Month: February 2011

It’s kind of understandable that conservatives are remembering that George W. Bush talked about a democracy agenda for the Middle East, are seeing a movement towards democracy in Tunisia and Egypt, and are drawing the conclusion that Bush is responsible for the present crises in the Arab world. Of course, this is supposed to be a good thing.

It should be remembered that the elections that took place during the Bush era were not exactly successful. The elections in Iraq brought to power a bloc of pro-Iranian, religiously conservative Shi’ites, much to the alarm of the rest of the Sunni-dominated Arab world. The Sunnis in Iraq initially boycotted the elections, making the problem even worse and leading to massive ethnic cleansing with dozens of headless bodies littering the streets of Baghdad each morning.

Elections in Lebanon led to increased power for Hizbollah and, ultimately, a destabilization of the central government. Within a year, Israel would invade Lebanon and essentially lose in their battle to disarm Hizbollah. This was hardly the outcome the neo-cons were looking for.

In Palestine, the elections were won by Hamas. When Israel refused to accept such an outcome and began arresting Palestine’s newly-elected officials, the U.S. went along with them. Within a year, Hamas took over the Gaza Strip and threw Fatah officials out. Then we witnessed the Battle of Gaza. Hamas remains in control of Gaza today.

The elections in Egypt and Afghanistan were rigged. The municipal elections in Saudi Arabia didn’t amount to much.

The one thing we can say is that the Middle East is experiencing a lot more democracy than ever before. We may not have liked the outcome, but Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine did have relatively fair elections. Maybe Tunisia and Egypt will soon be able to say the same thing. I don’t think Bush deserves much credit for this, except, perhaps, in an unintentional and ironic way. But I never opposed or disagreed with Bush when he said that the Middle East needs more democracy. I just thought he was a fool for thinking it would lead to any short-term advantage for Israel or the United States.

All the advantages are in the longer-term, and they depend on us doing a true pivot and becoming very supportive of these new democracies. There is no reason why we can’t be even better friends with a democratic Egypt than we are with an autocratic one. But we are going to have to adjust. The Egyptian electorate is going to have a lot of disagreements with us on long-standing foreign policies.

“The test of our progress is not whether we add to the abundance of those who have much. It is whether we provide enough to those who have little.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt

Sometimes I wonder what has happened to us as a nation. How have we allowed greed and selfishness to thrive and flourish so rampantly in our society? How can anyone take these so-called leaders seriously when on the one hand they continue to provide the corporate class and the wealthy with tax-cuts and on the other they tell the other classes that they are costing the country too much money? Can someone explain to me how the last time we faced similar economic conditions and the country was suffering so much pain that we created safety nets and today we are demolishing safety nets? How could we in the midst of a catastrophe find the resources and courage to provide for our countrymen but today we can provide for oil companies, wars, and corporate subsidies yet nothing for education, the unemployed or medical care?
I wonder what has fundamentally changed in our national psyche that we can now look at our fellow citizens suffering and have the ability to not only walk right by them but also curse them as we do so. The problem is not that we don’t have enough resources. It comes down to our priorities and what things do we value. Shortly there will be debates concerning our national priorities and what resources we are willing to allocate to them. There will be a lot of posturing and demagoguery concerning entitlements. Entitlements have become the new scapegoat for all that is wrong in America. Programs that have allowed seniors to live longer and more fulfilling lives will now be cut to shorten those lives. Obviously, it has been working too well and we have to cull the herd according to the wing-nuts. Death panels? Pulling the plug on grandma? How is this possible that even programs that have been successful are now being cast as failures? Sound familiar?

It is simple they have to cast these programs as failures so they can cut and eventually demolish them. The wing-nuts are realizing that the socialism tact is losing steam and so they have to develop a new strategy and with the help of the Democrats they will. If you continue to reduce revenues or shift revenues to corporate subsidies and war then of course the deficits are going to go up and spending cuts are going to seem like a necessary evil. The problem with this theory is that it flies in the face of reality and in the face of the majority of Americans who do not support these draconian cuts being proposed by the wing-nuts and the teabaggers. The majority of Americans do not support reducing the deficit on the backs of the poor and the elderly. The majority of Americans want to see the taxes of the wealthy increased not reduced and yet here we are. In America it is never about lack of, it is always about priorities.

We have gone from the poor and the elderly having problems to saying they are the problem. You see this is one of the things governments do, they support the weak and the old. So by saying that the government is the problem you are by extension saying these folks are the problem and to me that is a problem. The continued and strategic assault on unions, the middle-class, the elderly, and the poor is beginning to pay dividends, but for whom? If the majority of Americans support these items and yet the politicians are continuing to press their eradication then somewhere there is a disconnect. The will of the people is being circumvented by the interests of the moneyed few.

If our politicians aren’t willing to listen to us then we must “take our government back”, but not in the false sense of the teabaggers and their desire to return to 1776 when only white male property owners had rights. No, we must return to a “government of the people, by the people, and for the people”. Decades ago in the midst of a worse economic crisis our leaders used that opportunity to tell the American people the truth that many of our economic woes were due to the greed of unchecked capitalism and laid the foundation of many of the programs that ushered in the middle-class and dignity for our seniors. Wow, what a difference a few decades can make. Now our political leaders are telling us that the problem is no longer unchecked greed and capitalism it is the victims of unchecked greed and capitalism. Yeah, that’s it. This is akin to saying that prior to Nader’s crusade against unsafe cars that what caused the needless traffic fatalities wasn’t that automakers were designing and building unsafe cars, it was that drivers were buying and driving the unsafe cars.

When the “great debate” begins about cutting this and cutting that I hope we remember what made us a great nation. It wasn’t our huge military, it wasn’t our giveaways to corporate America, and it certainly wasn’t the unchecked greed of capitalism. What made us a great nation was our willingness to provide for the least of these and to provide an opportunity for all to succeed. These policies allowed a child from a family of 12 children living in a 2 bedroom house to attend college and grow up to be the Speaker of the House. It’s funny how these same folks who have benefited from these policies once they gain power want to pull up the ladder behind them. I will never understand the arrogance of these people.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. – Dwight D. Eisenhower
The Disputed Truth

“I don’t think any segregation law angered black people in Montgomery more than bus segregation.  And that had been so since the laws about segregation on public transportation had been passed.  That was back in 1900, and black people had boycotted Montgomery streetcars until the City Council changed its ordinance so that nobody would be forced to give up a seat unless there was another seat to move to.  But over the years practices had changed,, although the law had not.  When I was put off the bus back in 1943, the bus driver was really acting against the law.  In 1945, two years after that incident, the State of Alabama passed a law requiring that all bus companies under its jurisdiction enforce segregation.  But that law did not spell out what bus drivers were supposed to do in a case like mine.

Here it was, half a century after the first segregation law, and there were 50,000 African-Americans in Montgomery.  More of us rode the buses than Caucasians did, because more whites could afford cars.  It was very humiliating having to suffer the indignity of riding segregated buses twice a day, five days a week, to go downtown and work for white people.”

Twenty years ago, Nicholas Lemann wrote “The Promised Land:  The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America”.  It’s a great book, over 400 pages long.  It tells (different format, different details) the same story that Stevie Wonder told in 1973 in “Living For the City”—except you can’t dance to Lemann’s book.

I’m not knocking Lemann; I’m just pointing out that some great creations (like “Living For the City”) are so packed with meaning that whole books can be written unpacking their full implications.  

The same is true for the two paragraphs quoted above, which open Chapter 8 of Rosa Parks’ story.  You could teach a graduate seminar on organizing for change based on little more than those two paragraphs.  Here are just three of the lessons contained in those paragraphs:

1.  Anger—if people won’t get angry about something, they won’t organize to change it.  Mohandas Gandhi chose break the legitimacy of British rule in India by breaking the salt laws.  Why?  Because everyone needs and uses salt.  Because everyone can participate in the campaign.  Because the salt laws angered all Indians.  The Montgomery Bus Boycott was the first successful mass nonviolent direct action campaign of the modern civil rights movement in part because it was an issue that angered and engaged virtually the entire black community in Montgomery.
2.  Historical Memory—Rosa Parks and the other Montgomery civil rights leaders knew their history.  They knew that the buses hadn’t always been segregated (like the ancient Hebrews knew they hadn’t always been slaves).  They knew their ancestors (in many cases their parents and grandparents) had boycotted the buses 50 years earlier and had forced the City Council to at least ameliorate the segregation laws “so that nobody would be forced to give up a seat unless there was another seat to move to.”  Among other things, by deciding to launch a bus boycott, they were following in the footsteps of their ancestors.

3.  The Power of Numbers—“More of us rode the buses than Caucasians did….”  African-Americans rode the buses because they had no other way to get to work; that was their vulnerability, and a source of daily humiliation.  African-Americans were the vast majority (over 2/3) of bus riders; that was the bus company’s vulnerability.

The president is going after fossil fuel subsidies for the third straight year. He probably won’t have any more success this time.

When he releases his new budget in two weeks, President Obama will propose doing away with roughly $4 billion a year in subsidies and tax breaks for oil companies, in his third effort to eliminate federal support for an industry that remains hugely profitable.

Previous efforts have run up against bipartisan opposition in Congress and heavy lobbying from producers of oil, natural gas and coal.

Stronger Republican representation in Congress pretty much guarantees that this effort will fail this year and next. It’s not like Jack Gerard sounds worried.

“This is a tired old argument we’ve been hearing for two years now,” said Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute, the oil and gas industry’s main lobby in Washington. “If the president were serious about job creation, he would be working with us to develop American oil and gas by American workers for American consumers.”

Mr. Gerard noted that there was bipartisan opposition to lifting the tax breaks, adding: “The federal government by no stretch of the imagination subsidizes the oil industry. The oil industry subsidizes the federal government at a rate of $95 million a day.”

Bow down before your masters.

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The Concepts of the Turkish Model and the Greater Middle East Initiative
By Metin Camcigil, President of Atatürk Society of America

1-Should the modernization of Islam be an issue of a formal international agenda?

Any suggestion by outsiders to moderate or to modernize Islam is a non-starter. No religion -and Islam is no exception- is amenable to change, much less to any advice given by the believers of another religion. Firstly, such suggestions imply condescension on the part of the “suggestor”, and humiliation on the part of the “suggestee”. And yet we often read in the newspapers that missionary organizations are active in the area under the disguise of humanitarian assistance. I concede that this well-meant action is based on the presumption that Christian tradition is compassionate and by proselytizing the Muslims they will also be rendered compassionate. Thus their antagonism will disappear. I claim that conversely this would create an instinctive reaction to change and a hardening of Puritanism and Fundamentalism. The non-Turkic and non-Sinic Muslim nations are particularly sensitive in this respect. I mean the Smaller Middle Eastern Muslims. We cannot even try to have control over a modernization effort in Islam. Any change in Islam, or in any religion for that matter, has to come from within the authorities of that religion itself.

At any rate, there is no guarantee that democracy and secularism would follow a modernized Islam. At this point you might suggest that democracy and secularism should precede the modernization of Islam. If we encourage democracy and secularism prior to modernizing Islam, democracy will bring back Islam to power, as we know it. Modernization of the religion will be shown the back seat. Islamic rule requires conformity of laws and of their application to the Koranic dicta. We observed the outcome of recently drafted constitutions in Afghanistan and Iraq. In a society ruled by Islamic principles the Book governs the public and private lives in detail. You may compare the Koran to a constitution. While any religion in politics is undesirable for its traditionalism, political Islam is nothing short of autocracy. The exception of Turkic and Sinic Muslim countries is based on their cultural difference from the Semitic Muslims. This is the crucial distinction between the Greater and the Smaller ME. The question should not be to moderate Islam or whether Islam can embrace modernization and democracy, but whether Muslims as individuals can embrace liberty and modernity. To achieve this we should rather look for means of educating, thus modernizing the minds of these people, rather than modernizing their religion. Transforming minds is an easier task than transforming a religion. Once people are transformed they may attempt to modernize their religion on their own volition, without the bloodshed that happened during the two hundred years of Reformation in the West.

Turkish modernization reform was a case in point. Atatürk’s reforms were subtle than most foreigners and even scholars seem to have understood. The success of the public acceptance of the fast and sweeping reforms was that they were not aimed at modernizing Islam, but rather modernizing the people. However, Turkey benefited from two ingredients to achieve this modernization: the guidance of a genius of a leader in the person of Atatürk, and the adaptability of the Turkish people to developments.

The tactical key to Atatürk’s success was to isolate the issue of religion, and to lead the people to modernity, progress, education, and rationality.

-The substantive key to success was Atatürk’s understanding of Turkish people’s culture and mind. He ascribed the modernization process to the people themselves at every step of it. He was aware that for a social development to be well rooted it must be adopted by the people, it must belong to the people. Like any social element, if modernity and democracy were to be brought about by force they will create a counterforce.

Therefore, there should not be any reference to Islam or to any religion for that matter, much less any reference to its moderation or modernization, in any foreign policy design of the US in the Muslim world. In fact, even a perception of any religious element in any US foreign policy should be avoided at all cost for it would produce an entirely opposite effect in some Muslim countries.  

Israel contemplates worst-case scenarios as Egypt’s crisis deepens

As the Middle East faces a violent shake-up of the old regional order, Israel may be forced to align itself with Syrian President Bashar Assad who shares a desire to maintain the current status quo.
“It’s ironic that the rise of Islamist governments in Egypt and Jordan may force Israel to turn to Syria. The status quo in the Middle East is an illusion; the old order cannot be kept forever like the Israelis and the Syrians believe. The Israelis have been told that this could happen if they did not solve the Palestinian situation and other governments didn’t deal with unemployment, poverty and corruption. These are the elements of which revolutions are made of.”
“Jordan is ripe for revolution,” Mekelberg said. “There is a majority of Palestinians there who are fervent supporters of Hamas while the legitimacy of the government and King Abdullah is limited.”

With Egypt and Jordan in unfriendly hands, and with former ally Turkey increasingly turning toward Iran and Syria, Netanyahu could find himself without an ally in the region and may find that he needs to step up the tentative efforts Israel has already made to reach a peace agreement with Damascus.

Turkey, Syria and Qatar brokering a new government in Lebanon  

Egypt moves 800 soldiers into demilitarized Sinai to quell unrest

(Haaretz) – Meanwhile, in an unusual move and with Israel’s agreement, Egypt moved some 800 soldiers into Sinai in order to deal with the Bedouin unrest in the peninsula. The deployment of the troops in the Sinai is an infringement of the peace agreement signed between the two countries in 1979, which requires the area to be demilitarized.  

Group of Arab Nations seek quick UN action condemning Israeli West Bank settlement activity

Israel’s FM Lieberman tough stance on diplomacy with Turkey

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

An antidote to the Alito photo…