adults who weren't in the labor force. And the working-age population has grown by about 22 million since then. And, of course, Nancy Pelosi was right that unemployment benefits have a huge amount of stimulus bang-for-the-buck -- King is not only a brazen class warrior, he's also economically illiterate. 3. You Can't Really Be Poor if You Have a Color TV! Is it not the height of class war to make a conscious effort to erase the poor from the public's view? That has been a longterm project on the Right, and one of the classic, if shopworn arguments goes like this: back in the 1930s (or 1950s, or 1970s, depending on the speaker), most poor people didn't own color TVs, but now 97 percent of them do! So the poor really should stop bitching ? they're living the high life! Now, as of this writing, Craigslist offers the following items for free in the San Francisco Bay area: several TVs, multiple armchairs, a set of swivel bar stools, a stainless steel refrigerator, a Nordictrak elliptical trainer, a bunch of sofas and bed-sets ? including a ?like new? leather couch ? a countertop grill, a ?beautiful pine armoir? and some ?Hydro Massage Soaking Tub and Sinks.? Those are just the listings posted in one morning. We create a lot of goods and people want the shiniest, newest things, so there are a ton of obsolete but still functional items like TVs and washer-dryers out there that one can get for nothing or next to nothing. Perhaps my favorite example of the genre is the claim, accurate but divorced from context, that our poor have it good because they don't necessarily live in shoe-boxes. As the Wall Street Journal was happy to point out, ?The average living space for poor American households is 1,200 square feet. In Europe, the average space for all households, not just the poor, is 1,000 square feet.? Case closed! American-style capitalism for the win! Well, not really. This is a simple matter of population density: in the EU-15, there are 120 people per square kilometer; in the United States, we only have 29 people per kilometer. And that average obviously includes people living in sparsely populated rural expanses. I live in a tightly packed U.S. city, and given that most middle-class people here can?t even dream of affording 1,200 square feet, I don?t think our poor folks can either. 4. Food-Stamps: 'A Fossil That Repeats All the Errors of the War on Poverty' Sometimes what passes for an ?argument? is just stating a simple reality in an ominous tone. Consider this string of English words, offered by the Heritage Foundation's Robert Rector: "Some people like to camouflage this by calling it a nutrition program, but it's really not different from cash welfare," said Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, whose views have a following among conservatives on Capitol Hill. "Food stamps is quasi money." There are strict limits on what can be purchased with food stamps, which isn't true of money, but, yes, they do contribute to a household's financial health in the same way that cash does. That doesn't negate the fact that it is, indeed, a nutrition program. But Rector wasn't done ? it gets better: Arguing that aid discourages work and marriage, Mr. Rector said food stamps should contain work requirements as strict as those placed on cash assistance. "The food stamp program is a fossil that repeats all the errors of the war on poverty," he said. Perhaps this works in the same magical way that gay marriage ?discourages marriage? ? I don't know. But what is clear is that, in the words of one anti-hunger activist, "Without food stamps, we'd have starvation." According to the USDA, ?14.5 percent of households were food insecure at least some time during? the past year, and ?5.4 percent of households experienced food insecurity in the more severe range, described as very low food security.? It's also the case that about a third of those who are eligible to receive nutritional assistance don't, in part because of the stigma that people like Robert Rector has worked so hard to encourage. These are real people experiencing very real problems making ends meet, yet Rector and his ilk would make it more difficult to get assistance because they've embraced the fact-free idea that the poor are plagued with a ?culture of dependency.? That's some serious class warfare. 5. 'The Main Causes of Child Poverty Are Low Levels of Parental Work and the Absence of Fathers.' On Wednesday, the New York Yankees clinched the American League East title. On Thursday, it rained in New York. There is a correlation here, but only a fool would suggest that the Yanks' victory caused it to rain the following day. Yet, the Heritage Foundation (it happens to be Robert Rector again) sees a lot of poor, single-parent households, and would have you believe that ?the main causes of child poverty are low levels of parental work and the absence of fathers.? This gets the causal relationship wrong. The number of single-parent households exploded between the 1970s and the 1990s ? more than doubling -- yet the poverty rate remained relatively constant. In fact, before the crash of 2008, the poverty rate was lower than it had been in the 1970s. So, as the rate of single-parent households skyrocketed, poverty declined a little bit. Saying single-parent homes create poverty is therefore like claiming that the Yankees victory caused the sun to shine the next day. As I noted recently, this is an essential piece of the ?culture of poverty? narrative, and it is nonsense. Jean Hardisty, the author of Marriage as a Cure for Poverty: A Bogus Formula for Women, cited a number of studies showing that poor women have the same dreams as everyone else: they ?often aspire to a romantic notion of marriage and family that features a white picket fence in the suburbs.? But low economic status leads to fewer marriages, not the other way around. In 1998, the Fragile Families Study looked at 3,700 low-income unmarried couples in 20 U.S. cities. The authors found that 90 percent of the couples living together wanted to tie the knot, but only 15 percent had actually done so by the end of the one-year study period. And here?s the key finding: for every dollar that a man?s hourly wages increased, the odds that he?d get hitched by the end of the year rose by 5 percent. Men earning more than $25,000 during the year had twice the marriage rates of those making less than $25,000. Writing up the findings for the Nation, Sharon Lerner noted that poverty itself ?seems to make people feel less entitled to marry.? As one father in the survey put it, marriage means ?not living from check to check.? 6. Taxing Working People Less Than the Rich Is 'Perverse' That half of Americans ?pay no taxes? is a simple lie that will never die, regardless of how frequently it is debunked. It's pure class-war, feeding into the narrative of the parasitic poor feeding off the blood of the industrious. And it is totally divorced from reality ? in the real world, the working poor and the wealthy have virtually the same tax rates. Yet the belief that only a minority pay taxes is ubiquitous among conservatives. Senator Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said last month, "I don't want to tax the truly poor, those who would help themselves if they could, but you can't tell me that 51 percent of all households are the truly poor.? And here's where the lie was created: ?No matter what these Democrats tell you,? he said, ?the wealthy and middle class are already shouldering around 100 percent of the nation's tax burden and 51 percent pay absolutely nothing in income taxes." Note the slight-of-hand. Federal income taxes make up only 18 percent of the taxes collected in this country. It also happens to be among the more progressive taxes, and with median wages stagnating for years, many people today don't earn enough to have to pay them. Hatch takes this fact, which again pertains to less than a fifth of the country's total tax burden, and transforms it into ?the wealthy and middle class are already shouldering around 100 percent of the nation's tax burden? ? completely and totally untrue. If we looked only at the regressive payroll tax, and dishonestly pretended that no other taxes exist, we could make a similarly twisted argument that the wealthy pay virtually nothing in taxes ? billionaire investor Warren Buffett doesn't pay a penny in payroll taxes. When you include all taxes ? not just those that erase working people's contributions ? you see that we really have something close to a flat tax. That?s the conclusion of a 2007 study by Boston University economists Laurence J. Kotlikoff and David Rapson, who found that when you add it all up ? state and local taxes, federal taxes and excise fees ? ?The average marginal tax rate on incomes between $20,000 and $500,000 is 40.3%, the median tax rate is 41.8%, and the standard deviation of all of those rates is 5.3 percentage points. Basically, most of us pay about 40%, plus or minus 5.3 percentage points.? Class War All of these narratives are designed to protect a status quo that's serving the interests of a rarified elite, but is obviously not working well for the working majority in this country. All are intended to distract from the structural causes of poverty and inequality, or to ignore the fact that some people will always experience genuine misfortune ? the myriad surprises in life that can happen to anyone ? because they'd choose low taxes over caring for them. But it's also a narrative that denies the very existence of class differences in this country. As noted earlier, the United States is anything but a true meritocracy. What millions of white working-class Americans understand ? intuitively, even if they can't articulate it ? is that class still matters. And by erasing the very idea of class, of structural barriers to getting ahead in this economy, they are left with a nagging sense of grievance against those they perceive to be bringing them down: foreign powers, immigrants, people of color and liberals, with their ?job-killing? regulations and the like. Ultimately, to deny the very existence of an entire class of citizens is to wage some very real warfare against them. Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He is the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy: And Everything else the Right Doesn't Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America. From ths at psalience.org Mon Sep 26 12:42:42 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2011 12:42:42 +0200 Subject: [THS] NYPD pepperspray women behind barricade at #OccupyWallStreet is Viral Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110926124217.07f92200@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/09/25/1020012/-NYPD-pepper-spray-women-behind-barricade-at-OccupyWallStreet-goes-Viral Sun Sep 25, 2011 at 01:00 AM PDT NYPD pepperspray women behind barricade at #OccupyWallStreet is Viral (UPDATE: w/ victim testimony) (UPDATE: I am sitting with Chelsea Elliott, who is the blonde woman who was attacked in the video below. Here is a short message from Chelsea, written on my laptop for you all. Hello all, I was one of the girls that was maced yesterday. I'm in the black tank [with an albino beer belly hanging]. Pretty surreal stuff. I have talked to multiple press outlets, including the New York Times, since yesterday. Ironically a few moments before what you see in the video I was telling the police officer before me that we are there for them as well. They risk their life everyday to protect us, yet their pensions and salaries are being cut and their friends are being laid off. However, at that moment nothing really sunk in as they were under a lot of pressure. In retrospect, I am still here for the police. Most are with us, and they may have seriously helped our effort yesterday by overreacting. In the video, I turn around as I hear screams and the girl who was behind me was slammed down onto to the pavement. I saw blood and I screamed. This violence was totally unwarranted. I look back to the officer before me and all I could say was "Stop! Why are they doing this?" Dumbfounded, I turn around again only to be maced in the face by an officer walking by in a white shirt. The cop before me says something like "Thanks for the warning!". He felt it, too, as did ordinary New Yorkers strolling by getting Vietnamese food behind us. I just fell and sobbed like a baby; not as tough as I want to look. It really sucks that it had to get to this level for us to get media coverage in our own country. Don't let this scare you from our movement. And don't be angry with the police; there's always a bad apple. What we are doing is important and necessary and this will give us momentum... Watch this graphic video of unprovoked NYPD violence. It has gone viral. Help it go farther by tweeting, sharing it on facebook, and getting out the evidence of what is going on at #OccupyWallStreet. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moD2JnGTToA There were really large crowds today, more than I have seen in my 5 straight days here. I was interviewed by WPIX channel 11, and during the interview I was asked what I would say to those who feel it is a waste of taxpayer money to have the police surrounding the protestors. I don't remember exactly what I said, but I told her something to the effect of that each and every protestor is a taxpayer, and that I thank each and every police officer for the job they do, and that part of the reason we are protesting Wall Street is for the police officers who are with us, the other 99%. Moments later a police officer nearby who had overheard me thanked me. We really are on the same side against these rich bastards, if we could just stop fighting each other this would all be easier. So it is ironic that hours later I found this video and got to meet one of the young ladies who was pepper sprayed. Here is another version of the incident caught on Youtube. She is the blonde woman to the left in the beginning of the video below. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ05rWx1pig Hearing the shrieks of these women sends a chill through my spine. Shame. Shame on the NYPD. We are supposed to be better than this. (Update: I was wrong. Youtube suppression debunked. Note to self, think things through before publishing diaries at 4am in the morning.) More below the fold. [snip] http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/09/25/1020012/-NYPD-pepper-spray-women-behind-barricade-at-OccupyWallStreet-goes-Viral From ths at psalience.org Mon Sep 26 12:44:30 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2011 12:44:30 +0200 Subject: [THS] Occupy Wall Street: Video Shows Police Macing Women Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110926124409.07fc4e38@mail.messagingengine.com> ?Occupy Wall Street? Protests Turn Violent; Video Shows Police Macing Women Email34Smaller FontTextLarger Text|Print ap Occupy Wall Street March jt 110925 wblog Occupy Wall (Tina Fineberg/AP Photo) http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2011/09/occupy-wall-street-protests-turn-violent-video-shows-police-macing-women/ ABC News? Olivia Katrandjian reports: Video posted by the group Occupy Wall St from the eighth day of protests against corporations show police using Tasers and mace to control the crowd, which the group says has only made it more committed to keep up the demonstrations in lower Manhattan for the long haul. A New York Police Department spokeswoman today confirmed the group?s claim that approximately 80 people were arrested Saturday, mainly for disorderly conduct and obstructing vehicular and pedestrian traffic. ?One person was arrested for assaulting a police officer,? she said. She added that no arrests have been made today. The spokeswoman could not confirm whether police officers are using mace, Tasers or netting against protesters. Among the video clips on the Occupy Wall Street website is one that shows a police officer macing a group of young women penned in by orange netting. Another video has circulated of a police officer throwing a protester to the ground, though it is not clear why. The video shows the man standing in what seems to be a non-threatening manner before the incident. Another video shows police officers pushing male and female protesters off the street, and using a large orange net to move the crowd. Last night, a group of protesters marched from Zuccotti Park to One Police Plaza and then to the 5th Precinct in Chinatown, in search of their friends who had been arrested earlier on Saturday. ?You can still leave without being arrested. Leave this corner,? police told demonstrators. But several were arrested. Cristina Gonzalez, 25, was among those arrested last night. She spoke to ABC station WABC-TV when she called her sister from the back of a police van. ?We haven?t been charged, we don?t know what happened,? Gonzalez said. ?We are at One Police Plaza, there?s 16 of us in the back of a van and we?re sweating. And there?s a man back here in who needs medical attention. He?s bleeding from his head and his handcuffs are too tight.? The group claimed on its website that several arrested protestors were locked inside a police van Saturday morning, one with a ?possibly life-threatening? concussion. The website reported at least one protestor was arrested for taking photographs. An NYPD spokesman told ABC News Saturday that police were not targeting those with cameras. The protests began on Sept. 17, when hundreds of protestors gathered at Bowling Green Park in Manhattan, home of the iconic charging bull in New York?s Financial District, as they prepared to ?take the bull by the horns,? as a flyer advertising the event said. ?The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%,? said a statement on the website Occupy Wall Street. According to statements on the website, the movement, an offshoot of online magazine AdBusters, is angered by what it calls the principle of ?profit over and above all else,? which it says has dominated not only America?s economic policies, but also the way in which Americans view culture and humanity. Posts on the website compare the group?s efforts to those used in pro-democracy movements across the Middle East, dubbed the Arab Spring. ?On the 17th of September, we want to see 20,000 people to flood into lower Manhattan, set up beds, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months,? one statement says. ?Like our brothers and sisters in Egypt, Greece, Spain, and Iceland, we plan to use the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic of mass occupation to restore democracy in America. We also encourage the use of nonviolence to achieve our ends and maximize the safety of all participants.? As has become the norm of such protests, this movement has been fueled by social media fire, with supporters taking to Twitter under the hash tag #occupywallstreet. The major hacking group Anonymous has also thrown in its support, live streaming the day?s events. From ths at psalience.org Mon Sep 26 12:48:44 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2011 12:48:44 +0200 Subject: [THS] Unbelievable protest footage. NYPD drag girl across the street Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110926124502.07fc4ba8@mail.messagingengine.com> Unbelievable protest footage. NYPD drag girl across the street http://wp.me/pkFiL-81O NY cop attacks a man for speaking to him [VIDEO] http://wp.me/pkFiL-81V NYPD choking peaceful protestor [PHOTO] http://wp.me/pkFiL-81H NYPD pens up peaceful protesters?all women ?and then maces them [VIDEO] http://wp.me/pkFiL-81G www.opednews.com/articles/Occupy-Wall-Street-Day-8--by-Chaz-Valenza-110924-442.html Occupy Wall Street Day 8: 80 Arrested for Peaceful, Legal Protest; Nets & Pepper Spray Used. By Chaz Valenza (about the author) opednews.com LINK: WATCH LIVE HERE 7:57 PM - Occupy Wall Street marchers have started off for One Police Plaza. NYPD are following with arrest net. Lady Liberty Wrapped in American Flag Talks to NYPD by Global Revolution 7:30 PM - Dark now. Above Lady Liberty (name unknown) wrapped in an American Flag and Betsy Ross wig makes impassioned appeal to NYPD officers, "We're fighting for you pension, we'er fighting for your social security, we're fighting for you children and your children's children. We're fighting for liberty. We're peaceful." 7:00 PM - General Assembly decides half of Liberty Plaza protesters to remain and keep the occupation. The of 1/2 of the protesters will be marching to One Police Plaza to demand information and medical care for those arrested. 6:00 PM - 2000 occupiers remain in Liberty Plaza. They are being surrounded with NYPD fencing. Many more protesters have evacuated. 4:25 PM - 60 plus protesters arrested at Union Square many pepper sprayed. Details as they become available. Orange nets used. At Liberty Plaza: NY Police: "The use of an Umbrella is a safety Hazard. Put it down!" Police stopped marchers in street with barricades. Marchers chanted, "let them go! Let them go!" referring to those already arrested. Police picked a few protesters, who were not in the street but standing on the sidewalk out of the crowd and arrested them." One eyewitness at the scene said she heard police officers saying: "Rough her up." Call+demand protestors be released 728-520-9311 LINK: 13 Things You Can Do to Support Occupy Wall Street Union Square OWS March/Police by Yousef B. September 24, 2011 Media team arrested. Rain on way & police demand removal of umbrella protecting gear in media tent. Media Team Arrested: Live Stream Continues. 11:55 AM - Occupy Wall Street receives eviction notice. SNIP> From ths at psalience.org Mon Sep 26 13:12:29 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2011 13:12:29 +0200 Subject: [THS] Coorection Re: USA - 7.9 MILLION arrests In-Reply-To: <24498083.184301.1317032901797.JavaMail.root@m07> References: <24498083.184301.1317032901797.JavaMail.root@m07> Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110926131018.0822d150@spamarrest.com> Correction The title should have read, "7.9 MILLION arrests since 2000" >AlterNet / By Paul Armentano > >Marijuana Arrests Driving America?s ?Drug War,? Latest FBI Report Shows >Marijuana arrests now comprise more than one-half (52 percent) of all drug arrests in the United States. >September 21, 2011 | > From ths at psalience.org Mon Sep 26 13:21:34 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2011 13:21:34 +0200 Subject: [THS] !!!! The Rise of the Pro-Ignorance Right Wing Puts us All In Danger Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110926131547.07b8f388@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.alternet.org/story/152520/the_rise_of_the_pro-ignorance_right_wing_puts_us_all_in_danger The Smirking Chimp / By Stephen Pizzo comments_image 3 COMMENTS The Rise of the Pro-Ignorance Right Wing Puts us All In Danger Tea Party simpletons wrap themselves in prideful ignorance, and treat matters of life and death, like global warming, with dismissive derision. September 25, 2011 | As the old saying goes, "Every dog has his day." And so it has come to pass. The nation's simpletons have leapt from the shadows, where they wisely hide, except for distinct and notable moments in human history; the Dark Ages, the Inquisition, late 19th-century Germany and the same country during the 1930s. During such times, when the conditions are just right, like they are now, dumb and dumber leap from the shadows and take center stage, claim their right to lead, and... well the results are history. I only mention all this because it's true. Tea Party simpletons wrap themselves in prideful ignorance, and treat matters of life and death, like global warming, with dismissive derision. They scoff at the science that explains their very existence as a species. They say there are doubts about all that "science" stuff, but no doubt about the Spirit in the sky to whom they pledge mindless allegiance. Instead of all that complicated, annoying and often inconvenient "book learnin' stuff, they offer "common sense solutions." Which would be fine, if their solutions were not so uncommonly and provably disastrous. Here's the problem dealing with these simpletons; We can all argue about how things might turn out if we do this or that now, because this situation or that situation has not played itself out fully. It's much more difficult to argue with what actually happened when our ancestors did this or that back then. Those situations played out, for better or for worse. Of course simpletons don't care much for all that. They are profoundly nearsighted. Besides, a knowledge of history requires a modicum of curiosity, and simpletons are also a profoundly un-curious lot. If mankind only produced simpletons we'd all still be sitting around in caves reinventing wheels and rediscovering fire. Which is precisely what separates the enlightened from the simpleton. The simpleton seeks .... well.. simplicity. But hitching one's wagon to the simplest solutions at times of exploding complexity is like trying to navigate a maze with ones eyes closed. No, not a maze.. that's too benign a metaphor for these perilous times. It's more like navigating a mine field with eyes closed -- wearing logging boots while singing God Bless America. Nevertheless, here they are, simpletons proudly and loudly marching through our 21st-century mine fields, clutching their 2000-year-old guidebook they claim was inspired by a "Prince of Peace," -- but who also cheer like a lynch mob at the mere mention of executions, and cheer at the idea of letting the uninsured die on hospital doorsteps. Like the cycle that raises cicadas from the dark earth every 13-years, simpletons have risen -- again. History warns what follows. Yet no one seems to be able to figure out how to cram the simpleton genie back in the bottle. It's the Sorcerer's Apprentice come to life for GOP strategists who uncorked the simpleton bottle and now have no idea how to stop them. So, instead, they are running along beside them trying to keep up. Stephen Pizzo is the author of numerous books, including Inside Job: The Looting of America's Savings and Loans, which was nominated for a Pulitzer. From ths at psalience.org Mon Sep 26 13:40:24 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2011 13:40:24 +0200 Subject: [THS] =?iso-8859-1?q?_Wikileaks_Cable_Shows_U=2ES=2E_And_Israel_K?= =?iso-8859-1?q?ept_Lid_on_Bomb_Sale_to_=91Avoid_Any_Allegations=92_of__Pr?= =?iso-8859-1?q?eparations_to_Strike_Iran?= Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110926133627.0451d340@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.nationofchange.org/wikileaks-cable-us-and-israel-kept-lid-bomb-sale-avoid-any-allegations-preparations-strike-iran-13 [Bunker-Busters../.. Hmmm. Don't suppose there's a connection with the recent DC/Colo earthquakes story... -ths] On Friday, journalist Eli Lake published a story about the Obama administration?s sale of so-called bunker-busting bombs to Israel. According to Lake?s reporting, the Bush administration had put off the sale in order to avoid the perception that delivery of the 55 GBU-28 bombs represented a ?green light? for an Israeli strike on Iran: James Cartwright, the Marine Corps general who served until August as the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Newsweek the military chiefs had no objections to the sale. Rather, Cartwright said, there was a concern about ?how the Iranians would perceive it,? and ?how the Israelis might perceive it.? In other words, would the sale be seen as a green light for Israel to attack Iran?s secret nuclear sites one day? The Obama administration told Israel the bombs ? which could pierce the underground bunkers where Iran increasingly stashes elements of its nuclear program ? would be forthcoming in 2009. Lake reports that they were slated for delivery in late 2009 or 2010. However, neither Lake nor the New York Times, which did a follow-up report, mentioned a late-2009 U.S. State Department diplomatic cable from Tel Aviv. Released at the end of August by the transparency group WikiLeaks, the cable shows the participants in a high-level military-diplomatic meeting between the two countries discussing the ?upcoming delivery? of the bombs and vowing to keep a lid on the transaction due to the same concerns held by the Bush administration. The notes of the meeting in the November 18, 2009, cable read: Both sides then discussed the upcoming delivery of GBU-28 bunker busting bombs to Israel, noting that the transfer should be handled quietly to avoid any allegations that the [U.S. government] is helping Israel prepare for a strike against Iran. At the United Nations General Assembly on Friday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu derided Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?s conspiracy-laced Thursday speech to the world body. ?Can you imagine that man who ranted here yesterday ? can you imagine him armed with nuclear weapons?? said Netanyahu. ?The international community must stop Iran before it?s too late.? From ths at psalience.org Mon Sep 26 13:44:42 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2011 13:44:42 +0200 Subject: [THS] The American 'allergy' to global warming: Why? Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110926134420.044c6ef8@mail.messagingengine.com> The American 'allergy' to global warming: Why? September 24th, 2011 in Space & Earth / Environment The American 'allergy' to global warming: Why? (AP) In this July 15, 2011 photo, atop roughly two miles of ice, technician Marie McLane launches a data-transmitting weather balloon at Summit Station, a remote research site operated by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), and situated 10,500 feet above sea level, on top of the Greenland ice sheet. Climate scientists overwhelmingly agree that manmade greenhouse gases are warming the planet, accelerating the melt of Greenland's ice, and yet resistance to the idea appears to have hardened among many Americans. Why? "The desire to disbelieve deepens as the scale of the threat grows," concludes one scholar who has studied the phenomenon. Analysts now see climate as another battleground in America's left-right "culture wars." (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley) (AP) -- Tucked between treatises on algae and prehistoric turquoise beads, the study on page 460 of a long-ago issue of the U.S. journal Science drew little attention. "I don't think there were any newspaper articles about it or anything like that," the author recalls. But the headline on the 1975 report was bold: "Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?" And this article that coined the term may have marked the last time a mention of "global warming" didn't set off an instant outcry of angry denial. In the paper, Columbia University geoscientist Wally Broecker calculated how much carbon dioxide would accumulate in the atmosphere in the coming 35 years, and how temperatures consequently would rise. His numbers have proven almost dead-on correct. Meanwhile, other powerful evidence poured in over those decades, showing the "greenhouse effect" is real and is happening. And yet resistance to the idea among many in the U.S. appears to have hardened. What's going on? "The desire to disbelieve deepens as the scale of the threat grows," concludes economist-ethicist Clive Hamilton. He and others who track what they call "denialism" find that its nature is changing in America, last redoubt of climate naysayers. It has taken on a more partisan, ideological tone. Polls find a widening Republican-Democratic gap on climate. Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry even accuses climate scientists of lying for money. Global warming looms as a debatable question in yet another U.S. election campaign. From his big-windowed office overlooking the wooded campus of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y., Broecker has observed this deepening of the desire to disbelieve. "The opposition by the Republicans has gotten stronger and stronger," the 79-year-old "grandfather of climate science" said in an interview. "But, of course, the push by the Democrats has become stronger and stronger, and as it has become a more important issue, it has become more polarized." The solution: "Eventually it'll become damned clear that the Earth is warming and the warming is beyond anything we have experienced in millions of years, and people will have to admit..." He stopped and laughed. "Well, I suppose they could say God is burning us up." The basic physics of anthropogenic - manmade - global warming has been clear for more than a century, since researchers proved that carbon dioxide traps heat. Others later showed CO2 was building up in the atmosphere from the burning of coal, oil and other fossil fuels. Weather stations then filled in the rest: Temperatures were rising. "As a physicist, putting CO2 into the air is good enough for me. It's the physics that convinces me," said veteran Cambridge University researcher Liz Morris. But she said work must go on to refine climate data and computer climate models, "to convince the deeply reluctant organizers of this world." The reluctance to rein in carbon emissions revealed itself early on. In the 1980s, as scientists studied Greenland's buried ice for clues to past climate, upgraded their computer models peering into the future, and improved global temperature analyses, the fossil-fuel industries were mobilizing for a campaign to question the science. By 1988, NASA climatologist James Hansen could appear before a U.S. Senate committee and warn that global warming had begun, a dramatic announcement later confirmed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a new, U.N.-sponsored network of hundreds of international scientists. But when Hansen was called back to testify in 1989, the White House of President George H.W. Bush edited this government scientist's remarks to water down his conclusions, and Hansen declined to appear. That was the year U.S. oil and coal interests formed the Global Climate Coalition to combat efforts to shift economies away from their products. Britain's Royal Society and other researchers later determined that oil giant Exxon disbursed millions of dollars annually to think tanks and a handful of supposed experts to sow doubt about the facts. In 1997, two years after the IPCC declared the "balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate," the world's nations gathered in Kyoto, Japan, to try to do something about it. The naysayers were there as well. "The statement that we'll have continued warming with an increase in CO2 is opinion, not fact," oil executive William F. O'Keefe of the Global Climate Coalition insisted to reporters in Kyoto. The late Bert Bolin, then IPCC chief, despaired. "I'm not really surprised at the political reaction," the Swedish climatologist told The Associated Press. "I am surprised at the way some of the scientific findings have been rejected in an unscientific manner." In fact, a document emerged years later showing that the industry coalition's own scientific team had quietly advised it that the basic science of global warming was indisputable. Kyoto's final agreement called for limited rollbacks in greenhouse emissions. The United States didn't even join in that. And by 2000, the CO2 built up in the atmosphere to 369 parts per million - just 4 ppm less than Broecker predicted - compared with 280 ppm before the industrial revolution. Global temperatures rose as well, by 0.6 degrees C (1.1 degrees F) in the 20th century. And the mercury just kept rising. The decade 2000-2009 was the warmest on record, and 2010 and 2005 were the warmest years on record. Satellite and other monitoring, meanwhile, found nights were warming faster than days, and winters more than summers, and the upper atmosphere was cooling while the lower atmosphere warmed - all clear signals greenhouse warming was at work, not some other factor. The impact has been widespread. An authoritative study this August reported that hundreds of species are retreating toward the poles, egrets showing up in southern England, American robins in Eskimo villages. Some, such as polar bears, have nowhere to go. Eventual large-scale extinctions are feared. The heat is cutting into wheat yields, nurturing beetles that are destroying northern forests, attracting malarial mosquitoes to higher altitudes. From the Rockies to the Himalayas, glaciers are shrinking, sending ever more water into the world's seas. Because of accelerated melt in Greenland and elsewhere, the eight-nation Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program projects ocean levels will rise 90 to 160 centimeters (35 to 63 inches) by 2100, threatening coastlines everywhere. "We are scared, really and truly," diplomat Laurence Edwards, from the Pacific's Marshall Islands, told the AP before the 1997 Kyoto meeting. Today in his low-lying home islands, rising seas have washed away shoreline graveyards, saltwater has invaded wells, and islanders desperately seek aid to build a seawall to shield their capital. The oceans are turning more acidic, too, from absorbing excess carbon dioxide. Acidifying seas will harm plankton, shellfish and other marine life up the food chain. Biologists fear the world's coral reefs, home to much ocean life and already damaged from warmer waters, will largely disappear in this century. The greatest fears may focus on "feedbacks" in the Arctic, warming twice as fast as the rest of the world. The Arctic Ocean's summer ice cap has shrunk by half and is expected to essentially vanish by 2030 or 2040, the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center reported Sept. 15. Ashore, meanwhile, the Arctic tundra's permafrost is thawing and releasing methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. These changes will feed on themselves: Released methane leads to warmer skies, which will release more methane. Ice-free Arctic waters absorb more of the sun's heat than do reflective ice and snow, and so melt will beget melt. The frozen Arctic is a controller of Northern Hemisphere climate; an unfrozen one could upend age-old weather patterns across continents. In the face of years of scientific findings and growing impacts, the doubters persist. They ignore long-term trends and seize on insignificant year-to-year blips in data to claim all is well. They focus on minor mistakes in thousands of pages of peer-reviewed studies to claim all is wrong. And they carom from one explanation to another for today's warming Earth: jet contrails, sunspots, cosmic rays, natural cycles. "Ninety-eight percent of the world's climate scientists say it's for real, and yet you still have deniers," observed former U.S. Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, a New York Republican who chaired the House's science committee. Christiana Figueres, Costa Rican head of the U.N.'s post-Kyoto climate negotiations, finds it "very, very perplexing, this apparent allergy that there is in the United States. Why?" The Australian scholar Hamilton sought to explain why in his 2010 book, "Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change." In an interview, he said he found a "transformation" from the 1990s and its industry-financed campaign, to an America where climate denial "has now become a marker of cultural identity in the `angry' parts of the United States." "Climate denial has been incorporated in the broader movement of right-wing populism," he said, a movement that has "a visceral loathing of environmentalism." An in-depth study of a decade of Gallup polling finds statistical backing for that analysis. On the question of whether they believed the effects of global warming were already happening, the percentage of self-identified Republicans or conservatives answering "yes" plummeted from almost 50 percent in 2007-2008 to 30 percent or less in 2010, while liberals and Democrats remained at 70 percent or more, according to the study in this spring's Sociological Quarterly. A Pew Research Center poll last October found a similar left-right gap. The drop-off coincided with the election of Democrat Barack Obama as president and the Democratic effort in Congress, ultimately futile, to impose government caps on industrial greenhouse emissions. Boehlert, the veteran Republican congressman, noted that "high-profile people with an `R' after their name, like Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann, are saying it's all fiction. Pooh-poohing the science of climate change feeds into their basic narrative that all government is bad." The quarterly study's authors, Aaron M. McCright of Michigan State University and Riley E. Dunlap of Oklahoma State, suggested climate had joined abortion and other explosive, intractable issues as a mainstay of America's hardening left-right gap. "The culture wars have thus taken on a new dimension," they wrote. Al Gore, for one, remains upbeat. The former vice president and Nobel Prize-winning climate campaigner says "ferocity" in defense of false beliefs often increases "as the evidence proving them false builds." In an AP interview, he pointed to tipping points in recent history - the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the dismantling of U.S. racial segregation - when the potential for change built slowly in the background, until a critical mass was reached. "This is building toward a point where the falsehoods of climate denial will be unacceptable as a basis for policy much longer," Gore said. "As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, `How long? Not long.'" Even Wally Broecker's jest - that deniers could blame God - may not be an option for long. Last May the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences, arm of an institution that once persecuted Galileo for his scientific findings, pronounced on manmade global warming: It's happening. Said the pope's scientific advisers, "We must protect the habitat that sustains us." ?2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. "The American 'allergy' to global warming: Why?." September 24th, 2011. http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-09-american-allergy-global.html From ths at psalience.org Mon Sep 26 13:54:44 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2011 13:54:44 +0200 Subject: [THS] Jimmy Carter: 'We never dropped a bomb. We never fired a bullet. We never went to war' Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110926135315.044c6b20@mail.messagingengine.com> [From MCM] Carter and the courage of his convictions Jimmy Carter is, by the widest of margins, the most under-rated president in American history. Carter is a genius, and his presidency should be the model for every post-Reagan president. Carter largely got right what every president to follow largely got wrong: foreign policy. The parable of the ninth helicopter is instructive (see below). Carter invented the gold standard for a post-presidency, and he is still doing remarkable work as head of the Carter Center and a senior member of The Elders. Carter is an inspiration and a challenge to everyone. In 2007, Time magazine asked the field of presidential candidates who was their favorite former president. Out of a Democratic field of ten aspiring presidents, only one selected Jimmy Carter. That visionary candidate was Dennis Kucinich. Carter has the courage of his convictions, a characteristic that separates him from other presidents. Having worked in Carter's presidential campaign and having corresponded with him and seen him several times during his post-presidency, I can attest to the greatness of the man, the couple and the positive momentum surging through the Carter mystique. I am looking forward to seeing him again (even though we don't agree about HST). See also: Letters to Foreign Policy by Jimmy Carter & Zbigniew Brzezinski Call Off the Global Drug War by Jimmy Carter MCM ~~~~~~~~~~~ Jimmy Carter: 'We never dropped a bomb. We never fired a bullet. We never went to war' He may live a modest life in a one-horse town, but Jimmy Carter, now 86, retains his global vision. And 30 years after leaving the White House, the peanut farmer turned president is still a man on mission. In Plains, Georgia, we found the 39th US president full of energy and determined to make a difference Carole Cadwalladr Carole Cadwalladr The Observer,Sunday 11 September 2011 larger | smaller jimmy Carter at home View larger picture President Jimmy Carter at home last month in Plains, Georgia. Photograph: Chris Stanford for the Observer Where does Jimmy Carter live? Well, close your eyes and imagine the kind of house an ex-president of the United States might live in. The sort of residence befitting the former leader of the most powerful nation on earth. Got it? Right, now scrub that clean from your mind and instead imagine the sort of house where a moderately successful junior accountant and his family might live. It's what in America is called a "ranch house", or, as we'd say, "a bungalow". There are no porticoes. No columns. No sweeping lawns. There's just a small brick single-storey structure that Jimmy and his wife, Rosalynn, built on Woodland Drive back in 1961 when he was a peanut farmer and she was a peanut farmer's wife, right in the heart of the town in which they grew up. Though Plains, Georgia is barely a town. A street, might be a more accurate description. A single road going nowhere much. At the end of the drive there's a fleet of black Suburbans, giant SUVs with blacked-out windows: not too many junior accountants would have a crack team of secret service agents on site, it's true. But it's hard to overstate how modest it is. It's not much of an exaggeration to say that the whole thing would fit comfortably into the sitting room of just one of Tony and Cherie Blair's nine houses. If you're under 40, you may not even remember Jimmy Carter. But you might recall President Bartlet. From The West Wing. When I chat to Phil Wise, vice-president of the Carter Center ? the foundation Carter set up after leaving office ? he reminds me that Martin Sheen partly based his character on Carter. Wise grew up next door to the Carter family, and as a college student he volunteered for the governor's campaign alongside Chip, the middle son. He worked for the presidential campaign "as the youngest gopher", and ended up in the White House as Carter's appointment secretary. (His character in The West Wing? "The African-American man who sits outside the president's office.") Was Carter really like President Bartlet? I ask Wise that question as we drive from the Carter Center in Atlanta to Plains through the rolling Georgian countryside, passing signs for catfish buffets and churches that exhort us to "Get out of Facebook and into God's Book". He considers the question seriously: "They were both former governors. Could both be very stubborn. And they both had a certain moral tone." He concludes: "There was a lot of Carter in the part." In Britain we assumed that a politician that upright, that pure, could only be fictitious, and the expenses scandal has only reinforced that. But everything about Jimmy Carter's life ? what he did as president, and what he's done since ? has proved that "certain moral tone". And his home somehow encapsulates this. Inside, there's no hallway, just a patch of carpet separating a small dining room from a tiny sitting room. Then, all of a sudden, there's Jimmy. Strictly speaking, he's still Mr President, but it's hard to give the office its true gravitas in what looks like my mum's living room. And there's a plain, homespun quality about him that's reminiscent of that other great Jimmy, the patron saint of small-town American life: Jimmy Stewart. He'll turn 87 in October, and is recovering from having both his knees replaced this summer, but the dazzling smile that once captivated America is still there. Though it's a terrible clich?, not to mention patronising and ageist, to describe any octogenarian as "twinkly", he undeniably is. He leads me slowly into the family room at the back of the house. Photographs of the children, grandchildren and great grandchildren line the walls, and an old throw covers an even older sofa. Mary, the housekeeper who's been with the family for 40-odd years, brings Carter coffee in an ancient plastic cup, so old that the "Royal Caribbean" logo on it has faded nearly clean away. (Mary first came to work at the governor's mansion as a convicted murderer on day release, and ? how's this for living your liberal beliefs? ? the Carters asked her to look after their three-year-old daughter, Amy.) It's a tiny place, Plains, two-and-a-half hours' drive from Atlanta, but there was never any doubt that Jimmy and Rosalynn would come home. "Oh no. Never. My folks have been here since 1860. And Rosalynn's folks since the 1830s, so our families have been involved with the Plains community for a long time. Our land is here, and our churches are here, and the schools that we went to are here. We have a full life here. No matter what we do around the world ? and we now have programmes in maybe 70 countries ? we can work from here as easily as anywhere. This is where we've always come back to." It was even more of a political Siberia in the pre-internet age of 1981 when they first returned after Carter was defeated by Ronald Reagan. Wise came with them as their chief of staff. He recalls: "I was horrified when they said they were coming back here. I had to go and live with my parents. I thought they'd at least go to Atlanta." Thirty years on, the Carters are still incredibly involved with the town. I stay in the Plains Inn, a former funeral parlour turned into a hotel ? and decorated by Rosalynn ? at the Carters' instigation a few years back. One of my fellow guests works for the national park service at Carter's childhood home, now a museum, and tells me that the Carters still pop by to pick vegetables from the garden. And on most Sundays Jimmy wanders down to the Maranatha Baptist Church to teach Sunday school. In the Carters' family room there's a Harry Potter book on the coffee table. At Christmas they're taking the entire family to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios in Florida, and "so I thought I ought to acquaint myself with Harry Potter first," he says. He's never been one to skimp on the homework. Wise tells me: "My entire life, I've only ever managed to tell him one thing he didn't already know. I told him about how in the second world war the Japanese tried to develop a folding aeroplane, and he said 'I did not know that.' And I swear that's the only time that has ever happened." Jimmy's early years on the family farm just outside Plains coloured his entire life. As a boy during the Great Depression, he recalls, "streams of tramps, or we called them hobos, walked back and forth in front of our house, along the railroad". Even more influentially, it was a mostly black community. "I learned at first hand the deprivation of both white and black people living in a segregated community, which was then not challenged at all." Except by his own mother; thanks to her liberalism all his earliest playmates were black. Politics was never on the agenda. He's adamant about this, and when Rosalynn joins us she's bemused at the idea that he had any desire to be president when she married him. "Oh no. I assumed he'd be in the navy and I'd be a naval wife. And he did too." What would you have made of it had you known? "I'd have thought it was tremendously exciting," she says. "But ridiculous," he interjects. "But totally ridiculous," she agrees. They're not a couple, one senses, to shy away from stating bald truths. She's four years her husband's junior, and his equal in no-holds-barred energy. Until his knee operations temporarily prevented him, he swam "at least" 40 lengths a day. And she does two-and-a-half miles around the property on a trike. They travel all over the world. And Peggy, who works for the Carter Center in Plains, tells me: "Every minute of every day is scheduled. They make us mere mortals look bone idle." They're also ? rather amazingly, given that they've just celebrated their 65th wedding anniversary ? still as soppy about each other as two lovebirds. Everyone tells me this. Wise, four employees at the Carter Center, a man in a shop in Plains. And Jimmy and Rosalynn themselves. "They hold hands all the time," says Kelly Callahan, the assistant director of the Carter Center's health programme. "They're just so cute. It's unbelievable. They do everything together. They come to all the staff meetings, and he'll always say, 'Did I forget anything, Rosalynn?'" The story of Jimmy Carter's rise to power is, even 35 years on, still extraordinary. He truly was the man from nowhere. What was it, I ask Rosalynn, that enabled him to achieve the highest office in the land? "Well, he was elected governor after a long campaign " she begins. He interrupts her. "But what do you think propelled me from Plains to the White House?" "Well, it was not until you were governor that you ever dreamed of being president, I don't think." And she continues in this vein until he interrupts her again. "I'd be interested in hearing your answer to the question she asked," he says. And he really is. He's genuinely amused, and anticipating her potential reply. I get the sense she's not one to carelessly drop extraneous compliments. And eventually, after I rephrase it, she answers: "Well, I think he was always just looking for something moreto do. In the navy he always got the best job, and always went one step up, and then another step. And I think it's in his nature to be adventurous. He's always said, 'If you don't try something, you won't succeed.' So he's never been afraid of failure." It's not the most glowing of encomiums, all things considered, but he seems just about satisfied with this. The thing you have to remember about Jimmy Carter, explains Steven Hochman, a Jefferson scholar who's worked with him for the past 30 years, helping research his books, is that he's a problem-solver by nature. "He's very independent. If you grow up on a farm, you have to do things for yourself. When some problem comes up, he's used to solving it. His dad would do it. He would do it." The young Jimmy studied engineering at the US naval academy in Annapolis, and even now he's drawn to practical problems he believes he can solve. The Carter Center, the foundation he and Rosalynn set up to promote and champion human rights, has been quietly working towards eradicating some of the world's nastier diseases. Guinea worm, a debilitating parasite, affected 3.5 million people worldwide when the Carter Center decided to try to eradicate it. Last year there were just 1,797 cases, mostly in South Sudan, and it looks set to be only the second (after smallpox) disease ever eliminated. Also on their hit list is river blindness, trachoma and lymphatic filariasis, otherwise known as elephantiasis. As part of their human-rights efforts, they monitor elections in some of the most troubled corners of the world. "Our basic principle that has shaped us ever since we were founded is that we don't duplicate what other people do," says Carter. "If the World Bank or Harvard University or whoever is adequately taking care of a problem, we don't get involved. We only try to fill vacuums where people don't want to do anything." Kelly Callahan calls the diseases "low-hanging fruit". "All the money goes to the big three: HIV, Aids and malaria. Everything else gets neglected. But these diseases [those the Center targets] affect the poorest of the poor. And by eliminating them we can make a huge difference to the lives of the poorest people on earth. I think he was drawn to this work because he likes projects that are outcome-orientated, and that are community-based ? very much like he is. And he still asks all these questions. There's a desire to do more. A lot of us in this line of work are competitive. We want to do more. And he's like that. He's very passionate and intense." And he shows no sign of letting up. He travels to the world's most intractable trouble spots as part of his work with the Elders, a group of elder statesmen (the caped crusaders of conflict resolution!) led by Nelson Mandela. In April he was in North Korea, trying again to negotiate an agreement on its nuclear programme ? as he did successfully in 1994 when he persuaded Kim II-sung to agree to a nuclear weapons freeze. And this autumn he'll be in Haiti, helping build 100 homes with volunteers fromHabitat for Humanity, something he's done every year for the past 30 years. He's pioneered a model of post-presidential activism that Bill Clinton (or even ex-CEOs such as Bill Gates) have striven to emulate. And in 2002 he received the ultimate recognition for it: the Nobel Peace Prize. Jimmy Carter approached his career with all the pragmatism of a practical man, and the deep-rooted morality of a religious one. American politics is increasingly dominated by what's called the religious right; conservatives who share an anti-scientific world view, who treat evolution as a heretical theory, and universal healthcare as dangerous socialism. But Carter was of the religious left, a very different beast. He has a profound faith, rooted in his Baptist upbringing. He and Rosalynn read the Bible to each other every night and have done so for "30-something years". (They read in Spanish, so that they can practise their language skills at the same time; they're relentless self-improvers.) "I read a chapter one night," says Rosalynn. "And he reads a chapter the next night." Politics wasn't so much a life choice he made, as the culmination of a sequence of events. "I was the chairman of the school board, and I was concerned about the public school system," he tells me. "I served as governor for as long as the constitution would permit me, and after that I ran for president in 1975. As you probably know, I was elected." I heard, I say. Was there really never a master plan? "Not at all. It was always just the next step. When I told my mother I was running for president, she said, president of what?" Ah yes, Miss Lillian. I've read about her. She was the great egalitarian influence of his childhood years: "She never treated our black neighbours any differently than she did white people, and she was able to get away with that in a segregated society because she was a member of the medical profession [a nurse] and she was a very strong-willed woman anyway." At the age of 68 she went off to be a Peace Corps volunteer. There's a template, then, for an active old age, and he's started to resemble her in other ways too. He was the first high-profile figure to call for Guant?namo to be closed. He has criticised President Obama for failing to live up to his promises, for backtracking on foreign affairs, for failing to keep his resolve on Israel. ("When he said no more settlements, that was a major step forward. But then he backed away from that, as he's backed away from all of his other demands.") But his name is being increasingly linked with Obama's in other contexts too. In the heavyweight journal Foreign Policy, Walter Russell Mead coined a phrase to characterise what he suggested was hampering President Obama's presidency: the Carter Syndrome. The "conflicting impulses influencing how this young leader thinks about the world threaten to tear his presidency apart. And in the worst scenario turn him into a new Jimmy Carter." Or, as Nicholas Dawidoff put it in a major profile Rolling Stone published of Jimmy Carter this spring, it's because of Obama's "scattered ambitions, his lack of a grand vision, his outsider's discomfort with the ways of Washington, his fumbling economic policies and above all his supposed lack of toughness, [that] the man he is increasingly compared with is Carter". But as Dawidoff points out, Jimmy Carter is to Republicans what George W Bush is to Democrats: their very names make their enemies foam at the mouth. And the reassessment is working both ways. For years Carter was considered a failure because he was a single-term president, because he was perceived as weak, and because he refused to take action against America's newly minted enemy, Iran. But, at this distance, the three great achievements of that single term seem even more of an achievement today: he forced through the Camp David Accords, one of only two peace treaties that Israel has ever signed, isolating Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin at Camp David for 13 days until he gradually wore them down; he also forced through thePanama Canal Treaty, a deeply unpopular move that returned the canal to Panama, but which prevented, many believe, a difficult and nasty war in Latin America; and he brought in an energy policy that saw him reduce America's dependency on imported oil by half. He was mocked ? three decades before global warming became a fashionable concern ? for walking around the White House, turning down the thermostats. What he's most proud of, though, is that he didn't fire a single shot. Didn't kill a single person. Didn't lead his country into a war ? legal or illegal. "We kept our country at peace. We never went to war. We never dropped a bomb. We never fired a bullet. But still we achieved our international goals. We brought peace to other people, including Egypt and Israel. We normalised relations with China, which had been non-existent for 30-something years. We brought peace between US and most of the countries in Latin America because of the Panama Canal Treaty. We formed a working relationship with the Soviet Union." It's the simple fact of not going to war that, given what came next, should be recognised. "In the last 50 years now, more than that," he says, "that's almost a unique achievement." He was bitterly opposed to both Iraq wars. "Iraq was just a terrible mistake. I thought so in Iraq 1, and I was against it in Iraq 2." And it's not just George W Bush who has blood on his hands, he says, but Tony Blair too: "I don't know what went on in private meetings when Tony Blair agreed to it. But had Bush not gotten that tacit support from Blair, I don't know if the course of history might have been different." It's the second time we've talked about Blair. Money has disfigured American politics, Carter says. I ask him about the pledge he made the day after he lost his bid for re-election, when he told the press he would not make money off the back of his presidency. Is that true? "That is correct," he says. Then he jokes: "It was kind of a weak moment." What inspired it? "My favourite president, and the one I admired most, was Harry Truman. When Truman left office he took the same position. He didn't serve on corporate boards. He didn't make speeches around the world for a lot of money." Unlike Blair, I say. He's made a fortune since leaving office. "I know he has. I know that." What do you think of that? "I wouldn't comment on that." But then he doesn't need to. His whole life has been a comment on that. It seems an impossibly long time ago, 1980. Prince Charles had just started dating Lady Diana Spencer. Dallas was the most popular TV show on both sides of the Atlantic. And Iran had recently been convulsed by the world's first Islamic revolution. More pertinent to the story of Jimmy Carter, Islamist students and militants had stormed the American embassy in Tehran in November 1979 and taken 52 members of staff hostage. What could the US do? How could it save the hostages? It was a question that President Carter wrestled with for 444 long days. It paralysed the presidency. Carter refused to campaign for re-election, refused to light the White House Christmas tree, refused to bomb Tehran. Rosalynn has been quoted as saying that, had her husband bombed Tehran, he would have been re-elected. I put this to Carter. "That's probably true. A lot of people thought that. But it would probably have resulted in the death of maybe tens of thousands of Iranians who were innocent, and in the deaths of the hostages as well. In retrospect I don't have any doubt that I did the right thing. But it was not a popular thing among the public, and it was not even popular among my own advisers inside the White House. Including my wife." Really? "Well, she thought I ought to be more willing to use military power." Instead, he launched Operation Eagle Claw and, in a terrible confluence of extreme circumstances involving a sandstorm in the desert and a helicopter crash, eight US servicemen were killed. And no hostages were rescued. It was a humiliating failure. A failure his political career never recovered from. Nicholas Schmidle, in his New Yorker account of the covert Seals mission that killed Osama bin Laden in May this year, notes that: "Deploying four Chinooks was a last-minute decision made after President Barack Obama said he wanted to feel assured that the Americans could 'fight their way out of Pakistan'." In the event they weren't needed (although the prime helicopter did crash in Bin Laden's compound and had to be abandoned), but the source of his anxiety is easy to guess. If there is one thing President Carter wishes he'd done differently, it would be sending "one more helicopter". "We had to have six, to bring back the hostages. We planned on seven. At the last minute I ordered eight. And, incredibly, three of them were decommissioned. One turned back to the aircraft carrier. One went down in a sandstorm in the desert, and the other had a hydraulic leak and crashed. Complete surprise to all of us, particularly to the military experts. We lost three out of eight helicopters. So then we had to withdraw. But if I'd had one more helicopter we could have brought back our hostages, and I would have been looked upon as a much more successful president." Does that haunt you? "Not really. I feel quite at ease with what we were able to do while I was president and what we've done since then." No regrets? "Not really. On balance, my life has been a constant stream of blessings rather than disappointments and failures and tragedies. I wish I had been re-elected. I think I could have kept our country at peace. I think I could have consolidated what we achieved at Camp David with a treaty between Israel and the Palestinians. But I left office, and a lot of things changed. I think we would have had a very successful energy policy in this country and maybe around the world if I'd stayed in office. But that's just dreaming. I'm willing to accept that." But it's a tantalising prospect ? to play alternative histories. To do a Jimmy Stewart with Jimmy Carter. The great what-might-have-been? Lots of different people tell me that the Middle East is his "unfinished business". Including him. "My constant prayer, my number one foreign goal, is to bring peace to Israel. And in the process to Israel's neighbours." The Camp David Accords were a massive political gamble. He risked failure, but he succeeded where no one has before or since. In 2006 he published a book, Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, that excited fury from the American right. Steven Hochman tells me: "He's used to criticism. But I think it did hurt him. Some friends broke with him." And yet it's hard in Britain to understand what's so controversial about the book. He recommends, as has pretty much everybody else who's ever considered the situation, a two-state solution. What about death? That's what I want to ask, but it's a bald question to ask anyone, let alone a former president who's accelerating towards his 90s. Wise splutters when I start talking about "your time left". I'd read, though, that Carter's favourite poet is Dylan Thomas, and he confirms this. So I ask: "Does the poem 'Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night' have increasing resonance as you get older?" "It does. It does," he says. It's one of Thomas's most famous works, written as his father lay dying. He exhorts him instead to "rage, rage against the dying of the light". No one, not the wise, nor the good, nor even the wild men, he writes, has ever done enough to be ready to die. Does he think he'll rage against the dying of the light? "I do, I do," he says. "Come on, I'll show you my Dylan Thomas." He takes me off to his study ? a converted car-port ? where there's a whole row of Thomas and on the wall a carefully transcribed handwritten framed copy of "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child, in London". "Amy did that for me," he says. "When she was a child." (The former First Daughter was eight when she entered the White House, grew into a student firebrand and is now a stay-at-home mother in Atlanta: Rosalynn shows me a photo of Amy's elder son holding a baby and says, "I just love that photo. You know, I didn't have her until I was 40, and she's just had a baby in her 40s.") Does that poem also have special significance too for Jimmy? "Not really," he says. "I just always really loved the sound of the words. It's so beautiful. I made all my children learn it by heart." He's published his own poetry, too, along with many volumes of memoirs and a children's book. On the way out of the room he points out his oil paintings. Some are more successful than others (he got round the tricky self-portrait issue by painting himself from behind) but he's nothing if not a trier. Karin Ryan, director of the human-rights programme at the Carter Center, says what she loves about him is "that he's not jaded. He's not cynical. He gets exasperated but he still has hope. He gets enthusiastic in a very young way. There's almost an activist spirit about him." She has worked at the Carter Center for more than 20 years after happening to visit the museum. "I saw the exhibits on Camp David and Panama and was blown away. I just thought: this is the way that American power should be. It was at the height of Reaganism, and I really related to this case of America as a moral power. Of using our power and institutions for peace and empowerment. Those of us who've stayed, we've hung around because we love them, Jimmy and Rosalynn." Just not as much as they love each other. I find myself wondering about this. I've read Ronald Reagan's diaries and observed how much he doted on Nancy; and Laura Bush's memoirs, in which there's no doubt that her marriage to Dubya is a strong and happy one; as, surely, is Barack and Michelle's. A rock-solid marriage is almost a pre-condition of being elected president, it seems. But of all of them, none can match Jimmy and Rosalynn. I mention to Carter how Kelly Callahan had spoken of him as a true romantic. Jimmy and Rosalynn both answer at once. "I think he's romantic," says Rosalynn. "I think so," says Jimmy, and he turns to look at her. "We're still very much in love. We miss each other when we're apart." "That's why he doesn't like for me to go off on my own. I go sometimes but he doesn't like it. He likes for me to be at home." Carter tells me he could never have become president without Rosalynn. "That is literally true. I was completely unknown, and I didn't have any money. So I went to one state and Rosalynn went to a different state. My oldest son and his wife, my middle son and his wife, my youngest son and his wife, my mother, and my mother's sister all went to different places every week. And they all campaigned for me. So by the time the other more famous candidates woke up, they'd already lost." And their secret to a happy marriage? "We give each other space," says Rosalynn. "That's really important. And it was most important after we came home from the White House because we'd never been at home all day together every day. And it was a difficult time." They've always made a point of learning new things together. They have their Spanish lesson once a week. They climbed mountains, learned how to fly fish, went birdwatching. "I learned how to ski when I was 59 and Jimmy was 63," says Rosalynn. He was dating Miss Georgia Southwestern College when they first went out. Carter explains: "The next-to-last night that I was home on vacation from the naval academy, the whole family had a family reunion, and she [the beauty queen] couldn't have a date with me. So I was looking for a blind date, and picked up Rosalynn in front of the Methodist church." Rosalynn takes up the story: "His sister, Ruth, was my best friend, and we'd been trying to get me together with him all summer. That night, Ruth and her date stopped in front of the church and picked me up, and I finally got to go with him." So young Jimmy wasn't sad to see the back of the beauty queen? "Well after I'd had a date with Rosalynn, I was not interested in anybody else." It was love at first sight? "It was. For me." I should be asking him for his views on Michele Bachmann. Or Binyamin Netanyahu. OrKim Jong-il. But it's terribly affecting, watching and listening to them both together. And if President Obama does turn out to have the "Carter Syndrome", he might just need to count his blessings. I'm really not sure they make politicians like Jimmy Carter any more. If they ever did. President Carter will be in conversation with Jon Snow on 5 October at an Intelligence Squared event in the Royal Festival Hall, London as part of Southbank Centre's autumn literature season southbankcentre.co.uk. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/11/president-jimmy-carter-interview From ths at psalience.org Tue Sep 27 15:06:51 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Tue, 27 Sep 2011 15:06:51 +0200 Subject: [THS] Venezuela Endorses Sovereignty of Palestinian State Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110927150231.062fb618@mail.messagingengine.com> President Ch?vez: "I want to make myself clear: It is one thing to denounce anti-Semitism, and an entirely different thing to passively accept that Zionistic barbarism enforces an apartheid regime against the Palestinian people. From an ethical standpoint those who denounce the first, must condemn the second." http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29214.htm Venezuela Endorses Sovereignty of Palestinian State September 26, 2011 "CatBirdsSeat" - -ED NOTE: On September 17, 2011 Hugo Ch?vez Frias, President of The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela sent the following letter to Ban Ki-Moon, Secretary General of the United Nations, to confirm the Venezuelan government?s support for the establishment of the State of Palestine. The Venezuelan president sent this letter as the 66th UN General Assembly votes on Palestinian statehood. By Hugo Ch?vez Fr?as, President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela (En ingl?s y espa?ol) Embassy of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela Tuesday, Sep 20, 2011 Miraflores, September 17, 2011 His Excellency Ban Ki-moon Secretary General of the United Nations Mr. Secretary General: Distinguished representatives of the peoples of the world: I address these words to the United Nations General Assembly, to this great forum that represents all the people of earth, to ratify, on this day and in this setting, Venezuela?s full support of the recognition of the Palestinian State: of Palestine?s right to become a free, sovereign and independent state. This represents an act of historic justice towards a people who carry with them, from time immemorial, all the pain and suffering of the world. In his memorable essay The Grandeur of Arafat, the great French philosopher Gilles Deleuze wrote with the full weight of the truth: The Palestinian cause is first and foremost the set of injustices that these people have suffered and continue to suffer. And I dare add that the Palestinian cause also represents a constant and unwavering will to resist, already written in the historic memory of the human condition. A will to resist that is born of the most profound love for the earth. Mahmoud Darwish, the infinite voice of the longed-for Palestine, with heartfelt conscience speaks about this love: We don?t need memories/ because we carry within us Mount Carmelo/ and in our eyelids is the herb of Galilee./ Don?t say: If only we could flow to my country like a river!/ Don?t say that!/ Because we are in the flesh of our country/ and our country is in our flesh. Against those who falsely assert that what has happened to the Palestinian people is not genocide, Deleuze himself states with unfaltering lucidity: From beginning to end, it involved acting as if the Palestinian people not only must not exist, but had never existed. It represents the very essence of genocide: to decree that a people do not exist; to deny them the right to existence. In this regard, the great Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo is quite right when he forcefully states: The biblical promise of the land of Judea and Samaria to the tribes of Israel is not a notarized property contract that authorizes the eviction of those who were born and live on that land. This is precisely why conflict resolution in the Middle East must, necessarily, bring justice to the Palestinian people; this is the only path to peace. It is upsetting and painful that the same people who suffered one of the worst examples of genocide in history have become the executioners of the Palestinian people: it is upsetting and painful that the heritage of the Holocaust be the Nakba. And it is truly disturbing that Zionism continues to use the charge of anti-Semitism as blackmail against those who oppose their violations and crimes. Israel has, blatantly and despicably, used and continues to use the memory of the victims. And they do so to act with complete impunity against Palestine. It?s worth mentioning that anti-Semitism is a Western, European, scourge in which the Arabs do not participate. Furthermore, let?s not forget that it is the Semite Palestine people who suffer from the ethnic cleansing practiced by the Israeli colonialist State. I want to make myself clear: It is one thing to denounce anti-Semitism, and an entirely different thing to passively accept that Zionistic barbarism enforces an apartheid regime against the Palestinian people. From an ethical standpoint those who denounce the first, must condemn the second. A necessary digression: it is frankly abusive to confuse Zionism with Judaism. Throughout time we have been reminded of this by several Jewish intellectuals such as Albert Einstein and Erich Fromm. And today there are an ever increasing number of conscientious citizens, within Israel itself, who openly oppose Zionism and its criminal and terrorist practices. We must spell it out: Zionism, as a world vision, is absolutely racist. Irrefutable proof of this can be seen in these words written with terrifying cynicism by Golda Meir: How are we to return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to. There is no such thing as a Palestinian people. It is not as people think, that there existed a people called Palestinians, who considered themselves as Palestinians, and that we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn?t exist.? It is important to remember that: from the end of the 19th century, Zionism called for the return of the Jewish people to Palestine and the creation of a national State of its own. This approach was beneficial for French and British colonialism, as it would later be for Yankee imperialism. The West has always encouraged and supported the Zionist occupation of Palestine by military means. Read and reread the document historically known as the Balfour Declaration of 1917: the British Government assumed the legal authority to promise a national home in Palestine to the Jewish people, deliberately ignoring the presence and wishes of its inhabitants. It should be added that Christians and Muslims lived in peace for centuries in the Holy Land up until the time when Zionism began to claim it as its complete and exclusive property. Let?s not forget that beginning in the second decade of the 20th century, Zionism started to develop its expansionist plans by taking advantage of the colonial British occupation of Palestine. By the end of World War II, the Palestinian people?s tragedy worsened, with their expulsion from their territory and, at the same time, from history. In 1947, the despicable and illegal UN resolution 181 recommends dividing Palestine into a Jewish State, an Arab State, and an area under international control (Jerusalem and Belem). Shamefully, 56 percent of the territory was granted to Zionism to establish its State. In fact, this resolution violated international law and blatantly ignored the will of the vast Arab majority: the right to self-determination of the people became a dead letter. From 1948 to date, the Zionist State has continually applied its criminal strategy against the Palestinian people with the constant support of its unconditional ally, the United States of America. This unconditional allegiance is clearly observed by the fact that Israel directs and sets US international policy for the Middle East. That?s why the great Palestinian and universal conscience Edward Said stated that any peace agreement built on the alliance with the United States would be an alliance that confirms Zionist power, rather than one that confronts it. Now then: contrary to what Israel and the United States are trying to make the world believe through transnational media outlets, what happened and continues to happen in Palestine ?using Said?s words? is not a religious conflict, but a political conflict, with a colonial and imperialist stamp. It did not begin in the Middle East, but rather in Europe. What was and continues to be at the heart of the conflict?: debate and discussion has prioritized Israel?s security while ignoring Palestine?s. This is corroborated by recent events; a good example is the latest act of genocide set off by Israel during its Operation Molten Lead in Gaza. Palestine?s security cannot be reduced to the simple acknowledgement of a limited self-government and self-policing in its ?enclaves? along the west bank of the Jordan and in the Gaza Strip. This ignores the creation of the Palestinian State, in the borders set prior to 1967 with East Jerusalem as its capital; and the rights of its citizens and their self-determination as a people. This further disregards the compensation and subsequent return to the Homeland of 50 percent of the Palestinian people who are scattered all over the world, as established by resolution 194. It?s unbelievable that a country (Israel) that owes its existence to a general assembly resolution could be so disdainful of the resolutions that emanate from the UN, said Father Miguel D?Escoto when pleading for the end of the massacre against the people of Gaza in late 2008 and early 2009. Mr. Secretary General and distinguished representatives of the peoples of the world: It is impossible to ignore the crisis in the United Nations. In 2005, before this very same General Assembly, we argued that the United Nations model had become exhausted. The fact that the debate on the Palestinian issue has been delayed and is being openly sabotaged reconfirms this. For several days, Washington has been stating that, at the Security Council, it will veto what will be a majority resolution of the General Assembly: the recognition of Palestine as a full member of the UN. In the Statement of Recognition of the Palestinian State, Venezuela, together with the sister Nations that make up the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), have denounced that such a just aspiration could be blocked by this means. As we know, the empire, in this and other instances, is trying to impose its double standard on the world stage: Yankee double standards are violating international law in Libya, while allowing Israel to do whatever it pleases, thus becoming the main accomplice of the Palestinian genocide being carried out by the hands of Zionist barbarity. Edward Said touched a nerve when he wrote that: Israeli interests in the United States have made the US? Middle East policy Israeli-centric. I would like to conclude with the voice of Mahmoud Darwish in his memorable poem On This Earth: We have on this earth what makes life worth living: On this earth, the lady of earth, Mother of all beginnings/ Mother of all ends. She was called Palestine./ Her name later became Palestine./ My Lady, because you are my Lady, I deserve life. It will continue to be called Palestine: Palestine will live and overcome! Long-live free, sovereign and independent Palestine! Hugo Ch?vez Fr?as President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela From ths at psalience.org Tue Sep 27 15:10:30 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Tue, 27 Sep 2011 15:10:30 +0200 Subject: [THS] Mearsheimer Responds to Goldberg's Latest Smear Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110927150809.03e0ab20@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29224.htm Mearsheimer Responds to Goldberg's Latest Smear By Stephen M. Walt September 26, 2011 "Foreign Policy" -- Ever since John Mearsheimer and I began writing about the Israel lobby, some of our critics have leveled various personal charges against us. These attacks rarely addressed the substance of what we wrote -- a tacit concession that both facts and logic were on our side -- but instead accused us of being anti-Semites and conspiracy theorists. They used these false charges to try to discredit and/or marginalize us, and to distract people from the important issues of U.S. Middle East policy that we had raised. The latest example of this tactic is a recent blog post from Jeffrey Goldberg, where he accused my co-author of endorsing a book by an alleged Holocaust denier and Nazi sympathizer. Goldberg has well-established record of making things up about us, and this latest episode is consistent with his usual approach. I asked Professor Mearsheimer if he wanted to respond to Goldberg's sally, and he sent the following reply. John Mearsheimer writes: In a certain sense, it is hard not to be impressed by the energy and imagination that Jeffrey Goldberg devotes to smearing Steve Walt and me. Although he clearly disagrees with our views about U.S.-Israel relations and the role of the Israel lobby, he does not bother to engage what we actually wrote in any meaningful way. Indeed, given what he writes about us, I am not even sure he has read our book or related articles. Instead of challenging the arguments and evidence that we presented, his modus operandi is to misrepresent and distort our views, in a transparent attempt to portray us as rabid anti-Semites. His latest effort along these lines comes in a recent blog post, where he seizes on a dust jacket blurb I wrote for a new book by Gilad Atzmon titled The Wandering Who? A Study of Jewish Identity Politics. Here is what I said in my blurb: Gilad Atzmon has written a fascinating and provocative book on Jewish identity in the modern world. He shows how assimilation and liberalism are making it increasingly difficult for Jews in the Diaspora to maintain a powerful sense of their 'Jewishness.' Panicked Jewish leaders, he argues, have turned to Zionism (blind loyalty to Israel) and scaremongering (the threat of another Holocaust) to keep the tribe united and distinct from the surrounding goyim. As Atzmon's own case demonstrates, this strategy is not working and is causing many Jews great anguish. The Wandering Who? should be widely read by Jews and non-Jews alike. The book, as my blurb makes clear, is an extended meditation on Jewish identity in the Diaspora and how it relates to the Holocaust, Israel, and Zionism. There is no question that the book is provocative, both in terms of its central argument and the overly hot language that Atzmon sometimes uses. But it is also filled with interesting insights that make the reader think long and hard about an important subject. Of course, I do not agree with everything that he says in the book -- what blurber does? -- but I found it thought provoking and likely to be of considerable interest to Jews and non-Jews, which is what I said in my brief comment. Goldberg maintains that Atzmon is a categorically reprehensible person, and accuses him of being a Holocaust denier and an apologist for Hitler. These are two of the most devastating charges that can be leveled against anyone. According to Goldberg, the mere fact that I blurbed Atzmon's book is decisive evidence that I share Atzmon's supposedly odious views. This indictment of me is captured in the title of Goldberg's piece: "John Mearsheimer Endorses a Hitler Apologist and Holocaust Revisionist." This charge is so ludicrous that it is hard to know where to start my response. But let me begin by noting that I have taught countless University of Chicago students over the years about the Holocaust and about Hitler's role in it. Nobody who has been in my classes would ever accuse me of being sympathetic to Holocaust deniers or making excuses for what Hitler did to European Jews. Not surprisingly, those loathsome charges have never been leveled against me until Goldberg did so last week. Equally important, Gilad Atzmon is neither a Holocaust denier nor an apologist for Hitler. Consider the following excerpt from The Wandering Who? As much as I was a sceptic youngster, I was also horrified by the Holocaust. In the 1970s Holocaust survivors were part of our social landscape. They were our neighbours, we met them in our family gatherings, in the classroom, in politics, in the corner shop. The dark numbers tattooed on their white arms never faded away. It always had a chilling effect. . . . It was actually the internalization of the meaning of the Holocaust that transformed me into a strong opponent of Israel and Jewish-ness. It is the Holocaust that eventually made me a devoted supporter of Palestinian rights, resistance and the Palestinian right of return" (pp. 185-186). It seems unequivocally clear to me from those sentences that Atzmon firmly believes that the Holocaust occurred and was a horrific tragedy. I cannot find evidence in his book or in his other writings that indicate he "traffics in Holocaust denial." The real issue for Atzmon -- and this is reflected in the excerpt from his blog post that Goldberg quotes from -- is how the Holocaust is interpreted and used by the Jewish establishment. Atzmon has three complaints. He believes that it is used to justify Israel's brutal treatment of the Palestinians and to fend off criticism of Israel. This is an argument made by many other writers, including former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg, historian Peter Novick, and political scientist Norman Finkelstein. Atzmon also rejects the claim that the Holocaust is exceptional, which is a position that other respected scholars have held. There have been other genocides in world history, after all, and this whole issue was actively debated in the negotiations that led to the building of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. Whatever one thinks of Atzmon's position on this subject, it is hardly beyond the pale. Finally, Atzmon is angry about the fact that it is difficult to raise certain questions about the causes and the conduct of the Holocaust without being personally attacked. These are all defensible if controversial positions to hold, which is not to say one has to agree with any of them. But in no way is he questioning that the Holocaust happened or denying its importance. In fact, his view is clear from one of Atzmon's sentences that Goldberg quotes: "We should strip the holocaust of its Judeo-centric exceptional status and treat it as an historical chapter that belongs to a certain time and place." Note that Atzmon is talking about "the holocaust" in a way that makes it clear he has no doubts about its occurrence, and the passage from The Wandering Who? cited above makes it clear that he has no doubts about its importance or its tragic dimensions; he merely believes it should be seen in a different way. Again, one need not agree with Atzmon to recognize that Goldberg has badly misrepresented his position. There is also no evidence that I could find in The Wandering Who? to support Goldberg's claim that Atzmon is an apologist for Hitler or that he believes "Jews persecuted Hitler" and in so doing helped trigger the Holocaust. There is actually little discussion of Hitler in Atzmon's book, and the only discussion of interactions between Hitler and the Jews concerns the efforts of German Zionists to work out a modus vivendi with the Nazis. (pp. 162-165) This is why Goldberg is forced to go to one of Atzmon's blog posts to make the case that he is an apologist for Hitler. Before I examine the substance of that charge, there is an important issue that needs to be addressed directly. Goldberg's indictment of Atzmon does not rely on anything that he wrote in The Wandering Who? Indeed, Goldberg's blog post is silent on whether he has actually read the book. If he did read it, he apparently could not find any evidence to support his indictment of Atzmon. Instead, he relied exclusively on evidence culled from Atzmon's own blog postings. That is why Goldberg's assault on me steers clear of criticizing Atzmon's book, which is what I blurbed. In short, he falsely accuses me of lending support to a Holocaust denier and defender of Hitler on the basis of writings that I did not read and did not comment upon. This tactic puts me in a difficult position. I was asked to review Atzmon's book and see whether I would be willing to blurb it. This is something I do frequently, and in every case I focus on the book at hand and not on the personality of the author or their other writings. In other words, I did not read any of Atzmon's blog postings before I wrote my blurb. And just for the record, I have not met him and did not communicate with him before I was asked to review The Wandering Who? I read only the book and wrote a blurb that deals with it alone. Goldberg, however, has shifted the focus onto what Atzmon has written on his blog. I discuss a couple of examples below, but I will not defend his blog output in detail for two reasons. First, I do not know what Atzmon may have said in all of his past blog posts and other writings or in the various talks that he has given over the years. Second, what he says in those places is not relevant to what I did, which was simply to read and react to his book. Let me now turn to the specific claim that Atzmon is an "apologist for Hitler." Again, I am somewhat reluctant to do this, because this charge forces me to defend what Atzmon said in one of his blog posts. But given the prominence of the charge in Goldberg's indictment of Atzmon (and me), I cannot let it pass. Plus, I see that Walter Russell Mead, who is also fond of smearing Steve Walt and me, has put this charge up in bright lights on his own blog. Picking up on Goldberg's original post, Mead describes Atzmon's argument this way: "poor Adolf Hitler's actions against German Jews only came after US Jews called a boycott on German goods following Hitler's appointment as German Chancellor. Gosh -- if it weren't for those pushy, aggressive Jews and their annoying boycotts, the Holocaust might not have happened!" It is hard to imagine any sane person making such an argument, and Atzmon never does. Goldberg refers to a blog post that Atzmon wrote on March 25, 2010, written in response to news at the time that AIPAC had "decided to mount pressure" on President Obama. After describing what was happening with Obama, Atzmon notes that this kind of behavior is hardly unprecedented. In his words, "Jewish lobbies certainly do not hold back when it comes to pressuring states, world leaders and even superpowers." There is no question that this statement is accurate and not even all that controversial; Tom Friedman said as much in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago. In the second half of this post, Atzmon says that AIPAC's behavior reminds him of the March 1933 Jewish boycott of German goods, which preceded Hitler's decision on March 28, 1933 to boycott Jewish stores and goods. His basic point is that the Jewish boycott had negative consequences, which it did. In Atzmon's narrative -- and this is a very important theme in his book -- Jews are not simply passive victims of other people's actions. On the contrary, he believes Jews have considerable agency and their actions are not always wise. One can agree or disagree with his views about the wisdom of the Jewish boycott -- and I happen to think he's wrong about it -- but he is not arguing that the Jews were "persecuting Hitler" and that this alleged "persecution" led to the Holocaust. In fact, he says nothing about the Holocaust in his post and he certainly does not justify in any way the murder of six million Jews. Let me make one additional point about Goldberg's mining of Atzmon's blog posts. Goldberg ends his attack on me with the following quotation from a Feb. 19 blog post by Atzmon: "I believe that from [a] certain ideological perspective, Israel is actually far worse than Nazi Germany." That quotation certainly makes Atzmon look like he has lost his mind and that nothing he has written could be trusted. But Goldberg has misrepresented what Atzmon really said, which is one of his standard tactics. Specifically, he quotes only part of a sentence from Atzmon's blog post; but when you look at the entire sentence, you see that Atzmon is making a different, and far more nuanced point. The entire sentence reads: "Indeed, I believe that from [a] certain ideological perspective, Israel is actually far worse than Nazi Germany, for unlike Nazi Germany, Israel is a democracy and that implies that Israeli citizens are complicit in Israeli atrocities." This is not an argument I would make, but what Atzmon is saying is quite different from the way Goldberg portrays it. Finally, let me address the charge that Atzmon himself is an anti-Semite and a self-hating Jew. The implication of this accusation, of course, is that I must be an anti-Semite too (I can't be a self-hating Jew) because I agreed to blurb Atzmon's book. I do not believe that Atzmon is an anti-Semite, although that charge is thrown around so carelessly these days that it has regrettably lost much of its meaning. If one believes that anyone who criticizes Israel is an anti-Semite, then Atzmon clearly fits in that category. But that definition is foolish -- no country is perfect or above criticism-and not worth taking seriously. The more important and interesting issue is whether Atzmon is a self-hating Jew. Here the answer is unequivocally yes. He openly describes himself in this way and he sees himself as part of a long dissident tradition that includes famous figures such as Marx and Spinoza. What is going on here? The key to understanding Atzmon is that he rejects the claim that Jews are the "Chosen People." His main target, as he makes clear at the start of the book, is not with Judaism per se or with people who "happen to be of Jewish origin." Rather, his problem is with "those who put their Jewish-ness over and above all of their other traits." Or to use other words of his: "I will present a harsh criticism of Jewish politics and identity ... This book doesn't deal with Jews as a people or ethnicity." (pp. 15-16) In other words, Atzmon is a universalist who does not like the particularism that characterizes Zionism and which has a rich tradition among Jews and any number of other groups. He is the kind of person who intensely dislikes nationalism of any sort. Princeton professor Richard Falk captures this point nicely in his own blurb for the book, where he writes: "Atzmon has written an absorbing and moving account of his journey from hard-core Israeli nationalist to a de-Zionized patriot of humanity." Atzmon's basic point is that Jews often talk in universalistic terms, but many of them think and act in particularistic terms. One might say they talk like liberals but act like nationalists. Atzmon will have none of this, which is why he labels himself a self-hating Jew. He fervently believes that Jews are not the "Chosen People" and that they should not privilege their "Jewish-ness" over their other human traits. Moreover, he believes that one must choose between Athens and Jerusalem, as they "can never be blended together into a lucid and coherent worldview." (p. 86) One can argue that his perspective is dead wrong, or maintain that it is a lovely idea in principle but just not the way the real world works. But it is hardly an illegitimate or ignoble way of thinking about humanity. To take this matter a step further, Atzmon's book is really all about Jewish identity. He notes that "the disappearance of the ghetto and its maternal qualities" in the wake of the French Revolution caused "an identity crisis within the largely assimilated Jewish society." (p. 104) He believes that this crisis, about which there is an extensive literature, is still at the center of Jewish life today. In effect, Atzmon is telling the story of how he wrestled with his own identity over time and what he thinks is wrong with how most Jews self-identify today. It is in this context that he discusses what he calls the "Holocaust religion," Zionism, and Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. Again, to be perfectly clear, he has no animus toward Judaism as a religion or with individuals who are Jewish by birth. Rather, his target is the tribalism that he believes is common to most Jews, and I might add, to most other peoples as well. Atzmon focuses on Jews for the obvious reason that he is Jewish and is trying to make sense of his own identity. In sum, Goldberg's charge that Atzman is a Holocaust denier or an apologist for Hitler is baseless. Nor is Atzmon an anti-Semite. He has controversial views for sure and he sometimes employs overly provocative language. But there is no question in my mind that he has written a fascinating book that, as I said in my blurb, "should be widely read by Jews and non-Jews alike." Regarding Goldberg's insinuation that I have any sympathy for Holocaust denial and am an anti-Semite, it is just another attempt in his longstanding effort to smear Steve Walt and me. From ths at psalience.org Tue Sep 27 15:16:42 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Tue, 27 Sep 2011 15:16:42 +0200 Subject: [THS] Martin Luther King Jr. would have agreed with Tony Bennet Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110927151425.04ad6910@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29216.htm Martin Luther King Jr. would have agreed with Tony Bennet By Jay Janson September 26, 2011 "Information Clearing House" -- Jazz singer Tony Bennett, a W.W.II veteran and pacifist, speaking about 9/11 and American militarism on the Howard Stern Show comments, "But who are the terrorists? Are we the terrorists or are they the terrorists? Two wrongs don't make a right. They flew the plane in, but we caused it....Because we were bombing them and they told us to stop." Martin Luther King Jr. would have agreed with Tony exposing US history leading to 9/11. As Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in his world shaking sermon, "Beyond Vietnam -- a Time to Break Silence", recounted to us the history of the lies, from 1945 onward, used to trick Americans into supporting the Vietnam war, today he would be exposing the lies that have concealed secret arrangements for CIA covert crimes against humanity in the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere in the world since 1953 -- arrangements that always originate within a dominant financial element that rules our society through ownership and manipulation of 98% of all electronic and print media sources of information. The a few days later, on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher speaking of Tony Bennett 'getting into trouble', guest Michael Moore approved, "I think it's a brave thing to say. If you have a pit bull in your neighbor's back yard, and you go over there and keep kicking that pit bull, and then the pit bull bites you, you don't say, Hey, I don't know why that pit bull bit me!' It's 'cause you've been kicking the dog!" Another guest on the program, Former Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), protested that though "under the First Amendment everyone has a right to say whatever they want to say, some, who are not in politics, maybe are a little more careless with some of the language, but let's understand this, when it comes to 9/11 and the Holocaust, a lot of people take it very seriously" Us very old folks who remember the Holocaust pre-history of nearly every major corporation and most wealthy families of America, with earliest Hitler backer Henry Ford, Rockefeller and Dupont leading the rest, heavily investing in a prostate Germany of low wages, making fortunes building the Nazi armed forces to number one in the world in full knowledge of Hitler's intentions for Jews and plans to invade the Soviet Union. While our parents barely survived for lack of investment in the U.S., America's elite in collaboration with German industrial families, laid the groundwork for World War Two and the Holocaust that otherwise would never had been possible. The Holocaust, like 9/11 has been sold as brought about by one bad man who made himself powerful without American help. Americans, even survivors of death camps, were strangely quiet when Joe Kennedy, once fired by FDR for pro-Nazi statements, was buying his sons' presidential credentials and while disgraced Prescott Bush, who had his accounts frozen for trading with the Nazi enemy, was as a U.S. Senator launching his three sons as presidential timber. Folks, it has taken a beloved 85 year old jazz singer to scratch the surface of the psyop control of most American minds exercised by investor-owned-and-managed media since World War One. Our Tony Bennett made this writer feel good about being his fellow American musician. Yours truly didn't feel this way performing in the Mostly Mozart Festival on stage at Lincoln Center every evening (morning in Vietnam), for knowing that at the same time our planes were bombing and killing Vietnamese rice farmers by the thousands. Our boys, back then, were putting the equivalent of a 9/11 on Vietnam every month. Tony later apologized for upsetting listeners, but didn't retract his words, because he is an honest caring person and perhaps therefore such an extraordinary musician. Other things he said to Howard Stern were, "War is the lowest form of human behavior. Weapons should be banished from the planet and those that make weapons should be arrested. Life is a gift, to be enjoyed." Let us tell that to our great speculating financiers needing as King said "wars to maintain unjust overseas predatory investments." There is now an International Campaign for Awareness of King's Condemnation of U.S. Wars and the "unjust overseas predatory investments they are meant to maintain." http://kingcondemneduswars.blogspot.com/ . Jay Janson, 80, is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer, who has lived and worked on all the continents and whose articles on media have been published in China, Italy, England, India and the US, and now resides in New York City. See also http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3713.htm Article first published by OpEdNews From ths at psalience.org Wed Sep 28 13:06:07 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2011 13:06:07 +0200 Subject: [THS] Paul Craig Roberts: America's "worst enemy" Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110928130344.03f3d948@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29228.htm America?s ?worst enemy? The Latest Orchestrated Threat and The End of History By Paul Craig Roberts September 27, 2011 "Information Clearing House" -- Have you ever before heard of the Haqqanis? I didn?t think so. Like Al Qaeda, about which no one had ever heard prior to 9/11, the ?Haqqani Network? has popped up in time of need to justify America?s next war--Pakistan. President Obama?s claim that he had Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden exterminated deflated the threat from that long-serving bogyman. A terror organization that left its leader, unarmed and undefended, a sitting duck for assassination no longer seemed formidable. Time for a new, more threatening, bogyman, the pursuit of which will keep the ?war on terror? going. Now America?s ?worst enemy? is the Haqqanis. Moreover, unlike Al Qaeda, which was never tied to a country, the Haqqani Network, according to Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, is a ?veritable arm? of the Pakistani government?s intelligence service, ISI. Washington claims that the ISI ordered its Haggani Network to attack the US Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, on September 13 along with the US military base in Wadak province. Senator Lindsey Graham, a member of the Armed Services committee and one of the main Republican warmongers, declared that ?all options are on the table? and gave the Pentagon his assurance that in Congress there was broad bipartisan support for a US military attack on Pakistan. As Washington has been killing large numbers of Pakistani civilians with drones and has forced the Pakistani army to hunt for Al Qaeda throughout most of Pakistan, producing tens of thousands or more of dislocated Pakistanis in the process, Sen. Graham must have something larger in mind. The Pakistani government thinks so, too. The Pakistani prime minister,Yousuf Raza Gilani, called his foreign minister home from talks in Washington and ordered an emergency meeting of the government to assess the prospect of an American invasion. Meanwhile, Washington is rounding up additional reasons to add to the new threat from the Haqqanis to justify making war on Pakistan: Pakistan has nuclear weapons and is unstable and the nukes could fall into the wrong hands; the US can?t win in Afghanistan until it has eliminated sanctuaries in Pakistan; blah-blah. Washington has been trying to bully Pakistan into launching a military operation against its own people in North Waziristan. Pakistan has good reasons for resisting this demand. Washington?s use of the new ?Haqqani threat? as an invasion excuse could be Washington?s way of overcoming Pakistan?s resistance to attacking its North Waziristan provence, or it could be, as some Pakistani political leaders say, and the Pakistani government fears, a ?drama? created by Washington to justify a military assault on yet another Muslim country. Over the years of its servitude as an American puppet, the Pakistan government has brought this on itself. Pakistanis let the US purchase the Pakistan government, train and equip its military, and establish CIA interface with Pakistani intelligence. A government so dependent on Washington could say little when Washington began violating its sovereignty, sending in drones and special forces teams to kill alleged Al Qaeda, but usually women, children, and farmers. Unable to subdue after a decade a small number of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, Washington has placed the blame for its military failure on Pakistan, just as Washington blamed the long drawn-out war on the Iraqi people on Iran?s alleged support for the Iraqi resistance to American occupation. Some knowledgeable analysts? about whom you will never hear in the ?mainstream media,? say that the US military/security complex and their neoconservative whores are orchestrating World War III before Russia and China can get prepared. As a result of the communist oppression, a signifiant percentage of the Russian population is in the American orbit. These Russians trust Washington more than they trust Putin. The Chinese are too occupied dealing with the perils of rapid economic growth to prepare for war and are far behind the threat. War, however, is the lifeblood of the profits of the military/security complex, and war is the chosen method of the neoconservatives for achieving their goal of American hegemony. Pakistan borders China and former constituent parts of the Soviet Union in which the US now has military bases on Russia?s borders. US war upon and occupation of Pakistan is likely to awaken the somnolent Russians and Chinese. As both possess nuclear ICBMs, the outcome of the military/security complex?s greed for profits and the neoconservatives? greed for empire could be the extinction of life on earth. The patriots and super-patriots who fall in with the agendas of the military-security complex and the flag-waving neoconservatives are furthering the ?end-times? outcome so fervently desired by the rapture evangelicals, who will waft up to heaven while the rest of us die on earth. This is not President Reagan?s hoped for outcome from ending the cold war. Dr. Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. From ths at psalience.org Wed Sep 28 13:20:28 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2011 13:20:28 +0200 Subject: [THS] =?iso-8859-1?q?Fidel_Castro=3A_Ch=E1vez=2C_Evo_y_Obama?= Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110928131928.03f09c98@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29237.htm Ch?vez, Evo y Obama By Fidel Castro September 27, 2011 "Prensa Latina" -- I take a break from the tasks that are occupying all of my time these days to dedicate a few words to the unique opportunity presented by the political science of the sixtieth session of the United Nations General Assembly. The yearly event demands singular effort from those taking on the greatest of political responsibilities in many countries. For them, it constitutes a tough test; for the fans of that art, and there are many since it vitally affects everybody, it is difficult to remove oneself from the temptation of observing the interminable but educational show. In the first place, there are infinite thorny subjects and conflicts of interests. For a great number of the participants it is necessary to take positions on events that constitute flagrant violations of principles. For example, what position to take on the NATO genocide in Libya? Would anybody like to leave proof that under their leadership the government of their country supported the monstrous crime being committed by the US and their NATO allies, whose sophisticated fighter planes, manned or unmanned, undertook more than twenty thousand attack missions on a small Third World State that has barely six million inhabitants, alleging the same reasons that were used yesterday to attack and invade Serbia, Iraq and Afghanistan and which today threaten to do likewise in Syria or some other country in the world? Was it not precisely the government of the State hosting the UN that ordered the butchery in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, the mercenary attack on the Bay of Pigs in Cuba, the invasion of Santo Domingo, the ?Dirty War? in Nicaragua, the occupation of Grenada and Panama by US military forces and the massacre of Panamanians in El Chorrillo? Who promoted the military coups and genocides in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay that cost tens of thousands of deaths and disappeared? I am not speaking about things that happened 500 years ago, when the Spanish were starting the genocide in the Americas, or 200 years ago when Yankees exterminated native peoples in the United States or enslaved Africans, despite the fact that ?all men are born free and equal? as the Philadelphia Declaration of Independence states. I am speaking of events that occurred in the last few decades and which are happening today. These events have to be remembered and repeated whenever an occurrence having the importance and prominence of the meeting taking place at the United Nations where the political integrity and ethics of governments are being put to the test. Many of these represent small and poor countries needing support and international cooperation, technology, markets and loans that the developed capitalist powers have handled at their whim. Despite the unabashed monopoly of the mass media and the fascist methods of the United States and their allies to confuse and dupe world opinion, resistance of the peoples grows, and that can be seen in the discussions that are being produced in the United Nations. Quite a few Third World leaders, despite the obstacles and contradictions indicated, have laid out their ideas with courage. The very voices emanating from the governments of Latin America and the Caribbean no longer bear the lackey and scandalous accent of the OAS that characterized the statements of Heads of State in past decades. Two of them have addressed that forum; both of them, Bolivarian President Hugo Ch?vez, a mixture of the races that make up the peoples of Venezuela and Evo Morales, pure descendent of age-old native roots, poured out their concepts at that meeting, one of them via a message and the other speaking live, in response to the speech given by the Yankee president. Telesur broadcast the three statements. Thanks to that, from the evening of Tuesday the 20th, we were able to learn of President Chavez? message that was thoroughly read out by Walter Mart?nez on his program, Dossier. Obama gave his speech on Wednesday morning as the Head of State of the UN host country, and Evo gave his speech early that same afternoon. For the sake of brevity, I shall take essential paragraphs of both texts. Ch?vez was unable to personally attend the UN Summit, after 12 years of struggle, without one single day?s rest that put his life at risk and affected his health and who today is struggling in self-sacrifice for his full recovery. Nevertheless it was difficult for his courageous message to not deal with the most crucial topic at the historic meeting. I transcribe it, almost in its entirety: ?I address these words to the UN General Assembly [ ] to ratify, on this day and in this setting, Venezuela?s full support of the recognition of the Palestinian State: of Palestine?s right to become a free, sovereign and independent state. This represents an act of historic justice towards a people who carry with them, from time immemorial, all the pain and suffering of the world. ?The great French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, [ ] wrote with the full weight of the truth: The Palestinian cause is first and foremost the set of injustices that these people have suffered and continue to suffer. And I dare add that the Palestinian cause also represents a constant and unwavering will to resist, already written in the historic memory of the human condition [ ] Mahmoud Darwish, the infinite voice of the longed-for Palestine, with heartfelt conscience speaks about this love: ?We don?t need memories/ because we carry within us Mount Carmelo/ and in our eyelids is the herb of Galilee./ Don?t say: If only we could flow to my country like a river!/ Don?t say that!/ Because we are in the flesh of our country/ and our country is in our flesh.? ?Against those who falsely assert that what has happened to the Palestinian people is not genocide, Deleuze himself states with unfaltering lucidity: From beginning to end, it involved acting as if the Palestinian people not only must not exist, but had never existed. It represents the very essence of genocide: to decree that a people do not exist; to deny them the right to existence. ? conflict resolution in the Middle East must, necessarily, bring justice to the Palestinian people; this is the only path to peace. ?It is upsetting and painful that the same people who suffered one of the worst examples of genocide in history have become the executioners of the Palestinian people: it is upsetting and painful that the heritage of the Holocaust be the Nakba. And it is truly disturbing that Zionism continues to use the charge of anti-Semitism as blackmail against those who oppose their violations and crimes. Israel has, blatantly and despicably, used and continues to use the memory of the victims. And they do so to act with complete impunity against Palestine. It?s worth mentioning that anti-Semitism is a Western, European, scourge in which the Arabs do not participate. Furthermore, let?s not forget that it is the Semite Palestine people who suffer from the ethnic cleansing practiced by the Israeli colonialist State..? ? It is one thing to denounce anti-Semitism, and an entirely different thing to passively accept that Zionistic barbarism enforces an apartheid regime against the Palestinian people. From an ethical standpoint those who denounce the first, must condemn the second.? ? Zionism, as a world vision, is absolutely racist. Irrefutable proof of this can be seen in these words written with terrifying cynicism by Golda Meir: How are we to return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to. There is no such thing as a Palestinian people. It is not as people think, that there existed a people called Palestinians, who considered themselves as Palestinians, and that we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn't exist.?? ?Read and reread the document historically known as the Balfour Declaration of 1917: the British Government assumed the legal authority to promise a national home in Palestine to the Jewish people, deliberately ignoring the presence and wishes of its inhabitants. It should be added that Christians and Muslims lived in peace for centuries in the Holy Land up until the time when Zionism began to claim it as its complete and exclusive property.? ?By the end of World War II, the Palestinian people?s tragedy worsened, with their expulsion from their territory and, at the same time, from history. In 1947, the despicable and illegal UN resolution 181 recommends dividing Palestine into a Jewish State, an Arab State, and an area under international control (Jerusalem and Belem). [ ] , 56 percent of the territory was granted to Zionism to establish its State. In fact, this resolution violated international law and blatantly ignored the will of the vast Arab majority: the right to self-determination of the people became a dead letter.? ? contrary to what Israel and the United States are trying to make the world believe through transnational media outlets, what happened and continues to happen in Palestine ?using Said?s words? is not a religious conflict, but a political conflict, with a colonial and imperialist stamp. It did not begin in the Middle East, but rather in Europe. ?What was and continues to be at the heart of the conflict?: debate and discussion has prioritized Israel?s security while ignoring Palestine?s. This is corroborated by recent events; a good example is the latest act of genocide set off by Israel during its Operation Molten Lead in Gaza. ?Palestine?s security cannot be reduced to the simple acknowledgement of a limited self-government and self-policing in its ?enclaves? along the west bank of the Jordan and in the Gaza Strip. This ignores the creation of the Palestinian State, in the borders set prior to 1967 with East Jerusalem as its capital; and the rights of its citizens and their self-determination as a people. This further disregards the compensation and subsequent return to the Homeland of 50 percent of the Palestinian people who are scattered all over the world, as established by resolution 194. ?It's unbelievable that a country (Israel) that owes its existence to a general assembly resolution could be so disdainful of the resolutions that emanate from the UN, said Father Miguel D?Escoto when pleading for the end of the massacre against the people of Gaza in late 2008 and early 2009. ?It is impossible to ignore the crisis in the United Nations. In 2005, before this very same General Assembly, we argued that the United Nations model had become exhausted. The fact that the debate on the Palestinian issue has been delayed and is being openly sabotaged reconfirms this. ?For several days, Washington has been stating that, at the Security Council, it will veto what will be a majority resolution of the General Assembly: the recognition of Palestine as a full member of the UN. In the Statement of Recognition of the Palestinian State, Venezuela, together with the sister Nations that make up the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), have denounced that such a just aspiration could be blocked by this means. As we know, the empire, in this and other instances, is trying to impose its double standard on the world stage: Yankee double standards are violating international law in Libya, while allowing Israel to do whatever it pleases, thus becoming the main accomplice of the Palestinian genocide being carried out by the hands of Zionist barbarity. Edward Said touched a nerve when he wrote that: Israeli interests in the United States have made the US? Middle East policy Israeli-centric.?? ?I would like to conclude with the voice of Mahmoud Darwish in his memorable poem On This Earth: We have on this earth what makes life worth living: On this earth, the lady of earth, Mother of all beginnings/ Mother of all ends. She was called Palestine./ Her name later became Palestine./ My Lady, because you are my Lady, I deserve life.?? ?It will continue to be called Palestine: Palestine will live and overcome! Long-live free, sovereign and independent Palestine! ?Hugo Ch?vez Fr?as ?President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela?. When the meeting convened the next morning his words were already in the hearts and minds of all the persons meeting there. The Bolivarian leader was never an enemy of the Jewish people. A man with special sensitivity, he deeply detested the brutal crime committed by the Nazis on children, women and men, young and old in the concentration camps where gypsies were also victims of atrocious crimes and extermination attempts, something nobody of course remembers and is never mentioned. Likewise, hundreds of thousands of Russians perished in those extermination camps, considered to be an inferior race by Nazi racial concepts. When Ch?vez returned to his country from Cuba on the night of Thursday September 22nd, he indignantly referred to the speech given by Barack Obama at the United Nations. Few times have I heard him speak with such disappointment about a leader whom he treated with determinate respect, as a victim of his own history of racial discrimination in the United States. He never thought him capable of acting as George Bush would have and he held on to a respectful memory of the words they exchanged at the Trinidad and Tobago meeting. ?Yesterday we were listening to a number of speeches, also the day before yesterday, over there at the UN, lovely speeches like the one made by President Dilma Rousseff; a highly ethical speech like the one made by President Evo Morales; a speech we might catalogue as a monument to cynicism, President Obama?s speech, is a monument to cynicism because his own face was betraying him, his own face was a poem; a man calling for peace, imagine that, Obama calling for peace, with what kind of morals? A historical monument to cynicism, that?s what President Obama?s speech was. ?Lovely speeches, guiding speeches, that?s what we were listening to: the speech by President Lugo, that of the Argentine president, setting courageous positions before the world.? When the New York meeting convened on the morning of Wednesday, September 21st, the President of the United States, --on the tail of the words spoken by the President of Brazil which opened up discussions and after the de rigueur introduction ? took to the podium and began his speech. ?Over nearly seven decades, ?he began ?, even as the United Nations helped avert a third world war, we still live in a world scarred by conflict and plagued by poverty. Even as we proclaim our love for peace and our hatred of war, there are still convulsions in our world that endanger us all.? We don?t know when, according to Obama, the UN prevented World War III. ?I took office at a time of two wars for the United States. Moreover, the violent extremists who drew us into war in the first place -- Osama bin Laden, and his al Qaeda organization -- remained at large. Today, we've set a new direction. At the end of this year, America?s military operation in Iraq will be over. We will have a normal relationship with a sovereign nation that is a member of the community of nations. That equal partnership will be strengthened by our support for Iraq -- for its government and for its security forces, for its people and for their aspirations.? What country is Obama really talking about? ?As we end the war in Iraq, the United States and our coalition partners have begun a transition in Afghanistan. Between now and 2014, an increasingly capable Afghan government and security forces will step forward to take responsibility for the future of their country. As they do, we are drawing down our own forces, while building an enduring partnership with the Afghan people. So let there be no doubt: The tide of war is receding ?When I took office, roughly 180,000 Americans were serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. By the end of this year, that number will be cut in half, and it will continue to decline. This is critical for the sovereignty of Iraq and Afghanistan. It?s also critical to the strength of the United States as we build our nation at home. Moreover, we are poised to end these wars from a position of strength. Ten years ago, there was an open wound and twisted steel, a broken heart in the center of this city. Today, as a new tower is rising at Ground Zero, it symbolizes New York?s renewal, even as al Qaeda is under more pressure than ever before. Its leadership has been degraded. And Osama bin Laden, a man who murdered thousands of people from dozens of countries, will never endanger the peace of the world again.? Who was Bin Laden?s ally, who really trained and armed him to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan? It wasn?t the socialists, or the revolutionaries in any part of the world. ?This has been a difficult decade. [ ] But today, we stand at a crossroads of history with the chance to move decisively in the direction of peace. To do so, we must return to the wisdom of those who created this institution. The United Nations? Founding Charter calls upon us, ?to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security.? Who has military bases everywhere throughout the world, who is the greatest exporter of weapons, who possesses hundreds of spy satellites, who invests billions of dollars every year on military expenses? ?This year has been a time of extraordinary transformation. More nations have stepped forward to maintain international peace and security. And more individuals are claiming their universal right to live in freedom and dignity.? Then he cites the cases of Southern Sudan and C?te d?Ivoire. He doesn?t say that in the former, the Yankee transnationals launched themselves on the oil reserves of that new country, whose president, at that very UN Assembly, said that it was a valuable resource, but would run out and he proposed its rational and best use. Neither did Obama state that peace in C?te d?Ivoire was reached with the backing of the colonialist soldiers of an eminent member of belligerent NATO which had just dropped thousands of bombs over Libya. A little later on he mentions Tunisia and he attributed the US with the merit of the popular movement that overthrew that country?s government, imperialism?s ally. Even more mind-boggling, Obama would like to ignore that the US was responsible for Egypt installing the tyrannical and corrupt Hosni Mubarak government, which betrayed Nasser?s principles and allied itself with imperialism, stealing tens of thousands of millions from his country and tyrannizing that courageous people. ?One year ago ? Obama states?, Egypt had known one President for nearly 30 years. But for 18 days, the eyes of the world were glued to Tahrir Square, where Egyptians from all walks of life -- men and women, young and old, Muslim and Christian -- demanded their universal rights. We saw in those protesters the moral force of non-violence that has lit the world from Delhi to Warsaw, from Selma to South Africa -- and we knew that change had come to Egypt and to the Arab world.? ?Day after day, in the face of bullets and bombs, the Libyan people refused to give back that freedom. And when they were threatened by the kind of mass atrocity that often went unchallenged in the last century, the United Nations lived up to its charter. The Security Council authorized all necessary measures to prevent a massacre. The Arab League called for this effort; Arab nations joined a NATO-led coalition that halted Qaddafi?s forces in their tracks? ?Yesterday, the leaders of a new Libya took their rightful place beside us, and this week, the United States is reopening our embassy in Tripoli. ?This is how the international community is supposed to work -- nations standing together for the sake of peace and security, and individuals claiming their rights.? ?Now, all of us have a responsibility to support the new Libya -- the new Libyan government as they confront the challenge of turning this moment of promise into a just and lasting peace for all Libyans.? ?The Qaddafi regime is over. Gbagbo, Ben Ali, Mubarak are no longer in power. Osama bin Laden is gone, and the idea that change could only come through violence has been buried with him.? Observe the poetic form with which Obama deals with the Bin Laden affair, whatever had been responsible for this former ally, executing him by shooting him in his face in front of his wife and children and throwing his body into the sea from an aircraft carrier, ignoring the religious customs and traditions of more than a billion religious persons and the basic legal principles established by all penal systems. Such methods do not lead, nor will they ever lead, to peace. ?Something is happening in our world, ?he carries on, regarding Libya ? The way things have been is not the way that they will be. Dictators are on notice. Technology is putting power into the hands of the people. The youth are delivering a powerful rebuke to dictatorship, and rejecting the lie that some races, some peoples, some religions, some ethnicities do not desire democracy. ?The promise written down on paper -- ?all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights? -- is closer at hand The measure of our success must be whether people can live in sustained freedom, dignity, and security. And the United Nations and its member states must do their part to support those basic aspirations. And we have more work to do.? Right away he starts in on another Muslim country where, as it is well-known, his intelligence services along with those of Israel, systematically murder the most distinguished military technology scientists. He follows up with a threat on Syria, where Yankee agressivity could lead to a massacre even more horrifying than that in Libya: ?today, men and women and children are being tortured, detained and murdered by the Syrian regime. Thousands have been killed, many during the holy time of Ramadan. Thousands more have poured across Syria?s borders. ?. The Syrian people have shown dignity and courage in their pursuit of justice -- protesting peacefully, standing silently in the streets, dying for the same values that this institution is supposed to stand for. And the question for us is clear: Will we stand with the Syrian people, or with their oppressors? Already, the United States has imposed strong sanctions on Syria?s leaders. We supported a transfer of power that is responsive to the Syrian people But for the sake of Syria -- and the peace and security of the world -- we must speak with one voice. There's no excuse for inaction. Now is the time for the United Nations Security Council to sanction the Syrian regime, and to stand with the Syrian people.? Could it be that some country has been left out of the bloody threats made by this illustrious defender of security and international peace? Who granted such prerogatives to the United States? ?Throughout the region, we will have to respond to the calls for change. In Yemen, men, women and children gather by the thousands in towns and city squares every day with the hope that their determination and spilled blood will prevail over a corrupt system. America supports those aspirations. We must work with Yemen?s neighbors and our partners around the world to seek a path that allows for a peaceful transition of power from President Saleh, and a movement to free and fair elections as soon as possible. ?In Bahrain, steps have been taken toward reform and accountability. We?re pleased with that, but more is required. America is a close friend of Bahrain, and we will continue to call on the government and the main opposition bloc -- the Wifaq -- to pursue a meaningful dialogue that brings peaceful change that is responsive to the people. We believe the patriotism that binds Bahrainis together must be more powerful than the sectarian forces that would tear them apart. It will be hard, but it is possible.? He doesn?t mention one single word about the fact that that?s where one of the largest military bases in the region is and that the Yankee transnationals control and dispose of at will the greatest oil and gas reserves of Saudi Arabia and the Arab Emirates. ?We believe that each nation must chart its own course to fulfill the aspirations of its people, and America does not expect to agree with every party or person who expresses themselves politically. But we will always stand up for the universal rights that were embraced by this Assembly. Those rights depend on elections that are free and fair; on governance that is transparent and accountable; respect for the rights of women and minorities; justice that is equal and fair. That is what our people deserve. Those are the elements of peace that can last.? ? the United States will continue to support those nations that transition to democracy -- with greater trade and investment -- so that freedom is followed by opportunity. We will pursue a deeper engagement with governments, but also with civil society -- students and entrepreneurs, political parties and the press. ?We have banned those who abuse human rights from traveling to our country. And we?ve sanctioned those who trample on human rights abroad. And we will always serve as a voice for those who've been silenced.? After this long-winded speech, the distinguished Nobel Prize laureate embarks on the thorny issue of his alliance with Israel that certainly doesn?t come up among the privileged possessors of one of the most modern system of nuclear weapons and means capable of reaching distant targets. He knows full well how arbitrary and unpopular that policy is. ?I know, particularly this week, that for many in this hall, there's one issue that stands as a test for these principles and a test for American foreign policy, and that is the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. One year ago, I stood at this podium and I called for an independent Palestine. I believed then, and I believe now, that the Palestinian people deserve a state of their own. But what I also said is that a genuine peace can only be realized between the Israelis and the Palestinians themselves. One year later, despite extensive efforts by America and others, the parties have not bridged their differences. Faced with this stalemate, I put forward a new basis for negotiations in May of this year. That basis is clear. It?s well known to all of us here. Israelis must know that any agreement provides assurances for their security. Palestinians deserve to know the territorial basis of their state. Now, I know that many are frustrated by the lack of progress. I assure you, so am I. But the question isn?t the goal that we seek -- the question is how do we reach that goal. Peace is hard work. Peace will not come through statements and resolutions at the United Nations -- if it were that easy, it would have been accomplished by now Ultimately, it is the Israelis and the Palestinians who must live side by side. Ultimately, it is the Israelis and the Palestinians -- not us ?- who must reach agreement on the issues that divide them: on borders and on security, on refugees and Jerusalem. Ultimately, peace depends upon compromise among people who must live together long after our speeches are over, long after our votes have been tallied. Next, he goes on to verbosely explain and justify the unexplainable and unjustifiable. ? There?s no question that the Palestinians have seen that vision delayed for too long. It is precisely because we believe so strongly in the aspirations of the Palestinian people that America has invested so much time and so much effort in the building of a Palestinian state, and the negotiations that can deliver a Palestinian state. But understand this as well: America?s commitment to Israel?s security is unshakeable. Our friendship with Israel is deep and enduring..? ?The Jewish people have forged a successful state in their historic homeland. Israel deserves recognition. It deserves normal relations with its neighbors. And friends of the Palestinians do them no favors by ignoring this truth. ? each side has legitimate aspirations -- and that?s part of what makes peace so hard. And the deadlock will only be broken when each side learns to stand in the other?s shoes; each side can see the world through the other?s eyes. That?s what we should be encouraging. That?s what we should be promoting.? Meanwhile, the Palestinians remain exiled from their own homeland, their homes are destroyed by monstrous mechanical machinery and an odious wall that is much higher than the Berlin Wall was, separating Palestinian from Palestinian. The best Obama might have acknowledged is that the very Israeli citizens are by now tired of the waste of resources invested in the military sphere that deprives them of peace and access to the elementary means for living. Just like the Palestinians, they are suffering from the consequences of these policies imposed by the United States and the most warlike and reactionary elements in the Zionist State. ?even as we confront these challenges of conflict and revolution, we must also recognize -- we must also remind ourselves [ ]. True peace depends on creating the opportunity that makes life worth living. And to do that, we must confront the common enemies of humanity: nuclear weapons and poverty, ignorance and disease.? Who can understand this gibberish spoken by the President of the United States before the General Assembly? He follows up with his unintelligible philosophy: ?To lift the specter of mass destruction, we must come together to pursue the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons. Over the last two years, we've begun to walk down that path. Since our Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, nearly 50 nations have taken steps to secure nuclear materials from terrorists and smugglers? Could there be any terrorism greater than the aggressive and bellicose policy of a country whose arsenal of nuclear weapons could destroy life on this planet several times over? ?America will continue to work for a ban on the testing of nuclear weapons and the production of fissile material needed to make them?, Obama goes on to promise us. ?And so we have begun to move in the right direction. And the United States is committed to meeting our obligations. But even as we meet our obligations, we?ve strengthened the treaties and institutions that help stop the spread of these weapons. [ ]. The Iranian government cannot demonstrate that its program is peaceful Back to the same old refrain! But this time Iran is not alone; it is accompanied by the Democratic Republic of Korea. ?North Korea has yet to take concrete steps towards abandoning its weapons and continues belligerent action against the South. There's a future of greater opportunity for the people of these nations if their governments meet their international obligations. But if they continue down a path that is outside international law, they must be met with greater pressure and isolation. That is what our commitment to peace and security demands.? To be continued tomorrow. Fidel Castro Ruz - September 25, 2011 From ths at psalience.org Wed Sep 28 13:25:04 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2011 13:25:04 +0200 Subject: [THS] Uri Avnery: Obama's Speech, Abu Mazen's Gamble Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110928132242.03ef7360@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29230.htm Obama's Speech, Abu Mazen's Gamble By Uri Avnery September 26, 2011 - - "gush-shalom.org" -- A wonderful speech. A beautiful speech. The language expressive and elegant. The arguments clear and convincing. The delivery flawless. A work of art. The art of hypocrisy. Almost every statement in the passage concerning the Israeli-Palestinian issue was a lie. A blatant lie: the speaker knew it was a lie, and so did the audience. It was Obama at his best, Obama at his worst. Being a moral person, he must have felt the urge to vomit. Being a pragmatic person, he knew that he had to do it, if he wanted to be re-elected. In essence, he sold the fundamental national interests of the United States of America for the chance of a second term. Not very nice, but that?s politics, OK? It may be superfluous ? almost insulting to the reader ? to point out the mendacious details of this rhetorical edifice. Obama treated the two sides as if they were equal in strength ? Israelis and Palestinians, Palestinians and Israelis. But of the two, it is the Israelis - only they ? who suffer and have suffered. Persecution. Exile. Holocaust. An Israeli child threatened by rockets. Surrounded by the hatred of Arab children. So sad. No Occupation. No settlements. No June 1967 borders. No Naqba. No Palestinian children killed or frightened. It?s the straight right-wing Israeli propaganda line, pure and simple ? the terminology, the historical narrative, the argumentation. The music. The Palestinians, of course, should have a state of their own. Sure, sure. But they must not be pushy. They must not embarrass the US. They must not come to the UN. They must sit with the Israelis, like reasonable people, and work it out with them. The reasonable sheep must sit down with the reasonable wolf and decide what to have for dinner. Foreigners should not interfere. Obama gave full service. A lady who provides this kind of service generally gets paid in advance. Obama got paid immediately afterwards, within the hour. Netanyahu sat down with him in front of the cameras and gave him enough quotable professions of love and gratitude to last for several election campaigns. The tragic hero of this affair is Mahmoud Abbas. A tragic hero, but a hero nonetheless. Many people may be surprised by this sudden emergence of Abbas as a daring player for high stakes, ready to confront the mighty US. If Ariel Sharon were to wake up for a moment from his years-long coma, he would faint with amazement. It was he who called Mahmoud Abbas ?a plucked chicken?. Yet for the last few days, Abbas was the center of global attention. World leaders conferred about how to handle him, senior diplomats were eager to convince him of this or that course of action, commentators were guessing what he would do next. His speech before the UN General Assembly was treated as an event of consequence. Not bad for a chicken, even for one with a full set of feathers. His emergence as a leader on the world stage is somewhat reminiscent of Anwar Sadat. When Gamal Abd-al-Nasser unexpectedly died at the age of 52 in 1970 and his official deputy, Sadat, assumed his mantle, all political experts shrugged. Sadat? Who the hell is that? He was considered a nonentity, an eternal No. 2, one of the least important members of the group of ?free officers? that was ruling Egypt. In Egypt, a land of jokes and jokers, witticisms about him abounded. One concerned the prominent brown mark on his forehead. The official version was that it was the result of much praying, hitting the ground with his forehead. But the real reason, it was told, was that at meetings, after everyone else had spoken, Sadat would get up and try to say something. Nasser would good-naturedly put his finger to his forehead, push him gently down and say: ?Sit, Anwar!? To the utter amazement of the experts ? and especially the Israeli ones ? this ?nonentity? took a huge gamble by starting the 1973 October War, and proceeded to do something unprecedented in history: going to the capital of an enemy country still officially in a state of war and making peace. Abbas? status under Yasser Arafat was not unlike Sadat?s under Nasser. However, Arafat never appointed a deputy. Abbas was one of a group of four or five likely successors. The heir would surely have been Abu Jihad, had he not been killed by Israeli commandoes in front of his wife and children. Another likely candidate, Abu Iyad, was killed by Palestinian terrorists. Abu Mazen (Abbas) was in a way the choice by default. Such politicians, emerging suddenly from under the shadow of a great leader, generally fall into one of two categories: the eternal frustrated No. 2 or the surprising new leader. The Bible gives us examples of both kinds. The first was Rehoboam, the son and heir of the great King Solomon, who told his people: ?my father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions?. The other kind was represented by Joshua, the heir of Moses. He was no second Moses, but according to the story a great conqueror in his own right. Modern history tells the sad story of Anthony Eden, the long-suffering No. 2 of Winston Churchill, who commanded little respect. (Mussolini called him, after their first meeting, ?a well-tailored idiot.?). Upon assuming power, he tried desperately to equal Churchill and soon embroiled Britain in the 1956 Suez disaster. To the second category belonged Harry Truman, the nobody who succeeded the great Franklin Delano Roosevelt and surprised everybody as a resolute leader. Abbas looked like belonging to the first kind. Now, suddenly, he is revealed as belonging to the second. The world is treating him with newfound respect. Nearing the end of his career, he made the big gamble. But was it wise? Courageous, yes. Daring, yes. But wise? My answer is: Yes, it was. Abbas has placed the quest for Palestinian freedom squarely on the international table. For more than a week, Palestine has been the center of international attention. Scores of international statesmen and -women, including the leader of the world?s only superpower, have been busy with Palestine. For a national movement, that is of the utmost importance. Cynics may ask: ?So what did they gain from it?? But cynics are fools. A liberation movement gains from the very fact that the world pays attention, that the media grapple with the problem, that people of conscience all over the world are aroused. It strengthens morale at home and brings the struggle a step nearer its goal. Oppression shuns the limelight. Occupation, settlements, ethnic cleansing thrive in the shadows. It is the oppressed who need the light of day. Abbas? move provided it, at least for the time being. Barack Obama?s miserable performance was a nail in the coffin of America?s status as a superpower. In a way, it was a crime against the United States. The Arab Spring may have been a last chance for the US to recover its standing in the Middle East. After some hesitation, Obama realized that. He called on Mubarak to go, helped the Libyans against their tyrant, made some noises about Bashar al-Assad. He knows that he has to regain the respect of the Arab masses if he wants to recover some stature in the region, and by extension throughout the world. Now he has blown it, perhaps forever. No self-respecting Arab will forgive him for plunging his knife into the back of the helpless Palestinians. All the credit the US has tried to gain in the last months in the Arab and the wider Muslim world has been blown away with one puff. All for reelection. It was also a crime against Israel. Israel needs peace. Israel needs to live side by side with the Palestinian people, within the Arab world. Israel cannot rely forever on the unconditional support of the declining United States. Obama knows this full well. He knows what is good for Israel, even if Netanyahu doesn?t. Yet he has handed the keys of the car to the drunken driver. The State of Palestine will come into being. This week it was already clear that this is unavoidable. Obama will be forgotten, as will Netanyahu, Lieberman and the whole bunch. Mahmoud Abbas ? Abu Mazen, as the Palestinians call him ? will be remembered. The ?plucked chicken? is soaring into the sky. - Uri Avnery is an Israeli peace activist and a former Knesset member. He is the founder of Gush Shalom. From ths at psalience.org Wed Sep 28 13:36:25 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2011 13:36:25 +0200 Subject: [THS] President Obama's UN Speech and its Critics Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110928133614.04bb7450@mail.messagingengine.com> Never Say Never President Obama's UN Speech and its Critics By Lawrence Davidson The president tells us that the Washington won't dictate national self-determination, but it damn well can dictate the route the Palestinians must take to get it. Even if that route has proven worthless and will, most likely, lead them to their ultimate destruction. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29232.htm === Obama Is A Political Prostitute The Disappearance of President Obama & Netanyahu's Security Scam By Alan Hart Barack Obama is still occupying the Oval Office but on policy for Israel-Palestine he is no longer the president. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29229.htm From ths at psalience.org Wed Sep 28 13:53:01 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2011 13:53:01 +0200 Subject: [THS] Wall Street protests reveal slice of America's barely tamed brutality Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110928135023.03f4ddd8@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29238.htm Wall Street protests reveal slice of America's barely tamed brutality Pepper spray, Swat teams and judicial torture. This barbarity is ever present ? but rarely so visible ? in American life By Ed Pilkington September 27, 2011 "The Guardian" - - One of the hardships of life as a reporter in New York City is that you so rarely get credited with the kind of heroism shown by colleagues in Helmand, say, or Baghdad. The assumption is that you're spending time drinking gin martinis on the roof of Soho House (I prefer vodka) or dining at the Grand Central oyster bar (try the Rhode Island Cuttyhunks, they're sumptuous), rather than dodging bullets in Tripoli. I'd like to think that over the past few days perception of my job as a soft landing has started to change, and that its true nature as a tough, dangerous and ? yes ? heroic posting has begun to emerge. Take the events over the weekend in Wall Street. Admittedly, I wasn't there, but that's not the point. I could have been. The protests were a lament for a nation in which, despite the 2008 meltdown, the financial system remains largely unregulated, where 46 million Americans live below the official poverty line, and where inequality is greater now than at any time since 1929. That's hardly the stuff of revolutions: you can read Paul Krugman make a similar point every week in the New York Times. And in the land of the first amendment you'd think it was OK to shout it out in the street, even if that street is Wall Street. Not according to the two white-shirted senior NYPD officers captured on video. The film shows a small group of women protesters, who are doing nothing menacing at all, having been kettled by police. As they stand there fenced in and defenceless, the two white shirts walk up to them, hold out a pepper-spray canister and zap them straight in the face. It's the officers' insouciance that is most shocking. They engage the pepper spray as calmly as if they were handing out parking tickets, then turn and just as calmly walk away. The video reminded me of another recent event at which I was present: last week's execution in Georgia of Troy Davis. The case drew international attention because there was no forensic evidence and seven out of nine key witnesses had recanted their testimony. But it was the incidental details outside the prison that caught my eye. An impassioned but entirely peaceful crowd of protesters had gathered to make the pretty reasonable argument that states should not go around killing innocent people. Georgia's response was to line up a Swat team in black riot gear like extras in a Batman movie and fly police helicopters with spotlights overhead. Add to that the balmy night and the loud buzzing of the crickets and it was like stepping back in time into a pastiche of the old Deep South. It would be tempting to blame the extraordinary cruelty of that night on residual southern racism. But the most gruesome element of the proceedings had nothing to do with Georgia. Rather it came from the highest court in the land, the bastion of American justice, the US supreme court in Washington. It was the supreme court that kept Davis waiting for four full hours, not knowing whether he was about to live or die, and then announced the execution could go ahead. Calmly, insouciantly, just like those New York cops. The combination of pepper spray, Swat teams and judicial torture ? for that is what it was ? underlined for me a strain of American life that is forever present but rarely makes itself so boldly visible as it has this week. You find it nostalgically glamorised in westerns and Coen brothers films ? rough justice, primordial morality, the cold hard logic of the gun. It's a barely tamed brutality that sits oddly with America's claim to be the standard-bearer of civilisation in the world. And it has been on ample display too at the pinnacle of American politics over the past few days, in the Republican presidential nomination debates. It's easy to mock these guys: the pizza man, the Mormons (two of them), the libertarian, the Tea Party darling, the executioner-in-chief But that would be to belittle what is happening here. This is, after all, the party of Abraham Lincoln, of Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower. Now look at it. You know that something is rotten in the United States when you find yourself feeling sorry for Rick Perry. The governor of Texas, poor thing, is having a hard time at the hands of his rivals because he supports the idea of children being educated. Yes, you heard that right. Children being educated. They may be children of illegal immigrants, but so? We're talking kids here. That's enough sympathy for Perry. The executioner-in-chief was introduced at a recent TV debate as having presided over 234 executions. The Republican audience cheered. When asked how he felt about such blood-lust, he said: "I think Americans understand justice." In another debate, Ron Paul (the libertarian) was asked whether a man with a life-threatening illness but no health insurance should be allowed to die. "Yeah!" shouted the audience. Life is sacred, it seems, but only for the unborn. Such harshness ? barbarity, you might even say ? is not an aberration or a joke to be shrugged off over a Budweiser in front of our TV screens. It is an integral part of the American public mind, as evident in Manhattan and Washington as it is in the Deep South. And the Republican party is embracing it with a vigour that should focus all our minds in the presidential election ahead. From ths at psalience.org Wed Sep 28 13:56:11 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2011 13:56:11 +0200 Subject: [THS] Libya: Far from Over Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110928135553.03f19150@mail.messagingengine.com> Battle for Sirte continues as civilians flee town under siege: Snipers defending Muammar Gaddafi's hometown of Sirte held off an advance on Tuesday by interim government forces, as the last bastion of support for Gaddafi fought to keep the new government out. http://tgr.ph/r8Qdmt === Libya's City of Bani Walid Crushes Rebel Advance: Bani Walid residents reject NATO-proxy rule, defeats rebels at their gates. http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2011/09/libyas-city-of-bani-walid-crushes-rebel.html === UN: Libya's Bani Walid, Sirte still unaccessible: Humanitarian assistance led by the United Nations still could not get access to the Libyan city of Bani Walid and Sirte, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Libya Panos Moumtzis said here Monday. http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/world/2011-09/27/c_131161374.htm === Tuareg tribes clash with new Libyan forces: sources: Tuareg tribesmen fought skirmishes at the weekend with armed groups affiliated to Libya's interim government, two sources with local contacts told Reuters, a clash that highlighted the challenges Libya's new rulers face in winning over fractious tribes. http://bit.ly/ohEWs9 === 20,000 Missiles Reported Missing From Libya: Al-Qaida is active in the region, and security officials fear that the missiles will be used to target U.S. commercial planes. Due to the safety risk, some in Congress are now calling for all American passenger jets flying overseas to have the same protection as military planes. http://bit.ly/ogvdPr === Former Rebels' Rivalries Hold Up Governing in Libya: When the fighters who ousted Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi find caches of weapons from his arsenals, they do not entrust them to Libya's new provisional government. Instead, they haul them back to their hometowns, like Misurata, Zintan, Yafran or Rujban. And when they capture members of the Qaddafi government, the fighters say, they cart them home as well. http://nyti.ms/nUgRlU === Spoils of war: Exclusive: Libya assures UK firms on key role in rebuild: Britain's help in overthrowing Muammar Gaddafi will never be forgotten and British companies can expect to play an instrumental role in rebuilding Libya, a senior diplomat told executives on Tuesday. http://www.courant.com/news/nation-world/sns-rt-us-libya-britaintre78q30p-20110927,0,4203401.story === Libyan justice minister: Lockerbie case 'closed': Scotland has asked Libya's new authorities to help track down those responsible for the 1988 Lockerbie airplane bombing, but the country's transitional justice minister told reporters Monday "the case is closed." http://old.news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110926/ap_on_re_eu/eu_britain_lockerbie === From ths at psalience.org Wed Sep 28 13:58:29 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2011 13:58:29 +0200 Subject: [THS] Knesset to vote on annexing West Bank Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110928135811.03f193e0@mail.messagingengine.com> Knesset to vote on annexing West Bank: - The Knesset will vote on a bill calling for full Israeli annexation of the West Bank. Deputy Speaker Danny Danon announced Tuesday that the Knesset will take up the bill, which he authored, at the end of October. http://www.jta.org/news/article/2011/09/27/3089616/knesset-to-vote-on-annexing-west-bank === Israel must annex West Bank settlements, right-wing MKs tell Netanyahu: In letter to premier, leaders of several Knesset factions say Israel must retaliate against the Palestinians' 'unilateral' statehood bid at the UN, or risk losing its deterrence http://bit.ly/ndjC81 === From ths at psalience.org Wed Sep 28 14:01:38 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2011 14:01:38 +0200 Subject: [THS] Economy: Stories Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110928140117.03f19670@mail.messagingengine.com> Roubini: U.S. in Throes of Economic Contraction: "The way I see the global economy, I think we're entering into a recession again in most advanced economies," Roubini said http://bloom.bg/puM5LD === The Human Cost of a Global Crisis: Grim warning from global agencies as ILO fears 40m jobs could be lost by 2012. Undernourished total at 1bn, says Red Cross http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/27/warning-human-cost-global-crisis === Strikes and protests mount against austerity in Greece: "Today, it is no longer safe for us to go onto the streets," a politician of the Greek ruling party PASOK told the Frankfurter Rundschau. "We are the government and we are alone." http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/sep2011/gree-s27.shtml === Wall Street Donated $41 Million to Supercommittee Members: Members of the Joint Committee on Deficit Reduction have received $41 million from the financial sector during their time in Congress, according to a new report. At least 27 current or former aides for the "supercommittee" members have lobbied on behalf of financial firms. http://showdowninamerica.org/supercommittee-wallst === Michael Moore At Occupy Wall Street 9-26 - Video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRPbe3fVDcE === Occupy Wall Street spreads across America: Both Los Angeles, California and Chicago, Illinois have both hosted demonstrators in the days since the first protest kicked off in New York, and now dozens of more locales across America are expected to be swarmed upon by citizens sick and tired of corrupt corporations. https://rt.com/usa/news/occupy-wall-street-spreads-505/ === Thousands Line Up In Philadelphia For Food Stamps: - Thousands of people in Philadelphia are waiting in long lines for aid due to losses caused by Hurricane Irene; however, there is a lot of confusion over who exactly qualifies http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2011/09/27/thousands-line-up-in-philadelphia-for-food-stamps/ === Wells Fargo accused of forging loan documents: A Las Vegas attorney who represents people facing foreclosure has accused Wells Fargo of forging loan documents. The allegation is the latest sign that efforts to hold mortgage lenders accountable are escalating in Nevada. http://www.lvrj.com/business/wells-fargo-accused-of-forging-loan-documents-130337818.html?ref=818 === Shock Doctrine at U.S. Postal Service: Is a Manufactured Crisis Behind Push Toward Privatization?: Postal workers say the much touted crisis facing the U.S. Postal Service isn't what it seems. Rather, they point to a 2006 law that forced the USPS to find enough money to fund 75 years of retiree health benefits over just a 10-year span. http://www.democracynow.org/2011/9/27/shock_doctrine_at_us_postal_service From ths at psalience.org Wed Sep 28 14:06:50 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2011 14:06:50 +0200 Subject: [THS] Report Predicts Rising Oil Prices, Recession and The Demise of Banks Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110928140233.03f1d3d0@mail.messagingengine.com> http://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/German-Armys-Peak-Oil-Report-Predicts-Rising-Oil-Prices-Another-Recession-and-The-Demise-of-Banks.html German Army?s Peak Oil Report Predicts Rising Oil Prices, Another Recession and The Demise of Banks Written by Post Carbon Tuesday, 27 September 2011 06:52 In the last five or six years at least 20 major studies have been published by governmental and non-governmental organizations that either deal with or touch upon the possibility of severe energy shortages developing in the near future. Studies done by governmental entities, however, are rare for nearly all of the world's governments still prefer to wait as long as possible before confronting the myriad of problems that will accompany declining oil production. Exceptions to this phenomenon of denial, however, seem to be military organizations that have realistic planning baked into their DNA. All professional military services know that in the last century they have become so dependent on liquid fuels that their effectiveness would be severely degraded should shortages or extremely high oil prices develop. Last year two military planning organizations went public with studies predicting that serious consequences from oil depletion will befall us shortly. In the U.S. the Joint Forces Command concluded, without saying how they arrived at their dates, that by 2012 surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear and that by 2015 the global shortfall in oil production could be as much as 10 million b/d. Later in the year a draft of a German army study, which went into greater detail in analyzing the consequences of peaking world oil production, was leaked to the press. The German study which was released recently is unique for the frankness with which it explores the dire consequences which may be in store for us. The Bundeswehr Transformation Center, the organization that prepared the study, starts with the assertion that as there are so many forces in play, it is impossible to determine an exact date for peak oil, but that it will become obvious in hindsight. The Germans also believe that it is already too late to complete a comprehensive global transition to a post fossil fuel economy. They introduce the notion of a peak oil induced economic "tipping point" that would trigger so much economic damage that it is impossible to evaluate the possible outcomes. For the near future the study foresees that a very large increase in oil prices would harm the energy-intensive agricultural systems that produce much of our food. Not only could the costs of fertilizers and pesticides become prohibitive, but the massive amount of oil-dependent transportation needed to move agricultural products long distances could make food unaffordable for many. The study goes on to postulate a "mobility crisis" that would arise from substantial increases in the costs of operating private cars and trucks. Although sudden shortages could be relieved by volunteer and regulatory measures, ultimately the mobility crisis would feed into and add to the worsening economic situation. As oil is used either directly or indirectly in almost 90 percent of industrial production, major increases in the price of oil would change most price relationships. Domestic and foreign trade will have to adapt to these new relationships but doing so will likely lead to economic upheavals. As businesses transform to less oil-dependent forms of services and production, there would likely be an extended period of "transformation unemployment" that will become a major economic problem. A case could be made that our current "jobs" crisis is simply the leading edge of the "transformation unemployment" that could go on for decades. The German study maintains that all countries on earth will sooner or later be faced with the problem of transitioning to a post-fossil fuel age. As such a transition has never happened before, there are no guidelines for how it is to be accomplished. Of great significance is the willingness of nations to implement the economic policies necessary to effect the transformation to the post fossil fuel age. Forms of government will be sorely tested. The Germans who have much experience in these matters note that only continuous improvement in individual living conditions forms the basis for tolerant and open societies. Given the widespread unemployment and high mobility costs that are almost certain to accompany the transition to a post fossil fuel world, democratic forms of government are likely to face severe challenges. We all remember the Weimar Republic. Also of note are recent studies within the OECD that show that voting for extremist and nationalist political parties tends to increase with economic setbacks. For the immediate future, however, the German Army study foresees: 1. increasing oil prices that will reduce consumption and economic output (i.e. a recession or worse); 2. increasing transportation costs that will lead to lower trade volumes - less income for many and unaffordable food for some; and 3. pressure on government budgets as they must keep populations fed, deal with the social consequences of mass unemployment, and attempt to invest in sustainable sources of energy. Governmental revenues are bound to fall as unemployment increases along with resistance to further taxation. In the medium term, most companies would come to realize that the global economy is going to be shrinking for a long time and act accordingly. In an indefinitely shrinking economy, savings would not be invested as profits could no longer be made or borrowing costs paid. In this environment, the banking system, stock exchanges and financial markets would have a hard time surviving. Banks would be left with no reason to exist as they would not be able to pay interest on deposits or find credit-worthy companies or individuals. The final step would be the loss of confidence in currencies and with them the ability to carry on normal economic transactions outside of barter. If all this sounds extreme to American ears, remember the Germans have been through far more than we have in the last century. What is interesting is the way they are telling it like they see it - no pulling of punches here. By. Tom Whipple Source: Post Carbon From ths at psalience.org Thu Sep 29 00:38:49 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2011 00:38:49 +0200 Subject: [THS] !!!!!!!! William Bowles: In the Belly of the Beast Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110929003045.041bee38@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29250.htm In the Belly of the Beast By William Bowles September 28, 2011 "Information Clearing House" -- In case you hadn?t noticed, especially if you get your news from the MSM, there is the mother of all capitalist crises unfolding around us. A crisis that appears to be far deeper even than the Crash of ?29 and given the global nature of corporate capitalism, nobody (except the rich) can escape its awful destructive power, short of revolution of course. So deep in fact, that the imperial elites are incapable of resolving it and appear to be frozen to the spot like a deer caught in the headlights, attempting to apply ?solutions? that only compound the contradictions. It points once and again to the chaotic nature of capitalism that hides its ignorance behind glib phrases that mean nothing. The Independent?s headline (24/9/11) summed up the elite?s dilemma succinctly, if somewhat archaically but then that?s what you would expect from an obsolete elite used to bamboozling the public by obscuring the facts and praying that no one will notice: ?The World prays for an economic miracle? Thus the neoliberal route, pursued since the end of the 1970s?in actuality an attempt to roll back the clock to pre-Soviet times when imperialism ruled without any effective opposition, either from its colonised and its labour or from a socialist alternative?forces us to look anew at the problem of achieving revolution in a world that has more in common with Marx?s time than it does with the Soviet-shaped world most of us grew up in. It was clearly wrong to assume that the ?most advanced workers? in the industrial countries would lead a revolution, for obviously that hasn?t happened, even after one hundred years of trying. Instead, the opposite occurred. Organized labour found itself onboard the ?good ship capitalism?, coopted and reformed as part of an elite working class that has directly benefitted from the spoils of Empire (allbeit crumbs off the table). And right on cue, the leader of the Labour Party at its annual conference, Ed Milliband 27/9/11) pleaded that we need to ?make capitalism work?, though it works just fine- for the rich. It?s everyone else who has been screwed. And in a sense, the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 only delayed the events that now seem to be coming to a head but ironically, we are now short of a real left with which to challenge the stranglehold of corporate capital, where it counts, in the belly of the beast. We really do reap that which we have sown. As per usual, it?s the have nots of the world who stand up against the Empire, as they have done for the past five hundred years. Whilst those of us in the imperial centre can?t even get it together in order to protect our own hard-won rights, let alone those of the oppressed and occupied nations and judging by events around Libya, we can?t get that right either. It?s not only capitalism that?s in crisis. So in spite of all our knowledge, traditions and skills there exists no viable socialist alternative on offer. The traditional left, of whatever flavour, has nothing but the same old slogans that date back to the pre-1980s; to a time when there was still an organized industrial working class and a corresponding left firmly entrenched in the struggle against old-style industrial capitalism via the ballot box. And very comfortable it was, while it lasted. Thus all the while as capitalism inexorably revolutionizes itself in a wave of revolutions in production (over which it exerts virtually no control, merely endlessly exploiting each advance) that led, just as Marx predicted, to a fully globalized capitalism. Meanwhile the Western left is still banging on about a working class revolution but without what it would recognize let alone acknowledge, as a working class to (allegedly) take the lead. And it?s been this way for decades, prattling on about a working class life that has all but been eradicated, just as our rural, agricultural and artisan forebears saw their livelihoods plowed under and replaced by factories and the back-to-back houses of the industrial slums. The latest revolution in capitalist production?information technology?led inevitably to the deindustrialization of the most advanced industrial capitalist nations, driven as they are by the ?bottom line?; profit and thus exported production to where it was cheapest. And in the process, finance and consumption took over the role of generating profit out of a working population largely no longer employed in real production. Instead, consumption financed by debt became the mainstay of the economy, the interest charged siphoned off and used to speculate once the now deregulated banks got their hands on all our deposits. And when the speculation crashed spectacularly in 2008, instead of writing off the all phony money debts and restarting the banking system from scratch, the political class used our collective wealth to pay back the bankers, that?s their function, to protect their class interests and the reason why our democracy is corrupt and totally unrepresentative of the population. It?s also a different kind of over-production from that of earlier crises of capital characterized by an over production of goods followed by the inevitable layoffs, fall in consumption, recession, depression, yada-yada most times followed by General War, the capitalist version of starting over. Instead, it?s the ?over production? of vast quantities of ficticious capital, in the form of commodity money that has caused the crisis this time, inexorably leading to layoffs and downturns in the real economy as the ?debts? created by the banks and speculators are paid by us in the form of higher costs, lower wages and reduced social services. In more extreme situations, wholesale privatization of state assets is needed to pay off the usurers. In fact in Greece the crisis was engineered by the very same banks who sold Greece the dud paper (CDOs, et al) in the first place and then speculated on their future value as being worthless! What a scam! An entire country has its collective wealth wiped out overnight in an attack even more deadly than a NATO ?humanitarian? bombing mission. Financialized capitalism is a gigantic Ponzi scheme, and like all Ponzi schemes, sooner or later the IOUs are called in. The question for us is who pays? If not us then clearly it has to be them that ripped off the the planet in an orgy that began once there was no organized resistance to its predations. The rise of neoliberalism is directly connected the deindustrializing of the imperial centre, chiefly the US and the UK, the most financialized of the capitalist economies. Economies that dominate us all through their ownership and control of the circuits of global capital, vital raw materials and the military might to enforce their economic rule. With no effective challenge to the rule of the Empire the situation looks dire for the entire planet; another first for capitalism. The demise of the Soviet Union was the final and long overdue nail in the coffin of the Western Left, revealing that all along, regardless of its slogans, the Western left remained firmly embedded in a reformist approach to getting rid of capitalism. The capital/labour ?alliance? in the UK lasted only thirty-five years (1945-1980) during which time the left slowly but surely disintegrated, no longer fit for purpose as they say. Surely a unique period in British history: from rags to riches and back to rags again in just over three decades. But now that capitalist ?democracy? is revealed as a total sham, controlled by a political class, united only in self-interest, regardless of the ?party? in power, surely it?s time to rethink how we can bring about an end to this chaotic madness. A madness where we close hospitals in the UK and use the money allegedly saved, to bomb hospitals in Libya. Same end, different means. This is the end product: a democracy in name only. A democracy that kills and destroys with barely a murmur from us ?civilized? folks. The objective surely for us on the left is to connect the destruction wrought by the Empire to the destruction now being unleashed on us at home, for they are part and parcel off the same process. This is capitalism in the raw. William Bowles, Editor/Publisher - http://williambowles.info From ths at psalience.org Fri Sep 30 14:22:46 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Fri, 30 Sep 2011 14:22:46 +0200 Subject: [THS] Timothy Leary Makes a Surprise Visit to Liberty Plaza Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110930142232.05690538@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.timothylearyarchives.org/timothy-leary-makes-a-surprise-visit-to-liberty-plaza/ Timothy Leary Makes a Surprise Visit to Liberty Plaza From ths at psalience.org Fri Sep 30 16:27:48 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Fri, 30 Sep 2011 16:27:48 +0200 Subject: [THS] Libya: Mass killing and humanitarian disaster in NATO siege of Sirte Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20110930162734.059d86b0@mail.messagingengine.com> Libya: Mass killing and humanitarian disaster in NATO siege of Sirte: Refugees from the Libyan coastal city of Sirte report that thousands have died as a result of relentless NATO bombardment and shelling by the the Western-backed "rebels." http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/sep2011/liby-s29.shtml === NATO supported rebels retreat from Sirte: Equally fierce resistance from loyalists in the desert town of Bani Walid, Muammar Gaddafi's other remaining bastion of support, has stalled a final assault by National Transitional Council (NTC) fighters, said commanders, who called on NATO to increase its air support http://goo.gl/9RIzC From ths at psalience.org Sat Oct 1 16:12:52 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Sat, 01 Oct 2011 16:12:52 +0200 Subject: [THS] Glenn Greenwald: The due-process-free assassination of U.S. citizens is now reality Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111001161146.066855b0@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-due-process-free-assas-by-Glenn-Greenwald-110930-478.html The due-process-free assassination of U.S. citizens is now reality By Glenn Greenwald (about the author) opednews.com (updated below) It was first reported in January of last year that the Obama administration had compiled a hit list of American citizens whom the President had ordered assassinated without any due process, and one of those Americans was Anwar al-Awlaki. No effort was made to indict him for any crimes (despite a report last October that the Obama administration was "considering" indicting him). Despite substantial doubt among Yemen experts about whether he even has any operational role in Al Qaeda, no evidence (as opposed to unverified government accusations) was presented of his guilt. When Awlaki's father sought a court order barring Obama from killing his son, the DOJ argued, among other things, that such decisions were "state secrets" and thus beyond the scrutiny of the courts. He was simply ordered killed by the President: his judge, jury and executioner. When Awlaki's inclusion on President Obama's hit list was confirmed, The New York Times noted that "it is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for an American to be approved for targeted killing." After several unsuccessful efforts to assassinate its own citizen, the U.S. succeeded today (and it was the U.S.). It almost certainly was able to find and kill Awlaki with the help of its long-time close friend President Saleh, who took a little time off from murdering his own citizens to help the U.S. murder its. The U.S. thus transformed someone who was, at best, a marginal figure into a martyr, and again showed its true face to the world. The government and media search for The Next bin Laden has undoubtedly already commenced. What's most striking about this is not that the U.S. Government has seized and exercised exactly the power the Fifth Amendment was designed to bar ("No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law"), and did so in a way that almost certainly violates core First Amendment protections (questions that will now never be decided in a court of law). What's most amazing is that its citizens will not merely refrain from objecting, but will stand and cheer the U.S. Government's new power to assassinate their fellow citizens, far from any battlefield, literally without a shred of due process from the U.S. Government. Many will celebrate the strong, decisive, Tough President's ability to eradicate the life of Anwar al-Awlaki -- including many who just so righteously condemned those Republican audience members as so terribly barbaric and crass for cheering Governor Perry's execution of scores of serial murderers and rapists -- criminals who were at least given a trial and appeals and the other trappings of due process before being killed. From ths at psalience.org Sat Oct 1 16:14:33 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Sat, 01 Oct 2011 16:14:33 +0200 Subject: [THS] Haarrd Times Indeed: 45 million Americans are now living on food stamps Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111001161342.04888978@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.alternet.org/rss/breakingnews/673877/food_stamp_%27challenge%27_lays_bare_hard_times_in_us/?akid=7647.30928.lThdVf&rd=1&t=15 Food stamp 'challenge' lays bare hard times in US By 1554 Posted on September 30, 2011, Printed on September 30, 2011 A record 45 million Americans are now living on food stamps, a weekly stipend from the US government that helps them make ends meet in hard times. A sign in a market window advertises the acceptance of food stamps in 2010 in New York City. A record 45 million Americans are now living on food stamps, a weekly stipend from the US government that helps them make ends meet in hard times. For everyone else, there's the Food Stamp Challenge, thrown down by anti-hunger activists in the industrial port city of Baltimore to lay bare the reality of living on the poverty line. Participants each get $30 -- the average food stamp benefit in the East Coast state -- to buy groceries for a week, after which they are invited to blog about their experience. "The purpose is to raise awareness on the issue of hunger, the importance of this (food stamp) program and how critical it is that we continue to fund it, because so many people rely on it now in Maryland," said Cathy Demeroto, director of Maryland Hunger Solutions, which organises the challenge. Participating earlier this month, Demeroto set off for the supermarket with chili con carne -- a relatively cheap dish to prepare -- on her mind, "because I don't believe I'm going to have money to buy chicken." "With a budget of $30 you really have to plan," she told AFP. "You cannot just go and pick things up." Nearly one in six Americans draw food stamps from a scheme run by the Department of Agriculture that is officially called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Progam, or SNAP. Its history goes back to the early 1940s and the introduction of the Food Stamp Program, which used real stamps which have since been replaced by an electronic bank card. With the onset of recession, the ranks of beneficiaries have exploded from 28 million in 2008, and has leaped again by 10 percent since last year. The cost of the program has doubled since 2007 from $33 billion to $68 billion. The figures reflect those of the Census Bureau, another federal government agency, which found that 46.2 million Americans lived in poverty last year, or 15.1 percent of the population -- the highest level in 52 years. Eligibility for food stamps depends on a household's income and savings, and the benefits can be used only at designated supermarkets like Santoni's in Baltimore, where Tiffany White was shopping the other day. White, 21, is a part-time cashier whose 30-hour-a-week job earns her $900 a month, from which she spends about $150 to $160 on food. Without food stamps, she said, "it would be really hard to eat." Depending on food stamps is especially tough for families. Kelly Hicks, 31, who lives alone with two children in Arlington, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington, has been out of a job since June. She collects $288 a month in food stamps. "I try to stretch my meals," she said. "If I do run out, I go to churches (which offer food banks). I don't know what I would do without food stamps. It would be so hard." Blogging about her experience three days into the challenge, Demeroto wrote: "Not having the necessary funds for food not only negatively impacts on your mood and health, but also on your social life, and can lead to isolation." She added: "It's important also to just have a better understanding of what our neighbours are experiencing. Doing it for a week is not even comparable to having to do it, like many people do, for weeks, for months, even for years." ? 2011 Agence France Presse All rights reserved. View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/rss// From ths at psalience.org Sun Oct 2 18:58:14 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Sun, 02 Oct 2011 18:58:14 +0200 Subject: [THS] =?iso-8859-1?q?United_Steelworkers_announce_support_for_=91?= =?iso-8859-1?q?Occupy_Wall_Street=92_protest?= Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111002185751.043e3370@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/10/01/united-steelworkers-announce-support-for-occupy-wall-street-protest/ United Steelworkers announce support for ?Occupy Wall Street? protest By Eric W. Dolan Saturday, October 1, 2011 occupywallstreet-screen The United Steelworkers, North America?s largest industrial union, announced on Friday that it supported the ongoing ?Occupy Wall Street? protest that began in lower Manhattan and has slowly spread to other cities across the United States. The protesters have pledged to occupy Wall Street until something is done about corporate greed and corporate influence on the U.S. government. They have been camped out in New York?s old Liberty Plaza since September 17. ?The United Steelworkers union stands in solidarity with and strongly supports Occupy Wall Street,? Leo W. Gerard, International President of the United Steelworkers, said in a statement. ?The brave men and women, many of them young people without jobs, who have been demonstrating around-the-clock for nearly two weeks in New York City are speaking out for the many in our world. We are fed up with the corporate greed, corruption and arrogance that have inflicted pain on far too many for far too long.? United Steelworkers has 850,000 members in the U.S., Canada, and the Caribbean. The announcement comes after a number of labor unions and liberal groups said hey wouldthrow their weight behind the ?Occupy Wall Street? demonstrations. The United Federation of Teachers, 32BJ SEIU, 1199 SEIU, Workers United and Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 have said they will participate in the protest. The Working Families Party, MoveOn.org, Make the Road New York, the Coalition for the Homeless, the Alliance for Quality Education, Community Voices Heard, United New York and Strong Economy For All also plan to support the demonstration. TWU Local 100 president John Samuelson appeared on Current TV?s Countdown and explained that his union was making common cause with the ?Occupy Wall Street? protesters because they are, ?singing the same song and fighting the same battle that our union has fought for the last eighteen months.? Many have criticized the movement for not having any clear purpose or goals, but Salon.com?s Glenn Greenwald responded that most of those critiques were ludicrous. ?Does anyone really not know what the basic message is of this protest: that Wall Street is oozing corruption and criminality and its unrestrained political power ? in the form of crony capitalism and ownership of political institutions ? is destroying financial security for everyone else?? he wrote on Wednesday. From ths at psalience.org Sun Oct 2 19:00:10 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Sun, 02 Oct 2011 19:00:10 +0200 Subject: [THS] Arrests Made at Occupy Wall Street March on Brooklyn Bridge Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111002185954.043e30e0@mail.messagingengine.com> Arrests Made at Occupy Wall Street March on Brooklyn Bridge; Times' Natasha Lennard Reportedly Arrested By Nick Greene Sat., Oct. 1 2011 at 5:44 PM http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2011/10/arrests_made_at.php Watch live streaming video from globalrevolution at livestream.com Police have arrested protesters at today's Occupy Wall Street March on the Brooklyn Bridge. The New York Times says "500 people" were kettled on the bridge by police. TheTimes contributing reporter at the scene, Natasha Lennard, is said to have been arrested. A group called "globalrevolution" is livestreaming the march, and it their footage can be seen above. The Post reports the protests have "shut down" the Brooklyn Bridge and that Charlie Rangel "tried to lend his support [but] was chased away by a heckler." However, "the crowd came to his rescue, swamping the heckler and chanting in response: 'Everyone has the right to speak.'" It is being tweeted that the New York Times' Natasha Lennard was one of the people arrested. She was contributing to the Times' City Room coverage, which put up thefollowing post as the arrests began: After allowing marchers from the Occupy Wall Street protests to claim the Brooklyn-bound car lanes of the Brooklyn Bridge and get partway across, the police cut the marchers off and plunged into the crowd and began making arrests around 4:15 p.m. Saturday. At 4:35, around 500 people were caught on the bridge between orange nets. The police were letting some of them walk back to Manhattan. Others on the roadway clambered dangerously up the structure of the bridge to get to the wooden pedestrian walkway, which is about 15 feet above the road. The "orange nets" seem to have become a symbol of the protests after the now infamous footage of police penning and pepper spraying non-violent female demonstrators went viral. Video: Police Arresting Protesters on Brooklyn Bridge [NYT] From ths at psalience.org Sun Oct 2 19:01:23 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Sun, 02 Oct 2011 19:01:23 +0200 Subject: [THS] Momentum: Say No To Immunity For Wall Street Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111002190103.043e2e50@mail.messagingengine.com> BOLDPROGRESSIVES.ORG 771,521 MEMBERS STRONG Momentum: Say No To Immunity For Wall Street BREAKING VICTORY: California Attorney General Kamala Harris just announced that she's opposing a proposed deal with Wall Street banks that would give them immunity for crimes that haven't been investigated yet. She joins Attorneys General from New York, Kentucky, Delaware, Minnesota, and Nevada. Now we're taking the fight to other states! Keep up the momentum! Sign this statement, which we'll deliver to other state Attorney Generals. STATEMENT: "Today's economic crisis was caused by Wall Street acting improperly. Every American has paid the price -- with families losing their homes, investors losing their money, and many Americans losing their jobs. There should be absolutely no criminal or civil immunity given to banks for activity that has not yet been investigated." Please sign on the right -- and then tell your friends. SIGN THE STATEMENT: first namelast nameemail addresszip 103% 103,991 people have taken action ? 103% of our goal of 100,000! From ths at psalience.org Sun Oct 2 19:04:48 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Sun, 02 Oct 2011 19:04:48 +0200 Subject: [THS] Chris Hedges: Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street... Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111002190323.06a16b50@mail.messagingengine.com> http://www.truth-out.org/best-among-us/1317389455 The Best Among Us Friday 30 September 2011 by: Chris Hedges, Truthdig | Op-Ed An activist from the Occupy Wall Street movement is shown being arrested by police in New York on September 24, 2011. (Photo: Brennan Cavanaugh / Flickr) There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place on Wall Street and in the financial districts of other cities across the country or you stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct, in the only form left to us, which is civil disobedience, the plundering by the criminal class on Wall Street and accelerated destruction of the ecosystem that sustains the human species, or become the passive enabler of a monstrous evil. Either you taste, feel and smell the intoxication of freedom and revolt or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy. Either you are a rebel or a slave. To be declared innocent in a country where the rule of law means nothing, where we have undergone a corporate coup, where the poor and working men and women are reduced to joblessness and hunger, where war, financial speculation and internal surveillance are the only real business of the state, where even habeas corpus no longer exists, where you, as a citizen, are nothing more than a commodity to corporate systems of power, one to be used and discarded, is to be complicit in this radical evil. To stand on the sidelines and say ?I am innocent? is to bear the mark of Cain; it is to do nothing to reach out and help the weak, the oppressed and the suffering, to save the planet. To be innocent in times like these is to be a criminal. Ask Tim DeChristopher. Choose. But choose fast. The state and corporate forces are determined to crush this. They are not going to wait for you. They are terrified this will spread. They have their long phalanxes of police on motorcycles, their rows of white paddy wagons, their foot soldiers hunting for you on the streets with pepper spray and orange plastic nets. They have their metal barricades set up on every single street leading into the New York financial district, where the mandarins in Brooks Brothers suits use your money, money they stole from you, to gamble and speculate and gorge themselves while one in four children outside those barricades depend on food stamps to eat. Speculation in the 17th century was a crime. Speculators were hanged. Today they run the state and the financial markets. They disseminate the lies that pollute our airwaves. They know, even better than you, how pervasive the corruption and theft have become, how gamed the system is against you, how corporations have cemented into place a thin oligarchic class and an obsequious cadre of politicians, judges and journalists who live in their little gated Versailles while 6 million Americans are thrown out of their homes, a number soon to rise to 10 million, where a million people a year go bankrupt because they cannot pay their medical bills and 45,000 die from lack of proper care, where real joblessness is spiraling to over 20 percent, where the citizens, including students, spend lives toiling in debt peonage, working dead-end jobs, when they have jobs, a world devoid of hope, a world of masters and serfs. The only word these corporations know is more. They are disemboweling every last social service program funded by the taxpayers, from education to Social Security, because they want that money themselves. Let the sick die. Let the poor go hungry. Let families be tossed in the street. Let the unemployed rot. Let children in the inner city or rural wastelands learn nothing and live in misery and fear. Let the students finish school with no jobs and no prospects of jobs. Let the prison system, the largest in the industrial world, expand to swallow up all potential dissenters. Let torture continue. Let teachers, police, firefighters, postal employees and social workers join the ranks of the unemployed. Let the roads, bridges, dams, levees, power grids, rail lines, subways, bus services, schools and libraries crumble or close. Let the rising temperatures of the planet, the freak weather patterns, the hurricanes, the droughts, the flooding, the tornadoes, the melting polar ice caps, the poisoned water systems, the polluted air increase until the species dies. Who the hell cares? If the stocks of ExxonMobil or the coal industry or Goldman Sachs are high, life is good. Profit. Profit. Profit. That is what they chant behind those metal barricades. They have their fangs deep into your necks. If you do not shake them off very, very soon they will kill you. And they will kill the ecosystem, dooming your children and your children?s children. They are too stupid and too blind to see that they will perish with the rest of us. So either you rise up and supplant them, either you dismantle the corporate state, for a world of sanity, a world where we no longer kneel before the absurd idea that the demands of financial markets should govern human behavior, or we are frog-marched toward self-annihilation. Those on the streets around Wall Street are the physical embodiment of hope. They know that hope has a cost, that it is not easy or comfortable, that it requires self-sacrifice and discomfort and finally faith. They sleep on concrete every night. Their clothes are soiled. They have eaten more bagels and peanut butter than they ever thought possible. They have tasted fear, been beaten, gone to jail, been blinded by pepper spray, cried, hugged each other, laughed, sung, talked too long in general assemblies, seen their chants drift upward to the office towers above them, wondered if it is worth it, if anyone cares, if they will win. But as long as they remain steadfast they point the way out of the corporate labyrinth. This is what it means to be alive. They are the best among us. Click here to access OCCUPY TOGETHER, a hub for all of the events springing up across the country in solidarity with Occupy Wall St. Click here to see a video of Chris Hedges at Occupy Wall Street. From ths at psalience.org Sun Oct 2 19:20:04 2011 From: ths at psalience.org (The Harder Stuff in news and commentary) Date: Sun, 02 Oct 2011 19:20:04 +0200 Subject: [THS] Thousands of Occupy Wall Street Protesters March to NYPD Headquarters Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20111002191857.03fc8bf8@mail.messagingengine.com> from AlterNet Newsletter "Countdown" on Occupy Wall Street--Why Unions Joined In and What's Planned for Occupying DC By Sarah Seltzer | AlterNet Thousands of Occupy Wall Street Protesters March to NYPD Headquarters By Agence France-Presse Boston Bank of America Sit-In Draws Thousands of Foreclosure Victims, Supporters By Lauren Kelley | AlterNet Cornel West on Occupy Wall Street: It?s the Makings of a U.S. Autumn Responding to the Arab Spring By Amy Goodman, Cornell West | Democracy Now! "Occupy Together" Movement Grows: Is There a Protest in Your City? By Sarah Seltzer | AlterNet Mayor Bloomberg Says Occupy Wall Street Poses "Societal Concerns," We Should "Help the Banks" By Lauren Kelley | AlterNet GOP Plan for the Economy? More Workplace Injuries By Steve Benen | Washington Monthly Occupy Wall Street and the History of Democratic Finance Protest By William Hogeland | Hysteriography