Month: May 2010

So said Prof. John J. Mearsheimer in a recent address at the Palestine Center: Apartheid is inevitable. While the Israeli right wing government under Netanyahu’s Likud party shows the intent to keep confiscating more and more of what remains of original Palestine, the 40% that is left, visionaries like Mearsheimer (also read articles on the topic by Jeff Halper, ICAHD) can only see disaster for Israel in the making. The Two-State Solution, for all practical purposes, is dead, Palestine is wiped off the map (to paraphrase Ahmadinejad), and a new chapter of Middle East history is opening: Apartheid.

Prof. John J. Mearsheimer addresses the current status of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
A few days ago, Professor John J. Mearsheimer delivered the Hisham B. Sharabi Memorial Lecture, seen above, at the Palestine Center. It appeared to constitute the most extensive and up-to-date summary of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict made by  Mearsheimer, co-author of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. Mearsheimer discusses the inevitability of full-fledged Apartheid in Israel-Palestine.

A brief excerpt from the speech sums up the current situation:

“Regrettably, the two-state solution is now a fantasy. Instead, those territories will be incorporated into a Greater Israel,which will be an apartheid state bearing a marked resemblance to white-ruled South Africa. Nevertheless, a Jewish apartheid state is not politically viable over the long term. In the end, it will become a democratic bi-national state, whose politics will be dominated by its Palestinian citizens. In other words, it will cease being a Jewish state, which will mean the end of the Zionist dream.”

The full text of Mearsheimer’s talk is available on Sabbah’s Blog.

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I don’t understand the law all that well, but it appears that back in 1986 the oil companies bought Congress themselves a maximum liability of $75 million for damages related to any oil spill. They are responsible for cleaning up the mess, but who knows what that means when oil has destroyed 40% of the coastal wetlands in the country and most of its fisheries. I don’t think this geyser of oil will ever be cleaned up and so it would take an infinite amount of money for BP and the other responsible companies to meet their legal obligations. So, my solution is to just take everything BP owns and make it the property of the American people. All of us will get a dividend check each year from the proceeds of BP’s oil profits. This program can be modeled on Sarah Palin’s socialist Alaska Permanent Fund. Alaska, after all, is the only socialist state in America, and it was even socialist prior to the Exxon Valdez catastrophe. By why limit this to Alaska. Sarah Palin shouldn’t be the only one who gets to spread the wealth around. Let us all own a piece of British Petroleum. Then, maybe, we’ll want to let you drill offshore again.

Good to see that Larry Johnson is still wallowing in filth. At least he admits he got burned on the Whitey Tape. I’ll never understand why he decided to become the Orly Taitz of ex-CIA officers.

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"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."

From the New York Times:

There’s a world of difference between the impact of an oil spill and a deadly hurricane. And the White House hopes it stays that way.

As President Obama, who will visit the Gulf region on Sunday morning, has stepped up his administration’s response to the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, ordering a moratorium on new offshore drilling leases and dispatching cabinet secretaries and cargo planes to the region, the White House is also trying to avert the kind of political damage inflicted on former President George W. Bush by his administration’s slow response to Hurricane Katrina.

Based on what I’m reading, this oil spill may be significantly worse than Hurricane Katrina if the wellhead is lost. The president is smart to visit the region tomorrow. And he better do more than just fly over the Gulf of Mexico. This is potentially the biggest environmental crisis of our generation. We could lose more than half of our nation’s seafood and 40% of our coastal wetlands. Louisiana’s economy will be utterly devastated and it will start falling into the Gulf as mass erosion events take place in each hurricane season.

Unless they cap this well soon, this is going to make Katrina seem like a walk in the park.

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Couldn’t predict… didn’t expect.

Turns out that the grand wizards of corpocrazy have been exposed yet again.

Financial meltdown? Not gonna happen!
Major oil spills in the Gulf? Highly unlikely!

Finance and oil – profit margins other industries can only dream of. Must be visionary management…

These crooked CEOs and CFOs knew all along that the risks were immense, but what do they care as long as the bottom line is surpassed and obscene bonuses await at year-end.
Via AP:
Document: BP didn’t plan for major oil spill

BP suggested it was unlikely, or virtually impossible, for an accident to occur that would lead to a giant crude oil spill and serious damage to beaches, fish and mammals.
[…]
BP’s 52-page exploration plan for the Deepwater Horizon well, filed with the federal Minerals Management Service, says repeatedly that it was “unlikely that an accidental surface or subsurface oil spill would occur from the proposed activities.”

And while the company conceded that a spill would impact beaches, wildlife refuges and wilderness areas, it argued that “due to the distance to shore (48 miles) and the response capabilities that would be implemented, no significant adverse impacts are expected.”

Virtually impossible! Well, now it is a certainty! A major oil spill and consequent disaster for the environment. BP is nowhere close to containing the blow-out and the spill is increasing in volume, not declining. BP has acknowledged that 210,000 gallons leak every day, abandoning a claim that it was “only” 42,000 gallons a day.

Not only did BP dramatically downplay the possibility of disaster – they actively lobbied against stricter regulations:

While the cause of the fire and explosion on Deepwater Horizon is still uncertain, one thing is clear: BP, which was in charge of operating the rig, has a history of fighting tough regulations and safety inspections, misleading federal authorities about the dangers of a potential oil spill, and actively advocating for more relaxed safety standards — much like Massey Energy Co. repeatedly fought tougher regulation of mines.

It will be costly for BP and its shareholders:

BP says that the offshore drilling accident that is spewing thousands of barrels of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico could cost the company several hundred million dollars.
[…]
But regardless of the out-of-pocket costs, the long-term damage to BP’s reputation — and possibly, its future prospects for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico — is likely to be far higher, according to industry analysts.

The magnitude of the Deepwater Horizon disaster seems to be finally sinking in with investors. BP’s stock plunged more than 8 percent Thursday in American trading in an otherwise strong day for stocks. Since the accident, the American depositary receipts of the company have fallen about 13 percent, closing Thursday at $52.56.

Let the full and true costs be borne by BP and any manager responsible for the safety failures.

Happy Mission Accomplished Day. It’s been seven years!!

Defense Secretary Gates has sent a letter to House Armed Services chairman Ike Skelton (D-MO), strongly opposing any effort to repeal Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT) before the Pentagon has a chance to complete their review of the policy and develop a plan for implementation of a phase out. On the one hand, Gates clearly states that the policy will be phased out. On the other hand, this makes it very unlikely that it will be phased out this year. Gates’s excuse is that he wants the military community to have the opportunity to provide their “concerns, insights, and suggestions” prior to the change in policy going into effect. I know this is frustrating and it means more injustice in the interim, but I do think the administration will get this done next year. In the meantime, it would be a good idea to pass the Employee Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) this year as proof of good faith.

The president is giving the commencement address this morning at the University of Michigan:

President Barack Obama has some advice for the class of 2010: Don’t get caught up in the partisan trench warfare that often consumes Washington and use your talents instead to help America confront its biggest challenges.
Obama’s homily on the imperatives of citizenship comes in a speech Saturday at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

At the same time, 45 miles away, Sarah Palin is set to denounce the president as a big-government Democrat whose free-spending ways will bankrupt the country.

Nice juxtaposition, no?

Mark Halperin asks the question on every American’s lips:

Will President Obama use the White House Correspondents Dinner [tonight] to try to soften the “Obama hates the press/the press hates Obama” meme — or reinforce it?

Jay Leno will be doing the roast. Does he have the same kind of Giant Panda Balls of Steel displayed by Stephen Colbert in 2006?

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Concern over deficits is suddenly all the rage again.  One player putting itself in the forefront of the issue has missed an obvious candidate for cost savings, though.

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

On Wednesday the Peter G. Peterson Foundation held a conference to “bring together hundreds of stakeholders from across the political spectrum with diverse ideas on how to address critical fiscal issues while continuing to meet the priorities of the American people.”  They apparently did not consider $1.7 trillion in tax cuts to be a critical fiscal issue, nor spending a trillion dollars off the books for the military, nor the general mismanagement that caused the surpluses bequeathed by Democrats to Republicans to become huge deficits, but never mind.  I am sure they were greatly alarmed in their own quiet way by these developments.

While New Deal 2.0 offered an entire counter conference, I would like to offer my own one paragraph plan:  A 70% marginal income tax for the ultra rich (say $5 million per year) along with Pete DeFazio’s quarter cent stock transaction tax, which we can only hope will do as its critics claim and “Destroy High-Frequency Trading [HFT] and Liquidity.”  There has been no demonstrated value to HFT and in this context the opposite of liquidity is friction, which would be a brake on speculative excess.  It is a win-win, buffering the market from extreme volatility and easing the deficit at the same time.

If Peterson still is looking for ways to get our finances back in order, here is another win-win:  Aggressively shuttering our foreign military bases.  Chalmers Johnson examined the issue closely in chapters 4 and 5 of his book Nemesis, and has included much of that research in various online posts as well.  The fiscal argument for closing them is that they cost us over $100 billion per year, which incidentally is more than the new health care law.

While there is certainly room for debate on how much Americans’ health care will improve based on what was essentially health insurance reform, I have not seen any arguments that the new law is actually worse than the status quo.  While one person’s half a loaf may be another’s hyper-incrementalist bullshit, everyone seems to agree that there will be some tangible benefit to ordinary Americans for the money spent.  Can the same be said of our bases?

Their benefits are dubious and vague at best.  They give the US a presence abroad, which may serve as a reminder – potentially comforting or menacing – that Uncle Sam is nearby.  Any upside to that is almost impossible to quantify; while it almost surely has deterred aggression from enemies at times in the past, specific examples are unknowable.

Drawbacks can also be hard to measure; how do you quantify the local level of unease with a quasi-imperial (“America’s version of the colony is the military base”) presence?  Sometimes the disadvantages are unmistakable though.  Johnson’s article here – see his “The Three Rapes” section in particular – illustrates the problems we have had in Okinawa trying to reconcile two different legal systems, and sets of expectations, by a Status of Forces Agreement.

A review of the US Marine Corps Air Station Futenma there is underway now, and local residents want it off the island entirely.  Unsurprisingly, no other islands in Japan have volunteered to host it.  The US wants to move Futenma to a new part of Okinawa, where our history is ambivalent at best (pdf).  One proposal is to build a new one on a landfill, but Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama objected it “would defile nature.”  (This is hardly the best time to brag on our offshore structures, either.)  Futenma is so unpopular it may bring down Hatoyama’s government.  What exactly is the benefit to the American taxpayer?

Futenma is in the news (the Japanese news, anyway) at the moment because of its status, not because some incident made it a flash point.  Now is the perfect time to ask some fundamental questions.  Sure, there are possible drawbacks to leaving.  It could lead to military tensions with China.  In a worst case scenario we could see nuclear proliferation and a “mutual assured destruction” security model.  There are plenty of other scary possibilities.

What is the price we are paying now, though?  We ought to assume our presence in a foreign country is unpopular by default, and only believe otherwise in the face of substantial evidence.  In Japan the opposite is clearly true – citizens are marching in the streets to get us out of there.  Couldn’t regional peace and stability be largely achieved with robust diplomacy, and wouldn’t that be a much less objectionable way to exert our influence?  And as for Peterson and our other newly minted paragons of fiscal probity, wouldn’t that also be an enormous cost savings in the years and decades to come?

Hello again painting fans.

This week I’ll be continuing with the twilight Huson river painting. I’m using the photo seen directly below.

I will be using my usual acrylics on a small 4 by 5 inch gallery-style (thick) canvas.

When last seen, the painting appeared as it does in the photo directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

I’ve now (mostly) completed those dramatic clouds.  They meet the now complete hills of the Hudson highlands.  Directly below the larger of the two hills, the reflection has received some additional paint as has the river itself.  Finally, the roadway now has an additional paint layer as well as a line separating the shoulder.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

 
That’s about it for now. Next week I’ll have more progress to show you. See you then. As always, feel free to add photos of your own work in the comments section below.

Earlier paintings in this series can be seen here.