Two Bubbles That Went Pop

Reflections on the Manipulation of Populism

When will Americans learn that the class a politician serves is the the only indicator worth considering in any political contest?  



by PAUL STREET

Long after its leading encampments have been torn down – often with brute force and (educationally enough) by predominantly by Democratic mayors and with the approval and involvement of a Democratic White House – the populist Occupy Movement deserves major credit for changing the United States’ political discourse. It helped bring the nation’s savage economic inequalities and the unmatched democracy-, society-, and ecology-destroying power of the wealthy Few (the instantly famous “1%”) into the national political discussion in ways that will give it a deserved place in future American history textbooks. It performed the remarkable service of calling out the name and address of the nation’s true unelected masters: corporate-financial capital and Wall Street.

Why did it emerge in the late summer and early fall of 2011? There were precursors and inspirations of from recent history that helped spark and explain the timing of the Occupy moment, of course: occupations of public space (Cairo’s Tarhir Square) to protest the rule of a dictator in Egypt and to protest neoliberal austerity measures in Spain and Greece; the December 2008 occupation of the Republic Door and Window plant on Chicago’s North Side; and the mass popular upheaval in Madison, Wisconsin in February and March of 2011 – a remarkable rebellion that included a 16 day people’s occupation of the Wisconsin State Capitol.  Within New York City,  not far from where OWS broke out, activists  earlier the same year launched an outdoor encampment (“Bloombergville”) to protest Mayor Bloomberg’s plans to cut social services and jobs –  an action that provided an interesting link between the Madison upheaval and Occupy, that utilized many of the same organizational methods that would he employed by Occupy movements across the nation, and that provided some of OWS’ early activists..

Only the 1 Percent Took Your House Away

Beneath and beyond these immediate sparks, however, there lay deeper developments that provided the fuel for Occupy’s sparks to catch fire. Occupy and the broader popular and populist spirit of sympathetic opposition to the rich and corporate few it helped capture arose when it did, I think, because of the bursting of two bubbles: the hyper-collateralized real estate, credit, and finance bubble of 2001-2007; the electoral-politics Obama hope and change bubble of 2007-2011. The popping of the first bubble – sparked by a wave of foreclosures in poor black and Latino communities that Wall Street had pumped with a wave of super-exploitive sub-prime home loans- laid bare the true elite and its culpability for the decline and indeed the breaking of American life and society. As Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich argued in a December 2011 Mother Jones essay titled “The 1% Revealed,” the transparent crashing of the national and global economy by the financial shenanigans of the super-rich undermined the ability of the right-wing to credibly continue its longstanding fake-populist game of blaming the professional and managerial “liberal elite” for everything wrong in America.  It exposed the real masters, “the 1 percent who are, for the most part, sealed off in their own bubble of private planes, gated communities, and walled estates.” Compared to the corporate and Wall Street elite, “professionals and managers, no matter how annoying, were [shown to be] pikers. The doctor or school principal might be overbearing, the professor and the social worker might be condescending, but only the 1 percent took your house away.”

The Class One Serves

The bursting of the second bubble reflected the realization that American democracy (or what’s left of it) is no less crippled by the dark cloud of big money and the many-sided machinations of capital when Democrats hold nominal power than when Republicans do. Elected in the name of progressive change and a promise to clean up corruption in Washington, the Obama administration has been a tutorial on who rules America and the underlying conflict between capitalism and democracy. With its monumental bailout of hyper-opulent financial overlords, its refusal to nationalize and cut down the parasitic financial institutions that had paralyzed the economy, its passage of a health reform bill that only the big insurance and drug companies could love, its cutting of an auto bailout deal that rewarded capital flight and raided union pension funds, its undermining of desperately needed global carbon emission reduction efforts at Copenhagen (2009) and Durban (2011), its refusal to advance serious public works programs (green or otherwise), its green-lighting of offshore drilling and numerous other environmentally disastrous practices, its roll-over of Bush’s regressive tax cuts for the rich, its freezing of federal wages and salaries, its cutting of a debt ceiling deal (in the summer of 2011) that was all about cutting social programs instead of tax increases on the rich, its disregarding of promises to labor and other popular constituencies, and other betrayals of its “progressive base” (the other side of the coin of promises kept to its Wall Street and corporate sponsors, who set new campaign finance records in backing Obama in 2008), the “change” and “hope” presidency of Barack Obama  brilliantly demonstrated the reach of what Edward S. Herman and David Peterson call “the unelected dictatorship of money,” which vetoes any official who might seek “to change the foreign or domestic priorities of the imperial U.S. regime.”  It richly validated radical analysts’ jaded take on the plutocratic reality behind the heavily personalized, candidate-centered “electoral extravaganzas” (Noam Chomsky) that big money and big media stage for the citizenry every four years, telling us that “that’s politics” – the only politics that matters. In its presidential as in its other elections, U.S. “democracy” is “at best a guided one; at its worst it is a corrupt farce, amounting to manipulation…It is an illusion,” the left historian Laurence Shoup observed in early 2008,  “that real change can ever come from electing a different ruling class-sponsored candidate.”

John Pilger put it well at a socialist conference in San Francisco in July of 2009. “The clever young man who recently made it to the White House is a very fine hypnotist,” Pilger noted, “partly because it is indeed exciting to see an African American at the pinnacle of power in the land of slavery. However, this is the 21st century, and race together with gender and even class can be very seductive tools of propaganda. For what is so often overlooked and what matters, I believe, above all, is the class one serves.”

The lesson –  driven home by the wildly unpopular elite-manufactured debt-ceiling crisis of July and August 2011 – suggested the wisdom of the late radical historian Howard Zinn’s clever maxim that “the really critical thing isn’t who’s sitting in the White House, but who is sitting in – in the streets, in the cafeterias, in the halls of government, in the factories.  Who is protesting, who is occupying offices and demonstrating – those are the things that determine what happens.”  As Zinn explained in an essay on the “election madness” he saw “engulfing the entire society, including the left” with special intensity early in the year of Obama’s ascendancy:

“The election frenzy seizes the country every four years because we have all been brought up to believe that voting is crucial in determining our destiny, that the most important act a citizen can engage in is to go to the polls and choose one of the two mediocrities who have already been chosen for us…… Would I support one [presidential] candidate against another? Yes, for two minutes-the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth…But before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools. Our objective should be to build, painstakingly, patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House, in Congress, into changing national policy on matters of war and social justice.” (H. Zinn, “Election Madness, The Progressive, March 2008).

The Bubbles Co-Joined (2003-2008)

The two bubbles that burst have a curious linkage that goes back well before the collapse of Bear Stearns, Lehman Bros., AIG, and Washington Mutual. In an early May 2008 CounterPunch essay titled “The Obama Bubble Agenda,” the Wall Street veteran and left commentator Pam Martens reflected on a curious reason for high finance’s record-setting investment in the Obama campaign:

“The Wall Street plan for the Obama-bubble presidency is that of the cleanup crew for the housing bubble: sweep all the corruption and losses, would-be indictments, perp walks and prosecutions under the rug and get on with an unprecedented taxpayer bailout of Wall Street…..Who better to sell this agenda to the millions of duped mortgage holders and foreclosed homeowners in minority communities across America than our first, beloved, black president of hope and change?”

Obama, it should be remembered, did not step onto the stage of national celebrity and contention without first being carefully vetted by the financial and political investor class beginning in 2003.  “On condition of anonymity,” Ken Silverstein reported in the fall of 2006, “one Washington lobbyist I spoke with was willing to point out the obvious: that bigdonors would not be helping out Obama if they didn’t see him as a ‘player.’ The lobbyist added: ‘What’s the dollar value of a starry-eyed idealist?’” (K.Silverstein, “Barack Obama, Inc.: The Birth of a Washington Machine,” Harper’s , November 2006 )

The favorable political credit rating given to Obama by the investor class reflected among other things his remarkable “yes” vote in the U.S. Senate on the so-called Class Action Fairness Act of 2005. A Republican bill backed and signed with great gusto by President Bush on February 18, 2005, it was a “thinly-veiled ‘special interest extravaganza’ that favored banking, creditors and other corporate interests” (Matt Gonzales) over and against workers, consumers, and the public by making it more difficult for ordinary people to sue corporate abusers. The bill had been long “sought by a coalition of business groups and was lobbied for aggressively by financial firms, which constitute Obama’s second biggest single bloc of donors.” (Silverstein).  As Martens explained, that vile legislation amounted to “a five-year effort by 475 lobbyists, despite appeals from the NAACP and every other major civil rights group. Thanks to the passage of that legislation, when defrauded homeowners of the housing bubble and defrauded investors of the bundled mortgages try to fight back through the class-action vehicle, they will find a new layer of corporate-friendly hurdles.” (P. Martens, “The Obama Bubble Agenda,” CounterPunch, May 6, 2008,  http://www.counterpunch.org/2008/05/06/the-obama-bubble-agenda/)

The Manipulation of Populism by Elitism

Ironically enough, Obama now gets to channel the populist Occupy spirit in fashioning his campaign for re-election against (in all likelihood) the spectacularly wealthy Mitt Romney.  The Democrats are eager to portray Romney as Mr. 1%” and to identify Congressional Republicans with “those at the very top.” Liberal and Democratic activists, columnists, reporters, and politicians revel noting that Romney pays less than 14 percent on more than $40 million in mostly investment-based income over the previous two years  “He makes more in one day than most American makes all year,” proclaimed the elite Democrat Gerald McEntee (president of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, AFL-CIO), on the liberal-Democratic Huffington Post last month.  Entitled “Mitt Romney and the 1%,” McEntee’s column described the leading Republican presidential contenders Romney, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum, as “the candidates of the 1%, for the 1% and by the 1%” – as if Obama was not also such a candidate and not flying around the country raising vast sums of political capital from the nation’s financial elite at one push fundraising dinner after another.

The Democrats would certainly be campaigning against the Republicans along these anti-plutocratic lines even Occupy had never emerged. Knowing well that the majority of the population has for some time been deeply displeased with the wildly disproportionate wealth and power of the corporate and financial Few, they are old hands at what the late and formerly left Christopher Hitchens once described as “the essence of American poliotics…the manipulation of populism by elitism. That elite is most successful,” Hitchens wrote in a 1999 study of the Bill Clinton presidency, “which can claim the heartiest allegiance of the fickle crowd; can present itself as most ‘in touch’ with popular concerns; can anticipate the tides and pulses of public opinion; can, in short, be the least apparently ‘elitist.’ It’s no great distance from Huey Long”s robust cry of ‘Every man a king’ to the insipid ‘inclusiveness’ of [Bill Clinton”s slogan] ‘Putting People First,’ but the smarter elite managers have learned in the interlude that solid, measurable pledges have to be distinguished by a ‘reserve’ tag that earmarks them for the bankrollers and backers.”

Even the Republican candidates have not been able to resist the fake-populist campaign meme encouraged by the actually populist Occupy moment.  Smarting over defeats in the Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire primary, conservative Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich went after Romney for eliminating thousands of jobs while amassing millions in personal wealth during his previous career as the CEO of the rapacious equity capital firm Bain Capital Management. “You have to ask the question,” Gingrich told reporters in connection with Romney’s economic record: “is capitalism really about the ability of a handful of rich people to manipulate the lives of thousands of people and then walk off with the money?” A Talking Points Memo article on Gingrich’s comment bore an amusing if not wholly accurate title: “Gingrich Goes Full ‘Occupy Wall Street’ on Romney.”

A Rick Perry ad in Iowa said that Romney “made millions buying companies and laying off workers.” Imagine!  Perry went after Romney in South Carolina for talking about how he was once worried about receiving a “pink slip” himself. “I have no doubt that Mitt Romney was worried about pink slips, whether he was going to have enough of them to hand out because his company Bain Capital with all the jobs that they killed, I’m sure he was worried that he’d run out of pink slips,” Perry said.

Romney was compelled to release his tax returns – revealing his offshore tax havens and low overall tax rate (reflecting his utilization of a controversial filing method that is available only to wealthy investors) – partly under pressure from his Republican rivals.

But of course neither the Republican candidates nor  Obama would ever admit something that I suspect many of the smarter Occupiers are able to  acknowledge – that, yes, Newt, capitalism really is pretty much “about the ability of a handful of rich people to manipulate the lives of thousands of people and then walk off with the money.”

But that’s a topic for another essay.

Paul Street (www.paulstreet.org), an Iowa City resident,  is the author or numerous books, including Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis (2007), Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (2008), The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (2010) and (co-authored with Anthony DiMaggio)  Crashing the Tea Party
(Paradigm, 2011).  Street can be reached at paulstreet99@yahoo.com.

 

 

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Honduras’s prison inferno: A crime of capitalism

Bill Van Auken, WSWS.ORG, a socialist organization


An inmate who survived the prison fire stands inside the medical attention area of the prison in Comayagua, Honduras, Honduras, early Thursday Feb. 16, 2012. A fire started by an inmate tore through the prison Tuesday night, killing over 300 people, according to officials.

–
Read more: http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2012/02/22/honduras-pardons-killer-who-saved-prisoners-during-deadly-blaze/#ixzz1nPmNaips

The official death toll in the horrific fire that burned through the Comayagua prison in central Honduras on February 14 rose to 356 on Friday with the announcement that another hospitalized inmate had succumbed to third-degree burns.

The more that emerges about this immense tragedy, the more it becomes clear that those who died were victims of a state organized massacre, just as surely as if they had been gunned down by the military death squads that have played such a bloody role in Honduras’s recent history.

On Thursday, reports surfaced that the blaze, first attributed to an electrical short circuit and then to a prisoner’s cigarette igniting a mattress, was set intentionally by guards as a cover for a conspiracy involving better-off inmates who paid the warden to stage a prison escape. Honduran authorities are reportedly investigating the bank accounts of officials assigned to the facility.

Surviving prisoners have reported that they were fired upon as they tried to escape the flames and have called upon those doing the grim forensic work of identifying the victims to check the corpses for bullet wounds.

The firefighters who responded to the blaze have also testified to the gunfire. While they arrived within less than 10 minutes of being called, the call itself was not made until 20 minutes after the fire had started, and more precious time was lost as they were unable to go in for fear of being shot. By the time they began fighting the fire, it was too late to save anyone.

Prisoners and their families charged that guards failed to open cell doors, leaving the inmates to burn to death locked behind bars. Even if they had acted responsibly, there were only two guards actually inside the prison grounds to organize the rescue of 852 inmates. Authorities have acknowledged that there were no existing plans for the facility’s evacuation in event of an emergency.

The government of Honduras has acknowledged that nearly 60 percent of those imprisoned in Comayagua had not been convicted of any crime, but rather were either awaiting trial or had been thrown into jail as suspected gang members under draconian laws that allow police to detain individuals on no more evidence than having a tattoo.

If ever there was a disaster foretold, the Comayagua prison disaster was it. In 2004, a similar blaze killed 107 inmates at the prison in San Pedro Sula, Honduras’s second-largest city, and the year before, 66 prisoners and three female visitors died in a massacre at the El Porvenir jail near the Caribbean coastal city of La Ceiba.

As recently as 2010, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights issued a report indicting the abysmal conditions in Honduran jails and demanding that the government take urgent action to address them. Since then, the Honduran government has only allowed conditions to worsen as it has imposed one austerity program after another, slashing wages and social conditions to improve profits for the country’s dozen ruling families, the international banks and the transnational corporations that exploit low-wage labor in Honduras’s assembly sweatshops, or maquiladoras.

The conditions in the prisons is an accurate barometer of prevailing social conditions in any country. In Honduras, they reflect a society that is among the most unequal in the world. The second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere after Haiti, it is ruled by a narrow oligarchy of landowners, industrialists and financiers, while 60 percent of the population subsists in poverty and 30 percent are unemployed.

The international media’s response to this atrocity has inevitably included references to Honduras’s murder rate, the worst in the world with 82.1 per hundred thousand, compared to a 6.9 average globally, and to the role of the drug trade.

Virtually unmentioned, however, is Honduras’s long and bloody history of state violence, which is intimately bound with its more than century-long oppression by US imperialism.

Invaded seven times by US Marines during the first three decades of the 20th century, Honduras was the scene of rampant state killings, torture and repression in the 1980s, when it served as the CIA’s base of operations for the “contra” war against Nicaragua. It remains the site of the largest US military facility in Latin America, the Soto Cano Airbase, which this week supplied the Honduran authorities with 400 body bags for the Comayagua dead.

The country’s corrupt and reactionary institutions and ruling elite have been shaped by a long series of US-backed military coups, the latest of which took place just two-and-a-half years ago with the indispensable backing of the Obama administration.

The country’s current president, Porfirio Lobo, has managed to legitimize the bloody work of the June 2009 coup, while assuring all of its leaders complete impunity. The ousted ex-president Manuel Zelaya, who was frog-marched out of the presidential palace in his pajamas by Honduran troops in 2009, has made his peace with this regime. A wealthy landowner who earned the ire of his class with populist rhetoric, an alliance of convenience with Venezuela’s Chavez and a minimum wage hike, Zelaya signed an accord with Lobo last May, endorsing the government’s legitimacy and extolling the virtues of “democracy.”

For the masses of Honduran working people, however, the criminal contempt shown for the lives of the prisoners at Comayagua is an accurate indicator of the real character of this so-called democracy, in which journalists, trade unionists, human rights activists, workers, peasants and others continue to die at the hands of death squads.

The intense popular outrage over the prison atrocity in Honduras has profound roots in the determination of Honduran workers to resist. The massacre at Comayagua only demonstrates once again that it is impossible to secure livable conditions, democratic rights and freedom from imperialist domination outside of the independent mobilization of the working class in Honduras and throughout the Americas in the struggle to put an end to class oppression and build a socialist society.

Bill Van Auken is a prominent commentator withWSWS.ORG, a branch of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP).

 

 

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Irresponsible Anti-Iranian Fear-Mongering

Netanyahu

Irresponsible anti-Iranian political and pack journalism rhetoric sound ominously like spurious Iraqi WMD threats in the run-up to the 2003 war.  In his January State of the Union address, Obama said:

“Let there be no doubt: America is determined to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon and I will take no options off the table to achieve that goal.”
At the same time, Netanyahu told Israel’s Knesset:

“Only a combination of crippling sanctions and putting all the options on the table can make Iran stop” its nuclear program.  Republican presidential aspirants also use the issue irresponsibly. Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum all support bombing Iran’s nuclear sites and assassinating its scientists. Only Ron Paul’s strongly opposed but hawkish din drowns him out.

Daily reports heighten the alleged “Iranian threat.” Multiple rounds of sanctions were imposed. In late January, Israel’s Mossad connected DEBKAfile reported Obama ordering a “massive US military buildup around Iran: up to 100,000 troops by March.”

America’s heaviest concentration of regional might matches its strength before invading Iraq in 2003. DEBKA suggested “May as (a) tentative date for clash(ing) with Iran.”

On February 22, DEBKA stoked more fear headlining,”Iran cuts down to six weeks timeline for weapons-grade uranium,” saying:

“Tehran this week hardened its nuclear and military policies in defiance of tougher sanctions and ahead of international nuclear talks.”

Washington, NATO allies, Israel, and IAEA inspectors know Iran poses no nuclear threat. Nonetheless, pro-Western IAEA head Yukiya Amano said Tuesday night:

“It is disappointing that Iran did not accept our request to visit Parchin during the first or second meetings. We engaged in a constructive spirit, but no agreement was reached.”

DEBKA claims its where Tehran “conducts experiments in nuclear explosives and triggers.”

In fact, no evidence suggests Parchin Military Complex conducts nuclear related activities. IAEA’s been there before, took environmental samples, and found nothing. Parchin manufactures and tests conventional explosives.

IAEA found none consistent with nuclear weapons research and development. Amano knows it but stoked tensions anyway. So did IAEA’s Herman Nackaerts saying its team members “could not find a way forward.” As a result, talks were “inconclusive.”

An official February 22 IAEA statement said “Iran refuse(d) access to suspect nuke site.” Saying it contradicts IAEA inspectors who found nothing suspicious about Parchin.

In response, Iran’s Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast said the IAEA came for talks, not inspections.

In fact, no country’s nuclear facilities are more closely monitored round the clock than Iran’s, and none cooperate more fully. Suggesting otherwise is a spurious canard, yet it’s suggested daily.

At the same time, Reuters said, “Iran says would act against enemies if endangered,” quoting Iranian General Mohammad Hejazi telling Fars news agency:

“Our strategy now is that if we feel our enemies want to endanger Iran’s national interests, and want to decide to do that, we will act without waiting for their actions.”

Whether or not the translation’s accurate, Washington and Israel both maintain first-strike nuclear options (including against non-nuclear states) against real or manufactured threats. Western reports say virtually nothing, but ratchet up unjustifiable fears about non-belligerent Iran.

On February 22, senior Israeli military and intelligence officials said “(s)ince Wednesday, the rules of the game have changed.”

On February 15, AP headlined, “Israeli minister: Iran near ‘point of no return,’ ” saying:

Deputy Prime Minister Silvan Shalom said Iran achieved two major advances to produce nuclear fuel. They believe it’s “an insurance policy to their regime.” Tehran’s latest claims “show no intention to abandon plans for a nuclear bomb.”

“Israel and the world (can’t) live with Iran having the ability to develop a nuclear bomb.”

Other Israeli officials claim Iran’s nuclear capability is so advanced that unless it’s confronted within months or a year it’ll be too late. Their rhetoric belies the facts and they know it. Nonetheless, pressure keeps building for potential confrontation.

All Iranian nuclear facilities are closely monitored. No evidence suggests a military related program. US and Israeli officials know it. Responsible ones admit it, yet hawks in both countries drown them out.

On February 22, the Jerusalem Post headlined, “Iran missiles may be able to hit US in 2-3 years,” saying:

Israeli Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz told CNBC Wednesday that “Iran may develop inter-continental missiles that can reach the east coast of the United States in two to three years.”

Tehran’s investing “billions of dollars,” he claimed. “Their aim is clearly not only to be able to threaten Israel and the Middle East, but to put a direct nuclear ballistic threat to Europe and to the United States of America.”

Former IDF head General Gabi Ashkenazi also said Iran’s threat must be taken seriously.

Both men and other top officials in both countries know Iran threatens no one. But the big lie repeated often enough gets most people to believe it and risks potentially catastrophic war.

On February 22, Washington Post writer Joel Greenberg headlined, “Israelis seem resigned to a strike on Iran,” saying:

Israelis “are talking about a possible war come summer, or later this year….The prospect of devastating counter-strikes and possible mass casualties seems to be taken in stride, seen as a lesser evil than facing a nuclear-armed Iran.”

US and Israeli polls weigh an alleged Iranian threat and advisability of preemptively confronting it. A recent Pew Research Center one said 58% of those surveyed said America should use military force to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Only 30% want confrontation avoided.

Nuclear expert Graham Allison sees parallels between Iran today and the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Despite little threatening evidence then and now, heightened tensions risked potentially devastating conflict. When politics and heated rhetoric spin out of control, anything’s possible including nuclear war.

Earlier US Hawks

In July 1961, General Curtis LeMay believed nuclear war with Soviet Russia was inevitable and would erupt later that year. As a result, he argued for preemptively launching thousands of missiles to destroy their nuclear capability even though retaliatory strikes could destroy major US cities.

At the same time, at a National Security Council meeting, General Lyman Lemnitzer presented John Kennedy with a surprise nuclear attack strategy. Kennedy was so disgusted he walked out, and later told Secretary of State Dean Rusk: “And we call ourselves the human race.”

In his book, “Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years,” David Talbot wrote about former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara saying:

“LeMay’s views w(ere) very simple. He thought the West, and the US in particular, was going to have to fight a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and he was absolutely certain of that. Therefore, he believed that we should fight it sooner rather than later, when we had a greater advantage in nuclear power, and it would result in fewer casualties in the United States.”

Like Kennedy, McNamara categorically rejected the idea. Nonetheless, other extremists then and later urged the same strategy. Cooler heads throughout the Cold War prevailed. A potential nuclear holocaust was avoided.

A Final Comment

On February 22, inflammatory White House and State Department rhetoric included spurious statements.

Commenting on Iranian/IAEA talks, White House spokesman Jay Carney said:

“We regret the failure of Iran to reach an agreement this week with the IAEA that would permit the agency to fully investigate the serious allegation raised in its November report.”

“Unfortunately, this is another demonstration of Iran’s refusal to abide by its international obligations. This particular action by Iran suggests that they have not changed their behavior when it comes to abiding by their international obligations.”

In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

State Department Deputy spokesman Mark Toner added:

“This is a disappointment. It wasn’t all that surprising, frankly. But, you know, we’re going to look at the totality of the issue here and the letter and what we think is the best course of action moving forward”.

“Let’s be very clear that we consult very closely with Israel on these issues. We are very clear that we are working on this two-track approach. We believe, and are conveying to our partners, both Israel and elsewhere, that this is having an effect.”

At issue is whether greater regional conflict’s planned.

What goes around, comes around. Today, hawkish Israeli and US officials urge bombs away preemptively. Even though nuclear armed Soviet Russia posed only a retaliatory threat if attacked, potentially devastating war would have been waged if belligerent hawks prevailed.

Today, Iran threatens no one. Yet latter day LeMay types urge preemptive war. Spurious accusations aren’t at issue. It’s about replacing an independent regime with a client one.

Wars against Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya were for the same reason. So is Syrian insurgency.

Notably, post-WW II, US aggression achieved nothing but millions of deaths, mass destruction, incalculable human suffering, and bitter global anti-American sentiment. Waging war on Syria and Iran will send it higher. At issue is possible WW III, the first nuclear war if waged, threatening humanity.

Yet aggressive hawks advocating damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead don’t consider that in their calculus. Hopefully cooler heads will prevail today like decades earlier.

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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Israel backing down from Iran threats?

Are we getting a reprieve from the warmongering—however momentary? Contributing editor Steve Jonas files the following item:

 Israel backing down from Iran threats?

Israel is backing down from her threats to bomb Iran.  In a scathing loss of face for Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, diplomatic sources in Israel have revealed that President Shimon Peres will meet privately with President Obama at the White House before – repeat before Netanyahu.  High level sources in Israel have just leaked a sanitized version of the President’s plan to the Israeli press.  But, there is much more to the story.  In his meeting at the White House, Peres will inform Obama that Netanyahu has performed poorly in his handling of the Iran nuclear crisis and that bellicose statements from the Prime Minister’s cabinet have been both self-intimidating and self-destructive. 

Then after meeting with Peres, Obama will address AIPAC and finally meet with Netanyahu to counsel him on the sad fact of the self-inflicted damage to the diplomatic credibility of his right-wing government.  More on the diplomatic kabuki in due course.  This story is now literally less than one hour old.  See below.

Peres to tell Obama Israel should not strike Iran soon, officials say

President reportedly feels recent threats by Israeli spokesmen are unnecessary warmongering, believes Iran issue should be handled by superpowers.

By Yossi Verter

President Shimon Peres is expected to tell U.S. President Barack Obama early next month that he does not believe Israel should attack Iran in the near future.

Political and diplomatic officials who are familiar with Peres’ positions and are helping prepare for the Obama meeting said yesterday Peres has been apprised of all sensitive information involving Iran.

According to these officials, Peres is close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s position on Iran, while Defense Minister Ehud Barak is perceived, at least by the Americans, as pushing for an attack.

Peres told officials that there is no point in what he called the “unceasing self-intimidation” being voiced by senior Israeli spokesmen. This is what he intends to tell Obama.

Peres has told officials that the recent threats by Israel are unnecessary warmongering and that Israel should leave the Iran issue to the superpowers, first and foremost the United States.

Peres leaves for the United States on Tuesday, and the following Sunday he is to meet with Obama in Washington on the sidelines of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference.

Peres’ meeting with the U.S. president will take place a day before Netanyahu meets with Obama. Netanyahu will arrive in Washington after a visit to Canada.

The meeting between Peres and Obama will deal mainly with Iran, but also with the stalled negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.

When Obama meets with Netanyahu, he will already know what Peres thinks – information he will use in his meeting with Netanyahu.

Peres is expected to tell Obama that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is still the best Palestinian partner with whom to reach a peace agreement.

Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said in an interview yesterday that Israel will not bow to U.S. and Russian pressure in deciding whether to attack Iran.

Speaking on Channel 2, Lieberman rebuffed suggestions that warnings against striking Iran would affect Israeli decision making, saying the decision “is not their business.”

http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/peres-to-tell-obama-israel-should-not-strike-iran-soon-officials-say-1.414212

 

 

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OpEds: “Friends of Syria” plan war, regime change at Washington’s behest

By Chris Mardsen, WSWS.ORG. a socialist organization

—Chris Marsden

 

 

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