By Stephen Lendman

Let’s face it, a millennia or longer of vicious persecution of Jews in most of Europe, culminating in the Holocaust, has given the monstrously deformed state of Israel the perfect and perennial cover for its own criminality.—Eds

Rachel Corrie: American member of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). An unknown to 99.999 of Americans, and no movies are being optioned on her tragic biography. You ever wonder why?

On May 16, at 6:54AM Gaza time (3:54AM GMT), in international waters, an Israeli naval vessel attacked the Malaysian owned Spirit of Rachel Corrie ship (officially the MV Finch), carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza. More details below.

Lawless Monday followed Nakba Day’s bloody Sunday, Israeli security forces assaulting unprecedented numbers of nonviolent demonstrators in Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and along the Lebanese/Syrian borders.

Egypt was complicit, blocking activists from reaching Rafah. So was Jordan, forcefully preventing Palestinian supporters from approaching the King Hussein Jordan River Crossing Point.

Nonetheless, the day was potentially historic. Activists hope it will inspire greater global support for Palestinian liberation and justice, what only hindsight will show.

Up to two dozen were killed, scores injured, and many arrested, soldiers and police firing high-velocity tear gas canisters at point blank range, rubber bullets, live ammunition, and tank shell warning shots, a shocking display of violence given scant coverage in America’s media.

Now this, Israelis attacking Rachel Corrie’s spirit after an Israeli bulldozer operator killed her in Gaza on March 16, 2003. Trying to stop a Rafah refugee camp home’s demolition, witnesses said she climbed atop the giant Caterpillar tractor, spoke to the driver, climbed down, knelt 10 – 20 meters in front in clear view, blocking its path with her body. With activists screaming for it to stop, the soldier-operator crushed her to death deliberately, running her over twice to be sure.

On May 14, 2010, the MV Rachael Corrie sailed from Europe to Gaza. Other vessels, nine in all, tried to break the siege to deliver vitally needed aid, including over 10,000 tons of food, medicines, educational and construction materials.

They never made it. Israeli commandos intercepted them, killing at least nine unarmed activists on board the Mavi Marmara mother ship, injuring dozens, and arresting survivors. After stealing their property and harassing them for several days in confinement to deter future missions, they were released and sent home.

Israel miscalculated. They’re coming. Besides US and other initiatives, the European Campaign to End the Siege on Gaza (ECESG) plans new missions to deliver essentially needed aid.

It’s an “umbrella body of 34 European human rights and humanitarian organizations,” supporting the right of Palestinians “to live in peace and dignity,” to be free from occupation, and to have “their own independent and sovereign state.” It also “encourages all peoples of conscience and human rights advocates to intensify their efforts to highlight this life-threatening issue and end the catastrophe.”

Its web site provides current information of its mission, including planned events and actions, accessed through the following link:  http://www.savegaza.eu/eng/

Saying they won’t be intimidated, they’re “putting Israel on notice,” adding:

“We are Coming
We are Unarmed
We are Civilian
You have no right to threaten us
We Expect to Reach Gaza without any Interference.”

In fact, Israel will confront them belligerently, including a planned FREEDOM FLOTILLA – STAY HUMAN voyage honoring slain journalist/activist Vittorio Arrigoni, a heroic freedom fighter like Rachel. Martyred for a just cause, their spirit inspires others to go on. Indeed, their right over wrong commitment won’t ever be deterred, a lesson Israel insists on learning the hard way.

“There is nothing Israel – or our own governments – can do to frighten us into abandoning the 1.6 million ‘prisoners’ of Gaza,” said ECESG spokesperson Rami Abdo. “We stand on the right side of history. If they continue their campaign of tyranny, however, we will only become more determined.”

In fact, organizers of last May’s “Freedom Flotilla” plan a mid-June “Freedom Flotilla Two. (FF 2).” Activists from 22 European, North American and Asian Free Gaza Movement-connected humanitarian organizations will attempt to break Israel’s siege and deliver vitally needed aid.

Around 15 ships and over 1,000 activists are involved, sailing from various ports. Israel said preparations are underway to stop them, perhaps as violently as against last May’s mission.

On April 9 and 10, its Steering Committee met in Athens, continuing mission preparations. Aware of Israel’s plans, they’re:”calling on all our governments, the international community and the United Nations not to succumb to Israel’s intimidation. Governments need to fulfill their ‘responsibility to protect’ their own citizens.”

An ECESG initiative, FF 2 partners include participants from over 50 countries, including European Jews for a Just Peace.

Spirit of Rachel Corrie Attacked

Sponsored by the Perdana Global Peace Foundation (PGPF), headed by former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed, a May 16 press release explained what happened, accessed from the following link:

http://www.perdana4peace.net/?p=2654

Mohamed said:  “The Palestinian struggle is nothing more than a struggle for justice, to which they, as much as everyone else, have a right.”

He knows and supports it. Israel, Washington, and most other Western nations spurn it, denying Palestinians their international law guaranteed rights, including to life.

On May 16, Global Research editor Michel Chossudovsky featured the incident on Global Research.ca, a link accessing his account below:  http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24783

He said an Israeli and Egyptian ship intercepted MV Finch in international waters, an act of piracy, adding that new details will be posted when learned.

On May 11, the ship departed Port of Piraeus, Greece, carrying vitally needed plastic sewage pipes to restore the system Israel destroyed in its 2007 – 08 Cast Lead attack. Under siege, restoration can’t happen without help.

As a result, up to 95% of Gaza’s aquifer water is unsafe to drink because Israeli forces destroyed 20 km of water pipes, 7.5 km of sewage pipes, and 5,700 mobile water tanks. In 2009, Amnesty International (AI) addressed the problem in its report titled, “Troubled Waters – Palestinians Denied Fair Access to Water.”

Moreover, Military Orders applying only to Palestinians give Israel control over water, including:

— No. 92 controlling all West Bank and Gaza water;
— No. 158 stipulating that Palestinians can’t construct water installations without (nearly impossible to get) permits; moreover, those built without them will be confiscated; and
— No. 291 annulling all land and water-related arrangements prior to the occupation.

Destroyed and under siege, Gaza’s Coastal Aquifer is polluted by raw sewage from waste collection pond cesspits and seawater, itself contaminated by about 80 million liters of untreated or partially treated daily discharges into the Mediterranean Sea.

As a result, waterborne diseases are common, UNWRA reporting in February 2009 that:

“Water diarrhea as well as acute bloody diarrhea remain the major causes of morbidity among reportable infectious diseases in (Gaza’s) refugee population….”

In September 2009, according to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP):

“The pollution of groundwater is contributing to two main types of water contamination in the Gaza Strip. First and most importantly, it is causing the nitrate levels in the groundwater to increase. In most parts of (Gaza), especially around areas of intensive sewage infiltration, the nitrate level in groundwater is far above (accepted) guidelines….Second, because the water abstracted now is high in salt, the sewage is also very saline. (It’s well known that higher drinking water nitrate levels) can induce methemoglobinaemia (a blood disorder) in young children.”

Moreover, Gaza’s shoreline is polluted, posing serious health hazards because raw sewage is dumped daily into the Mediterranean Sea through 16 discharge sites along the coast.

Gaza TV News.com quoted PGPF member Shamsul Azhar saying: After Israeli forces fired warning shots, it forced MV Finch “to anchor in Egyptian waters, 30 nautical miles from Gaza.”

Malaysian journalist on board, Alang Mendahara, said:  “The Israeli naval vessel fired a warning shot at us upon approaching and asked us to leave the waters, but the ship’s captain refused and the Israelis fired again, circling the MV Finch before firing twice more.”

Bendahara said ship participants included seven Malaysians, two Irish, two Indians and a Canadian. No one was hurt. Events like this are fluid. A follow-up article will explain more if relevant information permits.

For now, Israeli remains a global menace and no fit state to live in, including for Jews.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.

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By Phil Rockstroh

“Everything that everyone is afraid of has already happened: The fragility of capitalism, which we don’t want to admit; the loss of the empire of the United States; and American exceptionalism. In fact, American exceptionalism is that we are exceptionally backward in about fifteen different categories, from education to infrastructure. But we’re in a stage of denial: we want to re-establish things as they used to be, to put the country back where it was.” — James Hillman

Most of the men I grew up with in Alabama and Georgia deny the veracity of climate change. They are unwilling to make the connection between their ownership (actually the bank’s) of SUVs and oversized pickup trucks and the super storms and massive floods that, now with alarming regularity, ravish the region.

Because their besieged sense of self is intermeshed with their motor vehicles, they hold fast to these symbols of the fading world they know. In their imaginings, these gruesome, noxious (and obnoxious) machines represent power and mobility — exactly the aspects of their lives that have been diminished by the demands and degradations of oligarchic capitalism.

By their self-imprisonment in these sorts of compensatory fantasies, they choose to risk their children’s future, rather than, as one victim of his own curdling testosterone expressed to me recently on FaceBook, “[give up his over-sized pick-up] and drive a 4-wheel vagina, algore-mobile.”

A deep-rooted, malignant anger regarding their diminished sense of manhood seethes at the core of pronouncements such as that, and the following, shared on my FaceBook scroll, this past Earth Day: “Happy Earhart day!!! How did you celebrate? I clubbed an adorable baby harp seal, dumped a barrel of waste oil down the storm drain, and started a giant tire fire!!! Good times….”

The sentiment expressed above is an imprecatory prayer, borne of uneasy submission i.e., the callow voice of deep denial, a manifestation of a culturally re-enforced, self-protective cynicism — a reflexive negation of novel ideas that masks a besieged psyche; it is the nihilistic rage appropriated by the powerless serving as a bulwark against the anxiety created by shifting circumstances and buffeted verities.

In the U.S., life keeps changing for the working class — and not for the better. Hence, an inner voice of doubt and despair falsely informs these men that the agents and effects of change will be of no help to them personally…that no one (especially smug, know-it-all liberals) can be of service to you, and, worse, what little you have amassed will be lost.

It is a common (unspoken) fear of the men I grew up around down south that if they were to let go of what little they clutch, nothing would arrive to replace what would be lost. There will be no place reserved for them and their families in the new situations and novel arrangements that (by their addled take on the situation) elitist environmentalist snobs contrive to force upon them.

Moreover, in the corporate state, the loss of community, in combination with the commercially-rendered sameness of the environment and the all-encompassing, manic insistency of mass media — both of which are so devoid of depth, context and meaning — it has become increasingly difficult for an individual to gain then retain the sense of self necessary to know where one exists in relationship to time, place, and changing social and political circumstance.

How is it possible to move in the direction of propitious change when the demands and distractions of the corporate/consumer state have negated one’s ability to remain still and focus long enough to even grasp the nature of the problem?

The relentless exploitation of both earthscape and timescape has had a catastrophic effect upon the inner realms of thoughts, dreams, and imaginings of the citizen/consumers of the neo-liberal economic superstate.

Loss of place and an attendant crisis of identity are inextricably bound to the angst and anomie so evident in the present neo-liberal epoch: Being bereft of connection to land, sky, sea, and polis creates a profound sense of unease.

In contrast, a powerful sense of presence rises from within when standing before oceans, rivers, mountains, and even amid streams of human currents traversing the streets and boulevards of great cities. Conversely, where are we, in relationship to the truths of our being, when we are waiting for an order of processed, fast food in a line of automobiles idling at a drive-thru window or we are engaged in hollow communion with the sundry, glowing screens of information age appliances?

One’s sense of self and one’s beliefs, as well as, the mythos and traditions of a people are inextricably bound with place, landscape, and social situation. When I was a child, growing up in Alabama and Georgia, on occasions such as backcountry fishing expeditions, I would, at times, come in contact with rural African American farmers who still lived by the agrarian rhythms of the nineteenth century.

Occasionally, taking refuge from the afternoon heat of high summer, we would lounge on wooden porches and snap green beans, and I would listen as they quoted scripture.

The Jesus of their belief system was born of humble beginnings (a mere seed) and grew beneath the hot sun, but, at the height of maturity, was cut down, sacrificed so they may live, then, like their life-sustaining crops, was resurrected as next year’s seed crop. Suffused with a metaphoric analog of the criteria they lived day to day, these tales held resonance for these rural, farming people; the metaphors resounded with the verities of place and circumstance. The figure of Christ was as real to them as the snap beans beneath their fingertips.

Now, in an era in which the destination of most all of our objects and accoutrement is the landfill, Deep South mega-churches espouse a cosmology that resonates from a junk food paradigm: a Gospel of The Drive Thru Jesus…when The Rapture comes our corporeal bodies will be cast aside like fast food wrappers.

All in all, for both Christians and for secular-minded, market economy true believers, a belief in economic providence has proven our undoing — an insistence on its miraculous influence left us mistaking ad-hoc, bubble-borne affluence for a soul-vivifying portion of divine grace. The corporate/consumer state’s trickster gods of fast buck commerce offer drive-thru-window epiphanies. Members of the congregation of the Church of Free Market miracles believe their prayers will always be answered: Instantly, the consumer state’s homilies of perpetual gratification arrive — their voices crackling like a burning bush from drive-thru order-boxes.

Yet the redeemer gods of product placement cannot provide our dying culture with a longer shelf life. Belief in the deities of empyreal marketplace might provisionally banish doubt and diffidence — yet this mythos cannot shelter us from the anonymous fury of the exponential mathematics of global systems shifted into entropic runaway.

Although every generation inherits a howling wasteland and dwells in structures constructed of the bleached bone legacy of past generations — you’d have to go back to Late Cretaceous to find a generation that stands at the threshold of a mass die-off as we human beings do at present.

The Greek tragedians would have grasped the manic and destructive nature of late capitalism…how an obsessively heroic quest for victory carries the seeds of one’s undoing; ergo, by an over-reliance on his strengths and virtues the classical hero brought on his own demise — because the habit of heroic action rendered him closed off to novel awareness.

Victory is a closed system; in contrast, defeat opens one to the possibility of new adaptations.

You win a while, and then it’s done –
Your little winning streak.
And summoned now to deal
With your invincible defeat,
–Leonard Cohen

In the case of Greek tragedy, the hero (even the collective mindset of a people) cannot, in the long run, thrive evincing victory-engendered hubris. He will wend towards tragedy; he, with each successive triumph, will become so self-encapsulated with self-regard that only trauma will reopen his heart to the intimacies availed by earth and eternity

Jason will ignore all council and bring his trophy of war, Medea, back to Corinth, setting events in motion that will cause him to lose everything he loves. He will die alone, in demented revelry, crushed beneath the rotting stern of the Argo, the ship that bore him to glory.

You lose your grip, and then you slip
Into the Masterpiece.
–Leonard Cohen

Apropos, facing tragedy, to paraphrase Camus, is the opposite of naivety. Yet we go on, even though we think we cannot, when we bear the knowledge of the ultimate futility of our aspirations. Although struggling against overwhelming power and collective delusion seems futile, such endeavors thwart one’s drive for perfection: When we seek paradise, we find paradox. Over the long term, the manner we receive, respond, and are changed by these exchanges with the world is called (our) character.

In the sorrow of defeat, one gains the possibility of identification with the oppressed people of the earth. Loss brings an intermingling with the inherent beauty of the neglected things of the world.

It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) a disaster. –Elizabeth Bishop

In my better (too rare) moments, I take Walt Whitman’s approach: I believe an individual should endeavor to connect, mingle, even merge one’s broken heart with the various and varied things of the world…polis, people, and landscape.

There are many things, although vile and ugly, I remain on speaking terms with, extant and within me. Although, our cities are decayed, people troubled and landscapes degraded, I don’t avoid those places and situations — because this is the criteria with which I was given to work, by time and circumstance.

Even, at present, towards empire’s end, when we find ourselves bearing much grief, we are stranded amid ferocious beauty.

Where does one find succor and seeds of renewal in times such as these?

It might prove helpful to glance back at what has been dubbed the “do-it-yourself-art” practiced by the pioneers of Punk Rock.

Bored blind by tedious, onanistic guitar solos of the arena rock era, they approached their instruments with a minimalistic aesthetic. In other words, many burned with such fervor to seize back rock and roll from the stultifying, velvet rope elitism of the period that they had neither the time nor inclination to master more than three cords on their instruments — which they played very fast — and did for scant financial compensation, and even less acclaim, in shot-out clubs in decayed downtown locations such as Manhattan’s Bowery district, thus reintroducing the dirty, lowdown exuberance and subversive intimacy of early rock and roll, plus establishing the enduring principle that being an imbecilic, rock and roll egoist should be a democratic process — not exclusively limited to guitar technocrats or even those individuals possessed of the tyranny of talent.

Accordingly, we can cultivate gardens (individual and communal) appropriating the ash of yesterday’s excesses and the mulch of victories long past; we can plant heirloom seeds, both terrestrial and mnemonic. Thus beginning to allow our lives to become imbrued with the purpose and meaning that arrives when one’s labors are directed at making the world anew. While one cannot know the future, one can begin to move away from a reliance upon a dysfunctional present.

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: phil@philrockstroh.com. Visit Phil’s website http://philrockstroh.com/ And at FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000711907499

By Alex Lantier  | 16 May 2011
The World Socialist Web Site

Dominique Strauss-Kahn

International Monetary Fund (IMF) head Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested early Sunday morning on charges of criminal sex acts, attempted rape, and unlawful imprisonment, after an alleged encounter with a chambermaid at a Sofitel hotel in New York City.

Strauss-Kahn was due to travel to Berlin to discuss the Greek bailout and European financial crises with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. He was also scheduled to speak to officials of France’s Socialist Party (PS), France’s main bourgeois “left” party, of which he is a high-ranking member. Strauss-Kahn was until yesterday seen as the PS’s most likely candidate in the 2012 French presidential elections to challenge President Nicolas Sarkozy.

According to a 32-year-old Sofitel employee, however, Strauss-Kahn assaulted her at 1 p.m. on Saturday, after she entered his $3,000-a-night suite to clean it, not realizing he was still there. He allegedly emerged from the bathroom naked, chased her down a hallway, and sexually assaulted her after dragging her into a bedroom, though she was subsequently able to break free.

After the woman escaped, she notified other hotel staff, who called the New York Police Department (NYPD). According to US authorities, Strauss-Kahn then fled his hotel room, leaving his cell phone behind, but was detained by Port Authority of New York and New Jersey police officers in the first class cabin of Air France Flight 23 at 4:40 p.m., ten minutes before the flight left for Paris.

The Sofitel employee was taken to Manhattan’s Roosevelt Hospital to be treated for minor injuries. Jorge Tito, a manager at the Accor chain that owns Sofitel, issued a statement declaring, “We would like to point out that our employee worked at the Sofitel New York for three years and was completely satisfactory in terms of her work and behavior.”

Strauss-Kahn was taken to the NYPD’s Special Victims office and was arrested at 2:15 a.m. Sunday. Strauss-Kahn’s attorney, Benjamin Brafman, said his client denied all charges and would plead not guilty.

Anne Sinclair—a former TV journalist who is Strauss-Kahn’s third wife, and a multi-millionaire heiress to the fortune of art dealer Paul Rosenberg—released a brief statement saying that she had no doubt “that his innocence will be established.” According to a report in France-Soir, she plans to investigate the Sofitel employee.

An IMF spokeswoman acknowledged Strauss-Kahn’s arrest, adding that “the IMF remains fully functioning and operational.” The IMF named former JP Morgan and US Treasury executive John Lipsky, the IMF number two official under Strauss-Kahn, as acting managing director.

Strauss-Kahn has faced repeated allegations of sexual improprieties in recent years, from both right-wing and PS sources. In 2007, journalist Tristane Banon alleged that he had sexually assaulted her years before, though she did not press charges amid fears that it might end her career. In 2008 PS deputy Aurélie Filipetti said that, after a “very blunt and insistent” proposal from Strauss-Kahn, “I arranged never to find myself alone with him in a closed location.”

After Strauss-Kahn’s 2008 affair with IMF employee and Hungarian economist Piroska Nagy came to light, an IMF investigation concluded that the relationship “reflected a serious error of judgment.”

A minister in several Socialist Party governments, Strauss-Kahn personifies the organization’s reactionary politics—a party of the financial aristocracy profoundly hostile to socialism and to the struggles of the working class. It underscores the profoundly dishonest, reactionary role of various “left” groups in France—such as the New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA) or Workers Struggle (LO)—who still present the PS as a socialist or “left” party.

Strauss-Kahn began in the 1970s as a member of the Union of Communist Students (UEC), the youth movement of the Stalinist French Communist Party (PCF), while a student of statistics, economics, and law. In 1976 he joined the Socialist Party (PS), then a newly-formed electoral vehicle for François Mitterrand.

This was part of a broad movement as student ex-radicals, who were politicized after the 1968 student protests and general strike, and were recruited to form what would become the bourgeoisie’s main political personnel in the 1980s, under Mitterrand’s presidency.

Numerous figures from pseudo-”left” organizations also joined the PS at this time, rising to leading positions. These included (from the Revolutionary Communist League [LCR], now the New Anti-Capitalist Party) Pierre Moscovici, Julien Dray, and Henri Weber; from the Internationalist Communist Organization (OCI), today the Independent Workers Party, came Jean-Christophe Cambadélis and, most famously, future Prime Minister Lionel Jospin.

A PS legislator and policy specialist in the 1980s under Mitterrand, Strauss-Kahn served as a minister, then became a corporate lobbyist in the 1990s. As finance minister in the 1997-2002 Jospin “Plural Left” government, Strauss-Kahn privatized several public firms—France Télécom, Crédit Lyonnais bank, and defense firm Thomson-CSF. After resigning as minister in 1999 in a bribery scandal, he remained a major figure inside the PS and corporate circles, taking the IMF post after being nominated by Sarkozy in 2007.

As IMF chief, he has overseen deep social cuts impoverishing workers in many indebted countries—Greece, Ireland, Latvia, Hungary, Romania, and Pakistan—in exchange for IMF loans. He recently oversaw financial negotiations with the military dictatorship in Egypt, as it tries to combat the resistance of the working class following the departure of Hosni Mubarak.

Until recently Strauss-Kahn led in polls for France’s 2012 presidential election, due to mass hostility to the right-wing policies of Sarkozy. He had already faced criticisms, however, in the media over his lavish lifestyle. There are reports that he bought a $30,000 suit in New York, and pictures of him appeared in the press stepping out of a Porsche reportedly owned by one of his top aides, Ramzi Khiroun.

French politicians expressed surprise and concern at the implications of the charges against Strauss-Kahn for the 2012 elections. The unpopular Sarkozy trails both Strauss-Kahn and neo-fascist candidate Marine Le Pen in polls. PS Chairwoman Martine Aubry described Strauss-Kahn’s arrest as a “thunderbolt.”

Long-time PS official Jacques Attali warned that Strauss-Kahn “won’t be able to be a candidate for the Socialist Party presidential primary.”

Strauss-Kahn’s potential competitors for the PS nomination made cautious statements. Ségolène Royal asked the public to “wait for the courts to decide,” adding: “No one can profit from [Strauss-Kahn’s] difficulties.” Former PS chairman François Hollande, who has declared his intention to run, also warned against drawing “premature conclusions.”

An anonymous Sarkozy advisor told Le Monde: “If this had taken place 15 days from the election, it would have been the theatrical scandal that would have kept him from going until the end. Now, however, we are in a troubled period. Everything is changing; each week brings new events, not just small ones but cataclysms.”

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By Barry Grey |  16 May 2011

Chalk up another one for the Great Deceiver.

In his weekly radio address Saturday, President Barack Obama announced a series of measures promoted by the oil industry to increase exploration and drilling, and already booming profits, in the Gulf of Mexico, Alaska and the Atlantic Ocean. Obama attempted to disguise the windfall for the energy conglomerates as an effort to provide relief to consumers facing skyrocketing gasoline prices, but the steps he laid out will do nothing to rein in prices at the pump.

The actions announced Saturday will not only lift all remaining restraints on the oil companies imposed after the eruption of the BP oil disaster 13 months ago, they will open up vast new areas to exploitation and provide new financial incentives to the oil giants. Obama did not even mention the BP spill, the greatest environmental disaster in US history, whose ecological, economic and health consequences continue to wreak havoc in the Gulf of Mexico and beyond.

The president said he was ordering the Interior Department to expand drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, including deep-water wells such as the Macondo well that gushed millions of gallons into the Gulf, to hold annual lease sales in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve, and to speed up geological research on exploration prospects off the south and mid-Atlantic seaboards.

Obama also said he was granting the oil and gas industry an across-the-board one-year extension of leases held by companies in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico to make up for delays resulting from the temporary moratorium imposed following the BP disaster.

The steps laid out on Saturday amounted to a return to the expansive drilling policy Obama announced in March 2010, shortly before the explosion that destroyed the Deepwater Horizon rig. In some important respects, however, they go even further.

Administration officials told the press that it is, for example, considering lowering royalty payments for companies that develop within the first three years of their leases, a step that could provide the big oil firms with billions of dollars in additional profits.

The administration will also consider making some Atlantic coastal waters available for exploration, a change from current policy which puts the entire Atlantic seaboard off limits to drilling until at least 2018.

The Alaska Petroleum Reserve is a 23.5-million acre tract (four times the size of New Jersey) that is home to millions of migratory birds and serves as hunting and fishing grounds to indigenous peoples. No drilling currently takes place in the reserve.

The administration said it would conduct at least one lease sale in the reserve this year and two in 2012.

Saying there are “no quick fixes” to $4-a-gallon gasoline prices, Obama began by touting a toothless task force led by the attorney general that is supposedly investigating fraud and manipulation of petroleum markets, “including any illegal activity by traders and speculators.” He avoided any reference to price-gauging by the oil companies themselves.

After outlining his steps to increase oil exploration and drilling, he once again attempted to strike a pseudo-populist pose, calling for the elimination of taxpayer subsidies for oil firms that he said amount to $4 billion a year. This is in line with the attempt of congressional Democrats to present themselves as opponents of big oil by pushing a bill that would eliminate $21 billion in tax incentives for the major oil companies over the next 10 years.

On Thursday, the Democratic-controlled Senate Finance Committee held a hearing at which the CEOs of the five largest oil firms that operate in the US testified. Democratic senators made a show of scolding the executives for defending tax breaks under conditions of profits in the tens of billions of dollars.

The CEOs barely concealed their contempt for their critics. The head of ConocoPhillips refused to apologize for a company press release that called the Democratic proposal “un-American.”

They are well aware, as are the White House and both political parties, that the measure has no chance of passing, with the Republicans solidly opposed and buttressed by Democratic senators from oil producing states, such as Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Mark Begich of Alaska.

Senator Robert Menendez (Democrat of New Jersey), the sponsor of the bill to cut oil company tax incentives, pointed out after Obama’s Saturday address that opening the East and West Coasts to drilling would, according to government estimates, lower gas prices by only 3 cents a gallon by 2030.

Obama’s announcement of expanded oil company drilling followed the passage last week by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives of three bills that would go even further in opening up onshore and offshore regions to exploitation. While the White House denied there was any linkage, it is clear that the Obama administration is intent on shoring up its support within the corporate elite.

Nancy Pelosi, the top Democrat in the House of Representatives, hailed the White House plan for increasing “safe oil production.” She was joined by Lisa Murkowski, the Republican senator from Alaska, who said, “I’ve been strongly critical of this administration’s policies on domestic production, but today I want to give credit to the president.”

BARRY GREY is a political analyst with the World Socialist Web Site.

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Special—

Barack Obama shakes hands with Cornel West after speaking at the National Urban League’s 100th Anniversary Convention in Washington in July 2010.

By Chris Hedges } Posted on May 16, 2011

The moral philosopher Cornel West, if Barack Obama’s ascent to power was a morality play, would be the voice of conscience. Rahm Emanuel, a cynical product of the Chicago political machine, would be Satan. Emanuel in the first scene of the play would dangle power, privilege, fame and money before Obama. West would warn Obama that the quality of a life is defined by its moral commitment, that his legacy will be determined by his willingness to defy the cruel assault by the corporate state and the financial elite against the poor and working men and women, and that justice must never be sacrificed on the altar of power.

Perhaps there was never much of a struggle in Obama’s heart. Perhaps West only provided a moral veneer. Perhaps the dark heart of Emanuel was always the dark heart of Obama. Only Obama knows. But we know how the play ends. West is banished like honest Kent in “King Lear.” Emanuel and immoral mediocrities from Lawrence Summers to Timothy Geithner to Robert Gates—think of Goneril and Regan in the Shakespearean tragedy—take power. We lose. And Obama becomes an obedient servant of the corporate elite in exchange for the hollow trappings of authority.

No one grasps this tragic descent better than West, who did 65 campaign events for Obama, believed in the potential for change and was encouraged by the populist rhetoric of the Obama campaign. He now nurses, like many others who placed their faith in Obama, the anguish of the deceived, manipulated and betrayed. He bitterly describes Obama as “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats. And now he has become head of the American killing machine and is proud of it.”

“When you look at a society you look at it through the lens of the least of these, the weak and the vulnerable; you are committed to loving them first, not exclusively, but first, and therefore giving them priority,” says West, the Class of 1943 University Professor of African American Studies and Religion at Princeton University. “And even at this moment, when the empire is in deep decline, the culture is in deep decay, the political system is broken, where nearly everyone is up for sale, you say all I have is the subversive memory of those who came before, personal integrity, trying to live a decent life, and a willingness to live and die for the love of folk who are catching hell. This means civil disobedience, going to jail, supporting progressive forums of social unrest if they in fact awaken the conscience, whatever conscience is left, of the nation. And that’s where I find myself now.

“I have to take some responsibility,” he admits of his support for Obama as we sit in his book-lined office. “I could have been reading into it more than was there.

“I was thinking maybe he has at least some progressive populist instincts that could become more manifest after the cautious policies of being a senator and working with [Sen. Joe] Lieberman as his mentor,” he says. “But it became very clear when I looked at the neoliberal economic team. The first announcement of Summers and Geithner I went ballistic. I said, ‘Oh, my God, I have really been misled at a very deep level.’ And the same is true for Dennis Rossand the other neo-imperial elites. I said, ‘I have been thoroughly misled, all this populist language is just a facade. I was under the impression that he might bring in the voices of brother Joseph Stiglitzand brother Paul Krugman. I figured, OK, given the structure of constraints of the capitalist democratic procedure that’s probably the best he could do. But at least he would have some voices concerned about working people, dealing with issues of jobs and downsizing and banks, some semblance of democratic accountability for Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats who are just running amuck. I was completely wrong.”

West says the betrayal occurred on two levels.

“There is the personal level,” he says. “I used to call my dear brother [Obama] every two weeks. I said a prayer on the phone for him, especially before a debate. And I never got a call back. And when I ran into him in the state Capitol in South Carolina when I was down there campaigning for him he was very kind. The first thing he told me was, ‘Brother West, I feel so bad. I haven’t called you back. You been calling me so much. You been giving me so much love, so much support and what have you.’ And I said, ‘I know you’re busy.’ But then a month and half later I would run into other people on the campaign and he’s calling them all the time. I said, wow, this is kind of strange. He doesn’t have time, even two seconds, to say thank you or I’m glad you’re pulling for me and praying for me, but he’s calling these other people. I said, this is very interesting. And then as it turns out with the inauguration I couldn’t get a ticket with my mother and my brother. I said this is very strange. We drive into the hotel and the guy who picks up my bags from the hotel has a ticket to the inauguration. My mom says, ‘That’s something that this dear brother can get a ticket and you can’t get one, honey, all the work you did for him from Iowa.’ Beginning in Iowa to Ohio. We had to watch the thing in the hotel.

“What it said to me on a personal level,” he goes on, “was that brother Barack Obama had no sense of gratitude, no sense of loyalty, no sense of even courtesy, [no] sense of decency, just to say thank you. Is this the kind of manipulative, Machiavellian orientation we ought to get used to? That was on a personal level.”

But there was also the betrayal on the political and ideological level.

“It became very clear to me as the announcements were being made,” he says, “that this was going to be a newcomer, in many ways like Bill Clinton, who wanted to reassure the Establishment by bringing in persons they felt comfortable with and that we were really going to get someone who was using intermittent progressive populist language in order to justify a centrist, neoliberalist policy that we see in the opportunism of Bill Clinton. It was very much going to be a kind of black face of the DLC [Democratic Leadership Council].”

Obama and West’s last personal contact took place a year ago at a gathering of the Urban League when, he says, Obama “cussed me out.” Obama, after his address, which promoted his administration’s championing of charter schools, approached West, who was seated in the front row.

“He makes a bee line to me right after the talk, in front of everybody,” West says. “He just lets me have it. He says, ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself, saying I’m not a progressive. Is that the best you can do? Who do you think you are?’ I smiled. I shook his hand. And a sister hollered in the back, ‘You can’t talk to professor West. That’s Dr. Cornel West. Who do you think you are?’ You can go to jail talking to the president like that. You got to watch yourself. I wanted to slap him on the side of his head.

“It was so disrespectful,” he went on, “that’s what I didn’t like. I’d already been called, along with all [other] leftists, a “F’ing retard”by Rahm Emanuel because we had critiques of the president.”

Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to the president, has, West said, phoned him to complain about his critiques of Obama. Jarrett was especially perturbed, West says, when he said in an interview last year that he saw a lot of Malcolm X and Ella Bakerin Michelle Obama. Jarrett told him his comments were not complimentary to the first lady.

“I said in the world that I live in, in that which authorizes my reality, Ella Baker is a towering figure,” he says, munching Fritos and sipping apple juice at his desk. “If I say there is a lot of Ella Baker in Michelle Obama, that’s a compliment. She can take it any way she wants. I can tell her I’m sorry it offended you, but I’m going to speak the truth. She is a Harvard Law graduate, a Princeton graduate, and she deals with child obesity and military families. Why doesn’t she visit a prison? Why not spend some time in the hood? That is where she is, but she can’t do it.

“I think my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men,” West says. “It’s understandable. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he’s always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He is just as human as I am, but that is his cultural formation. When he meets an independent black brother, it is frightening. And that’s true for a white brother. When you get a white brother who meets a free, independent black man, they got to be mature to really embrace fully what the brother is saying to them. It’s a tension, given the history. It can be overcome. Obama, coming out of Kansas influence, white, loving grandparents, coming out of Hawaii and Indonesia, when he meets these independent black folk who have a history of slavery, Jim Crow, Jane Crow and so on, he is very apprehensive. He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination. It is understandable.

“He feels most comfortable with upper middle-class white and Jewish men who consider themselves very smart, very savvy and very effective in getting what they want,” he says. “He’s got two homes. He has got his family and whatever challenges go on there, and this other home. Larry Summers blows his mind because he’s so smart. He’s got Establishment connections. He’s embracing me. It is this smartness, this truncated brilliance, that titillates and stimulates brother Barack and makes him feel at home. That is very sad for me.

“This was maybe America’s last chance to fight back against the greed of the Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats, to generate some serious discussion about public interest and common good that sustains any democratic experiment,” West laments. “We are squeezing out all of the democratic juices we have. The escalation of the class war against the poor and the working class is intense. More and more working people are beaten down. They are world-weary. They are into self-medication. They are turning on each other. They are scapegoating the most vulnerable rather than confronting the most powerful. It is a profoundly human response to panic and catastrophe. I thought Barack Obama could have provided some way out. But he lacks backbone.

“Can you imagine if Barack Obama had taken office and deliberately educated and taught the American people about the nature of the financial catastrophe and what greed was really taking place?” West asks. “If he had told us what kind of mechanisms of accountability needed to be in place, if he had focused on homeowners rather than investment banks for bailouts and engaged in massive job creation he could have nipped in the bud the right-wing populism of the tea party folk. The tea party folk are right when they say the government is corrupt. It is corrupt. Big business and banks have taken over government and corrupted it in deep ways.

“We have got to attempt to tell the truth, and that truth is painful,” he says. “It is a truth that is against the thick lies of the mainstream. In telling that truth we become so maladjusted to the prevailing injustice that the Democratic Party, more and more, is not just milquetoast and spineless, as it was before, but thoroughly complicitous with some of the worst things in the American empire. I don’t think in good conscience I could tell anybody to vote for Obama. If it turns out in the end that we have a crypto-fascist movement and the only thing standing between us and fascism is Barack Obama, then we have to put our foot on the brake. But we’ve got to think seriously of third-party candidates, third formations, third parties.

“Our last hope is to generate a democratic awakening among our fellow citizens. This means raising our voices, very loud and strong, bearing witness, individually and collectively. Tavis [Smiley]and I have talked about ways of civil disobedience, beginning with ways for both of us to get arrested, to galvanize attention to the plight of those in prisons, in the hoods, in poor white communities. We must never give up. We must never allow hope to be eliminated or suffocated.”

CHRIS HEDGES is a veteran journalist and radical analyst of current events.

Crossposted with
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_obama_deception_why_cornel_west_went_ballistic_20110516/

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