[dropcap]O[/dropcap]n 3 March 2015 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came before the U.S. Congress and once again painted a false picture of Iran and its ambitions. His vision was both apocalyptic and simplistic: the state of Iran is evil and the source of most of the aggression and terrorism in the Middle East; it is eternally hostile to the West and it aims at the destruction of Israel; the West, with the United States leading the way, must stop this evil regime before it gains the capacity to use nuclear weapons.

He has been saying this for at least twenty five years, and like the false prophecies predicting the end of the world, the alleged catastrophe never seems to occur. Iran never seems to come up with a nuclear bomb. However, Netanyahu never stops predicting it.

The truth is that the actions and motives Netanyahu assigns to the Islamic Republic are factually wrong. Iran is not seeking nuclear weapons, has not carried on weapons research of this nature in over a decade, and is willing to commit itself to an inspections regime that will keep track of its good intentions in this regard. This stance is attested to by nearly every Western intelligence agency, and the Israeli intelligence organizations as well.

Indeed, Iran is much less aggressive than is Israel. Iran has not launched an offensive war in 240 years! However, Israel is in a state of constant aggressive expansion. So which one is the greater danger for the Middle East and the world? Apart from firing a small number of oral threats leveled against the Zionist state, the Iranian leaders have made no aggressive moves toward Israel. On the other hand, Israel appears to be actively working for the destruction of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Therefore, the prime minister’s assertions tell us more about the worldview of Netanyahu and his allies than it does about Iran. It tells us that the facts make no difference. Netanyahu and his allies just know, “existentially,” that Iran is after nuclear weapons and plotting the destruction of Israel.

Iran is much less aggressive than Israel. Iran has not launched an offensive war in 240 years! However, Israel is in a state of constant aggressive expansion. Zionism insists on the absolute right to a Jewish state in all of Palestine.

Given this disconnect from reality, one can only assume that the prime minister of Israel and his associates are delusional – that is they cannot tell fact from fiction, or alternatively, that they are simply liars. My feeling is that while the latter is certainly possible, I would not dismiss the former. Why so?

Netanyahu, and indeed all Zionists of his sort, are committed ideologues. In other words, they do not start with objectively investigated facts as the basis of their worldview. Rather they start with an ideology (Zionism) with which all interpretations of the outside world must be made to conform. Zionism insists on the absolute right to a Jewish state in all of Palestine. For the true believer, anything that might stand in the way of this right must be fought without compromise. That is why there can be no compromise peace with the Palestinians. Their willingness to accept compromise must be ignored or denied. And that is why Iran, whose leaders have publicly, and accurately, called Zionism a dangerous ideology, must be denied any nuclear capacity at all. The fact that Iran’s activities in this regard are legal and peaceful must also be ignored, denied or distorted into something evil. That is the only way they will fit the strictures of ideology.

This image, resembling a mugshot of Netanyahu, unwittingly but accurately captures the sheer reckless dimension of this man, and the threat to peace represented by his ideology.

People who are ideologically fixated can be like this – delusional and obsessive. In the ordinary workaday world they may or may not be annoying. However, if you give them power, their potential goes far beyond annoying to the point of being downright dangerous. That is where we are at with Benjamin Netanyahu.

What sort of history underlies Netanyahu’s obsessive delusions? It is the history of European Jewry, which, for him, is overwhelmingly the history of anti-Semitism culminating in the Holocaust. For Netanyahu that history is ongoing. It can never really stop. Because this is so, he and others holding this view have expanded the threat of anti-Semitism beyond Europe into the Middle East. The Muslims of that region are the new Nazis and their leadership comes from Iran (which is really impossible due to the Shiite-Sunni divide – but no matter, facts don’t count). Finally, Israel stands in for all of Jewry and, of course, is in everlasting mortal danger.

In the past month Prime Minister Netanyahu has repeatedly claimed that anti-Semitism is growing worldwide and presents a threat not just to Israel, but to all the world’s Jews. Take for instance his mid-February declaration that sporadic terrorist episodes in Europe are a sign of rising, revitalized anti-Semitism. As he put it “Jews have been murdered again on European soil only because they are Jews” and the ultimate key to their safety is immigration to Israel – the same Israel he claims to be threatened with nuclear destruction. Both the president of France and the prime minister of Denmark, who do not share Netanyahu’s view of the world, scolded the Israeli leader for implying that native Jews were not integral members of their national communities and would not be protected.

What is Left Out

It is typical of minds shaped by ideology that their worldview leaves out important aspects of any given situation. And so it is with Netanyahu. One important thing left out is Israel’s role in creating what danger does exist for Jews worldwide.

This fact was noted by the Israeli peace movement leader Uri Avnery who asserted in a column posted on 21 February 2015 that attacks on Jews in France and Denmark “had nothing to do with anti-Semitism.” They were caused in good part by “the ongoing Arab-Zionist conflict. … Practically every Arab in the world, and most Muslims are emotionally involved in the conflict.” The fact that Israel refuses to come to a fair and just agreement with the Palestinians, and continues to illegally expand into Palestinian land, seriously exacerbates the situation.

An unprecedented 40% of Israeli Jews would move out of Israel if the opportunity to do so presented itself.

And, as Avnery puts it “When Binyamin Netanyahu does not miss an opportunity to declare that he represents all the Jews of the world, he makes all the world’s Jews responsible for Israeli policies and actions.” In other words, Netanyahu and the Israeli government are inciting violence against all Jews by making them appear complicit in Israeli crimes against Palestinians and other Arabs, such as those in southern Lebanon.

Just What Does Israel Have to Offer?

If Israel cannot offer a safer place for the world’s Jews, what else does it have to offer? Zionists other than the prime minister, sensing the weakness of the safety argument, offer other rationales. Unfortunately, these rationales also turn out to be distorted by Zionist ideology. Take, for instance, Avinoam Bar-Yosef, president of the Jewish People Policy Institute, a Jerusalem-based research center. He asserts that “the raison d’être of Israel is to create a place where Jews can have a better quality of Jewish life.”

Let’s think about this claim. What does “better quality of Jewish life” actually mean? If Mr. Bar-Yosef is referring to a Jewish religious life, then Israel offers a powerful orthodox (that is, fundamentalist) religious environment that most Western Jews would find unacceptable. Perhaps he means a Jewish social or cultural life? If so, Israel offers a version that is laced with racism and militarism. Bar-Yosef might find this scenario congenial, but how many other Jews would? And indeed, a very recent poll has suggested that close to an unprecedented 40% of Israeli Jews would move out of Israel if the opportunity to do so presented itself.

Then there is the Israeli professor Shlomo Avineri’s, declaration that “the legitimacy of Israel does not hinge on anti-Semitism. It hinges on the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in a Jewish state.” One might agree that self-determination is a good thing overall, except where it leads to the creation of an apartheid-style racist environment. No one has a right to that sort of state.

Conclusion

Prime Minister Netanyahu is the most publicly unpleasant Israeli leader since Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, both of whom were unrepentant terrorists. Netanyahu’s repeated war mongering against Iran is a real embarrassment for anyone who is familiar with the facts. And then to see congresspeople and senators collectively jumping up and applauding the man’s distortions is downright frightening. (And revolting—but that’s par for the course.—Eds.)

It would appear that while Netanyahu certainly does not speak for all the Jews or even all Israeli Jews, he might, perversely, speak for most of the U.S. Congress. There are now bills in Congress demanding more sanctions against Iran and a congressional veto over any negotiated deal with that country. These bills represent the spread of Benjamin Netanyahu’s obsessive delusions through the medium of the Zionist lobby’s corruption of electoral politics.

Think of the Israeli prime minister as a Pied Piper, playing the hypnotic tunes of anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and clash of civilizations down a dark and dismal road to war. He has most of Congress dancing behind him. Do the rest of us really want to follow?

[box] Lawrence Davidson is professor of history at West Chester University in West Chester, PA. [/box]

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]f reason and justice prevailed in this country, you’d think that the recent series of articles in the Washington Times concerning the U.S.-NATO attack on Libya in 2011 would torpedo Hillary Clinton’s presidential prospects.

Clinton as U.S. Secretary of State at that time knew that Libya was no threat to the U.S. She knew that Muammar Gadhafi had been closely cooperating with the U.S. in combating Islamist extremism. She probably realized that Gadhafi had a certain social base due in part to what by Middle Eastern standards was the relatively equitable distribution of oil income in Libya.

But she wanted to topple Gadhafi. Over the objections of Secretary of “Defense” Robert Gates but responding to the urgings of British Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Nicholas Sarkozy, she advocated war. Why? Not for the reason advertised at the time. (Does this sound familiar?) Not because Gadhafi was preparing a massacre of the innocents in Benghazi, as had occurred in Rwanda in 1994. (That episode, and the charge that the “international community” had failed to intervene, was repeatedly referenced by Clinton and other top officials, as a shameful precedent that must not be repeated. It had also been deployed by Bill Clinton in 1999, when he waged war on Serbia, grossly exaggerating the extent of carnage in Kosovo and positing the immanent prospect of “genocide” to whip up public support. Such uses of the Rwandan case reflect gross cynicism.)

 “It has never been hard for Hillary to choose brute force in the service of U.S. imperialism and its controlling 1%.

No, genocide was not the issue, in Libya any more than in Kosovo. According to the Washington Times, high-ranking U.S. officials indeed questioned whether there was evidence for such a scenario in Libya. The Defense Intelligence Agency estimated that a mere 2,000 Libyan troops armed with 12 tanks were heading to Benghazi, and had killed about 400 rebels by the time the U.S. and NATO attacked. It found evidence for troops firing on unarmed protestors but no evidence of mass killing. It did not have a good estimate on the number of civilians in Benghazi but had strong evidence that most had fled. It had intelligence that Gadhafi had ordered that troops not fire on civilians but only on armed rebels.

The Pentagon doubted that Gadhafi would risk world outrage by ordering a massacre. One intelligence officer told the Washington Times that the decision to bomb was made on the basis of “light intelligence.” Which is to say, lies, cherry-picked information such as a single statement by Gadhafi (relentlessly repeated in the corporate press echoing State Department proclamations) that he would “sanitize Libya one inch at a time” to “clear [the country] of these rats.” (Similar language, it was said, had been used by Hutu leaders in Rwanda.) Now that the rats in their innumerable rival militias control practically every square inch of Libya, preventing the emergence of an effective pro-western government, many at the Pentagon must be thinking how stupid Hillary was.

No, the attack was not about preventing a Rwanda-like genocide. Rather, it was launched because the Arab Spring, beginning with the overthrow of the two dictators, President Ben Ali of Tunisia and President Mubarak of Egypt, had taken the west by surprise and presented it with a dilemma: to retain longstanding friendships (including that with Gadhafi, who’d been a partner since 2003) in the face of mass protests, or throw in its lot with the opposition movements, who seemed to be riding an inevitable historical trend, hoping to co-opt them?

Cover of Hillary’s memoir, Hard Choice.  The powerful are given a chance to shape history to their own liking. (Mike Mozart, flickr)

Recall how Obama had declined up to the last minute to order Mubarak to step down, and how Vice President Joe Biden had pointedly declined to describe Mubarak as a dictator. Only when millions rallied against the regime did Obama shift gears, praise the youth of Egypt for their inspiring mass movement, and withdraw support for the dictatorship. After that Obama pontificated that Ali Saleh in Yemen (a key ally of the U.S. since 2001) had to step down in deference to protesters. Saleh complied, turning power to another U.S. lackey (who has since resigned). Obama also declared that Assad in Syria had “lost legitimacy,” commanded him to step down, and began funding the “moderate” armed opposition in Syria. (The latter have at this point mostly disappeared or joined al-Qaeda and its spin-offs. Some have turned coat and created the “Loyalists’ Army” backing Assad versus the Islamist crazies.)

Col. Gadhafi, painted portrait.  His barbarous murder is on Hillary’s long criminal tab. (Thierry Ehrmann, via flickr)

Hillary, that supposedly astute stateswoman, believed that the Arab Spring was going to topple all the current dictators of the Middle East and that, given that, the U.S. needed to position itself as the friend of the opposition movements. Gadhafi was a goner, she reasoned, so shouldn’t the U.S. help those working towards his overthrow?

Of course the U.S. (or the combination of the U.S. and NATO) couldn’t just attack a sovereign state to impose regime change. It would, at any rate, have been politically damaging after the regime change in Iraq that had been justified on the basis of now well discredited lies. So the U.S. arm-twisted UNSC members to approve a mission to protect civilians in Libya against state violence. China and Russia declined to use their veto power (although as western duplicity and real motives became apparent, they came to regret this). The Libya campaign soon shifted from “peace-keeping” actions such as the imposition of a “no-fly” zone to overt acts of war against the Gadhafi regime, which for its part consistently insisted that the opposition was aligned with al-Qaeda.

The results of “Operation Unified Protector” have of course been absolutely disastrous. Just as the U,S. and some of its allies wrecked Iraq, producing a situation far worse than that under Saddam Hussein, so they have inflicted horrors on Libya unknown during the Gadhafi years. These include the persecution of black Africans and Tuaregs, the collapse of any semblance of central government, the division of the country between hundreds of warring militias, the destabilization of neighboring Mali producing French imperialist intervention, the emergence of Benghazi as an al-Qaeda stronghold, and the proliferation of looted arms among rebel groups. The “humanitarian intervention” was in fact a grotesque farce and huge war crime.

But the political class and punditry in this country do not attack Hillary for war crimes, or for promoting lies to validate a war of aggression. Rather, they charge her and the State Department with failure to protect U.S. ambassador to Libya John Christopher Stevens and other U.S. nationals from the attack that occurred in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. And they fault her for promoting the State Department’s initial “talking point” that the attack had been a spontaneous reaction to an anti-Muslim YouTube film rather than a calculated terrorist attack. They pan her for sniping at a senator during a hearing, “What difference does it make (whether the attack had been launched by protestors spontaneously, or was a terrorist action planned by forces unleashed by the fall of the Gadhafi regime)”?

In other words: Hillary’s mainstream critics are less concerned with the bombing of Libya in 2011 that killed over 1100 civilians, and produced the power vacuum exploited by murderous jihadis, than by Hillary’s alleged concealment of evidence that might show the State Department inadequately protected U.S. diplomats from the consequences of the U.S.-orchestrated regime change itself. In their view, the former First Lady might have blood on her hands—but not that, mind you, of Libyan civilians, or Libyan military forces going about their normal business, or of Gadhafi who was sodomized with a knife while being murdered as Washington applauded.

No, she’s held accountable for the blood of these glorified, decent upstanding Americans who’d been complicit in the ruin of Libya.

This version of events is easy to challenge. It’s easy to show that Clinton skillfully—in full neocon mode, spewing disinformation to a clueless public—steered an attack on Libya that has produced enormous blowback and ongoing suffering for the Libyan people. If a right-wing paper like Washington Times can expose this, how much more the more “mainstream” press? Could they at least not raise for discussion whether what Rand Paul calls “Hillary’s war” was, like the Iraq War (and many others) based on lies? Shouldn’t Hillary be hammered with the facts of her history, and her vaunted “toughness” be exposed as callous indifference to human life?

While championing the rights of women and children, arguing that “it takes a village” to raise a child, Clinton has endorsed the bombing of villages throughout her public life. Here are some talking points for those appalled by the prospects of a Hillary Clinton presidency.

*She has always been a warmonger. As First Lady from January 1993, she encouraged her husband Bill and his secretary of state Madeleine Albright to attack Serbian forces in the disintegrating Yugoslavia—in Bosnia in 1994 and Serbia in 1999. She’s stated that in 1999 she phoned her husband from Africa. “I urged him to bomb,” she boasts. These Serbs were (as usual) forces that did not threaten the U.S. in any way. The complex conflicts and tussles over territory between ethnic groups in the Balkans, and the collapse of the Russian economy following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, gave Bill Clinton an excuse to posture as the world’s savior and to use NATO to impose order. Only the United States, he asserted, could restore order in Yugoslavia, which had been a proudly neutral country outside NATO and the Warsaw Pact throughout the Cold War. President Clinton and Albright also claimed that only NATO—designed in 1949 to counter a supposed Soviet threat to Western Europe, but never yet deployed in battle—should deal with the Balkan crises.

The Bosnian intervention resulted in the imposition of the “Dayton Accord” on the parties involved and the creation of the dysfunctional state of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Kosovo intervention five years later (justified by the scaremongering, subsequently disproven reports of a Serbian genocidal campaign against Kosovars) involved the NATO bombing of Belgrade and resulted in the dismemberment of Serbia. Kosovo, now recognized by the U.S. and many of its allies as an independent state, is the center of Europe’s heroin trafficking and the host of the U.S.’s largest army base abroad. The Kosovo war, lacking UN support and following Albright’s outrageous demand for Serbian acquiescence—designed, as she gleefully conceded, “to set the bar too high” for Belgrade and Moscow’s acceptance—of NATO occupation of all of Serbia, was an extraordinary provocation to Serbia’s traditional ally Russia. “They need some bombing, and that’s what they are going to get,” Albright said at the time, as NATO prepared to bomb a European capital for the first time since 1945.

*Clinton has been a keen advocate for the expansion of an antiquated Cold War military alliance that persists in provoking Russia. In the same year that NATO bombed Belgrade (1999), the alliance expanded to include Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. But Clinton’s predecessor George H. W. Bush had promised Russia in 1989 that NATO would not expand eastward. And since the Warsaw Pact had been dissolved in 1991, and since Russia under Boris Yeltsin hardly threatened any western countries, this expansion has understandably been viewed in Russia as a hostile move. George Kennan, a former U.S. ambassador to the USSR and a father of the “containment” doctrine, in 1998 pronounced the expansion a “tragic mistake” with “no reason whatsoever.” But the expansion continued under George W. Bush and has continued under Obama. Russia is now surrounded by an anti-Russian military alliance from its borders with the Baltic states to the north to Romania and Bulgaria. U.S.-backed “color revolutions” have been designed to draw more countries into the NATO camp. Hillary as secretary of state was a big proponent of such expansion, and under her watch, two more countries (Albania and Croatia) joined the U.S.-dominated alliance.

(To understand what this means to Russia, imagine how Washington would respond to a Russia-centered “defensive” military alliance requiring its members to spend 2% of their GDPs on military spending and coordinate military plans with Moscow incorporating Canada and all the Caribbean countries, surrounding the continental U.S., and now moving to include Mexico. Would this not be a big deal for U.S. leaders?)

*As New York senator Clinton endorsed the murderous ongoing sanctions against Iraq, imposed by the UN in 1990 and continued until 2003. Initially applied to force Iraqi forces out of Kuwait, the sanctions were sustained at U.S. insistence (and over the protests of other Security Council members) up to and even beyond the U.S. invasion in 2003. Bill Clinton demanded their continuance, insisting that Saddam Hussein’s (non-existent) secret WMD programs justified them. In 1996, three years into the Clinton presidency, Albright was asked whether the death of half a million Iraq children as a result of the sanctions was justified, and famously replied in a television interview, “We think it was worth it.” Surely Hillary agreed with her friend and predecessor as the first woman secretary of state. She also endorsed the 1998 “Operation Desert Fox” (based on lies, most notably the charge that Iraq had expelled UN inspectors) designed to further destroy Iraq’s military infrastructure and make future attacks even easier.

*She was a strident supporter of the Iraq War. As a New York senator from 2001 to 2009, Hillary aligned herself with the neoconservatives in the Bush administration, earning a reputation as a hawk. She was a fervent supportive of the attack on Iraq, based on lies, in 2003. On the floor of the Senate she echoed all the fictions about Saddam Hussein’s “chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program.” She declared, “He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members.” She suggested that her decision to support war was “influenced by my eight years of experience on the other end of Pennsylvania Ave. in the White House watching my husband deal with serious challenges to our nation.” (Presumably by the latter she meant the threats posed by Serbs in Bosnia and Kosovo.) Her loss to Obama in the Democratic primary in 2008 was due largely to Obama’s (supposed) antiwar position contrasting with her consistently pro-war position. She has only vaguely conceded that her support for the invasion was something of a mistake. But she blames her vote on others, echoing Dick Cheney’s bland suggestion that the problem was “intelligence failures.” “If we knew know then what we know now,” she stated as she began her presidential campaign in late 2006, “I certainly wouldn’t have voted” for the war.

*She actively pursued anti-democratic regime change in Ukraine. As secretary of state from 2009 to 2013, Clinton as noted above endorsed NATO’s relentless expansion. She selected to serve as Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs the neocon Victoria Nuland, who had been the principal deputy foreign advisor to Cheney when he was vice president. The wife of neocon pundit Robert Kagan, Nuland is a war hawk whose current mission in life is the full encirclement of Russia with the integration of Ukraine into the EU and then into NATO. The ultimate goal was the expulsion of the Russian Black Sea Fleet from the Crimean Peninsula (where it has been stationed since 1783). She has boasted of the fact that the U.S. has invested five billion dollars in supporting what she depicts as the Ukrainian people’s “European aspirations.” What this really means is that the U.S. exploited political divisions in Ukraine to topple an elected leader and replace him with Nuland’s handpicked prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyev, deploying neo-Nazi shock troops in the process and generating a civil war that has killed over 5000 people.

Clinton has increasingly vilified Vladimir Putin, the popular Russian president, absurdly comparing the Russian re-annexation of the Crimean Peninsula following a popular referendum with Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland. She is totally on board the program of producing a new Cold War, and forcing European allies to cooperate in isolating the former superpower.

*She wanted to provide military assistance to the “moderate” armed opposition in Syria, to effect regime change, and after leaving office criticized Obama for not supplying more than he did. In 2011 Clinton wanted the U.S. to arm rebels who quickly became aligned with the al-Nusra Front (an al-Qaeda affiliate) and other extreme Islamists, in order to bring down a secular regime that respects religious rights, rejects the implementation of Sharia law, and promotes the education of women. The U.S. indeed has supplied arms to anti-Assad forces from at least January 2014, But as it happens the bulk of U.S. aid to the “moderate rebels” has been appropriated by Islamists, and some of it is deployed against U.S. allies in Iraq. It is now widely understood that the bulk of “moderate” rebels are either in Turkish exile or directed by CIA agents, while the U.S. plans to train some 5000 new recruits in Jordan. Meanwhile Assad has won election (as fair as any held in a U.S. client state like Afghanistan or Iraq) and gained the upper hand in the civil war. U.S. meddling in Syria has empowered the Islamic State that now controls much of Syria and Iraq.

*She has been an unremitting supporter of Israeli aggression, whenever it occurs. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz described her last year as “Israel’s new lawyer” given her sympathetic view of Binyamin Netanyahu’s 2014 bombardment of Gaza and even his desire to maintain “security” throughout the occupied West Bank. She postured as an opponent of Israel’s unrelenting, illegal settlements of Palestinian territory in 2009, but backed down when Netanyahu simply refused to heed U.S. calls for a freeze. In her memoir she notes “our early, hard line on settlements didn’t work”—as though she’s apologizing for it.

In 1999 as First Lady, Hillary Clinton hugged and kissed Yassir Arafat’s wife Suha during a trip to the West Bank. She advocated the establishment of a Palestinian state. She changed her tune when she ran for the New York Senate seat. When it comes to the Middle East, she is a total, unprincipled opportunist.

*Hillary tacitly endorsed the military coup against elected Honduran president Manuel Zelaya in 2009, refusing to call it such (even though Obama did). She made common cause with those who feared his effort to poll the people about constitutional reform would weaken their positions, made nice with the ensuing regime and made sure Zelaya would not return to office.

*She provoked China by siding with Japan in the Senkaku/ Daioyutai dispute. Departing from the State Department’s traditional stance that “we take no position” on the Sino-Japanese dispute about sovereignty over the Senkaku/ Daioyutai islands in the East China Sea, seized by Japan in 1895, Clinton as secretary of state emphasized that the islands fall within the defense perimeters of the U.S.-Japanese alliance. The warmongering neocon National Review in a piece entitled “In Praise of Hillary Clinton” praised her for “driving the Chinese slightly up a wall.”

*She helped bring down a Japanese prime minister who heeded the feelings of the people of Okinawa, who opposed the Futenma Marine Corps Air Force Station on the island. The new president Yukio Hatoyama, whose Democratic Party of Japan defeated the slavishly pro-U.S. Liberal Democratic Party in the general election of 2009, had promised to move the hated U.S. base in the heart of Ginowan city for the noise, air pollution and public safety hazards it causes. Clinton met with him, listened sympathetically, and said “no.” Hatoyama was obliged to apologize to the people of Okinawa, essentially conceding that Japan remains an occupied nation that doesn’t enjoy sovereignty. Nationwide his public support ratings fell from 70 to 17% and he was obliged to resign in shame after eight months in office.

*She made countless trips to India, signing bilateral economic and nuclear cooperation agreements with a country her husband had placed under sanctions for its nuclear tests in 1998. While castigating North Korea for its nuclear weapons program, and taking what a CIA analyst called a “more hard line, more conditional, more neoconservative [approach] than Bush during the last four years of his term,” she signaled that India’s nukes were no longer an issue for the U.S. India is, after all, a counterweight to China.

What can those who revere her point to in this record that in any way betters the planet or this country? Clinton’s record of her tenure in the State Department is entitled Hard Choices, but it has never been hard for Hillary to choose brute force in the service of U.S. imperialism and its controlling 1%.

This is a country of 323 million people. 88% of those over 25 have graduated high school. The world respects U.S. culture, science, and technology. Why is it that out of our well-educated, creative masses the best that the those who decide these things—the secretive cliques within the two official, indistinguishable political parties who answer to the 1% and who decide how to market electoral products—can come up with is the likely plate of candidates for the presidential election next year? Why is it that, while we all find it ridiculous that North Korea’s ruled by its third Kim, Syria by its second Assad, and Cuba by its second Castro, the U.S. electorate may well be offered a choice between another Clinton and another Bush? As though their predecessors of those surnames were anything other than long-discredited warmongering thugs?

Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, (AK Press). He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu

SOURCE: Counterpunch

[dropcap]The Koch Brothers[/dropcap] are the closest thing the United States has to Russia’s oligarchs. They fuse ownership of the economy and state, using the latter to enrich themselves while making private gains through the public’s losses. Their idea of a “market economy” is to buy government officials and the assets they privatize at giveaway prices.

The top three butlers at the Koch’s nouveau riche ‘Downton Abbey’ are Governors Sam Brownback of Kansas, Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, and Chris Christie of New Jersey. All three ran elections based on the anti-Keynesian oxymoron of promoting job creation by balancing budgets with regressive tax plans. All declared that cutting taxes (chiefly on their wealthy campaign contributors) was the way to achieve their goal (more campaign contributions). All have served at least one term in office and the results are in: Their rates of job creation and income growth are way below the national average. Rather than closing budget deficits, tax cuts create them – providing more excuse to privatize state assets, post-Soviet style.

Brownback simply hopes to stay on the job as governor of the state where the Kochs’ corporate headquarters are located. Despite flagging poll numbers, he remained in office thanks to a mildly tawdry incident involving his Democratic opponent’s youthful visit to a strip club (in the era of talk radio and Fox News, anything can be manufactured into a scandal). Christie and Walker, by contrast, have presidential aspirations and are raising funding as the two top prospects from the Kochs’ political farm team.

The looming public danger ahead is how these Koch governors will ‘repair’ the fiscal potholes their tax policies are creating. Chanting the GOP refrain of ‘lower tax rates good, higher taxes bad’ as their stage-magic abracadabra, they proselytize Arthur Laffer’s cocktail napkin ‘Laffer Curve’ depicting lower tax rates delivering higher tax revenues as a sacred scroll – its inevitable failure leading to privatization of rent-extracting opportunities in a Yeltsin-like post-Soviet policy under the banner of free markets.

All three Koch Governors are following this fiscal folly of widening budget deficits. The effect is to force more cutbacks in public services, with sermons exhorting voters to tighten their belts while the Kochs gorge themselves on the tax cuts enacted by their pet governors.

Christie: An unapologetic bully and sneaky reactionary. Yet many continue to buy his demagogy.

Christie and Walker are the two governors with the most to lose by reciting the same tax-cutting catechism that Brownback parroted while driving Kansas into insolvency. Walker ran for re-election largely on having eliminated a $3.6 billion budget shortfall while cutting taxes and – more to the point – by cutting public employee benefits while holding most state wage increases below the rate of inflation. Christie likewise originally ran on closing deficits. Both now find themselves big budget deficits after serving a term with the policy they would like to impose on the nation at large.

Christie and Walker both sought to finance budget deficits and tax cuts (chiefly for the wealthy) by reducing living standards for public sector workers. But the deficits have re-appeared, while the cuts to public worker compensation have reduced consumer spending at local restaurants, taverns, car dealers and the innumerable goods and services tendered by New Jersey and Wisconsin businesses.

Christie and Walker pretended that cutting inflation-adjusted wages and benefits would not reduce consumer demand if the ‘savings’ were spent by the taxpayers enjoying lower tax bills. This argument ignored the obvious fact that the tax cuts go disproportionately to the wealthiest. As every economic textbook for the past century has taught, the rich typically spend and invest more of their money out of state, or simply buy more Wall Street stocks and bonds and foreign luxuries. The supposed savings thus escape Wisconsin, slowing economic growth – and hence, state tax revenue!

Christie and Walker are now facing deeper deficits after their tax cuts. Governor Walker no longer has a balanced budget. New Jersey’s shortfall for this year was close to $1.6 billion. Christie was counting on revenues from the state lottery to serve as income transfer from the poor and working class to pay for his tax cuts to the rich. But lottery revenues have fallen short. So he is trying to make up by cutting state payments to the pension system. As for Wisconsin’s state deficit, it is projected to widen to $2.2 billion.

Just as important as how much tax is collected, is how it is collected – who/whom? The aim should be to structure tax policies in ways that maximize wealth creation. But Governor Christie and Walker’s tax policies cut the bone, not the fat.

Their political dilemma is that their ‘tools’ of income and property tax cuts have not ‘repaired’ their respective budgets. The danger is that their pursuit of the 2016 GOP presidential nomination will lead them to use the next ‘tool’ in today’s class war arsenal: weaponizing fiscal policy to sell off the public domain.

Governor Walker has led the way by trying to sell state land and power plants in no-bid contracts. The idea is for privatization sell-offs to raise enough short-term revenue to allow the Koch Governors to wave the banner of fiscal rectitude, just in time for the 2016 presidential primaries.

But this will sell their states’ ‘family silver’ of land, power plants and other basic infrastructure that has been kept in the public domain to benefit taxpayers by keeping their basic infrastructure prices low. Selling off this public property, currently owned free of debt, would provide rent-extraction opportunities for the buyers. It would turn their taxpayers into rent payers for the services of the assets they formerly owned free and clear. The new prices for hitherto public services will include debt servicing charges, management charges, the cost stock dividends, and whatever rack-renting the new owners can squeeze out of the public.

To be sure, there is room for investigating whether a private vender could better manage our state-owned power plants, or if a private developer should construct and manage buildings on public land to maximize revenue. But this is different than selling the underlying assets owned by taxpayers.

Tax rates can be lowered or raised in response to budgetary needs – and to pay for errors by past political office holders. But once public assets are sold, they cannot easily be re-acquired. The long-term fiscal damage from their sale is permanent. That is what England learned from the devastating wave of Thatcherism. It raised the fees that taxpayers must now pay for transportation, water and other hitherto public services that have been privatized and financialized. They lose more paying such rents than they saved in the tax cuts (financed by much higher public debt levels).

The problem with New Jersey and Wisconsin is that unlike Britain, whose economy was saved by North Sea oil revenues coming online just when Thatcher’s policies were cutting demand in the economy, these states have no such natural resource windfall to save them from the short-term fixes to the budgetary shortfalls that have been created by tax cuts benefiting the most affluent.

Beyond New Jersey and Wisconsin, the whole country needs a more enlightened discourse on wealth creation. Blanket lowering or raising taxes will not balance our state budgets or deliver prosperity. The aim should be to make the tax structure more progressive, and to incentivize investment over speculation. What must be avoided at all costs is selling off public infrastructure. This Koch ‘tool’ will not ‘repair’ our budgets. It risks shattering budgets, and also the middle class. Selling off public property returns the public to their role as peasants on the Kochs plantation.

But here’s the real nightmare: President Obama has been giving speeches warning about the nation’s deteriorating bridges, roads and other infrastructure. This sounds like a Grand Bargain in the making by the Democratic ‘Rubinomics’ and Koch crowds to raise the funds to ‘fix’ America by privatizing bridges and other infrastructure that have been starved of maintenance as a means to balance local budgets in the face of cutting taxes for the rich. A Democratic Congress might block Koch tax cuts on the national level – but a Democratic presidential victory could restore Obama-Clinton style neoliberal policies to out-Koch the Koch brothers by engaging in privatizations as a means to both restore our infrastructure, while levying a de facto tax on the middle class in the form of tolls and fees going to private investors for infrastructure currently paid for by general government revenues.

In short, the 2016 presidential election could be another example of ‘heads you lose, tails you lose’ with either the Democrats or Republicans. The best chance of staving off this ‘casino fix is in’ is to focus on electing progressives to the Congress rather than ‘investing’ in a Hillary victory for 2016.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Jeffrey Sommers is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee and visiting faculty at the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga. His book with Charles Woolfson, The Contradictions of Austerity: The Socio-economic Costs of the Neoliberal Baltic Model  is available from Routledge.

Michael Hudson’s book summarizing his economic theories, “The Bubble and Beyond,” is available on Amazon. His latest book is Finance Capitalism and Its Discontents.  He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press. He can be reached via his website, mh@michael-hudson.com