Author: fairleft

Abdelrahman Amr Zaki, 15, rejected what he said were claims the protests are just about economic conditions.

“They are not. My father drives a BMW and I have a very good home. There is no democracy, no freedom. We just want Mubarak to go.”

The U.S. media and some progressives and a substantial number of demonstrators will apparently satisfied with an Egyptian revolution that devolves into just `Mubarak out’. As we see in the quote at the top and the blockquotes below:

But a coalition of activists … said they would not talk with [Prime Minister] Shafiq.

Amr Salah, a coalition representative, told AFP that those who had launched the call to protest last week “will not accept any dialogue with the regime until our principal demand is met, and that is for President Hosni Mubarak to step down.”

“Our principal demand”? The subtitle and then a couple paragraphs from Code Pink Medea Benjamin‘s article on alternet:

Despite violence and intimidation, thousands of people are still camped out in the square — absolutely determined to stay there until Mubarak goes

Despite the danger on the streets, we went to the square carrying with two big banners. One said “World Says Time To Go, Mubarak!” and the other said “Solidarity With Egyptian People” in both English and Arabic. When the people in the square saw us and discovered we were Americans, they erupted into cheers. …

I couldn’t believe that after today’s attacks, there were still women in the square who planned to spend the night. A group of young women ran up to us and started hugging and kissing us. “You don’t know what your presence means to us,” one of the students said. ” Please tell Obama that we need him to do more to push Mubarak to go NOW, before more of us get killed.”

This attitude is not good, in fact it’s suspiciously post-ideological. In other words, if Egypt’s revolution goes the way of the “color-coded” revolutions sponsored by Western governments and foundations, it will be just as unsuccessful as those revolutions in transferring political power and economic wealth to the bottom 80% of Egypt’s population. Which is why the West sponsors these post-ideological revolutions.

So, no, I’m sorry otherwise honorable but congenitally too optimistic David North, the following does not seem to be happening:

The Egyptian revolution is dealing a devastating blow to the pro-capitalist triumphalism that followed the Soviet bureaucracy’s liquidation of the USSR in 1991. The class struggle, socialism and Marxism were declared irrelevant in the modern world. “History”–as in “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels)–had ended. Henceforth, the only revolutions conceivable to the media were those that were “color-coded” in advance, politically scripted by the US State Department, and then implemented by the affluent pro-capitalist sections of society.

This complacent and reactionary scenario has been exploded in Tunisia and Egypt. History has returned with a vengeance. What is presently unfolding in Cairo and throughout Egypt is revolution, the real thing.

Wish it were, but no. The best clue I have to the non-class nature of the revolution is summed up in the following question “What happened to the General Strike?” We read here and here on Monday that it was supposed to have begun on Tuesday. At myfiredoglake, Jeff Kaye wrote:

Egyptian Workers Hold Key to Uprising, New Union Association Issues Call for General Strike

… Barely reported in the West, among the crowds at Tahrir Square last Sunday, a new trade union confederation was announced, the Federation of Egyptian Trade Unions (FETU), which immediately issued a call for a general-strike. The call has been widely taken up, and many reports now link the uprising to unity with the workers, particularly in Suez, where the battle has been fought most intensely with state police.

But we’ve heard nothing about it, from any source, since then. Do a google search and see for yourself. Now, I realize the mainstream media is always reluctant to focus attention on expressions of worker power, but a successful general strike would force attention on itself. That just has not happened, so I have to assume the general strike has not, uh, become ‘general’. And, since the effective way to demonstrate the working class is playing a primary role in a revolution is through it carrying out an effective general strike, my conclusion is the Egyptian working class and lower-middle-class are not going all out participating in this revolution, at least not yet.

Another worrying sign is the apparent fact that less than 300,000 protestors participated in Tuesday’s “million-man march.” Again, the regime attempted to discourage participation, but such attempts would’ve been overwhelmed by an entire working class enthusiastically participating in this revolution. So, I wonder.

If there is only a peripheral class aspect to this revolution and in fact its commanding center is post-ideological, that makes it understandable that workers would be reluctant to put their lives on the line for it. What would be the point? To get a “new boss, same as the old boss”? I wrote “It’s the U.S. vs. the Egyptian people (Mubarak’s just our dictator)” optimistically last week, but if this revolution is simply about replacing Mubarak with a friendlier face of what is essentially U.S.-sponsored military rule, what’s the point of dying for that?

Anyway, I hope I’m wrong, and that this is not just another of those manipulated “naive young people” revolutions that U.S. ‘pro-democracy’ foundations specialize in. However, it concerns me how long the U.S. has been planning for the post-Mubarak era, and, frankly, that Mohammed ElBaradei is a board member of the George Soros’s International Crisis Group. (I wonder if that’s a secret, because Soros didn’t mention it in his op-ed boosting ElBaradei that the Washington Post published today.)

Why is the revolution’s command-and-control post-ideological, if that is the case? Michael Barker writes well on capitalism’s foundations, how they fund progressive change but also place firm limits on it:

… if “we are serious about collectively working to building workable alternatives to capitalism then we must learn to subject our most influential theorists to ruthless criticism.” As I pointed out, a fundamental aspect of such endeavours required “critiquing the very organizations that have sustained (and constrained) much progressive activism, liberal foundations.” Unfortunately, in the year 2009, bar a few noteworthy exceptions, progressive writers have failed to respond to this challenge. On the contrary, many activist commentators have rallied to undermine support for a political agenda that raises legitimate debate about the multitude of problems associated with capitalist funding for progressive activism.

Another Michael Barker quote:

Counter to popular misunderstandings of their work, rather than promoting progressive and more participatory forms of democracy, liberal philanthropy actually serves the opposite purpose by helping preserve gross inequalities, thereby legitimising the status quo. It should not be surprising that Robert Arnove and Nadine Pinede note that although the Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford foundations’ “claim to attack the root causes of the ills of humanity, they essentially engage in ameliorative practices to maintain social and economic systems that generate the very inequalities and injustices they wish to correct.”

Finally, Ideology 1A might begin with an understanding of imperialism and the necessity for its success of co-opted host country capitalists. Juan Cole writes:

It should be remembered that Egypt’s elite of multi-millionaires has benefited enormously from its set of corrupt bargains with the US and Israel and from the maintenance of a martial law regime that deflects labor demands and pesky human rights critiques. It is no wonder that to defend his billions and those of his cronies, Hosni Mubarak was perfectly willing to order thousands of his security thugs into the Tahrir Square to beat up and expel the demonstrators, leaving 7 dead and over 800 wounded, 200 of them just on Thursday morning. …

More recently the cover story has been the supposed threat of radical Islam, which is a tiny fringe phenomenon in most of the Middle East that in some large part was sowed by US support for the extremists in the Cold War as a foil to the phantom of International Communism. And then there is the set of myths around Israel, that it is necessary for the well-being of the world’s Jews, that it is an asset to US security, that it is a great ethical enterprise- all of which are patently false.On such altars are the labor activists, youthful idealists, human rights workers, and democracy proponents in Egypt being sacrificed with the silver dagger of filthy lucre. …

For removing all pressure on Israel by the biggest Arab nation with the best Arab military, Egypt has been rewarded with roughly $2 billion in US aid every year, not to mention favorable terms for importation of sophisticated weaponry and other perquisites. This move allowed the Israelis to invade and occupy part of Lebanon in 1982-2000, and then to launch massively destructive wars on virtually defenseless Lebanese and Gaza Palestinians more recently. Cairo under Mubarak is as opposed to Shiite Hizbullah in Lebanon and fundamentalist Hamas in Gaza as is Tel Aviv. The regime of Hosni Mubarak appears to have taken some sort of bribe to send substantial natural gas supplies to Israel at a deep discount. It has joined in the blockade against the civilians of Gaza. It acts as Israel’s handmaid in oppressing the Palestinians, and is bribed to do so by the US.

P.S. Two things I wrote at pffugeecamp that inspired this post:

The sad failure of post-ideological revolts

Soros Foundation prudently sponsors this deadheaded stupidity. And dumbed-down college-educated kids swallow it.

I very very much wish that instead this were true:

Egyptian Workers Hold Key to Uprising, New Union Association Issues Call for General Strike

But unfortunately Jeff Kaye is likely wrong, and the backed by millions of dollars ‘post-ideology’ will win again. Like it has done in various colored revolutions in Eastern Europe and the Middle East in recent years. All of those revolutions spectacular failures in relation to their peoples’ actual hopes. Like Obama has been for his 2008 youngish, naive ‘post-ideological’ hopesters.

No, folks, there’s no easy way, ya can’t win with the learning you get from MTV and video games. Ya’ gotta crack the fuckin’ real books and learn something, get some ideology in ya. Leftism, Marxism, social democracy, modified by a lot of history reading and common sense.

Again, though, I assume the next U.S.-sponsored and military-dominated government will throw the people some bones in the form of subsidized bread prices and such. So, good on the Egyptian people.

by: fairleft @ Tue Feb 01, 2011 at 15:54:59 PM EST

Or, as I wrote briefly Wednesday, on the incoherence of `post-ideology’:

Anti-ideology is just for people too lazy and/or economically comfortable to stress working out a coherent ideology for themselves. And of course the rich who aren’t sociopaths don’t want to know what their real-life ideology is.

It’s unlikely that Jared Loughner feels ‘guilt’ over what he did two days ago, if guilt means feeling bad or at least defensive about having done something morally wrong. But that won’t stop Arizona from convicting him of murder and quite possibly killing him. There is already an on-point case, Clark v. Arizona, given the stamp of approval by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2006, where a paranoid schizophrenic 17-year-old was convicted of murder (probably because he was not yet an adult, he was ‘only’ sentenced to 25 years to life).

After he shot and killed a police officer, Eric Clark called his mom and dad from jail and explained that Flagstaff, Arizona, “was a ‘platinum city’ inhabited by 50,000 aliens. He told them: ‘The only thing that will stop aliens are bullets.'” For Arizona, that’s a guilty frame of mind. Five years ago, Emily Bazelon wrote an excellent article summarizing the case called Crazy Law:

The psychiatrists who testified in the case of Eric Clark agreed that he was a paranoid schizophrenic, and actively psychotic, when he shot and killed a police officer in Flagstaff, Ariz. Clark had previously been hospitalized for his mental illness. After his release, he retreated to one room in his house, rigged up a fishing line with beads and wind chimes to warn of intruders, and said that aliens were trying to capture and kill him. In the two days before the shooting, which took place in 2000 when he was 17, his parents frantically–and fruitlessly–called mental-health facilities and a lawyer in an effort to get him recommitted. …

How did we get to a place where a clearly crazy teenager’s craziness is irrelevant to disproving the prosecution’s theory that he committed murder? …

Obviously, something crazy has happened to the insanity defense over the last three decades, and some of the blame should go to ‘pay to say’ psychiatrists, the indeterminate nature of mental illness, and the 1982 John Hinckley ‘not guilty by reason of insanity’ verdict:

Before the 1970s, the public outcry over a jury finding a person “not guilty by reason of insanity” (“NGRI”) was not nearly as great as it is today. In that time period, insanity acquitees regularly spent many years (even a lifetime) locked in institutions for the criminally insane. An insanity acquittal was a showing of compassion and a recognition of the cruelty [of inflicting] punishment on someone who did not know his actions were wrong. More importantly, the public could rest assured that a person committed to a mental institution would not be walking the streets anytime in the near future (if ever).

In the past twenty years, however, this country has seen a more rapid release of NGRI’s from hospitals. This pattern of early release is due to two factors: (1) court rulings that insanity acquitees are entitled to the same constitutional due process and equal protection rights of civil patients; this makes it more difficult to keep an individual in a hospital after recovering from mental illness; and (2) advances in psychiatric treatment. Thus, for the very first time, large numbers of NGRI’s could return to the streets.

However, what was the underlying motivation for why, after Hinckley, ‘something just had to be done’ about the insanity defense? I think that’s obvious: the American people’s overwhelming desire to ‘make somebody pay’ when there’s a murder. This desire overrode and still overrides the inconvenience that crazy people are not really ‘guilty’ under any reasonable understanding of the word.

That irrational desire for ritual sacrifice is one of many symbols of the decline, the coarsening and primitivization, of ‘normal’ U.S. society and morality under the squalid ‘leadership’ of Ronald Reagan and backbone-free Democrats who ‘me-too-ed’ him back in the ’80s. Nothing at all has changed since then. So, prepare for the ritual sacrifice of a paranoid schizophrenic, you’ll feel cleansed and whole again, America.

Knowing Saudi Arabia has urged the bombing of Iran, that Shell maintains an iron grip on the government of Nigeria, that Pfizer hired investigators to disrupt investigations into drugs trials on children, also in Nigeria, that the Pakistan intelligence service, the ISI, is swinging both ways on the Taliban, that China launched a cyber attack on Google, that North Korea has provided nuclear scientists to Burma, that Russia is a virtual mafia state in which security services and gangsters are joined at the hip … means we are far more likely to treat the accounts of events we are given in the future with much greater skepticism.

… What is astonishing is the number of journalists out there who argue that it is better not to know these things, that the world is safer if the public is kept in ignorance. In their swooning infatuation with practically any power elite that comes to hand, some writers … argue in essence for the Chinese or Russian models of deceit and obscurantism. They advocate the continued infantilising of the public.

— Henry Porter

Though who knows how many will take advantage, Wikileaks is potentially a destroyer of the government and corporate media enforced/generated naivete about how U.S. foreign policy works and what its real goals are. Let’s then understand, my fellow non-naive readers – we who are already well-informed by good, empirical sources and ideologically smart guesswork – that of course for us the leaks mainly remind and confirm rather than reveal (though there are some important revelations ‘even’ for us). But that doesn’t make meaningless the leaks revelations of the expected massive hypocrisy, condescension and brute force neo-imperialism.

Wikileaks’ contribution is not to slightly better enlighten the already well tuned in. Its purpose is to replace the naive, idealistic and U.S.-cheerleader ‘mainstream media’ perspective with the truth, for newbies wanting to go that route. So, yeah, ‘we’ already knew that the U.S. is the world’s most abusive neo-imperial state, reliant on blunt military and economic force. But most Americans, and most people around the world, don’t know that.

But if many more Americans did get clued in, what difference would `just knowing’ make? Very little, I think, if those Americans – like those of us here in the internet whineysphere – remain isolated individuals, now wisely skeptical if not dismissive of reality’s official media version. Hell, without some minimal ideological smarts and then political solidarity and action the only `real’ effect might be that the newly enlightened drone becomes a career-detractingly excessive dissident within the official reality prevailing at `the office’. (Not to be overly U.S.-centric: particularly in the greater Middle East, the revelations of various countries’ U.S. stooge status aids democratic and anti-imperialist movements.) …
First of all, just a little ideology – i.e., just follow the fucking money – matters a lot in reading the cable leaks. Sites like WSWS and Counterpunch, and writers like Pepe Escobar and Tom Englehardt assume the “follow the money” logic of capitalist elite political motivation, and therefore have long effectively understood what’s going on overseas and why, and conjectured what’s going to happen next and why.

The basic `money is the root of all evil’ perspective – is it too much to hope that much of the general public will `get’ that? – is all that is needed to point the newly skeptical and enlightened, whatever the ultimate ends of his/her particular democratic ideology, toward the essential populist goal, that of getting private, profit-seeking money out of politics. And we need to take the money-making motivation out of our mass media too, since any reasonable person knows – latest evidence the court stenographer media’s reaction to the Wikileaks phenomenon – that the political system and its mass communication system are one monolithic and very anti-populist thing.

With that fundamental agreement, maybe in 2012 all the peon classes can run a single Presidential candidate whose goals are milquetoasty except for one big thing: cancel the power of private money over our politics, and then let the democratic chips wherever.

But back to Wikileaks: what might the naïve and even you and me learn from the revelations so far?

1. The one party foreign policy of the U.S.

Of course, `we’ all knew this, but many were rah rah Obama naively disinformed as recently November, 2008. But, yeah, nothing changed when power was transferred from `brute force neoconservative’ Bush to `enlightened globalist’ Obama.

2. Israel is US

Israel has been largely untroubled by [the leaks] because US views on key Middle Eastern issues especially on Iran, Syria and Lebanon, are so close to its own.

Aside from doing sales work for U.S. corporations, as far as the Middle East is concerned U.S. diplomacy is Israeli diplomacy. All sorts of desperate U.S. diplomatic effort and coercion is focused on organizing boycotts of anything and everything Iran (including climate scientists) and promoting Israel’s attack Iran agenda.

The U.S. passionately pushes the Israeli foreign policy agenda, however far right, racist and paranoid that gets each year. Yeah most of ‘us’ knew that already. Actually, this is a case where I have revised my understanding. I had always assumed the U.S. `went along’ with an Israel-uber-alles Middle East policy but this is way more than `going along’: we pursue Israel’s interests, as its racist and lunatic leadership understands it, with a loyal and all-consuming passion and focus.

Specifically, what the U.S. says about Iran is simple re-drafting of Israeli government perspectives, now mouthed by U.S. diplomats.
These redrafted opinion statements, not worth much really, have now been trumpeted by the official U.S. media as new evidence of Iran’s evil, nuclear intentions. But it’s not just Iran, you also find the U.S. spending $100s of millions to defeat Hezbollah in Lebanon, and in effect doing locate-to-kill grunt work for Israel’s `assassinate Hamas politicians’ squads. But, yeah, what else should we expect U.S. diplomats would be doing, something actually beneficial to the people of the Middle East?

(See Jahanpour: US following Israeli 5-Point Plan on Iran: Wikileaks; WikiLeaks cables: US pressured UN climate chief to bar Iranian from job; NYT Still Stalking Iran; Actual Wiki Cables Belie NYT’s Version of Saudi / Gulf States’ Stance on Iran)

2. They lie all the time

Examples too numerous to catalog, but here’s one example: WikiLeaks cables: Whitehall told US to ignore Brown’s Trident statement.

3. Russia is on the U.S. enemies list

Despite surface changes since Obama took office, it’s locked in: Russia is a U.S. enemy. This is a long-term policy that our military-industrial complex needs, and so there you go. Russia doesn’t seem to understand the way it is, and so it continues to bend over backwards trying to please the U.S. A lot of good that will do them.

(See WikiLeaks cables reveal secret Nato plans to defend Baltics from Russia; WikiLeaks cables condemn Russia as ‘mafia state’)

4. Diplomacy is for corporations

Politically powerful corporations (i.e., financial giants and war corporations) will receive relentless and pull-out-all-the stops diplomatic effort on their behalf.

(WikiLeaks cables: US ‘lobbied Russia on behalf of Visa and MasterCard’)

5. Shell owns Nigeria

WikiLeaks cables: Shell’s grip on Nigerian state revealed

6. Gulf Arab reality vs. the New York Times

While the New York Times and therefore conventional U.S. punditry promotes the Israeli perspective that can often be found in U.S. diplomatic cables — that Persian Gulf Arabia is up in arms about Iran — there is also actual reality to be found. Oxford University’s Sharmine Narwahi describes it:

Far more interesting than slurs against Iran by the “usual suspects,” is the disintegration of uniform thinking on the Islamic Republic by the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries bordering the Persian Gulf.

Narwahi continues, more broadly (emphasis removed):

I research shifting centers of influence in the region, and have long pointed out that we are erroneously lumping Syria, Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas together as a exclusive club of four. This grouping … is perhaps the ground zero of a new and fast-growing “Worldview” emanating from the Mideast, but there are other important participants, namely Qatar, Turkey, maybe Oman, Iraq, and more.

This worldview — put simply — reflects a “desire to act in their own self-interest,” and its adherents, who come from varying backgrounds, place “opportunism” ahead of “ideology” which has led to new and unexpected political and economic alliances, both regionally and internationally.

(See WikiLeaks Iran Cables — New York Times in Full-Spin Mode; NYT Still Stalking Iran; Actual Wiki Cables Belie NYT’s Version of Saudi / Gulf States’ Stance on Iran)

7. Diplomacy: incompetence, childishness, and racist/imperialist condescension

US believed moderates would prevail during Iranian revolution

Throwing caution to WikiLeaks wind
Abdullah Bozkurt
November 30, 2010

… I was disappointed … to see how some of the US diplomats positioned here in Ankara, including former US Ambassador to Turkey James Jeffrey, who now serves in Iraq, were way off the mark in their analysis of what is really happening in the transformation of Turkey. …

Jeffrey also details his off-the-record conversation with Israeli Ambassador to Turkey Gabby Levy and concurs with him that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan simply hates Israel and that is what has led to the decay in relations between the two countries. He sent this cable to the State Department despite offering no evidence whatsoever.  …

In some notes, I find hilarious comments made by some American diplomats who have little or no understanding of the Muslim religion. They would know better if they worked in the field to report back to the capital, and certainly, they need to familiarize themselves with the local culture, religion and customs to pass correct judgments. In a display of naïveté in a 2004 cable concerning a character analysis of Erdogan, Ambassador Eric Edelman claims Erdogan believes he was appointed by God. … if taken in literal form in Turkish, it would mean political suicide for Erdogan. He could never make such a claim as it would invite the wrath of conservative and liberal Muslims alike.

Can `Desperate Housewives’ Defeat al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia? Wikileaks
Posted on 12/09/2010 by Juan

… the [U.S.] consulate argues on May 9, 2009, that changes in media are having a wider effect. Apparently allowing the viewing of `Desperate Housewives’ and `David Letterman’ is intended by state programmers to combat extremism and foster cosmopolitanism in strongly conservative Saudi Arabia.

This strategy, by the way, does not work. The Egyptian government has been trying it for decades now, since the 1980s. Salacious television as a way of convincing people to turn away from the puritan Muslim Brotherhood has long been a policy of the Egyptian government. But Egypt is nevertheless having a massive religious revival. It turns out you can be a fundamentalist, watch Hollywood, and still go out and demonstrate for a more just social order. …

When Saudi Arabia permitted municipal elections in 2005, the Salafi fundamentalists swept them. That is where I would put my money if I were a betting man, not on the supposed moderating influences of watching Letterman and Eva Longoria.

8. Klepto-puppets and allies in the wars against Afghanistan and Pakistan

WikiLeaks: Afghan vice-president ‘landed in Dubai with $52m in cash’

WikiLeaks cables show US public-private conflict over Uzbekistan

Pakistan elites turn blind eye to war

… Tariq Ali, a Pakistani writer and historian, reacted to the WikiLeaks revelations swiftly and with a frustration and anger felt by many Pakistanis:

The WikiLeaks confirm what we already know: Pakistan is a US satrapy. Its military and political leaders constitute a venal elite happy to kill and maim its own people at the behest of a foreign power. The US proconsul in Islamabad, Anne Patterson, emerges as a shrewd diplomat warning her country of the consequences if they carry on as before. Amusing, but hardly a surprise, is that Zardari reassures the US that if he were assassinated, his sister would replace him and all would continue as before. Always nice to know that the country is regarded by its ruler as a personal fiefdom.

9. Look at how the state and its corporations react to free speech that matters

The west has fiscalized its basic power relationships through a web of contracts, loans, shareholdings, bank holdings and so on. In such an environment it is easy for speech to be “free” because a change in political will rarely leads to any change in these basic [relationships]. … We should always look at censorship as an economic signal that reveals the potential power of speech in that jurisdiction. The attacks against us by the U.S. point to a great hope, speech powerful enough to break the fiscal blockade.
— Julian Assange

10. Lebanon defense minister ‘offered invasion advice for Israel’
11. The U.S. opposes climate controls

12/08/2010
Copenhagen Climate Cables
The US and China Joined Forces Against Europe
By Gerald Traufetter

Last year’s climate summit in Copenhagen was a political disaster. Leaked US diplomatic cables now show why the summit failed so spectacularly. …

Confidential US diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks now show just how closely the world’s biggest polluters — the United States and China — colluded in the months leading up to the conference. …

When the leaders and representatives of 192 countries gathered in Copenhagen last December, everyone was talking about an agreement. However, at the decisive moment Europe’s politicians were forced to stand by helplessly while China, India, South Africa and Brazil met in a hotel room and took matters into their own hands. They took the draft Copenhagen agreement and struck off all binding obligations. Later on the plotters were joined by Barack Obama. The outcome of this paring-down is now known as the “Copenhagen Accord.”

WikiLeaks: The U.S. Must “Neutralize, Co-opt or Marginalize” Radical Latin American Bloc in Climate Negotiations

Nikolas Kozloff
December 7, 2010

As activists launch protests at the Cancún climate summit in Mexico, could negotiators be engaged in cynical backroom deals? In light of recent WikiLeaks disclosures, such an eventuality seems more than likely. Indeed, U.S. diplomatic cables show that the Americans have been trying to strong arm other countries in order to get their way at international summits. The cables, which go back to last year’s Copenhagen summit, show the U.S. as a manipulative and opportunistic power seeking to water down important environmental agreements.

Judging from documents, the WikiLeaks scandal could well turn into the Climate Gate scandal. When reporting to his colleagues, U.S. Chargé d’Affaires in La Paz John Creamer described Bolivian President Evo Morales’ climate justice activism in the most unflattering light. An impoverished Andean nation, Bolivia is poorly equipped to deal with the ravages of climate change and has been a leading critic of the United States and the Global North at international summits like Copenhagen. …

One would expect U.S. diplomats to be critical of Morales in their reporting, but in going over the WikiLeaks cables I’ve been struck by the remarkably supercilious tone and vindictive accusations hurled at the Bolivian leader. … Perhaps American diplomats genuinely had high placed intelligence on Morales upon which to base their reports, or maybe they simply wanted to satisfy their superiors in Washington with wishful propaganda.

P.S. –

History teaches us that when we discount what people are able to do, we are almost always wrong. Think of the perception of the French and after them the US government of what the Vietnamese peasants could do in the few years just before their liberation. Think of South Africa in the early 1980s. Algeria in the 1940s and 1950s. India in the 1920s and 30s. Think of the US South in the 1940s. Even here in Palestine, just think of the dismissal and opinions of pundits about the end of Palestine offered in 1928 (before the 1929 uprising), 1935 (before the 1936 uprising), 1955, 1970, 1981, 1986, and 1999.

That even the US administration has stood unable to effect even the minor change in Israeli colonial settler activities is just one indication that we are reaching a dead end in the old ways and the new ways and new actors must step forward. Things will change as power shifts to the people. Around the world, many are now realizing what is happening and few are leading the way of change.

WIKILEAKS deserves protection, not threats and attacks.

The overwhelming reason for the Democrats’ losses was their failure to take the necessary measures to ensure a robust recovery from the recession.

This is a case where it clearly would have been better to fight for something that you want, and lose, than fight for what you don’t want, and win.

— Mark Weisbrot

Of course, unemployment would be much worse today than 9 and a half percent if we hadn’t passed Obama’s inadequate stimulus, but you never were going to win in 2010 on 9 and a half percent unemployment. So Q1: Why was the 2009 stimulus so small? A1: Obama wanted an inadequate stimulus. Q2: Why did Obama want an inadequate stimulus? A2: That’s who he is: no “the Republicans and Blue Dogs made him do it,” that’s who he is.

Anyway, I disagreed yesterday with Jason Rosenbaum on the notion that Obama’s “giving in to Senate Democratic and Republican “moderates” to keep the size of the stimulus down” is what made the stimulus inadequate. Obama was and is one of the ‘moderates’ or blue dogs: the record shows that “giving in” happened only on a relatively small-scale, and that Obama’s initial $825 billion proposal — the one he wanted, pre-giving in — was only slightly less inadequate than the $787 billion package which eventually passed.

According to Mark Weisbrot’s colleague Dean Baker — “the person with the most serious claim” for predicting the onslaught of the housing/financial collapse — the stimulus Obama eventually got passed made up for only an eighth of the demand lost in the bursting of the financial and real estate bubbles. And for Obama’s initial, January 2009 proposal, before ensuing negotiations and compromises, Baker (and Krugman and others) had already pointed out the “much too small” problem (emphasis added):

Barack Obama’s big stimulus
The proposed $825bn economic stimulus package will do much to get the US back on track. But it needs to be even larger
Dean Baker
Guardian.co.uk
January 19, 2009

… The main features of the bill are very much on the right track. The biggest problem is that it should be larger. This downturn is so severe that this package may not be sufficient to offset even half of its impact.

… If we assume a multiplier effect of 1.4 for the stimulus package being debated in Congress, then the $400bn in annual spending will raise 2010 GDP by $560bn, less than half what would be needed to bring us back to full employment by CBO’s estimate and just more than one-third by mine.

By mid-2009 progressive economists were nearly uniformly urging Obama to pass a second stimulus. Obama and his advisors said it was ‘too soon’. Baker, for example, wrote emphatically:

In short, we badly need another very big dose of stimulus. Unfortunately, the politicians and pundits in Washington are either too ignorant, dishonest, or scared to talk about the $2 plus trillion stimulus that this economy needs. As a result, tens of millions of people will lose their jobs and/or their homes because of continued economic mismanagement.

Weisbrot also notes that there would’ve been (and would be today) almost no economic price for spending the amount of federal dollars needed to make up for the double bubble bursting:

The irony is that our economy remains in a situation where we could spend this money without even adding to the public debt burden. This may seem like magic but it is not. When the economy is this depressed, with high unemployment and unused capacity, the Federal Reserve can create money and loan it to the Treasury – and such money creation does not cause any problem of inflation. In fact, since 2007, the Fed has created more than $1.4 trillion . . . But inflation is still running at just 1.1 percent annually – a level that is too low, even for the Fed.

On the other hand, the price the people of the U.S. will pay for Obama ignoring the good advice of people like Baker and Krugman will be enormous, almost incalculable. The Republicans won on Tuesday, they will stop any effort at stimulating the economy, and are instead pushing the perversion of cutting back government spending — even balancing the budget? — in the middle of 9% plus unemployment. So that’s the next two years. Then, in 2012, we face a battle between Mr. Obama, inadequate stimulus personified, and some neanderthal pre-FDR economics Republican. So, that has us covered till 2016. And all because Obama GOT WHAT HE WANTED: a vastly inadequate stimulus.

“I don’t know how you ‘spoil’ a process that’s already rotten. The Democratic Party is just as much a part of the problem in their policies as the Republicans.” – LeAlan Jones

U.S. Senate, Illinois: Mark Kirk: 48% … Alexi Gianoulias: 46%  … LeAlan Jones: 3%

With less than $5000 bucks to spend, compared to RepubliCorp Mark Kirk’s $12.4 million and DemoCorp Alexi Giannoulias’s $8.4 million, Green Party candidate LeAlan Jones still captured 3% of the vote, preventing DemoCorp President Barack Obama’s man Alexi from winning the U.S. Senate seat for Illinois. According to CNN, Jones won 4% of Democratic votes, 8% of independents, and 2% of Republican votes.

The Libertarian Party candidate received too few votes to mention (at least at CNN and ABC), except at the Chicago Tribune, which distorted the Senate results as follows:

Green Party candidate LeAlan Jones and Libertarian candidate Mike Labno each had less than 4 percent.

Jones is an interesting guy, becoming well known in the Chicago area when he made two documentaries about life in the Ida B. Wells public housing project on the Southside. That’s where he began to learn the way the status quo political system works:

The setting for Jones’s two famous documentaries, the Ida B. Wells project at 39th and King, is all but gone now, razed as part of the Chicago Housing Authority’s Plan for Transformation, under which most of Chicago’s notorious housing projects have been demolished. Some of the residents were resettled in new mixed-income developments near their former homes, but many have been scattered across the metro area, breaking up extended families and communities. To Jones, the Plan for Transformation is a clear example of Democrats exploiting African-Americans. He says it’s benefited politicians, banks, developers, and real estate agents. “The only people who didn’t profit,” he says, “were the residents of public housing.”

Like all Green candidates, he rejects Obama’s health care reforms:

Jones thinks the federal health care legislation signed into law in March will be ineffective. He says he’d vote to repeal “Obamacare” and promote the single-payer bill drafted by Michigan’s John Conyers and Ohio’s Dennis Kucinich.

Good on ya, protest voters, and screw DemoCorp and RepubliCorp. Of course, I understand the corporate media will misinterpret the election results as an embrace of RepubliCorp and their feed the rich epiphanies. Yeah, right. Check out this latest CNN poll:

CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll. Oct. 27-30, 2010. N=1,006 adults nationwide. Margin of error ± 3.

“Which of the following is the most important issue facing the country today?“

The economy 52%
The federal budget deficit 8%
Education 8%
Health care 8%
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan 8%
Illegal immigration 8%
Terrorism 4%
Energy and environmental policies 4%

Tomorrow’s election is sad, particularly for those with their ears blasted by the two corporate parties advertising for the votes of the dwindling few who don’t get the joke, which is on everyone outside the top income brackets. Nonetheless, I will vote in the local and state elections, usually for Democrats, but half-knowing Governor Pat Quinn (here in Illinois) will do what the rich and big corporations want: instead of raising their taxes, (with bipartisan support) he’ll hellaciously cut back on stuff like public schools (hey, elite kids don’t go to there, so who give a damn?).

But on the national level, HELL no. How much Congresspeople from each party raised this 2010 election season from the “Finance/Insurance/Real Estate” sector: Democrats: $72.1 million; Republicans: $74.7 million.

Colin Crouch argues that the decline of those social classes which had made possible an active and critical mass politics has combined with the rise of global capitalism to produce a self-referential political class more concerned with forging links with wealthy business interests than with pursuing political programmes which meet the concerns of ordinary people. He shows how, in some respects, politics at the dawn of the twenty-first century returns us to a world familiar well before the start of the twentieth, when politics was a game played among elites.

Sad too to contemplate what some call the political event of the season, a Rand Paul security guy stepping (was it stomping; check the video) on a MoveOn operative’s shoulder (was it her head; check the video). That MoveOn so willfully and (yeah) knowingly misses what’s really going on in this country, and then hires college grads like Lauren Valle to spread the lame lie that DemoCorp (despite Clinton and now Obama) will save us from scary RepubliCorp. . . .

MoveOn.org activist Lauren Valle and Rand Paul supporter Tim Profitt were launched into the national spotlight following what may end up being the most infamous incident of the 2010 campaign season.

Valle was attempting to present Kentucky Senate candidate and tea party favorite Paul with a fake “Employee of the Month” award as part of MoveOn.org’s RepubliCorp initiative when she was wrestled down and briefly stomped on by Profitt. …

Oh well, you too can be a paid agent provacateur, if you know the rules (don’t tell anyone both parties are Corp and the election and Congress are a bipartisan sham):

RepubliCorp Bird-dogging Guide
…
RepubliCorp Stunts

They [sic] key to media attention is a little political theater. Here are a few idea for your bird-dogging event:

* Present your target with a RepubliCorp “Employee of the Month” award.

Under post-democracy, even the guerilla politics is corporate/Soros sponsored.

Meteor Blades still refuses to say why he banned Tom J, the secret censorship decision that inspired the Arab Writers Strike at Daily Kos. Weird, anti-openness must an important value for him and/or site property owner Markos Moulitsas, definitely more important than free speech. I mean, what is the problem, even the Daily Kos apparatchiks have lined up massively in favor (64% versus 28% against) of making banning an open process:

Well, otoh, there was this obscure exchange:

Meteor Blades, with respect, why was TomJ banned?

Sorry, I came here from FDL, I don’t know.

Also Jane Stillwater?

by thatvisionthing on Wed Oct 27, 2010 at 08:57:50 PM PDT

Multiple warnings, each previously suspended… (8+ / 0-)

… for a month and, after being reinstated, still either ignoring those warnings or violating the rules.

Don’t tell me what you believe. Tell me what you do and I’ll tell you what you believe.

by Meteor Blades on Wed Oct 27, 2010 at 09:08:55 PM PDT

What rule?

Was it Tom J’s comment with 2 HRs?

People here may know I/P rules but I don’t, sorry. Scanned the FAQs and still don’t get it. Thanks.

by thatvisionthing on Wed Oct 27, 2010 at 09:21:16 PM PDT

No answer.

But MB did take time in the Arab Strike Diary to tell three non-specified myfiredoglake users that they are lying about having been banned at Daily Kos. Since the Dkos banning process and who is banned is a complete secret, there is of course no way to know who’s lying and who isn’t (trust MB; asking to verify his statements is a bannable offense). Here’s Meteor Blades’ accusation (pro-censorship and anti-Palestinian recommenders noted):

For the record, at least three of.. (10+ / 0-)

Recommended by: Paul in Berkeley, LeftHandedMan, arielle, kalmoth, leftynyc, Corwin Weber, Its the Supreme Court Stupid, thebluecrayon, Mets102, angry marmot

…the “bannees” making “insightful contributions” on the myfdl comment thread of this diary are lying. They are NOT banned at all and have never been.

Don’t tell me what you believe. Tell me what you do and I’ll tell you what you believe.

by Meteor Blades on Wed Oct 27, 2010 at 08:21:54 PM PDT

P.S. Is it unintended irony, or does Meteor Blades’ tag line mean he wants to be known as a censor of political speech?

P.S.2. Arab Writers Strike at Daily Kos was yesterday’s 7th most commented on (294 comments) and 12th most viewed (553 viewers) diary at Daily Kos.

P.S.3. Here’s simone daud‘s original call for an Arab Writers Strike (non-Arabs welcome to join), and a reminder of what it is about:

We are definitely (5+ / 0-)

being personally abused in every essay.

I’m not feeling very welcome here.

The people that show up on every essay speaking to, and showing video of the crisis in Palestine get verbally abused and have their essays derailed by a vocal few who are trying to eliminate any Free Speech on the subject.

It is horrific when humanitarians and Peace Activists get shouted down by name calling and vile comments.

Tom J was a brilliant writer and a man concerned with our relatives there.

I had my ratings taken away months ago for uprating something by sheer accident, after removing it and apologizing for the scroll over. They were never returned.

I feel it is because I am an openly Arab man of Palestinian descent who speaks against the atrocities in Palestine.

But I am loathe to be silenced by those who throw “anti-semite” around to defend a Government that has run as far right amok as the Bush administration and beyond.

Let me sleep on this Simone.

by Peacenick on Sat Oct 23, 2010 at 04:23:28 PM PDT

P.S.4. For me, it is also about the big political blogs, and the obvious fact that they are the ‘public squares’ of the 21st century, where free speech rights have to be given priority over private property rights:

Herding sheep into bipartisan political positions (1+ / 4-)

is what censorship of the actual diversity of opinion among Democrats ends up being. And many of us are tired of the bipartisan and right-wing crap we get from the national Democratic Party and this Democratic Party subservient blog.

Free speech rights supersede Kos’s property rights. The correct analogy is claiming the right to free speech at a privately owned shopping mall. A shopping mall, like a big political [blog], is one of the only available ‘town squares’ of the 21st century.

by fairandleft on Wed Oct 27, 2010 at 03:16:12 PM PDT

Several reliable reports point to a bipartisan Debt-Commission-‘inspired’ slashing of Social Security and Medicare and other little goodies as the people’s reward for voting either Democrat or Republican November 2. It’s funny how the plans (see the three excerpts below) gets clearer and clearer as we approach the election, the PTB being so confident when both parties loudly signal they’re prepared to do their bidding. Some reporters then decide that it doesn’t matter if the rest of us know about the next very collegial and bipartisan hell the system is going to give us.

So, of course, whether we elect Dems or Repubs Nov. 2, good stuff will be slashed, and (btw) the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy will be made permanent. Y-a-w-w-n. So this election and its aftermath, like the last one, will simply be about the lesson Americans never learn: whoever pays for the elections gets what they want. And of course when it matters the ‘left’ and right TV and radio media will ditch and distract from that lesson. Like they are doing right now, even during this worst of all recessions with the President and Congress gung ho only to make it worse. BTW, I say 100 Democrats (but it will proabably turn out to be more) because only 135 of the 255 Democrats* in the House have ‘promised’ (and you know how good a Congressperson’s promise is) to vote no on Obama Debt Commission recommendations to cut Social Security or raise the ‘full benefits’ retirement age (from 67, where it is now).

And so, like any real leftist should, I now present my on-point evidence for the above:
1. Obama:

Obama likely to focus on deficit in next 2 years

Preparing for political life after a bruising election, President Barack Obama will put greater emphasis on fiscal discipline, a nod to a nation sick of spending and to a Congress poised to become more Republican, conservative and determined to stop him. …

While trying to save money, Obama will have to decide whether to bend to Republican and growing Democratic pressure to extend Bush-era tax cuts, even for the wealthy, that expire at year’s end. Obama wants to extend them for people making less than $200,000 and married couples making less than $250,000, but a broader extension is gaining favor with an increasing number of Democrats.

Moving to the fore will be a more serious focus on how to balance the federal budget and pay for the programs that keep sinking the country into debt.

2. Republicans:

In 2010, Republicans are … holding up their “Pledge to America” as a road map to fix the economy.

Balancing the budget is a major part of that pledge …

Rep. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) says … that Republicans will have to take a “serious look at Medicare and Medicaid and see what can be changed.” But Capito warns that it can’t just be the Republicans formulating this plan.

“When you talk about something as deeply personal to the American family as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, ” she says, “this is where I think hopefully we can take down the hammers and try to find a bipartisan solution.”

Even so, Capito sees balancing the budget in the first year as a “lofty goal.”

“I think you’ll see a movement toward that, but I don’t believe that achieving a balanced budget in one year is realistically achievable,” she says.

3. Bipartisan:

Suddenly, President Barack Obama is talking about the record $1.42 trillion US deficit (which has contributed to a $13.6 trillion national debt). In the New Year, he suggests, he is going to “get serious” and have a “tough conversation” about the deficit:

If we’re going to get serious about the deficit, then we’re going to have to look at everything: entitlements, defense spending, revenues. … And that’s going to be a tough conversation.

John Boehner, hoping to be the new Speaker of the House of Representatives, is talking about Republican eagerness to tackle the deficit:

They’re going to have to signal some kind of willingness to work with Republicans to cut spending. Cutting government spending is what the American people want, and it’s an approach neither party has tried yet.

*I realize the actual number is 136, but one of those is Eleanor Holmes-Norton, the DC rep who has no final vote on anything.

The American economy is falling apart – but, as an election approaches, the public debate concerns the following: College pranks at Baylor in the 1980s; a high school date with a dabbler in witchcraft; the fact that someone called someone a whore; a joke about being a bearded Marxist in a college newspaper.  

  Daily Howler, October 20, 2010

Monday’s Rachel Maddow Show was a good example of the problem of both ‘Republican’ and ‘Democratic’ mainstream political shows: screw serious evidence, me and my audience got some bonding to do! And, as always, Daily Howler made the point well and provocatively. The larger point I took away from his screed about Monday’s show, and the Howler quote above in particular (whether or not it is/was Howler’s point), is that IT IS A BIPARTISAN PROJECT to distort and distract election and political coverage away from the economic crisis and related injustices. (The Howler’s main purpose, whether its author Bob Somerby realizes it or not, is to make this point with airtight specificity.)
Let’s now focus on the specifics of plutocracy Democrat Maddow’s Monday show, but begin with Howler’s conclusion, because it gives the overview through which to observe the specific failure of Maddow’s latest “those damn Republicans” myth/argument:

… a final point should be offered: Maddow’s performance was very much like the kind of dreck that gets served on Fox on a nightly basis. On that much-maligned news channel, prime time hosts like Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly simply assert, again and again, that the Beltway media are spinning things the Democrats’ way. They rarely feel the need to offer serious evidence for their sweeping claims; they seem to assume that their viewers won’t notice the lack of evidence, or will be too eager to swallow the message. On Monday, Maddow was playing this same sweet game for a different tribe. She treated 1.3 million liberal viewers like a gang of low-IQ rubes.

This is Daily Howler’s usual complaint against Maddow and nearly all mainstream political pundits and talk show hosts: not presenting serious evidence for your claims. Maddow’s charge opened her show …

Over and over, for the next sixteen minutes, Maddow kept saying that “the Beltway media” is promoting the GOP’s campaign messages-is “spinning the elections for them.” …

Maddow’s first of two pieces of ‘evidence’:

So here’s just one example. Here is the spin as dictated to us by the punditocracy:

It’s the deficit! That’s what the elections are all about, the deficit! The reasons Republican are going to pick up seats in this election is because people are fed up with the deficit! That’s the media spin.

(Reading from news analysis piece in The Hill):

“The Republican Party’s focus on reducing the federal deficit may be resonating with independent voters who could swing the midterm elections.”

You know, conveniently, here’s that exact same spin in a typical Republican campaign ad. [She then plays a Republican campaign ad.]

Howler’s comment:

…that brief quotation from The Hill constitutes one of only two examples of the way “the Beltway media” are allegedly “spinning the elections for the GOP.” And yet, there’s nothing much wrong with the report in question. In that analysis piece (click here), Sean Miller discusses a recent poll sponsored by The Hill-a poll in which 52 percent of independent voters “cited debt reduction as a priority, compared with only 39 percent who said additional federal spending to create jobs is more important.” (Headline: “Independents prefer cutting the deficit to spending on jobs.”) On the basis of this stated preference, Miller says that the GOP’s focus on the deficit might help them win the congressional districts where the poll was conducted.

As a bit of election analysis, this is thoroughly common-place stuff-and The Hill, a Capitol Hill publication, hardly defines “the Beltway media.” And yet, this is one of only two examples of the vast plot by that Beltway media-the plot against which Maddow inveighed for sixteen minutes.

Maddow’s second and final piece of ‘evidence’ for the statement that the Beltway media are selling us the Republican spin this campaign season:

Big government is what explains what’s going to happen in these elections! The Republicans are poised to pick up seats in these elections because they represent a rejection of big government.

That’s what we’re hearing from the media.

(Quoting headline from opinion column in Real Clear Politics:)

“As Views of Big Government Go, So Go Dems Out the Door.”

Conveniently, it’s not just what we’re hearing in the media. It’s also what we are hearing from the people who are trying to elect Republicans this year.

Howler’s take:

Maddow quoted the headline of this column-another piece in which the author cited polling data to explain why voters are tilting Republican. This time, the data came from a Gallup survey-but the analysis was perfectly sensible.

So, no serious evidence presented for the claim, which may nonetheless be true, but the point is, present serious evidence if you want to be taken seriously. And I want leftist/progressive claims to be taken seriously, and for viewers to notice the difference between ‘evidence-free’ right-wing arguers and leftist ones. But does Maddow want to be taken seriously? No, that’s not IMHO what her show is about; the show in fact is simply a bonding exercise, accepting what she says on faith as a sign you’re part of her camp.

Note, by the way, that a ‘Republicans control the media’ spin fits well into the (at this point absurdly absurd) myth that ‘Republicans vs. Democrats’ is the main conflict in American politics. Rather than what is much more in evidence especially since the rise of Clinton and Obama, that a bipartisan plutocracy rules us and screws us over (and over). But you won’t bond with Maddow over that truth; she’s all about squawking over and lending credibility to the play-acting ‘fight show’ the Repub/Dems put on for us every two years.

((Expanded up from this comment.))

Barbara Boxer Gets Progressive Support Despite Checkered Record on Human Rights, International Law

Boxer takes the positions she does not because AIPAC forces her, but because she can get progressives to campaign for her, donate money to her, and vote for her anyway.

By Stephen Zunes
October 18, 2010

Barbara Boxer shaking hands with Ariel Sharon

“The army knows the kids are there to collect. They watch them every day and they know they have no weapons,” said Mohammed Abu Rukbi, a fieldworker with DCI. “They usually fire warning shots but the kids don’t take much notice.”

Mohammed Sobboh, 17, [ABOVE] was shot just above the knee on August 25 when he was 800 metres from the border, he said. The 12 people in his family have no other income and are not entitled to aid from the UN as they are not refugees.

Israeli soldiers shot dead a horse and a donkey used by Mohammed and his brothers to carry the rubble, he said.

Gaza teens brave IDF fire to collect salvaged building materials
In three months, soldiers shot and wounded 10 youths collecting building materials in expanded buffer zone.
By Amira Hass
October 10, 2010

In the course of three months this summer Israeli soldiers shot and wounded 10 Palestinian teenagers who collect building materials from demolished structures in the former Israeli settlements and the Erez industrial zone in the northern Gaza Strip, dozens or hundreds of meters from the border. Palestinians believe the shootings are aimed at keeping people away from these areas, but despite the great risk dozens of nearby residents, many of them minors, continue to come in order to collect bits of cement and gravel from inside the buildings that were destroyed by the Israel Defense Forces around the time of the 2005 disengagement, and sell them to contractors and factories in the Strip. …

Every day dozens of people come to the ruins of the industrial zone and the settlements, such as Elei Sinai, in wagons drawn by donkeys or horses. One of the teens, who was shot on August 25, told Defence for Children that in recent months soldiers also shot and killed one of the donkeys and three of the horses.

Most of the children tell of a father who is unemployed. Some were among the thousands of Gazans who worked in Israel up until 2006, when their work permits were revoked. The father of one of the teens was forced to close his store as a result of Israel’s ban on the entry of goods it did not define as “humanitarian” into the Strip. After the death, about two years ago, of a 14-year-old shooting victim identified as “N.,” the teen dropped out of school to help support his family. That is the story of all these teens, dropping out and going out to work. They all said in their statements that they are afraid to go back to collecting gravel. Some have difficulty walking or carrying heavy loads as a result of their injuries.

Some of the teens sold vegetables in the streets of Gaza City, earning only about NIS 20 or NIS 30 per day, before hearing from neighbors or acquaintances that one could make NIS 40 or more from collecting gravel.

Nine year old Amal and her twelve year old brother Mahmoud witnessed their father and brother being shot dead.  Their house was also destroyed. Amal was injured and now lives with shrapnel embedded in her brain which leads to blinding headaches and visual impairment.  She struggles with her homework and often finds it difficult to help her mother around the house. Amal says her wish is to become a doctor and help sick people.

Omsyatte, whose home was destroyed by F16s during the 2008 military offensive.

Nasser Abu Said outside the shrapnel-riddled home where his wife, Ne’ema, was killed by Israeli artillery.

Mother of five killed by Israeli artillery fire close to Gaza buffer zone
Three relatives also wounded in shelling on Gaza border, as family say no rockets were heard being fired before attack
Harriet Sherwood in Johar a-Deek
Friday 16 July 2010

…According to the woman’s husband, Nasser Abu Said, 37, the attack began without warning at about 8.30pm on Tuesday with two shells being fired as the family of 17 sat outside their house in the village of Johar a-Deek. Apart from Nasser and his 65-year-old father, the entire group was women and children.

“It was completely quiet, there were no rockets being fired or we wouldn’t have been sitting outside,” he said, referring to Qassam missiles launched by militants into Israel.

His sister and his brother’s wife were injured by shrapnel. The family moved indoors and called an ambulance. “About 10 minutes later the ambulance called back to say the Israelis had refused them permission to come to the house,” said Nasser.

His wife Ne’ema, 33, soon realised their youngest son, Jaber, was not among the children she was attempting to calm down, and was probably asleep on a mattress outside that he often shared with his grandfather.

As she went to fetch the toddler, another shell landed. “I called to my wife three times,” said Nasser, who realised his father had also been badly injured in his leg and stomach. “I could hear small noises coming from her. I knew she was dying.”

Via Palestinian co-ordinators, the IDF told the family that anyone going outside the house would be shot dead. Nasser began to tend to his injured father, knowing he could not reach his dying wife.

“I was holding myself in, especially in front of the children,” he said. The children were crying hysterically and some had wet themselves, he added.

After two hours, an ambulance was allowed to reach the family. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), which investigated the incident, said Ne’ema and her wounded relatives were taken to al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital in Deir al-Balah, where it was confirmed she had died from shrapnel wounds.

The Israeli Defence Force (IDF) said it had identified a number of suspects close to the border. “An IDF force fired at the suspects and identified hitting them,” it said. The incident was being investigated, it added, but declined to say why ambulances had not been allowed to reach the family. …

29 December 2008: Palestinian children walk past a destroyed mosque and houses after they were hit by an Israeli missile strike that killed Jawaher Baalusha, 4, and her four sisters in the northern Gaza Strip.

29 December 2008: A Palestinian man carries his wounded child to the treatment room of Kamal Adwan hospital following an Israeli missile strike in Beit Lahiya.

1 January 2009: A Palestinian woman with two wounded members of her family in hospital following an Israeli missile strike in Beit Hanoun. Israel dropped a bomb on the home of a Hamas strongman, killing him along with two wives and four children in the first attack on the top leadership of Gaza’s rulers.

5 January 2009: A Palestinian woman sits on the floor beside her baby wounded by an Israeli tank shell, at al-Shifa hospital in Gaza. An Israeli tank shell killed three Palestinian children in their home in eastern Gaza City, medical officials said.

Gaza’s children suffer as conflict enters the classroom
The Israeli blockade and years of fighting have taken their toll on Gaza’s schools, where failure rates are rapidly rising
Rory McCarthy in Gaza City
Friday 16 May 2008

On this morning there was no electricity for the first four hours of school, there were no lights and staff had to use a whistle instead of the electric school bell. There was no running water, save what had been held in reserve in a spare tank at the bathroom. There was no bread for sale in the canteen because of shortages at the bakeries, even though many of the children rely on the small school shop to buy their breakfast. This, a result of the Israeli economic blockade of Gaza, was an ordinary day in extraordinary times.

More worrying are warning signs of a broader disintegration of society, such as those seen in exam results. Last autumn, the UN, which runs some of the best schools in Gaza, noted a sharp increase in exam failures. The failure rate in Arabic between ages nine and 15 was between 34.9% and 61.1% . In maths at the same age the failure rate was even higher at more than 65% , peaking at around age 11 with an astonishing failure rate of 90%. That compares with a failure rate of just 10% at UN schools in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria.

“There’s been a big change. There’s no enjoyment in the children’s lives, no going out, no picnics. There’s a lot of pressure on them and I can feel it in the class,” said al-Katib. “They don’t do their homework, they make any excuse – no electricity, or they were sick, or tired. They are less attentive in class than they used to be.”

It is not hard to cast a protest vote for a U.S. Senate candidate who expresses your values on Israel and Palestine.

Israel/Palestine position of Green Party California U.S. Senate candidate, Duane Roberts:

Duane Supports…  Ending all U.S. military and economic aid to the state of Israel and the right of self-determination for the Palestinian people, including the right of refugees to return.

(Another state with two major party reactionaries to choose from is Illinois) Israel/Palestine position of Green Party Illinois U.S. Senate candidate, LeAlan Jones:

We should adopt the Israel-Palestine single-state solution and end apartheid in the Middle East. Nations should be based on our collective humanity, not our divisive religions. and we must take steps guarantee that no taxpayer money supports state-sponsored terrorism or assassination. This means no more investing in Israel bonds, Saudi Arabia or China.