No More "All Options Are On The Table"?

Following up from this older post (and this one as well) - it would be nice indeed if what the following article discusses would become a reality:

Nuclear Arms Ban Is Hot Again
Interest grows among world leaders, 'Global Zero' campaign builds steam.
By Sean Casey

The movement to abolish nuclear weapons, after dropping low on the political radar, shows signs of resurging in the Obama era.

In December, 100 world dignitaries gathered in Paris to unveil the Global Zero campaign -- an effort to eliminate nuclear arms spearheaded by international political, military, and business leaders.

Principle signatories include Jimmy Carter, Mikhail Gorbachev and Robert McNamara.

Global Zero seeks to develop an international agreement to disarm and dismantle nuclear arms through phased and verified reductions. The plan's first phase will call for heavy reductions to U.S. and Russian arsenals, which comprise 96 per cent of the world's nuclear weapons.

Dr. Jennifer Simons -- a Global Zero principle signatory and winner of the Vancouver Citizens' Peace award -- said there's "been a massive change of mind expressed globally" about nuclear proliferation, and that the winds of change now favour disarmament.

Treaties stalled by Bush

After the Cold War, there was a brief flurry of advancement towards disarmament.

In 1994, the U.S. and Russia agreed to de-target their strategic missiles. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) was extended indefinitely the following year, and the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) was signed in 1996.

But the past decade has not been kind to abolition ambitions.

Nuclear disarmament stalled in key areas. The U.S. did not ratify the CTBT, and the Bush administration withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 to pursue missile defence systems.

In other political and military arenas, abolition took a step backwards. India and Pakistan emerged on the world stage as nuclear powers in 1998. North Korea tested its own nuclear weapon in 2006, and Iran has been accused of pursuing technology to enrich weapon-grade uranium.

Nuclear disarmament renaissance

Despite the setbacks, new calls for disarmament have emerged from high-level policy analysts in recent years.

In January 2007, Henry Kissinger and George Schulz reignited the disarmament debate with an essay published in the Washington Post. They warned that the U.S. "will enter a new nuclear era that will be more precarious, psychologically disorienting, and economically even more costly than was Cold War deterrence" unless the world freed itself from reliance on nuclear weapons and deterrence.

Kissinger and Schulz's warnings have not gone unheeded.

Dr. Wade Huntley, research director at UBC's Liu Institute for Global Issues, told a Vancouver conference last week that recommitment to a world free of nuclear weapons "has been increasingly adopted and embraced by foreign policy and strategic thinkers across the political spectrum in the United States."

On the White House's recently updated website, the Obama administration has promised to "move toward a nuclear free world" by strengthening the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, stopping the development of new nuclear weapons and by taking ballistic missiles off of hair-trigger alert.

"U.S. policy, which has long been an anchor in moving closer to a world free of nuclear weapons, could now become an engine," Huntley said. U.S. diplomatic leadership could pave the way toward "a global nuclear weapons agreement that, much like the land mines ban, would set the goal of elimination and map the path by which that goal can be realized," Huntley said.

Canadian enthusiasm waned

A poll conducted last year found 88 per cent of Canadians believe nuclear weapons make the world a more dangerous place.

But Huntley said the Canadian government's enthusiasm towards nuclear non-proliferation has waned.

"Everybody supports disarmament," Huntley said. "But what's really changed is that the nuclear issue doesn't have the prominence and priority in the public agenda the way it used to. The questions of energy development, of climate change, of human rights and human security have taken priority."

If nuclear apocalypse is no longer feared, why should disarmament continue to be a Canadian concern?

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A World On The Edge

I hereby yield the floor (again) to Paul Rogers:

A combination of long-term trends and the global economic turmoil of 2008-09 is fuelling a potential revolution of frustrated expectations.

The global financial downturn that accelerated throughout 2007-08 for some time seemed to be largely confined to a cluster of western states - the United States, Spain, Japan and Britain among them. Yet the greater extent and severity of the crisis that erupted on "debtonation day", 9 August 2007, is becoming clearer. As late as November 2008, the International Monetary Fund (IMF's) monthly update was forecasting that overall world output would rise by 2.2% in 2009; the leaders were expected to be some of the "tiger" economies, especially China. Now, in late January 2009, that assessment is being downgraded sharply: to 0.5% prospective overall growth, the lowest annual rate since 1945.

There is a bleak implication here: that emerging economies will for the foreseeable future no longer be able to drive the global financial machine. This in turn dissolves the hope that they would cushion the worst impacts of the recession in wealthy states. The IMF cites a range of evidence - lower commodity prices, worsening export prospects and financial constraints - to forecast that the growth of the emerging and developing economies will shrink from 6.25% to 3.25% in 2009 (see "World Growth Grinds to Virtual Halt, IMF Urges Decisive Global Policy Response", 28 January 2009).

The impact of this fall will be especially heavy on the approximately 4 billion peole who compose the marginalised majority of the world's people, those who lack security and minimally reliable living-standards. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) warns that there could be 51 million job-losses in 2009. The food-security summit in Madrid on 26-27 January 2009 heard that while food prices had declined in the past few months, they were still 30% higher than in 2005-06 (see Victoria Burnett, "UN chief warns of food shortages in poor countries", International Herald Tribune, 27 January 2009).

The United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-moon drew attention to a recent rise in malnutrition, which he linked to the wider economic downturn: "With the spreading misery of shrinking economies, communities that were starting to emerge from poverty must wrestle instead with fewer jobs, limited access to credit and restricted market opportunities."

A tale of two trends

It is in this context that members of the global elite are gathering for the annual World Economic Forum summit in Davos, Switzerland, on 28 January - 1 February 2009. The emphasis in most of the discussions - organised around the theme of "shaping the post-crisis world" - reflects the concerns of the rich west in particular, albeit with high-profile contributions from the prime ministers of (for example) Russia and China.

The real issue that the Davos summiteers are unlikely to address is the impact of the recession on a worldwide community in which thirty years of neo-liberal economic policies on a global scale have failed to deliver any measure of true economic justice. There has certainly been growth, most recently in some of the largest Asian economies; but this has been accompanied by the evolution of a transnational elite of well over a billion people that has forged ahead of the rest.

The extent of the divisions is staggering. A striking example is found in a study of the "household wealth survey" by the Helsinki-based World Institute for Development Economics Research, which shows that the richest 10% of the world's people own 85% of household wealth whereas the poorest 50% own barely 1% (see James Davies, Susanna Sandstrom, Anthony Shorrocks & Edward N Wolff, "The World Distribution of Household Wealth", WIDER Angle, 2/2006 [World Institute for Development Economics Research, Helsinki]).

The fundamental failure of the liberalised world system to counter such divisions has, however, been paralleled by another and far more welcome trend: the impressive growth in education, literacy and communications across the world. This achievement, owed primarily to the efforts of hundreds of millions of people across the global south, means that there are now far more people who have shared in educational progress. At the same time, this very advance carries with it a clearer and more widespread recognition of the realities of their marginalisation (see "A world in flux: crisis to agency", 16 October 2008).

This global phenomenon may be beyond the awareness of most of the world's elite - but huge numbers of people in the majority world have an acute understanding of both how far they have come and how high are the obstacles to thier further progress. The result is no longer what used to be described as "the revolution of rising expectations"; but rather a potential revolution of frustrated expectations. This has already led to revolts from the margins, which are likely to continue.

The recent experiences of China and India is instructive (see "China and India: heartlands of global protest", 7 August 2008). In 2006, for example, the Chinese authorities had to introduce a new group of security forces - 600-strong elite squads in each of thirty-six cities dedicated primarily to social control. They were intended to supplement existing policing systems attempting to cope with a rapid rise in social unrest (see Jane Macartney, "China creates crack units to crush poverty protests", Times, 20 June 2005).

In India, the neo-Maoist Naxalite rebel movement that originated in West Bengal in 1968 might have been expected to be consigned to an over-full dustbin of history (see Ajai Sahni, "India and its Maoists: failure and success", 20 March 2007). Instead it has been able to expand its influence and engage in sustained combat with official security forces; it is now active in 185 districts, located in seventeen out of India's twenty-eight states. In 2007, the movement was described by India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh, as the "single biggest internal-security challenge facing India" (see P V Ramana, "Red Storm Rising", Jane's Intelligence Review, August 2008).

A further example of the potential revolution of frustrated expectations is the violent reaction to the rapid rise in food prices in 2007-08. This led to numerous riots and other civil disturbances in Mexico, Senegal, Morocco, Mauritania and elsewhere (see Dominique Baillard, "The demand for grain won't stop growing", Le Monde diplomatique, May 2008 [subscription only]).

These developments are only the more visible indicators of a deeper resentment among communities that have far greater access to communications technology (especially television) and are far more aware of the scale of the world's social divisions than ever before (see "A world in the balance", 13 November 2008). In a situation where half of the world's population is now urbanised, many of the divisions are stark and unavoidable; not least the development of heavily-guarded gated communities, some of them akin to medieval walled towns (see "A tale of two towns", 21 June 2007).

The risk of revolt

The key point here is that these alienated and often violent responses have all evolved during a period of overall growth, in which even in the midst of wide social divsions the prospect of economic betterment has remained open.

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Late Friday Night Ode To ... Harper And His Harpies (Again)

Tonight's Ode is dedicated to our very own Canadian Incompetent-In-Chief - with a triple play at that in izonor.

First off, we have Stone Temple Pilots - Creep:

Second, we have 3 Doors Down - Loser:

And third, we have Radiohead - Creep:

Maybe our Mini Leader will finally get the message?

(Hey - one can always wish, eh?)

Keep on rockin', folks.

(and of course, you as well, Impolitic!)

;-)

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White House Dismisses Report Of Iran Letter

Attacking Iran Still on the Table, Obama Spokesman Insists

Yesterday it was reported that the Obama Administration was looking at sending a reply letter to the Iranian government which would signal a willingness to improve ties and perhaps hold direct talks between the two. The move would have been the most significant move toward normalizing relations between the United States and Iran in 30 years.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs was quick to dismiss the report. “Neither the president nor the secretary of state has seen such a letter,” according to Gibbs. He also added that many issues needed to be address with respect to Iran, including their illusory “illicit nuclear program” and their “threatening of peace in Israel.”

So just one day after the possibility that the Obama Administration might actually make a positive move toward peace with Iran, the White House is again raising the specter of a US military strike against Iran. The Iranian government has expressed repeated willingness to improve ties, and while President Obama has spoken of rapprochement as well his official policy has so far remained that of President Bush: barely restrained hostility.

punditman says .... We shall see.

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The Problem With "Human Resources"

I've always thought that the "begining of the end" with regards to labour rights, respect for labour and stemming overt expoitation/extorsion/domination of labour, occured when companies and corporations came up with the idea of considering their work force as "resources" - as in "human resources" - to be managed and used as any other kind of resources.

Thus conveniently putting aside the obvious verity that human beings are not things to be used and discarded when used up - in addition to the fundamental fact that our economies happen to be shouldered by ...those very same "human resources" ...

The falling stock of workers
By Rick Salutin

Blinding moments of insight often come in asides, parentheses or (among academics) footnotes; what seems overbold gets slipped past fast. This happened in a recent Globe and Mail column by Murray Campbell on the decline of Ontario's economy: "The long-term trend toward globalization" (here it comes, pay attention) "-- seeking out lower-cost jurisdictions --". And it's gone. But he said it. All the glam theory and rhetoric on globalization and free trade came down to one thing: businesses taking work from here and shipping it to where people will do it more cheaply.

Notice that he doesn't even specify what the lower costs apply to in those "jurisdictions." It must be an economic factor that dare not speak its name. So I'll name it: workers. Labour. When workers appear in news about the current crisis, it's mostly as victims, collateral damage to impersonal forces like the economy, credit freezes or globalization.

What a comedown from the heyday of classical economics. All the greats, from Adam Smith to Marx, called labour the source of wealth and value. Workers were the core of the economic process, not vulnerable bystanders.

This is why the sad hallmark of this week's federal budget is its failure to restore the wasted employment insurance system for those out of work. It's the hallmark because of what it says about our attitudes toward the economy.

When unemployment insurance began, during the Depression of the 1930s, it was built on the idea of a right to work, like other basic rights, and not just a need to survive. Also on the dignity of work. UI was meant to tide the jobless through bad patches so that they needn't grab any shabby job offer that came along for the sake of survival. It reflected a sense of work as the heart of social and economic life, in a society where left-wing parties, ideologies, writers and, above all, unions, voiced this sense.

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"Liberal" Media Bias?

Yeah - ri-ight.

Right on cue, the White House press awakens from its Bush slumber
by Eric Boehlert

Pulling a collective Rip Van Winkle, the White House press corps has awakened from its extended nap just in time to aggressively press the new Democratic administration, just as it dogged the last Democratic president during his first days in office back in the 1990s. Conveniently skipped over during the press corps' extended bout of shut-eye? The Bush years, of course.

Suddenly revved up and vowing to keep a hawk-like watch on the Obama administration ("I want to hold these guys accountable for what they say and do") and all of a sudden obsessed with trivia, while glomming onto nitpicking, gotcha-style critiques, Beltway reporters have tossed aside the blanket of calm that had descended on them during the previous administration, a blanket of calm that defined their Bush coverage.

Can't say I'm surprised about the sudden change in behavior, though. Taking the long view, I recently went back and contrasted how the press covered the first days and weeks of Clinton's first term in 1993 with its coverage of Bush's arrival in 2001. The difference in tone and substance was startling. (Think bare-knuckled vs. cottony soft.)

One explanation at the time of the Bush lovefest was that reporters and pundits were just so burnt out by the Clinton scandal years that they needed some downtime. They needed to relax; it was human nature. Conversely, the opposite now seems to be true: Because the press dozed for so long -- because it sleepwalked through the Bush years -- it just had to spring back to life with the new administration. It's human nature.

When contrasting the early Clinton and Bush coverage, I noted it would be deeply suspicious if, in 2009, the press managed to turn up the emotional temperature just in time to cover another Democratic administration. But wouldn't you know it, the press corps' alarm went off right on time for Obama's arrival last week, with the Beltway media taking down off the shelf the dusty set of contentious, in-your-face rules of engagement they practiced during the Clinton years and putting into safe storage the docile, somnambulant guidelines from the Bush era. In other words, one set of rules for Clinton and Obama, another for Bush. One standard for the Democrats; a separate, safer one, for the Republican.

"I don't think there is a honeymoon" for Obama, Jon Banner, the executive producer of ABC's World News, announced last week. "The accountability starts immediately." See, accountability suddenly reigns supreme. Just like right after Clinton was sworn in. But Bush in 2001? Not so much.

For folks who, understandably, weren't paying attention 16 years ago or who haven't read up on their White House media history, it's hard to appreciate just how uncanny the similarities are between how the suddenly hyperactive, conflict-driven press corps (baited by the right to prove their independence) is dealing with Obama's first days and how the hyperactive press dealt with Clinton's opening days, as journalists then also seemed determined to prove their un-liberalness.

The early Clinton and Obama scripts are at times interchangeable (i.e. baseless, negative stories like the cost of Obama's inauguration and the cost of Bill Clinton's haircut). The only part that doesn't fit in with the rest of the mosaic is how the press lovingly treated the Republican in 2001 during his arrival in town.

The media's abrupt transformation last week in terms of greeting the new president -- a transformation that unfolded with great pride and even apparent glee among reporters -- was showcased during the new administration's first White House press briefing, where many reporters, previously comatose during the news-free Bush-era briefings, rose up in anger and demanded answers during a contentious session.

"Game On! Obama's Clash With The White House Press Corps" announced The Daily Beast. And under the headline, "Obama press aide gets bashed in debut," The Washington Times' Joseph Curl reported:

Although President Obama swept into office pledging transparency and a new air of openness, the press hammered spokesman Robert Gibbs for nearly an hour over a slate of perceived secretive slights that have piled up quickly for the new administration. It wasn't pretty.

[...]

And so it went at the first official White House briefing of the new Obama administration -- a fiery back and forth dispelling the notion that journalists would go easy on the guy that many reports show it went easy on during the marathon primary and general election campaigns.

Halfway through the interrogation, a reporter asked succinctly: "Is the honeymoon over already?"

Curl also reported there was yelling and shouting from journalists inside the White House press room that day. (One "spat.") Now, if you're having trouble recalling all the times the same press corps "hammered" Bush White House spokesman Ari Fleischer for nearly an hour -- yelled, shouted, and spat questions at him -- back in January 2001, don't worry, your memory isn't going bad. It's just that those contentious hardball sessions never actually happened.

In fact, the media's lullaby treatment of Bush at the outset of 2001 became so pronounced that even some members of the Beltway press corps acknowledged the unfolding phenomenon and how it so obviously contrasted with the high-octane coverage the outgoing Democratic administration had been bombarded with. "The truth is, this new president [Bush] has done things with relative impunity that would have been huge uproars if they had occurred under Clinton," Politico's John Harris, then with The Washington Post, wrote during Bush's first months in office. (Harris went on to cheer, "[G]ood for Washington in giving a new president a break at the start.")

The other Clinton/Obama connection is how the press detests the way new Democratic White Houses treat the media. Of course, the irony is thick, considering the utter contempt the Bush White House displayed toward the press. The way former chief of staff Andrew Card famously dismissed the press as just another D.C. special interest group desperately seeking access, the way aides quickly formed habits of not returning reporters' calls for weeks and months, and the way the Bush White House waved in a former male prostitute using an alias and without any valid journalistic credentials to toss softball questions during briefings. That's how Republicans brushed back the press. But it's the Democrats whom reporters lash out at. It's the Democrats whom reporters denounce with righteous indignation within days of the new administration's taking office.

Back at the outset of 1993, journalists complained that the new Clinton communications team limited their access by closing off portions of the White House to reporters, that aides didn't sufficiently schmooze journalists, and that the new president did not have enough formal press conferences. (And don't even ask what reporters did when their pals in the White House travel office got fired.) "They're dissing us," Los Angeles Times California editor David Lauter, then-White House reporter, complained in April 1993.

Well, fast-forward to last week, and it's déjà vu all over again. Here's how Politico cataloged the media's petty laundry list of grievances that sparked the press "frustration":

There have been a handful of rocky moments so far. Some press staffers found their name cards misspelled on Wednesday and phone lines weren't properly hooked up. Reporters trying to reach the press staff got emails bounced back.

[...]

And in the hours before Gibbs' briefing, the northwest gate of the White House started running out of temporary passes.

No wonder NBC's Chuck Todd compared the White House press room to Gitmo -- reporters' names were misspelled!

It was telling that in its piece about Obama's press woes, Politico noted how the Clinton administration had also run into trouble with the press over issues of access. Noticeably absent from the Politico article was any mention of how the Bush administration dramatically limited media access, regularly cordoned off information from the press, and warned reporters that edgy questions posed at the daily sessions were "noted in the building." That's all been tossed down the memory hole. It's only new Democratic presidents who are asked to play nice with the press and get badgered when they do not.

But back to the showdown at the White House briefing last week: CNN's Ed Henry, while appearing on The Situation Room, stressed to host Wolf Blitzer that he didn't think the new White House press secretary had answered his query that day about Obama's pick to become deputy defense secretary. Think about that premise for a moment (i.e. a White House press secretary artfully dodges a reporter's question) while recalling what the White House press briefings were like for reporters under Bush. Dan Froomkin at washingtonpost.com did his best to capture the vacuous nature of those exercises:

The spin, the secrets, the non-answers and the unprecedented lack of access are an insult not only to journalists, but to the public that depends on us to fully inform them about what's really going on in the White House.

Added blogger and J-school professor Jay Rosen:

The point here was to underline how pointless it was even to ask questions of the Bush White House. And reporters got that point, though they missed the larger picture I am describing. Many times they wondered what they were doing there.

And TNR's Jonathan Chait:

Much of the time [Ari] Fleischer does not engage with the logic of a question at all. He simply denies its premises -- or refuses to answer it on the grounds that it conflicts with a Byzantine set of rules governing what questions he deems appropriate. Fleischer has broken new ground in the dark art of flackdom: Rather than respond tendentiously to questions, he negates them altogether.

But suddenly for Henry, when a Democrat's in power, it's news when a White House press person doesn't answer a reporter's question during a daily briefing. After eight years of having a succession of Bush flacks who, almost with robotic precision, refused to answer weeks, months, and years' worth of daily briefing questions from reporters -- to the point where journalists stopped showing up at the daily briefings or even trying to draw out useful information from the uncooperative White House press operation -- against that backdrop, the CNN correspondent thought it was newsworthy that his question wasn't answered by the new Democratic White House spokesman.

In other words, a routine, everyday press occurrence under Bush (a reporter gets a non-answer) suddenly transformed itself into a news event under Obama.

Do reporters deserve to get straight answers at the White House? Yes. Was Henry's query a legitimate one? Absolutely. But when the non-answers came from Bush spokesmen and women, the working press corps seemed to shrug it off. On Obama's first day, though, an unsatisfactory response was suddenly worthy of discussion on cable television. Why? From the press' perspective, Democratic administrations are supposed to answer all questions. They're supposed to grant carte blanche access to the press. Republicans could do whatever they wanted to the daily briefing and defang the process to the point of irrelevancy. But Democrats? Sorry, a different set of rules apply.

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"See" Me on WWL Radio Tonight!!!

Join Producer Diane G, and Hosts Gottlieb and Ed Encho for a Wildly Left Hour!!!

This evening, at 6pm Eastern, join us at WWL BlogTalkRadio as we discuss:

1. Equal Pay - The Lilly Ledbetter Law gets signed!

Call in and let us know if this will effect you, or has effected you in the past.

2. Conyers vs Rove.. Holder vs The Right

Is accountability a pipe dream, or did someone just repack the bowl???

3. Stimulus Package... Is Keynesianism on the Rise, or is this just more Trickle down?

Speak your minds!

Our VERY Special Guest will be OPOL, of Docudharma!!!!

Nothing like One Pissed Off Liberal to discuss with us:

1. we should have listened to the hippies

2. we should cease making war on people for bogus reasons

3. we should re-purpose the MIC to address environmental and energy issues

Tune in and Listen:



Call in with comments or questions to:

646-929-1264

The link to BTR live chat will be available on the WWL 15 minutes before the show!

Don't forget to plug APOV or your own blogs when introducing yourself on the Air!

When we lift any one of us on the Left, we lift us all!!!

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Harper/Flaherty Budget: Stimulus Too Timid, Tax Cuts Ineffective

Right. Dead on. And then some. Utter incompetence all around.

Stimulus too timid; tax cuts ineffective — NUPGE

“Everyone except the prime minister seems to understand that big problems require bold solutions. Canada needs a large-scale fiscal stimulus."

Ottawa (27 Jan. 2009) – The Harper government has let Canadians down again with a stimulus package that is short on the bold investments needed to boost the economy, create jobs and protect vulnerable families, says the National Union of Public and General Employees (NUPGE).

The union says the budget is not equal to the challenges facing the country and should be significantly amended or defeated.

"When it comes to the economy the prime minister has a tin ear,” said James Clancy, NUPGE national president.

“That was obvious in the last election and the lead-up to the fall economic update. After losing the confidence of Canadians and shutting down Parliament the prime minister entered into a much-heralded ‘listening mode’ but he apparently conducted ‘listening mode’ with a tin ear as well," he says.

“Everyone except the prime minister seems to understand that big problems require bold solutions. Canada needs a large-scale fiscal stimulus but unfortunately today’s budget is underwhelming and amounts to timid tweaking at the margins.”

Equal to just 1% of GDP

Almost half of the deficit for next year is due simply to lost revenue from the faltering economy. The stimulus package announced in the budget for next year is a modest $18 billion, which represents about 1% of Canada's gross domestic product (GDP) and only half the size of efforts presented in other countries. U.S. President Barack Obama has proposed a stimulus package of about 5% of GDP.

"We're far behind what's happening internationally and that means Canadians are going to see more joblessness, uncertainty and hardship than they need to," Clancy adds. “Mr. Harper doesn't seem to realize that the dangers of being too timid are far greater than the risks of doing too much.”

A good part of the stimulus package is going to tax cuts for corporations and permanent personal income tax cuts. When it comes to reviving the economy and helping vulnerable families tax cuts do not work as well as smart public spending, Clancy points out.

“The tax cuts in today’s budget are ill-advised and will be ineffective. The most important personal tax cuts are not targeted at low-income families and most people will use tax cuts to pay down debt, build savings or buy imports – none of which will help boost the economy.”

Previous tax cuts didn't prevent recession

In recent years the Harper government has announced tax cuts totalling close to $200 billion, most of which has gone to large corporations. The union notes that these tax cuts did nothing to prevent the economic recession and says it makes no sense to expect more tax cuts to lift Canada out of a recession or help struggling families.

“The Harper government is focused on business tax cuts while at the same time funneling billions of taxpayer dollars to the big banks,” Clancy notes. “When are they going to drop their corporate tax cut ideology and instead start helping average families by doing things like ensuring the big banks reduce mortgage rates, credit card interest rates and ATM fees?”

There’s a widespread consensus among leading economists that when it comes to reviving the economy the impact of tax cuts is much lower than that of direct government spending.

“More investment in our social safety net should have been the core of today’s stimulus plan,” argues Clancy. “That would have provided more bang for the buck, more support for vulnerable families, and it would have ensured that something of value is left behind when the short-term stimulus is over.”

Little for jobless, families, elder care or students

Instead, the new budget confirms that equalization improvements already announced will be limited to the growth rate of the economy, meaning that struggling provinces will receive $7 billion less from the federal government than they had been counting on over the next two years. The budget also contained next to nothing to help the unemployed, families struggling with the rising costs of child care and elder care, students with rising debt loads, and seniors struggling with reduced retirement savings.

“Extending Employment Insurance (EI) benefits by five weeks is not nearly enough to help unemployed Canadians,” Clancy says.

“Improving access to EI and increasing benefits would have been far more helpful when it comes to putting money in the hands of those who need it most. But the budget does nothing to address our flawed system, where only 40% of workers qualify for what are now poverty-level benefits."

“Most Canadians were expecting new investments in our social infrastructure but this budget invests nothing in child care, elder care, mental health, post-secondary education or community-based social services,” he adds.

"Furthermore, the budget does nothing to improve public pensions for seniors and nothing to shore up workplace pension plans.”

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The United Haters Of America

by Guy Reel

Somewhere deep inside the authoritarian minds of the ultra right-wingers, the fear, helplessness and paranoia that have always been so evident have reached the boiling point. For them, Obama's election and, perhaps even more so, the sight of him standing on the Capitol steps and taking the oath of office, have brought home a grim truth. They have tried to deny it for many years now, but America is not what they think it is. And because of their own incompetence, blindness to reality and the changing demographics among voters - the growing minorities and young voters who have rejected the GOP - they have lost America, perhaps for good.

And so now we hear, sometimes overtly, sometimes covertly, their wish of failure (and perhaps worse) for America.

Karl Rove and Marc Thiessen, the former chief White House speechwriter, have been warning that Obama's new anti-terror policies (such as closing Guantanamo Bay, prohibiting torture and stopping rendition to CIA black sites) may put the nation at risk. In The Washington Post, Thiessen wrote, "If Obama weakens any of the defenses Bush put in place and terrorists strike our country again, Americans will hold Obama responsible - and the Democratic Party could find itself unelectable for a generation."

One can read the anticipation between the lines - "When there's a terrorist attack, Republicans will rule again because that will prove Obama was wrong and Bush was right!"

Well, of course it would do nothing of the sort. First, there is no evidence that any of Bush's anti-American policies - illegal wiretapping, coercive interrogations, extraordinary renditions, or holding people without charges, lawyers or trials - have prevented any attacks. In fact, most military and intelligence personnel agree that these policies have increased terrorist recruiting and made American less safe. They have also resulted in far more terrorist attacks around the world.

Bush and Dick Cheney made similar claims during their beauty pageant goodbye strolls while completing their terms in office. The most important legacy for them is that there were no terrorist attacks on the U.S. after 9/11, and they argued that Obama's reversals of Bush's policies could invite future attacks. That argument is utter nonsense.

Leave aside the fact that more than 4,000 U.S. soldiers have died, many from terrorist attacks, and that more than 150,000 Iraqis have died, many from terrorist bombings, and that hundreds more died in terrorist assaults in London and Madrid and India and Indonesia and elsewhere. Even had none of these things happened, the cause-and-effect argument simply isn't logical. It's just after-the-fact rationalization.

There is also no reason to think that most people will blame Obama if terrorists strike again, even though that's what all this noise from the right wing is about - laying the groundwork to blame the new president. Despite the evidence that the Bush administration ignored blatant warnings about 9/11, went on vacation and did nothing to stop the attacks, Americans rallied around Bush. They would likely do the same with Obama.

Now there is fear-mongering about what would happen were we to grant some rights to offenders at Guantanamo - that some would go free and incite violence against us. Well, here's a news flash: That has already happened, under Bush. The U.S. has already released more than 400 prisoners from Guantanamo, many held for years without any legal rights whatsoever. Some have simply gone home. But some have taken up arms against us (perhaps some of them because they were held without cause). The New York Times reported that one became the deputy leader of Al Qaeda in Yemen. The militant, Said Ali al-Shihri, was released to Saudi Arabia in 2007 and is suspected of involvement in the bombing of the United States Embassy in Yemen in September.

Where are the howls of protest about this outrage? If this happens under an Obama administration, the Limbaughs and the Hannitys will be calling for his head. But, in their blind devotion to Bush, they say nothing about policies that led to an arrest and incarceration of a terrorist but were so ill-conceived and poorly managed that they forced his release. Similarly, some charges against terrorists have been or will be thrown out because Cheney and Rumsfeld and Bush allowed their torture. The very policy they so lovingly embraced has actually helped the enemy.

But that actually isn't that surprising. Right-wingers have always seemed to have a strange enthusiasm for the things terrorists do and say, then they react in a way that helps the terrorists. The administration based U.S. military and foreign policy on what the terrorists said they were going to do - imagine, running U.S. policy based on the lies and threats of a bunch of wanton murderers. Bush put the country trillions more into debt to fight wars and finance tax cuts for the rich so that he could say we were taking the fight to the terrorists but could still go shopping. He let terrorists' threats lead him to ignore the Constitution, erode our moral standing in the world and drive a wedge between the U.S. and its allies. And his policies have allowed murders to go free and kill again - exactly what the right-wing claims Obama is going to do.

So it's not much of a stretch to think that, somewhere deep down, some in the extreme right wing will gain a smug satisfaction if terrorists do strike again in America. They can't wait for the blame game to start. People like Rush Limbaugh and Rove and Sarah Palin seem to think that liberals hate America. But, who, really, are the haters?

Limbaugh and many of his listeners have said they hope Obama will fail. That means they want America to fail. Or, at least, they want the kind of America that Obama stands for to fail - you know, the one where civil liberties are respected, where the rule of law prevails, where a multi-lateral foreign policy is embraced to increase homeland security, and where an African-American Democrat can become president.

They hate the America that is a liberal democracy, which it has been through most of its history. They hate the idea of equal protection for gays, of rights for the accused. They hate the idea of any kind of social welfare. This is a group that would destroy an entire industry because they hate the union workers who are fighting for better health care and wages. Yet they barely bat an eye at millions stolen by CEOs and investment bankers who raped their companies and banks and gave away billions in bonuses while the economy collapsed all around.

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Dick Armey, Rush Limbaugh And Today's GOP

(I will be extremely busy over the next week or so, hence blogging on my part will be light - I apologize for the inconvenience)

Dick Armey And Post-Partisan Harmony
by Glenn Greenwald

Numerous people have commented on the deeply repellent behavior from former GOP House Majority Leader Dick Armey on Hardball yesterday, when he appeared with Salon's Joan Walsh. You can watch the video here. After dismissively cackling every time Walsh spoke, Armey finally spat at her: "I am so damn glad that you could never be my wife, 'cause I surely wouldn't have to listen to that prattle from you every day." I want to focus on two points highlighted by this episode:

First, Dick Armey isn't some obscure, aberrational Republican. He was one of the key leaders of the so-called "Gingrich Revolution" of the 1990s, when the modern incarnation of the Republican Party fully degenerated into the crazed, primitive, regional mess that it is today. He wasn't a back-bencher. He was the Republicans' House Majority Leader for eight years -- from 1995 to 2003 (when he left Congress, failed to have his son elected to his seat, and was replaced as the GOP's House Majority Leader by Tom DeLay).

People like Dick Armey -- and Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity -- are the face of today's GOP, its heart and soul. Armey, who once notoriously referred to Barney Frank as "Barney Fag," comes from a faction -- the Texas Republican Party -- that continues to advocate formally in its 2008 Party Platform (.pdf), among so many wonderful planks, that sex between gay people be criminalized and that all gay citizens be denied the most basic rights, including even the right to adopt children and to have custody over their own children [p.12]:

We also believe that no homosexual or any individual convicted of child abuse or molestation should have the right to custody or adoption of a minor child, and that visitation by such persons with a minor child should be prohibited [p. 14]. . . .

The Texas GOP wants creationism taught in the public schools alongside evolution and given "equal treatment" [p. 17]; Guantanamo to remain opened [p. 24]; the U.S. military to remain in Iraq with no timetable for withdrawal [p. 24]; and extraordinary medical care to be denied to all prisoners except for those who can pay for it themselves [p. 19].

The party's 2008 Platform also demands that the U.S. -- this is really what it says -- "cease strong arming Israel" by pressuring them "to make future diplomatic concessions, such as giving up land to the Palestinians on the West Bank" [p. 24]. American policy towards Israel, they argue, should be "based on God's biblical promise to bless those who bless Israel and curse those who curse Israel and we further invite other nations and organizations to enjoy the benefit of that promise" [p. 24]. Armey himself, in a 2002 Hardball appearance, advocated that Palestinians should "leave" the West Bank and Gaza (which Armey believes is part of Israel) and go somewhere else. His state party's Platform also wants the U.S. to "immediately rescind our membership in, as well as financial and military contributions to, the United Nations" [p. 25] .

These are the people who have largely been in power for the last two decades and the country is in the shape one would expect it to be in as a result. That's why all of this chatter about post-partisan transcendence and trans-partisan harmony and the like is so inane.

Why would anyone think that "common ground," on any consistent basis, can be found with people like this, or that it would be beneficial to eliminate real differences in order to accommodate their views? People in this country -- like most countries -- have radically different views of things, and politics is about having those ideas compete with one another for persuasive supremacy. This compulsion to eliminate differences and disharmony in pursuit of some feel-good, trans-partisan consensus is not only futile but also destructive. Why would it be a good idea to mold one's beliefs and actions to induce the assent of the Dick Armeys and the Texas GOPs, even if that could be done?

Second, Republicans have made about as clear as possible that even though they'll pay lip service to "bipartisanship," they don't actually want that. The principal criticism Armey was launching at Joan Walsh in that Hardball segment was that she, along with most people, degrade our politics generally, and our economic debates specifically, by turning them into partisan wars. We should rise above that for the good of the country, Armey repeatedly intoned.

But please go read the email that John Cole posted last night about the stimulus package which the very same Dick "Post-Partisan" Armey was sending around on behalf of his group FreedomWorks, on the very day he was on Hardball excoriating those who want to politicize our economic debates. Armey's mass-emailed screed urges opposition to the stimulus package as nothing more than "the Left's Multi-Billion Dollar Handout to Liberal Allies."

As I've documented many times before, Beltway "bipartisanship" means that Democrats adopt as many GOP beliefs as possible so what ultimately is done resembles Republican policies as much as possible (anyone doubting that should simply review these "bipartisan" votes of the last eight years). I'm glad that the stimulus package yesterday -- which Democrats watered down and comprised on as much as possible to please Republicans -- did not attract even a single Republican vote in the House: not one.

Republicans aren't interested in "bipartisanship" except to the extent that they can force Democrats to enact their policies even though they have only a small minority thanks to being so forcefully rejected by the citizenry. And why should they be interested in bipartisanship? Why should they vote for a stimulus package that they don't support and that is anathema to what their most ardent supporters believe? It's very hard to find any virtuous attribute of the contemporary Republican Party, but one thing that can be said for them is that -- unlike Democrats, whose overarching desire in life is to please the needy harmony fetishists by adopting as many GOP views as possible -- Republicans are willing to incur criticisms by opposing what they oppose and supporting what they support.

And that's how it should be. As Atrios wrote yesterday:

If I were advising the Republicans I would've told them to vote against the stimulus package. I would tell them to make the point clearly that if they were in charge, the bill would be a different bill. They're a competing political party and they need to, you know, highlight the fact that their vision for America is actually different. I appreciate that members of both parties don't always toe the line completely, but on a bill as big as this it makes perfect sense for it to play out as it did.

Of course the flip side is that Dems should've pushed the best plan that could pass the Senate instead of pushing some pointless fantasy about bipartisanship.

Some Obama supporters will claim that the whole post-partisan song is nothing more than a political game, a super-shrewd, exotic political tactic Obama is employing in order to cast the GOP as obstructionists. But if so, that's a Beltway tactic almost as old as Obama himself. Media Broderites and The Third Way have been demanding for decades that Democrats move as close as possible to Republicans in the name of overcoming partisanship (for instance, watch as Time's Joe Klein desperately tries to convince Dick Armey himself not to view Klein as a radical who is far away from Armey, but rather, that they're both "playing between the 40-yard-lines here").

Partisan disputes happen because people are very different and have very different views. Partisanship is about advocating for your own beliefs and discrediting the beliefs that you reject and believe are harmful. This doesn't mean that these disagreements must or should break down along Republican/Democratic lines. On so many critical, contentious issues, the leadership of the two parties are in perfect harmony. Many of the worst policies are embraced by the mainstream of both parties, and the real disagreements now break down on other lines, whether it be insider/outsider or diverging socioeconomic interests or rapidly-re-aligning ideological divisions. But politics is and should be about defeating ideas -- and people -- that are discredited and destructive.

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Reloaded: More On the Continuing Blackmail Con Game

... and it still goes on and on and on.

And on:

What Red Ink? Wall Street Paid Hefty Bonuses
By Ben White

By almost any measure, 2008 was a complete disaster for Wall Street — except, that is, when the bonuses arrived.

Despite crippling losses, multibillion-dollar bailouts and the passing of some of the most prominent names in the business, employees at financial companies in New York, the now-diminished world capital of capital, collected an estimated $18.4 billion in bonuses for the year.

That was the sixth-largest haul on record, according to a report released Wednesday by the New York State comptroller.

While the payouts paled next to the riches of recent years, Wall Street workers still took home about as much as they did in 2004, when the Dow Jones industrial average was flying above 10,000, on its way to a record high.

Some bankers took home millions last year even as their employers lost billions.

The comptroller’s estimate, a closely watched guidepost of the annual December-January bonus season, is based largely on personal income tax collections. It excludes stock option awards that could push the figures even higher.

The state comptroller, Thomas P. DiNapoli, said it was unclear if banks had used taxpayer money for the bonuses, a possibility that strikes corporate governance experts, and indeed many ordinary Americans, as outrageous. He urged the Obama administration to examine the issue closely.

“The issue of transparency is a significant one, and there needs to be an accounting about whether there was any taxpayer money used to pay bonuses or to pay for corporate jets or dividends or anything else,” Mr. DiNapoli said in an interview.

Granted, New York’s bankers and brokers are far poorer than they were in 2006, when record deals, and the record profits they generated, ushered in an era of Wall Street hyperwealth. All told, bonuses fell 44 percent last year, from $32.9 billion in 2007, the largest decline in dollar terms on record.

But the size of that downturn partly reflected the lofty heights to which bonuses had soared during the bull market. At many banks, those payouts were based on profits that turned out to be ephemeral. Throughout the financial industry, years of earnings have vanished in the flames of the credit crisis.

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High-Flying Citigroup Grounds Plans for $50M Jet
By Jake Tapper
Obama Aide Called Citigroup to Complain About Jet

The high-flying execs at Citigroup caved under pressure from President Obama and decided today to abandon plans for a luxurious new $50 million corporate jet from France.

The decision came 24 hours after the banking giant, which was rescued by a $45 billion taxpayer lifeline, defended buying the state-of-the-art Dassault Falcon 7X -- one of nine to be flying in U.S. skies -- as a smart business deal.

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Corporations use bailout money to organize against Employee Free Choice Act
By John Amato

These people have no shame. The Huffington Post is reporting that the CEO's who received billions of tax payer dollars to save their asses are using the money to organize a massive attempt to block the Employee Free Choice Act.

Three days after receiving $25 billion in federal bailout funds, Bank of America Corp. hosted a conference call with conservative activists and business officials to organize opposition to the U.S. labor community's top legislative priority.

Participants on the October 17 call -- including at least one representative from another bailout recipient, AIG -- were urged to persuade their clients to send "large contributions" to groups working against the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), as well as to vulnerable Senate Republicans, who could help block passage of the bill.

Bernie Marcus, the charismatic co-founder of Home Depot, led the call along with Rick Berman, an aggressive EFCA opponent and founder of the Center for Union Facts. Over the course of an hour, the two framed the legislation as an existential threat to American capitalism, or worse.

"This is the demise of a civilization," said Marcus. "This is how a civilization disappears. I am sitting here as an elder statesman and I'm watching this happen and I don't believe it."

This is outrageous. It's bad enough to see these Bozos still try and buy private jets and hand out massive bonuses with our money, but to actively attack labor with it should be a criminal offense.

As you've seen so far, the Employee Free Choice Act is making right-wing heads explode because it places the choice of how to form a union in the hands of the workers and takes it away from big business. But I really didn't think they would take this money and use it for this purpose. The Huffington Post has audio of the calls. Reading some of what was said was infuriating.

You'll always notice that whenever most reporters mention EFCA, they call it by the right-wing name for it. Just for fun: If you drop the phrase "Card Check" in passing you'll get an angry reaction from most right-wingers and many of them don't even know why. And Bank of America has a personal vendetta going on with the SEIU now, so it's not a surprise they hosted the call.

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Financial elite have no shame
by Linda McQuaig
Even in face of crisis, they continue to push for tax cuts instead of stimulus.

Let's imagine, for a moment, how different the public debate would be today if it had been unions that had caused the current economic turmoil.

In other words, try to imagine a scenario in which union leaders — not financial managers — were the ones whose reckless behaviour had driven a number of Wall Street firms into bankruptcy and in the process triggered a worldwide recession.

Needless to say, it's hard to imagine a labour leader being appointed to oversee a bailout of unions the way former Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson was put in charge of supervising the $700 billion bailout of his former Wall Street colleagues.

My point is simply to note how odd it is that the financial community has emerged so unscathed, despite its central role in the collapse that has brought havoc to the world economy.

Of course, not all members of the financial community were involved in Wall Street's wildly irresponsible practices of bundling mortgages into securities and trading credit default swaps. But the financial community as a whole, on both sides of the border, certainly pushed hard to put in place an agenda of small government, in which financial markets largely regulated themselves and citizens (particularly high-income investors) would be spared the burden of paying much tax.

The agenda advanced much further in the US, but had an impact in Canada, particularly on the tax front.

One would think that those who pushed this agenda so enthusiastically would, at the very least, be a tad embarrassed today.

But so influential are those in the financial elite – and their hangers-on in think-tanks and economics departments – that they continue to appear on our TV screens, confidently providing us with economic advice, as if they'd played no role whatsoever in shaping our economic system for the past quarter century.

Of course, we're told there's been a major change in their thinking, in that many of them are now willing to accept large deficits in today's federal budget, in the name of stimulating the economy.

While this does seem like a sharp departure from the deficit hysteria of the 1990s, a closer look reveals the change may not be that significant.

In fact, financial types have always accepted deficits — when they liked the cause. Hence their lack of protest over George W Bush's enormous deficits, which were caused by his large tax cuts for the rich and his extravagant foreign wars.

What they don't like is governments going into deficit to help ordinary citizens — either by creating jobs or providing much unemployment relief.

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Obama The Imperialist?

Change? In foreign policy, hardly. The new president is in the classic liberal interventionist mould

The first Democratic president in the modern era to be elected on an anti-war ticket is also, to the relief of neocons and the liberal belligerati, a hawk. Committed to escalation in Afghanistan, his foreign policy selections also indicate bellicosity towards Sudan and Iran. During his first week in office he sanctioned two missile attacks in Pakistan, killing 22 people, including women and children. And his stance on Gaza is remarkably close to that of the outgoing administration. The question now is how Obama will convince his supporters to back that stance. Bush could rely on a core constituency whose commitment to peace and human rights is, at the very least, questionable. Obama has no such luxury. In making his case, he will need the support of those "liberal hawks" who gave Bush such vocal support.

It is tempting to dismiss the "pro-war left" as a congeries of discredited left-wing apostates and Nato liberals. Their artless euphemisms for bloody conquest seem especially redundant in light of over a million Iraqi deaths. Yet their arguments, ranging from a paternalistic defence of "humanitarian intervention" to the championing of "western values", have their origins in a tradition of liberal imperialism whose durability advises against hasty dismissal. In every country whose rulers have opted for empire, there has developed among the intellectual classes a powerful pro-imperial consensus, with liberals and leftwingers its most vociferous defenders.

Liberal imperialists have resisted explicitly racist arguments for domination, instead justifying empire as a humane venture delivering progress. Even so, implicit in such a stance was the belief that other peoples were inferior. Just as John Stuart Mill contended that despotism was a "legitimate mode of government in dealing with the barbarians" provided "the end be their improvement", so the Fabians contended that self-government for "native races" was "as useless to them as a dynamo to a Caribbean". Intellectuals of the Second International such as Eduard Bernstein regarded the colonised as incapable of self-government. For many liberals and socialists of this era, the only disagreement was over whether the natives could attain the disciplined state necessary to run their own affairs. Indigenous resistance, moreover, was interpreted as "native fanaticism", to be overcome with European tuition.

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punditman says ...
It is true that Bush was profoundly unpopular, but thanks to the propaganda system, even at the height of US aggression most people didn't pay much attention to all his "collateral damage" in Iraq and Afghanistan. To no surprise, early indications are that they are paying even less attention to the deaths of innocents abroad under the overly popular Obama regime. This will change only if people stop seeing Obama as the peace president.

Punditman thinks you can kiss goodbye to any hope of the Obama administration taking Bush to task for breaking international law by willfully leading the US into war in Iraq under false premises (lies). By continuing such a policy "responsibly," is he not complicit? And this says nothing of his fetish for attacking Afghanistan and Pakistan.

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Reloaded: Meanwhile, Elsewhere ...

Following up on this older post here - I hereby yield the floor to Chris Floyd, who updates us on yet another FUBAR (two recent developments here and here) that has been going on and yet having garnered scant attention:

Silent as the Tomb: Another American-Backed Slaughter Ignored

Before taking office, Barack Obama was chided -- in certain quarters, at least -- for his long silence on the slaughter in Gaza. Of course, as we noted here the other day, the main reason he stayed mum on the subject before his inauguration was that he was in complete accord with George W. Bush's stance on the American-backed massacre of civilians.

However, there is another horrific, American-backed slaughter that Obama has been silent about for even longer -- throughout his entire presidential campaign, in fact, and continuing into his presidency. We speak, of course, of the ghastly Terror War "regime change" operation in Somalia, where American bombs, American weapons, American training, American money -- and American death squads -- aided the military forces of the Ethiopian dictatorship in its brutal invasion and murderous occupation of the long-shattered land. [For more background, see this, especially the links at the bottom.]

The aim of this savage operation was to overturn the "Islamic Courts" movement -- a coalition of various sectarian factions which had brought Somalia its first semblance of stability and security after 15 years of violence, chaos and abandonment by the outside world. The broad-based movement included a range of groups, from the very moderate to the more extreme, and represented a grass-roots effort by Somalis to rebuild their own nation on their own terms.

But these terms were not those approved by the Potomac poobahs, who had their own hand-picked warlords -- some of them on the CIA payroll -- whom they preferred to see in power. And so the "regime change" was launched in December 2006, with American bombers and missiles targeting fleeing refugees while Washington's proxy forces poured in from Ethiopia.

The results were entirely predictable: one of the worst humanitarian disasters on the planet, with many thousands killed, hundreds of thousands displaced, and millions driven into hunger and deprivation. Week after week, as the American-backed occupation went on -- with U.S. missile attacks on villages, the insertion of U.S. death squads to "clean up" after covert ops, the "rendition" of Somali refugees (and some U.S. citizens) to Ethiopia's notorious, torture-laden prisons -- more and more Somalis were radicalized, and the more extreme element in the former coalition grew stronger -- and more virulent. This too was inevitable; it has been the inevitable outcome of every single major operation in the so-called "War on Terror" that Obama has now made his own. In Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia (and Pakistan too, which has been a shadow theater of the Terror War, but now looks to be taking center stage soon), religious extremism has been strengthened immeasurably. And each of the Terror War theaters has been turned into seething hotbeds of anti-American fury. Now Obama is pledged to continue and exacerbate this process, with his surge in Afghanistan and his incursions into Pakistan.

In Somalia, the very extremists which were the ostensible reason for the "regime change" are now on the verge of capturing most of the country. As the Washington Post notes:

The departure of the last Ethiopian tanks from Somalia's capital is ushering in a new phase of conflict in a nation known for clan warfare: a battle for power among militias flying Islamist banners.

In some ways, the situation in Somalia, where people have long practiced a moderate and mostly apolitical form of Islam, has circled back to where it was when the Ethiopians invaded two years ago. The U.S.-supported operation was intended to oust a popular movement of moderate and radical Islamists that had taken over the capital and that the United States accused of having ties to al-Qaeda.

But the operation drove the more radical Islamist fighters, known as al-Shabab, into a brutal insurgency against the Ethiopian occupiers and the secular, transitional government their invasion installed. After the deaths of at least 10,000 people and the displacement of 1 million, Ethiopia and the United States are now supporting a political compromise that stands to return to power some of the same moderate Islamist leaders they originally ousted.

In other words, the entire operation has been completely pointless -- at least in terms of its stated objectives. A union of the "transitional government" and the Islamic Courts could have been achieved through long and arduous negotiations -- and yes, perhaps some internal fighting with the then-small extremist factions. But in any case, it would have been Somalis working out a Somali solution, building on the stability achieved by the Islamic Courts, and aided perhaps by economic and diplomatic help from the Western powers who backed the transitionals.

But of course, the true aim of the "regime change" operation was neither to quell a non-existent "terrorist threat" from the Islamic Courts nor to bring peace and stability to Somalia. It was to install, by blood and iron, a compliant government that would serve the American imperial agenda in the strategic Horn of Africa. A grass-roots movement like the Islamic Courts would be too independent, could never be relied upon; so it had to go.

Now in its place comes more chaos and murderous ruin. The insurgency against the U.S.-backed occupation is splintering violently into opposing factions now that this first attempt at "regime change" has failed so miserably. This is of course in keeping with the age-old "divide and conquer" strategy of all imperial powers. The almost certain result will be a hydra-headed, multi-sided civil war. And as the Guardian notes:

It's no mystery who will pay the highest and most immediate price. "The human rights and humanitarian catastrophe facing Somalia today threatens the lives and livelihoods of millions on a scale not witnessed since the early 1990s," Human Rights Watch's latest report warns. UN agencies say 3.25 million Somalis are already dependent on food aid; 1.3 million are internally displaced, including two-thirds of the population of Mogadishu. Twenty-five per cent of the total population is suffering from acute malnutrition.

Beset by conflict and drought, thousands more are fleeing each month in all directions – to north-eastern Kenya (already home to 220,000 Somalis), Ethiopia, Eritrea and, risking the perilous passage across the Gulf of Aden, to Yemen. This exodus is likely to grow significantly if the political impasse and related insecurity intensifies.

The seizure of a few commercial ships by the remarkably non-violent pirate gangs operating in Somalia last year brought a swift international response, with the world's great powers teaming up and giving each other carte blanche to strike Somalia whenever and however they please, as we noted here last month. [See "Abandoned by the World: UN Declares Open Season on Somalia."] It is likely that these blank checks will be cashed over and over, especially as the fighting goes on. Under the rubric of "protecting business interests" -- which is, of course, the violent extremist cult of the 'civilized world' -- and "fighting terrorism," we will likely see more and more interventions in the incipient Somali civil war.

The entirely predictable result will be more chaos, more extremism, more needless death, and more unimaginable suffering of multitudes of innocent people. But the military-business establishments of many great powers, from Washington to Beijing, will reap huge dividends -- financial and political -- from this churning sea of blood. So it will go on, while the world, and the White House, looks the other way.


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On Striking Parallels And Repeating History ...

... over and over again. Here's (lots) more food for thought on the matter - drawing upon the close similarities between the U.S. and Israel in the way they behave:

The Necessary Violence of the Murderous National Bully
by Arthur Silber

I want to explore here some themes that are interconnected in very complex ways. It took me several years to appreciate these interconnections, so I do not expect them to be readily apparent to others. I continue to discern further aspects and ramifications of these ideas, and they are also related to certain mechanisms I will discuss when I explore the nature of tribalism in politics.

I'm prompted to offer these thoughts in part because of the monstrous devastation visited on Gaza by Israel. In considering Israel's ghastly recent actions, it is critical always to keep in the forefront of one's mind that Israel brought widescale death and destruction upon a captive population -- that Israel slaughtered many innocent people in precisely the way cattle are slaughtered. Now, while Israel's military remains in Gaza, Israel announces that it will abide by a ceasefire. Please note that this ceasefire takes effect after "after 22 days of war that killed more than 1,200 Palestinians and 13 Israelis." Even when confronted by such a devastatingly awful death toll (and if "disproportionate" ever had any meaning, it most certainly does here), many people are proclaiming that Israel "lost" insofar as longer term goals of peace and security are concerned -- see, as just two examples, here and here. Because they believe Israel "lost," they are unable to understand Israel's motives in pursuing this course.

This view is absolutely wrong, in at least two critical ways. First, on the practical level (or speaking "pragmatically," as our incoming president might say), Israel pursued its murderous course for several weeks -- and no one at all did anything of consequence to try to stop the murder. To the contrary, Israel's strongest ally, the United States, offered enthusiastic support for these crimes, most notably in the form of almost unanimous and unqualified support from the U.S. Congress. As I've said before, this is far from surprising, since the United States government has a long history of crimes of this kind, and currently continues a crime of historic proportions in Iraq. It is to their mutual benefit for criminals of this kind to applaud each other's bloody work.

Throughout the continuing scenes of dismembered bodies, corpses of bloody children and all the nightmarish further details, Obama maintained his loathsome silence, and broke it only to express a generalized "concern" with the great suffering being endured. Obama also claimed he would have "plenty to say" about Gaza once he is inaugurated. However, as I recently discussed, there is no reason whatsoever to believe that his policy toward Israel will differ in any significant way from that of previous administrations. In fact, there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that his policy will be virtually identical.

I will credit Israel for exceptionally clever timing, in the same manner I would credit a very skilled murderer for knowing how to eradicate clues to his identity. Israel says it will now stop the murder, just as Obama is about to become president. In this manner, Israel generously allows Obama to avoid having to take a stand as president about these recent events, and to indicate whether he would have stopped the massacre if he had been president as it was occurring. But the general dynamics remain unchanged. When Israel again decides to ramp up the terror -- and it will, the only question is when -- the blame will once again fall on the "terrorists" who provoked Israel, in the same manner that the U.S. government is always very careful to make every act of its own aggression the fault of the other party. And the slaughter of the innocent will commence once more.

To think that Israel "lost" reveals a significant failure to understand the operations of the State, and of a particular kind of State. Just as the U.S. drive to American global hegemony means that the U.S. government intends to have its way no matter what, Israel intends to have its way within the smaller territory which it claims for its own dominance. From this perspective, it can be seen that the exercise of power in the manner just demonstrated by Israel is not a strategy toward a further end: the exercise of power is the end. Terrorizing an entire captive population, making large numbers of people (including many entirely innocent people) believe they have no choice but to obey, and visiting destruction and death upon them if they do not do exactly as they are told -- all of that is the purpose. To summarize this point, which applies to the governments of both the United States and Israel:

The fundamental lesson is unmistakable, and unmistakably evil in intent and execution (a word made horribly appropriate in more than one sense by our government's actions): you will do exactly as we say -- or else.

Israel did all this -- and no one stopped it. When Israel does it again, it is almost certain that no one, certainly not the U.S. government, will stop it then, either. That, I submit, is precisely what victory looks like.

Here is another connection. From "Lies in the Service of Evil," and the full essay discusses this in great detail:

The crucial point is Foucault's. Let me rephrase it as follows, in connection with torture specifically.

Torture does not work. Its use permanently damages all those who are tortured, and those who administer the violence. Its "lawful" use profoundly undermines the broader society and democratic institutions in ways that are irreparable. But its persistent, ineradicable failure is entirely irrelevant for those who seek to consolidate and expand state power. Moreover, its inherent failure underscores their aim: it does not work, everyone knows it does not work, but the state does it because it can.

There is a second way in which the belief that Israel "lost" is profoundly wrong, and it concerns a particular kind of narrative: the narrative of national founding and identity. Since all States are founded upon and rely on force and coercion (for much more on this subject, see this essay), all States must periodically remind their subject-citizens of the meaning of State power, and of the fact that when the State targets you, there is precious little you have to offer by way of defense. Within this general principle, a narrower principle may also be identified: one particular kind of State is especially prone to fits of aggression, just as any bully is driven to demonstrate regularly that you (and anyone else) cross the bully at your own peril. The psychology of the bully is one that lies at the core of the American national identity, to the extent such a phenomenon can be identified. I discussed these issues at length in two essays in particular: "Bullied, Terrorized and Targeted for Destruction: Our Children Have Learned Well," and "Let the Victims Speak."

What is true of America in this respect is also true of Israel, for their national narratives and their histories contain striking similarities. Chris Floyd recently described this as follows:

[W]hat we have been witnessing in Palestine over the past several decades is a remarkable echo of the dispossession and destruction of the Native American nations by the United States. There are myriad differences, of course, but the broad outline is basically the same: a people denigrated as primitive and inferior are being stripped of their land, driven into poverty and desperation, and killed in large numbers by another people who believe that their "manifest destiny" and moral superiority justify violent conquest and repression. Any violent resistance to the conquest is treated as barbaric terrorism -- and another justification for yet more repression, for even harsher tactics to grind down the conquered, secure "the frontier" and make it safe for "settlers" and the "civilization" they bring.

One reason that Israel persists in its harsh policies of decimation and destruction against the Palestinians is that such methods very often work: you can dispossess another people, destroy all but an ineffective remnant of their society and colonize their land to your own lasting profit and advantage. And you can do it in such a thoroughgoing manner that there will be no realistic possibility of the conquered people ever rising again to take back what was theirs. This is the example that the United States has set for Israel. It is unlikely to work in the same way or with the same degree of success for Israel in 21st century, for a number of reasons. In fact, it can -- and probably will -- end in disaster. But it is not an irrational policy; it does have many successful historical precedents -- including the history of Israel's chief benefactor.

And in "Why Most People Won't Fight," I discussed Uri Avnery's analysis of the same point:

Avnery discusses the profound similarities to be found in the national narratives of the United States and of Israel: how "Israel is a small America, the USA is a huge Israel"; how the "Mayflower passengers, much as the Zionists of the first and second aliya (immigration wave), fled from Europe, carrying in their hearts a messianic vision, either religious or utopian"; how "Both suffered a great deal in their new country. Both saw themselves as 'pioneers' who made the wilderness bloom, a 'people without land in a land without people.' Both completely ignored the rights of the indigenous people, whom they considered subhuman savages and murderers. Both saw the natural resistance of the local peoples as evidence of their innately murderous character, which justified even the worst atrocities." And then Avnery writes:

How is it that a man like Obama, the son of an African father, identifies so completely with the actions of former generations of American whites? It shows again the power of a myth to become rooted in the consciousness of a person, so that he identifies 100 percent with the imagined national narrative. To this may be added the unconscious urge to belong to the victors, if possible.

Therefore, I do not accept without reservation the speculation: "Well, he must talk like this in order to get elected. Once in the White House, he will return to himself."

I am not so sure about that. It may well turn out that these things have a surprisingly strong hold on his mental world.

These are very important insights. That Obama "identifies so completely with the actions of former generations of American whites" folds into my current series, "The Triumph of the White, Male Ruling Class" -- a class to which Obama belongs fully and completely in every way that matters, philosophically, politically, and ideologically. Avnery provides yet another aspect of Obama's identification with the white, male rulers of America, the rulers who have held almost all power from the founding of this nation (and before) through and including today -- and into tomorrow. And Avnery's observations about the power of myth track completely with my writings about that power, and about the power of narrative. As but one example, see "Why the Stories We Tell Matter So Much."

For the argument here, the crucial aspect of these very similar national narratives and histories is this: the founding and development of both America and Israel required the large-scale, even genocidal, destruction of indigenous peoples. To further that destruction, and to provide moral "justification," the indigenous peoples first had to be condemned and demonized. And because force and violence are necessary to the continuation of the State, such demonization must continue into the future, especially since additional acts of destruction will be necessary for the maintenance and consolidation of State power.

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Some Insight Into The "Gaza Escalation"

Following up on this earlier post - here's some very interesting food for thought on the (still ongoing) Gaza conflict ...

War of Choice: How Israel Manufactured the Gaza Escalation
By Steve Niva

Israel has repeatedly claimed that it had "no choice" but to wage war on Gaza on December 27 because Hamas had broken a ceasefire, was firing rockets at Israeli civilians, and had "tried everything in order to avoid this military operation," as Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni put it.

This claim, however, is widely at odds with the fact that Israel's military and political leadership took many aggressive steps during the ceasefire that escalated a crisis with Hamas, and possibly even provoked Hamas to create a pretext for the assault. This wasn't a war of "no choice," but rather a very avoidable war in which Israeli actions played the major role in instigating.

Israel has a long history of deliberately using violence and other provocative measures to trigger reactions in order to create a pretext for military action, and to portray its opponents as the aggressors and Israel as the victim. According to the respected Israeli military historian Zeev Maoz in his recent book, Defending the Holy Land, Israel most notably used this policy of "strategic escalation" in 1955-1956, when it launched deadly raids on Egyptian army positions to provoke Egypt's President Nasser into violent reprisals preceding its ill-fated invasion of Egypt; in 1981-1982, when it launched violent raids on Lebanon in order to provoke Palestinian escalation preceding the Israeli invasion of Lebanon; and between 2001-2004, when Prime Minister Ariel Sharon repeatedly ordered assassinations of high-level Palestinian militants during declared ceasefires, provoking violent attacks that enabled Israel's virtual reoccupation of the West Bank.

Israel's current assault on Gaza bears many trademark elements of Israel's long history of employing "strategic escalation" to manufacture a major crisis, if not a war.

Making War 'Inevitable'

The countdown to a war began, according to a detailed report by Barak Raviv in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, when Israel's Defense Minister Ehud Barak started planning the current attack on Gaza with his chiefs of staff at least six months ago — even as Israel was negotiating the Egyptian brokered ceasefire with Hamas that went into effect on June 19. During the subsequent ceasefire, the report contends, the Israeli security establishment carefully gathered intelligence to map out Hamas' security infrastructure, engaged in operational deception, and spread disinformation to mislead the public about its intentions.

This revelation doesn't confirm that Israel intended to start a war with Hamas in December, but it does shed some light on why Israel continuously took steps that undermined the terms of the fragile ceasefire with Hamas, even though Hamas respected their side of the agreement.

Indeed, there was a genuine lull in rocket and mortar fire between June 19 and November 4, due to Hamas compliance and only sporadically violated by a small number of launchings carried out by rival Fatah and Islamic Jihad militants, largely in defiance of Hamas. According to the conservative Israeli-based Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center's analysis of rocket and missile attacks in 2008, there were only three rockets fired at Israel in July, September, and October combined. Israeli civilians living near Gaza experienced an almost unprecedented degree of security during this period, with no Israeli casualties.

Yet despite the major lull, Israel continually raided the West Bank, arresting and frequently killing "wanted" Palestinians from June to October, which had the inevitable effect of ratcheting up pressure on Hamas to respond. Moreover, while the central expectation of Hamas going into the ceasefire was that Israel would lift the siege on Gaza, Israel only took the barest steps to ease the siege, which kept the people at a bare survival level. This policy was a clear affront to Hamas, and had the inescapable effect of undermining both Hamas and popular Palestinian support for the ceasefire.

But Israel's most provocative action, acknowledged by many now as the critical turning point that undermined the ceasefire, took place on November 4, when Israeli forces auspiciously violated the truce by crossing into the Gaza Strip to destroy what the army said was a tunnel dug by Hamas, killing six Hamas militants. Sara Roy, writing in the London Review of Books, contends this attack was "no doubt designed finally to undermine the truce between Israel and Hamas established last June."

The Israeli breach into Gaza was immediately followed by a further provocation by Israel on November 5, when the Israeli government hermetically sealed off all ways into and out of Gaza. As a result, the UN reports that the amount of imports entering Gaza has been "severely reduced to an average of 16 truckloads per day — down from 123 truckloads per day in October and 475 trucks per day in May 2007 — before the Hamas takeover." These limited shipments provide only a fraction of the supplies needed to sustain 1.5 million starving Palestinians.

In response, Hamas predictably claimed that Israel had violated the truce and allowed Islamic Jihad to launch a round of rocket attacks on Israel. Only after lethal Israeli reprisals killed over 10 Hamas gunmen in the following days did Hamas militants finally respond with volleys of mortars and rockets of their own. In two short weeks, Israel killed over 15 Palestinian militants, while about 120 rockets and mortars were fired at Israel, and although there were no Israeli casualties the calm had been shattered.

It was at this time that Israeli officials launched what appears to have been a coordinated media blitz to cultivate public reception for an impending conflict, stressing the theme of the "inevitability" of a coming war with Hamas in Gaza. On November 12, senior IDF officials announced that war with Hamas was likely in the two months after the six-month ceasefire, baldly stating it would occur even if Hamas wasn't interested in confrontation. A few days later, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert publicly ordered his military commanders to draw up plans for a war in Gaza, which were already well developed at the time. On November 19, according to Raviv's report in Haaretz, the Gaza war plan was brought before Barak for final approval.

While the rhetoric of an "inevitable" war with Hamas may have only been Israeli bluster to compel Hamas into line, its actions on the ground in the critical month leading up to the official expiration of the ceasefire on December 19 only heightened the cycle of violence, leaving a distinct impression Israel had cast the die for war.

Finally, Hamas then walked right into the "inevitable war" that Israel had been preparing since the ceasefire had gone into effect in June. With many Palestinians believing the ceasefire to be meaningless, Hamas announced it wouldn't renew the ceasefire after it expired on December 19. Hamas then stood back for two days while Islamic Jihad and Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades militants fired volleys of mortars and rockets into Israel, in the context of mutually escalating attacks. Yet even then, with Israeli threats of war mounting, Hamas imposed a 24-hour ceasefire on all missile attacks on December 21, announcing it would consider renewing the lapsed truce with Israel in the Gaza Strip if Israel would halt its raids in both Gaza and the West Bank, and keep Gaza border crossings open for supplies of aid and fuel. Israel immediately rejected its offer.

But when the Israel Defence Forces killed three Hamas militants laying explosives near the security fence between Israel and Gaza on the evening of December 23, the Hamas military wing lashed out by launching a barrage of over 80 missiles into Israel the following day, claiming it was Israel, and not Hamas, that was responsible for the escalation.

Little did they know that, according to Raviv, Prime Minister Olmert, and Defense Minister Barak had already met on December 18 to approve the impending war plan, but put the mission off waiting for a better pretext. By launching more than 170 rockets and mortars at Israeli civilians in the days following December 23, killing one Israeli civilian, Hamas had provided reason enough for Israel to unleash its long-planned attack on Gaza on December 27.

The Rationale for War

If Israel's goal were simply to end rocket attacks on its civilians, it would have solidified and extended the ceasefire, which was working well, until November. Even after November, it could have addressed Hamas' longstanding ceasefire proposals for a complete end to rocket-fire on Israel, in exchange for Israel lifting its crippling 18-month siege on Gaza.

Instead, the actual targets of its assault on Gaza after December 27, which included police stations, mosques, universities, and Hamas government institutions, clearly reveal that Israel's primary goals go far beyond providing immediate security for its citizens. Israeli spokespersons repeatedly claim that Israel's assault isn't about seeking to effect regime change with Hamas, but rather about creating a "new security reality" in Gaza. But that "new reality" requires Israel to use massive violence to degrade the political and military capacity of Hamas, to a point where it agrees to a ceasefire with conditions more congenial to Israel. Short of a complete reoccupation of Gaza, no amount of violence will erase Hamas from the scene.

Confirming the steps needed to create the "new reality," the broader reasons why Israel chose a major confrontation with Hamas at this time appear to be the cause of several other factors unrelated to providing immediate security for its citizens.

First, many senior Israeli political and military leaders strongly opposed the June 19 ceasefire with Hamas, and looked for opportunities to reestablish Israel's fabled "deterrent capability" of instilling fear into its enemies. These leaders felt Israel's deterrent capability was badly damaged as a result of their withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, and especially after the widely criticized failures in the 2006 Israeli war with Hezbollah. For this powerful group a ceasefire was at best a tactical pause before the inevitable renewal of conflict, when conditions were more favorable. Immediately following Israel's aerial assault, a New York Times article noted that Israel had been eager "to remind its foes that it has teeth" and to erase the ghost of Lebanon that has haunted it over the past two years.

A second factor was pressure surrounding the impending elections set to take place in early February. The ruling coalition, led by Barak and Livni, have been repeatedly criticized by the Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister, who is leading in the polls, for not being tough enough on Hamas and rocket-fire from Gaza. This gave the ruling coalition a strong incentive to demonstrate to the Israeli people their security credentials in order to bolster their chances against the more hawkish Likud.

Third, Hamas repeatedly said it wouldn't recognize Mahmud Abbas as president of the Palestinian Authority after his term runs out on January 9. The looming political standoff on the Palestinian side threatens to boost Hamas and undermine Abbas, who had underseen closer security coordination with Israel and was congenial to Israeli demands for concessions on future peace proposals. One possible outcome of this assault is that Abbas will remain in power for a while longer, since Hamas will be unable to mobilise its supporters in order to force him to resign.

And finally, Israel was pressed to take action now due to its sense of the American political timeline. The Bush administration rarely exerted constraint on Israel and would certainly stand by in its waning days, while Barack Obama would not likely want to begin his presidency with a major confrontation with Israel. The Washington Post quoted a Bush administration official saying that Israel struck in Gaza "because they want it to be over before the next administration comes in. They can't predict how the next administration will handle it. And this is not the way they want to start with the new administration."

An Uncertain Ending

As the conflict rages to an uncertain end, it's important to consider Israeli military historian Zeev Maoz's contention that Israel's history of manufacturing wars through "strategic escalation" and using overwhelming force to achieve "deterrence" has never been successful. In fact, it's the primary cause of Israel's insecurity because it deepens hatred and a desire for revenge rather than fear.

At the same time, there's no question Hamas continues to callously sacrifice its fellow Palestinian citizens, as well as Israeli civilians, on the altar of maintaining its pyrrhic resistance credentials and its myopic preoccupation with revenge, and fell into many self-made traps of its own. There had been growing international pressure on Israel to ease its siege and a major increase in creative and nonviolent strategies drawing attention to the plight of Palestinians such as the arrival of humanitarian relief convoys off of Gaza's coast in the past months, but now Gaza lies in ruins.

But as the vastly more powerful actor holding nearly all the cards in this conflict, the war in Gaza was ultimately Israel's choice. And for all this bloodshed and violence, Israel must be held accountable.

(Keep reading ...)

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Modern-Day Slavery ... In Our Own Backyard

First, go read this three-parts series of investigative reporting.

Then read this recent follow-up.

Then answer this little question: how truly civilized do you now think we are?

Me? I say not so much.

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Domestic Spying In Canada: Ok. *Now* I'm Saying "I Told You So"

You're damn right I am (emphasis added):

CSIS stepped over line in terror probe: watchdog

The committee that keeps an eye on the Canadian Security Intelligence Service has chastised the spy agency for breaking the rules in a probe of suspected extremists.

The security intelligence review committee's annual report for 2007-2008 — released on Tuesday — says CSIS had a source gather information on possible homegrown radicals without proper authorization.

(...)

In addition, it reiterated a call for the spy service to implement recommendations from a federal commission of inquiry into the case of Maher Arar, the Ottawa engineer who was tortured in a Syrian jail over false terrorism accusations.

The review committee, composed of civilian appointees, examines CSIS operations and handles complaints about the spy agency. The committee is expected to soon complete a review of the case of Omar Khadr, the Canadian being held by the U.S. in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for allegedly killing an American soldier in Afghanistan.

In its examination of the homegrown extremists case, the committee found that an Ontario CSIS official directed the source to spy on an unspecified "sensitive institution." The spy agency's senior executive must sign off on operations involving institutions in the academic, political, media, religious and trade union fields.

(...)

"It was a question of their interpretation of what kind of authority was required," said Susan Pollak, the review committee's executive director. "But we didn't see eye-to-eye."

CSIS is worried about people raised in Canada who convert to extremist interpretations of Islam. The watchdog said the spy agency was too vague in outlining its concerns about this threat.

So here it is, my fellow Canadians:

I.

Told.

You.

So.

Do you get it, now?

Well - do you?

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The LPC And Harper/Flaherty's Budget: Like We Didn't See *That* Coming ...

What Chet Scoville said. The Mound of Sound as well.

Totally predictable and expected - indeed.

Words fail me ... because I am too pissed off.

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... And Things Just Keep On Getting Better, Eh?

Oh yeah - absolutely. Read'em and weep, folks:

World growth 'worst for 60 years'

World economic growth is set to fall to just 0.5% this year, its lowest rate since World War II, warns the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

In October, the IMF had predicted world output would increase by 2.2% in 2009.

It now projects the UK, which recently entered recession, will see its economy shrink by 2.8% next year, the worst contraction among advanced nations.

The IMF says financial markets remain under stress and the global economy has taken a "sharp turn for the worse".

In another gloomy view of the UK economy, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said Britain would be saddled with government debt for more than 20 years.

IFS director Robert Chote warned that spending would have to be cut or taxes raised by more than planned to allow public finances to recover.

The predictions came as Pascal Lamy, the director general of the World Trade Organization, urged countries not to react to the global economic crisis by resorting to protectionism.

Speaking from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Mr Lamy said such a move would be "a big mistake".

'Virtual halt'

According to the IMF, the outcome of the economic slowdown has been to send global output and trade plummeting.

"We now expect the global economy to come to a virtual halt," said IMF chief economist Olivier Blanchard in a statement.

The IMF says that despite a number of policy moves, which have been carried out by many states, financial strains remain.

International co-operation is needed now to draw up new policy initiatives, and for capital injections to support "viable financial institutions".

Meanwhile, it predicts that the eurozone economy is poised to shrink by 2.0% in 2009 and the US economy by 1.6%.

Banking crisis

The report comes on the same day the International Labour Organization said that as many as 51 million jobs worldwide could be lost this year because of the global economic crisis.

It had been hoped that growth in developing nations would continue at a steady pace and help offset the recession in developed nations such as the US and UK.

The BBC's Greg Wood: "The recession will also last longer than expected"

But the seemingly endless crisis in the banking system has put paid to that notion.

Countries such as China are now struggling with a collapse in demand from their primary export markets.

Meanwhile, developed economies such as Japan, Spain, the US and UK are in recession, with new job losses being announced on a daily basis.

'Uncertainty'

The IMF says that growth in emerging and developing economies is expected to slow sharply, from 6.25% in 2008 to 3.25% in 2009.

It cites the main reasons for the drop as being falling export demand, lower commodity prices and much tighter external financing constraints.

(Keep reading ...)

Global job losses 'could hit 51m'

As many as 51 million jobs worldwide could be lost this year because of the global economic crisis, says the International Labour Organization(ILO).

The UN agency says that would push up the world's unemployment rate to 7.1% by the end of 2009, compared with 6.0% in 2008 and 5.7% in 2007.

The ILO's most optimistic forecast is for 18 million more unemployed, giving a global jobless rate of 6.1%.

It says developing countries will suffer most from additional job losses.

"If the recession deepens in 2009, as many forecasters expect, the global jobs crisis will worsen sharply," the ILO said.

The International Monetary Fund is expected later on Wednesday to cut its forecast for world economic growth and predict a deeper than expected recession in the developed nations.

Action needed

Despite painting both its best and worst jobs scenarios, the ILO said realistically 30 million more people could lose their jobs, pushing the global unemployment rate to 6.5%.

This week US construction and mining equipment maker Caterpillar has taken steps to cut about 20,000 jobs, Home Depot is shedding 7,000 jobs, and other firms such as ING and Philips are also axing posts.

"We are now facing a global jobs crisis," said ILO director-general, Juan Somavia in the ILO's Global Employment Trends 2009 report.

"Many governments are aware and acting, but more decisive and coordinated international action is needed to avert a global social recession.

"Progress in poverty reduction is unravelling and middle classes worldwide are weakening."

He called on the upcoming meeting of the G20 in early April in London to urgently agree on priority measures to promote productive investments and "decent" work and social protection objectives.

'Working poor'

According to ILO estimates, North Africa and the Middle East had the highest unemployment rates at the end of 2008, of 10.3% and 9.4%.

Central and south-east Europe, as well as the former Soviet Union countries, ended last year with a jobless rate of 8.8%.

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Looks like a very dark and violent storm is brewing over the planet, folks ...

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Harper/Flaherty Budget And Infrastructure: Still Far Short Of The Mark

Ok - so it will be $12B for infrastructure instead of the "leaked" $7B amount ... but this remains far short of the $50B amount that would actually be required to, you know, stimulate the economy and put folks back to work.

But hey - there is also a whopping $1 billion over five years for a "Green Infrastructure Fund" focused on "sustainable energy" infrastructure such as modern energy transmission lines.

Not exactly a resounding "Green New Deal", is it?

Good thing Harper is, you know, an economist - I shudder to think how catastrophically worse things would have been with this "budget" had he not been one ...

So, there you have Harper and his Harpies: still out of touch with economic reality and still out of touch with environmental reality.

Or, in one other word: incompetence.

Aren't we happy to have re-elected them, fellow Canadians?


(Addendum: looks like yours truly is not the only one who thinks that this farce of a budget falls far short of the required and necessary mark ...)

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An Appeal To Stephen Harper To Stop U.S. War Resister Deportations

punditman says ...

Another brave young American who has deserted from this criminal war. What will Obama do with those who are sent back? Just in case PM Harper misses this Youtube video, you can take action by going to:
War Resisters Support Campaign.

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Torture Vs. Civilization: Yup. My Point Exactly.

What I've been saying all along:

Are We Civilized Enough To Prosecute For Torture?

Top international lawyer Philippe Sands QC speaks before the House Judiciary Constitution, Civil Rights & Civil Liberties Subcmte. in May last year, states without reservation that war crimes were committed by the most senior members of the Bush administration.

Via AlterNet comes a remarkable piece from John W. Dean, fomer White House counsel to Nixon, who writes that Obama must prosecute bush administration officials and that, if he doesn't, other nations are very likely too. Read the whole thing, but he concludes:

My question is how can the Obama Administration not investigate, and, if appropriate, prosecute given the world is watching, because if they do not, other may do so? How could there be "change we can believe in" if the new administration harbors war criminals – which is the way that Philippe Sands and the rest of the world, familiar with the facts which have surfaced even without an investigation, view those who facilitated or engaged in torture?

One would think that people like Cheney, Rumsfeld, Addington, Gonzales, Yoo, Haynes and others, who claim to have done nothing wrong, would call for investigations to clear themselves if they really believed that to be the case. Only they, however, seem to believe in their innocence – the entire gutless and cowardly group of them, who have shamed themselves and the nation by committing crimes against humanity in the name of the United States.

We must all hope that the Obama Administration does the right thing, rather than forcing another country to clean up the mess and seek to erase the dangerous precedent these people have created for our country.

Great stuff, indeed ...

But who will listen?

Questions, questions, questions ...

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The Cycle Of Hate Continues ...

Round and round we go, running in circles to our very last throes.

Looks like the truce is off (yet again) over there, in Palestine.

And here we go again ...

Fueling the Cycle of Hate
by Neve Gordon and Yigal Bronner

War is teaching the children of Israel and Gaza that the other side is a bloodthirsty monster, and destroying any desire for peace

Israeli soccer matches were suspended during the assault on Gaza. When the games resumed last week, the fans had come up with a new chant: "Why have the schools in Gaza been shut down?" sang the crowd. "Because all the children were gunned down!" came the answer.

Aside from its sheer barbarism, this chant reflects the widespread belief among Israeli Jews that Israel scored an impressive victory in Gaza - a victory measured, not least, by the death toll.

Israeli pilots and tank commanders could not really discriminate between the adults and the children who hid in their homes or huddled in the UNRWA shelters, and yet they chose to press the trigger. Therefore, it is not at all surprising that the lethal onslaught left 1,314 Palestinians dead, of which 412 - or nearly one third of all of the casualties - were children.

This latest assault underscores that Israel, not unlike Hamas, readily resorts to violence and does not distinguish between civilians and combatants (only the weapons at Israel's disposal are much more lethal). No matter how many times the Israeli government tries to blame Hamas for the latest Palestinian civilian deaths it simply cannot explain away the body count, especially that of the children. In addition to the dead, 1,855 Palestinian children were wounded, and tens of thousands of others have likely been traumatised, many of them for life.

Every child has a story. A Bedouin friend recently called to tell us about his relatives in Gaza. One cousin allowed her five-year-old daughter to walk to the adjacent house to see whether the neighbours had something left to eat. The girl had been crying from hunger. The moment she began crossing the street a missile exploded nearby and the flying shrapnel killed her. The mother has since been bedridden, weeping and screaming, "I have let my girl die hungry".

As if the bloody incursion was not enough, the Israeli security forces seem to be keen on spreading the flames of hatred among the Arab population within Israel. Hundreds of Palestinian citizens of Israel have been arrested for protesting at the Israeli assault and more than 200 of them are still in custody. One incident is enough to illustrate the psychological effect these arrests will likely have on hundreds more children.

A few days after the ceasefire, several men wearing black ski masks stormed the home of Muhammad Abu Humus. They came to arrest him for protesting against the killings in Gaza. It was four in the morning and the whole family was asleep when the men banged on the door. After entering the house, they made Abu Humus's wife Wafa and their four children Erfat (12), Shahd (9), Anas (6) and Majd (3) stand in a corner as they searched the house, throwing all the clothes, sheets, toys, and kitchenware on the floor. With tears in their eyes, the children watched as the armed men then took their father away and left.

Chance would have it that Abu Humus, a long-time peace activist and member of the Fatah party, is a personal friend of ours. In 2001, he joined Ta'ayush Arab-Jewish Partnership, and since then has selflessly organised countless peace rallies and other joint activities. During the past eight years, we have spent many hours at each other's homes and our children have grown up respecting and liking one other. It is hard to believe that just one month ago he attended the Bar Mitzvah of Yigal's son in a Jerusalem synagogue.

Muhammad and Wafa Abu Humus have tried over the years to instil in their children a love and desire for peace, and while the security forces may not have destroyed this, the hatred they have generated in one night cannot be underestimated. Indeed, what, one might ask, will his children think of their Jewish neighbours? What feelings will they harbour? And what can we expect from those children in Gaza who have witnessed the killing of their parents, siblings, friends and neighbours?

We emphasise the Palestinian children because so many of them have been killed and terrorised in the past month. Yet it is clear that Israeli children are suffering as well, particularly those who have spent long periods in shelters for fear of being hit by rockets.

The one message that is being conveyed to children on both sides of this fray is that the other side is a bloodthirsty monster.


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Obama's Vietnam: Hey, Hey, BHO, How Many Years Until We Go?

A "team of rivals" is how the Obama administration is being portrayed by the head-over-heels media, which started out by likening the new president to Lincoln and may end up comparing him – favorably – to God. A more appropriate phrase would be "team of retreads": Hillary at State, Gates still at Defense, and all the usual suspects lording it over their regional fiefdoms.

The appointment of George Mitchell, whose success at helping settle the Irish imbroglio suggests some skill at managing impossible situations, has evoked hope in those who pine for a more open-mined – and evenhanded – approach to the problem of Palestine. It is a hope I share.

Yet I'm not optimistic, for two very good reasons: Dennis Ross, whose appointment as plenipotentiary for Middle Eastern affairs seems to undercut what is likely to be the Mitchell approach, and Richard Holbrooke, whose dual domain of Afghanistan and Pakistan will be the focus of U.S. military action in the coming years. Specifically, more than 14 years – at least, that's what Holbrooke told us in a pre-election piece in Foreign Affairs magazine:

"The situation in Afghanistan is far from hopeless. But as the war enters its eighth year, Americans should be told the truth: it will last a long time – longer than the United States' longest war to date, the 14-year conflict (1961-75) in Vietnam."

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punditman says ...
Thus far, I am wholly unimpressed by what is shaping up to be Obama's foreign policy. He now has the first blood of innocents on his hands, with his initial kill in Pakistan. Then there is the appointment of Richard Holbrooke. To learn of the blood on Holbrook'es hands, click here. Plus ca change, anyone?

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Time For A "Green" New Deal?

Sounds good to me - what about you, folks?

It's time for a green New Deal
By Maude Barlow and Mary Corkery

In this time of global economic crisis, Canadians from all walks of life are worried about their jobs, their homes and their futures. In a time of protracted climate crisis, we are worried about the future of our planet. In its upcoming budget, the Canadian Government has the opportunity to launch a hopeful response to these crises by making a "Green New Deal" for Canada.

As Finance Minister Jim Flaherty prepares to deliver his budget on January 27, all eyes seem fixed on the global economic crisis. An international consensus has emerged that free markets alone cannot resolve it, and that financial stimulus packages are a necessity, even if they result in budget deficits.

But there is another global emergency, one which has slipped from view as concerns about the economy have taken centre stage, one which could contain the seeds of hope to help resolve the first: the climate crisis.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has asserted that financial stimulus must be tied to government action on climate change. "The economic crisis is serious; yet when it comes to climate change, the stakes are far higher," he said at the recent UN Conference on Climate Change, adding that what the world needs is "a green New Deal." Former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern's Review on the Economics of Climate Change likens the impacts of climate change on the world economy - if unchecked - to that of the world wars and the Great Depression.

We need a budget that is good for the economy, Canadians and the environment. In his efforts to draft such a bill, Minister Flaherty is faced with a choice.

On the one hand, he can continue subsidizing fossil fuel industries that contribute to the environmental crisis. The oil and gas industries now receive approximately $1.4 billion a year in subsidies. Alberta and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers want new subsidies for costly, and unproven, techniques to capture and store carbon emissions from the tar sands.

A recent joint Canada-Alberta government study found that only a small percentage of carbon dioxide released by the tar sands can be captured. Others want infrastructure spending on projects like roads that continue our fossil fuel dependency.

On the other hand, Minister Flaherty could look at the climate crisis consequences of relying on the tar sands as an economic driver and choose instead to fund sustainable energy production and consumption.

Investing in energy efficiency and renewable energy production not only reduces greenhouse gases, it can also provide quality jobs. Investing in public transit, co-generation (combined heat and power systems), retrofitting homes and buildings and improving the efficiency of electricity transmission can create a host of new job opportunities. The Alternative Federal Budget produced by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives calls for $1 billion a year for the next three years and $8 billion over thirteen years in improving energy efficiency and implementing a renewable energy strategy.

Minister Flaherty has called for "nation building" infrastructure projects. Why not work with provinces, territories, municipalities and First Nations to build public regional grids for renewable power, integrated across provincial borders? Investments to expand green energy development in the public sector would create jobs in the research, design, construction and maintenance of renewable energy systems.

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We, The Uncivilized, Savage Barbarians

A quick follow up on yesterday's post here ...

If you thought that torture was only for terrorists, and that torture is only "relatively recent", then I strongly advise you to guess again and read the three following articles:

Torture in U.S. Prisons: Common, Lethal, Unreported

Torture Inc. Americas Brutal Prisons

Torture at a Louisiana Prison

Ah yes - how noble, how civilized we are, indeed ...

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Welcome To Earth ...

... you may come in peace, but we're far from peaceful.

On account that we are still fearful, primitive mind-thinking, uncivilized savages - and we revel in it, at that.

Sorry.

Come back in, say, 1000 years - maybe we'll still be around and more the wiser ...

Maybe.


(Cross-posted at TWWL)

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Changes Ahead You'd Better Believe In

When the applause dies down, the first African-American President of the United States will have to deal with things less cheerful than his Inaugural Ball. The US is losing close to 16,000 jobs a day on average. (That was 14,000 a day just a month ago.) It lost over 1.1 million jobs in just the two months of November and December. And the December loss in payroll employment (5,24,000) recorded by the Bureau of Labour Statistics, is a provisional figure. It is likely be revised upwards by several thousand - as were the numbers of earlier months.

This means that 2008, with 2.75 million jobs lost, was the worst year for layoffs in the United States since 1945. What does President Obama do? And what will he have to confront in doing it? He will have to create jobs on a scale unheard of in decades in his nation. Unemployment benefits, giant public works, massive infrastructure spending, a good health system, all these would also help lessen the hardship ahead. He will need - assuming he wants that - to flip a system where wealth still flows most disproportionately towards the top 1 per cent. In any effort he makes, he will run into an awesome corporate power - already regrouping from Meltdown Phase I.

Parallels with Franklin Delano Roosevelt are tempting - and dicey. True, FDR did not start out as a progressive. Quite the contrary. But circumstances forced him to take a path he might not have dreamed of. In that, there is perhaps hope for Obama. However, FDR lived and worked in a very different era. In an America where Labour and poor people had a voice. Where unions mattered. Where many diverse political currents had their own following. Where Socialists, Populists, Communists, Anarchists and others made an impact on political thought and process. In such a world, it was not only easier to do the bold thing - it was perhaps unavoidable. What kind of diversity is there now? Obama can choose to toe the corporate line broadly. Or he can choose to toe the corporate line narrowly. Anything else would be radical. It was great to have Pete Seeger at the inaugural concert. Alas, it won't be that best-loved folk singer calling the tune now.

The America Obama inherits is one where most Democrats and Republicans in Congress unite to stifle Labour.

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punditman says ....

If you have a bruise, apply ice, right? Punditman is recovering from a bruising game of pond hockey, only to wake to find that Iceland's government has now fallen. The problem is that for deep bone bruises, ice will help, but it will take months, even years, before the body heals the area. Good luck, Iceland.

Meanwhile, economists whose brains are not bruised have a pessimistic outlook on growth for 2009 with greater job losses and worsening economic conditions in the months to come.

In the above article, the author points out that typically, governments will come up tomorrow with something that might have worked yesterday, and he quotes Nouriel Roubini ("Dr. Doom") as follows, "a housing bubble, a mortgage bubble, an equity bubble, a bond bubble, a credit bubble, a commodity bubble, a private equity bubble, and a hedge funds bubble -- are all now bursting simultaneously."

Yeah, I get it— it's an unprecedented global, economic bruising.

To end on a positive note, let's work towards finding new solutions today that will work for the problems of today—and tomorrow. Only then can we hope to heal these economic contusions.

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Commie Pinko Me

I've written about Democratic Socialism more than once, citing shining examples of European models that work.

But really, I am a good old communist flower child at heart.

I can look at pictures of glistening cities, pristine example of architecture old and new, filled with lovely dining spots and walk to arts and culture and still be sickened.



I always wonder what their alleys hide, where the people serving the affluent there live like.

Preserving cultural advance is important, but I often wonder if there has to be such cost. I bemoan at times, that America tears everything down, and has no sense of history, but I also wonder about the moral lacking of a people who would bookmark millions for each building and let their people live in poverty.




Because in my mind, I know outside most of these bastions of taken entirely for granted excesses, lie slums full of hungry, tired hopeless people.



I hear them say, I love where I live, you can get exotic food from all over the world, feeling all smug and so very Continental. I wonder if they think speaking to a person of darker skins or sampling international food makes them feel like they have clues about the World's true culture.



When people expound joyfully on their "healthy" fresh fruit and vegetable farmers markets, I envision the lives of those who pick these fruits going to bed hungry, while thousands of pounds of discarded "overripe" nutrition are discarded by the elitists for which they work.

The true face of our World is dirt poor and enslaved.



Our excesses have brought the ability to invest in research, yes. But other than when a few philanthropists decide to grant a few vaccines to a few chosen "lessers" mostly those developments are saved for the elites. Those elites are mainly Western Industrial Nations.

Perhaps those ideas of a benevolent "Parent" society assuages the guilt that any thinking person may feel. Not mine. I could never be affluent, I'd give too much away. I know me, I do it poor now.

I am left in the company of one.



Pinko, commie me.

Somehow, we were convinced along the way that sharing is bad.

Somehow, a supposedly "Christian" nation like the United States who taught every toddler to "share" personally, was brain washed into believing grown ups sharing is bad.



Somehow, that greed was masked in the rationalization of "fruits of one's own labors" and the idea that poverty is the result of sloth.

! in 4 American homeless men are veterans. The rest of the world? The reasons are myriad.



I cannot abide.

Even our Constitution, which I speak fervently of upholding, with its lofty words of Commonwealth, Common Good, and Created Equal really, in its measures covers few of those things.

All it makes for is somewhat free slaves to economic disparity and the preservation of assets by the few wily enough to gain them.

The "overtake of the world by Godless Communism" was the boogeyman of my youth.

How does one need a God if he is living a life of care for everyone? That is being in God, a God oneself.

They pointed to the corruption, reminded me I would not have been born, in a World with communism and population control. They pointed to the failed examples of communism enforced by military means.

Have not Democracies failed, have not Empires based on Capitalism?

I call bullshit on the whole premise.

For in my heart of hearts, I know that Communism, in its real sense is merely HUMANISM. Humanism does not accept that there will always be suffering, and my acts cannot overcome that. Humanism knows that my acts can overcome that... for if we all stopped believing we cannot make a difference, we could.

Why is a life in South Africa, Nicaragua or Tibet worth less than mine?



Why in a country that claims to value life, air strikes on villages are applauded?

Why the FUCK do people think its fine to "Die for my ideals" when all that really means is "Kill those who don't do and think as I say?"



I cannot, in my commie pinko skin, abide. I cannot abide the murder of human beings for what amounts to nothing. For what amounts to your own pride, arrogance and false superiority.

You should not ever be willing to die for your ideals, anymore, that means killing for them. Our ideals should be in preserving all of humanity.

Yes, sometimes my brainwashing comes out and I get all "V"... but my soul screams for PEACE, for LOVE.

I don't know how it can be done, but I know it can be done. I know the effort, time, brainpower, think tanks and money poured into preserving a status quo that is on EVERY level unconscionable could find a way.

We could bring health and relative prosperity to every being on this planet. We could have no one live in fear of War, no matter what their religion or social norm. We could.

There may still be broken people who commit crimes against humanity, but there would be far less in a civil World. They could be addressed case by case, rather than whole scale punishment of innocents, as War does.

We could have education that still respects cultural differences.

Yes.

I stand alone.

I am the FIRST monkey, perhaps, ready to give away everything and go anywhere to get it done.



Social security, national health care, free education, guaranteed housing, employment each to his abilities and each according to their needs.

Gay rights, women's rights, Palestinian rights, Native American rights, Mexican immigrants rights, all those things people with their own agendas decry... these are mine.

I am for HUMAN rights, and I refuse to skim over one, or laugh it off, only to making scathing commentary over another.

Sure, its fashionable to care about Palestinians right now, but how many even read what is done to the natives of this country anymore? It was fashionable a year or more ago to care about Katrina, yet 75% of them are still not HOME.

It is not only the kleptocracy that makes these things possible. It is the ingrained idea of me and mine first that does it. It is the idea of demonizing a group that does it more.

Are people more worried about the Palestinians, or just more ready to demonize Zionists? Were people more interested in Katrina victims, or was it just a new reason to hate Bush?

Sorry. I don't fit in. I never will.

I cannot stop caring about humanity to conquer anyone. I cannot compartmentalize people into "collateral damage" in my fight.

If my fight does not include caring about the individuals, then I have become what I despise. INHUMAN.

I am a Pinko Commie, and I will win, one LOVE at a time, one shoulder, one dollar, one kind act, until people learn to LOVE eachother enough to stop other people from abusing anyone.

The elites will never relinquish their ill gotten gains easily, but how can they stand against an army of humanity, an army of every person on the planet who LOVES every single person on this planet equally?

"They don't stand a chance, against our love..."

Everyone deserves everything, no one deserves to withhold anything they don't need to survive.

Everyone deserves freedom to be who they are, respected.

No more starvation. No more AIDS. No more water wars. No more hoarding resources. No more oppression. No more slavery.

I am the first monkey and I stand alone.

No more. Everything More.

I am a Pinko Commie, and I want to give you the World.



Are you ready to be Monkey Number 2?

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The Harper (Pathetic, But Costly) Economic Comedy Routine

So, today we were served the throne speech. More obfuscations, hypocrisy, double-speaking and lies from our Mini Leader ... what I've come to call harperisms.

Nothing new here.

(Seventh Principle of Incompetence, anyone?)

I laughed aloud especially at this line from the throne speech (emphasis added):

"Canadians face a difficult year — perhaps several difficult years"

And perhaps we should pay no mind (yet again) to real, bona fides experts on the matter who have projected mid-2009 as the point whereby we'll be getting out of the recession ...

Which in turn reminded me of this quote, from Baird:

"We did not start this economic crisis but we will take steps to protect Canadians and our country from it"

Sure - they may not have started this economic crisis, but they definitely let it happen - despite all the warning signs (sounds familiar?).

Harper and his Harpies are a joke. A sad, pathetic joke - however, one that happens to be at our own expense.

Glad to know I'm not the only one who thinks so, as the following article (echoing previous posts of mine, like this one) indicates:

Abbott and Costello meets Harper and Flaherty
By Trish Hennessy

As I try to make sense of the varied and multiple trial balloons our federal government is floating in advance of the January 27 budget, I am reminded of Abbott and Costello.

You know their hilarious baseball schtick Who's On First (What's on second, I Don't Know's on third)?

In Canada, we've witnessed our own Abbott and Costello show. Here it is, courtesy of Coach Harper and Pitcher Flaherty, whose game plan has been changing wildly from inning to inning.

Line Drive to First Base: Recession.

During the fall federal election, Coach Harper stuck to classic pep talk: Canada, he assured us, is recession-proof.

"This country will not go into recession next year," he proclaimed on October 10, 2008.

Two days later, same position, only more insistent:

"If you don't want ... a deficit and recession, the only way to ensure that is the case is to vote for the Conservative party."

Once they were returned to the relative safety of minority government status, Pitcher Flaherty threw us a bit of a curve ball: "We may well be in a technical recession," he said on November 23.

By January 12, Pitcher Flaherty was lamenting about how "we are in extraordinary times" and that he's trying "to get through the consequences in Canada of a synchronized global recession."

Sliding to Second: Deficits.

On October 9, Pitcher Flaherty was insisting he would never run a deficit. He said, simply: "We will not run a deficit."

On November 23 Coach Harper tried to steal a base: "Deficits are generally bad, but there are occasions in which deficits are not necessarily bad, but in fact they are essential."

On January 22 a federal official knocked it out of the ball park, confirming the federal government will be $64 billion in the red within the next two years.

Easy Stroll to Third: Tax cuts.

Despite research showing tax cuts aren't the powerful stimulus Canada needs to ward off the worst of a recession, as recently as January 15 Coach Harper was sticking to the old Conservative game plan, strongly hinting there would be tax cuts for the middle class in the federal budget.

On January 21, Pitcher Flaherty gave similar signals.

A day later, he put broad-based tax breaks back on the bench. Instead, there would be short-term breaks and tax credits for home renovations or tax savings for companies that invest in advanced or green technologies.

Will They Make it Home?

Ironically, last October 4 Coach Harper was vowing a reprieve from such games. He said, and I quote:
"We're not going to get into a situation like we have in the United States where we're panicking and enunciating a different plan every day."

As it happens, he's followed a similar playbook, throwing curve balls, fast balls and knuckle balls with dizzying speed. And while Who was on first, no one seemed to know What was on second and all Canadians really want is a good coach to get us safely to home base.

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"Fearmongering Primitive Minds"? They *Are* Us!

Following up on today's earlier post - the usual suspects are still at it again - aided and abetted by the media, of course:

First, we have this:

Fox Shows Photos Of Muslim Men: ‘Would You Want A Guy Like This Living In Your Backyard?’

Since President Obama’s announcement last week that he would shut down the Guantanamo Bay detention center within on year, Fox News has done its best to frighten its viewers about the rule:

SEAN HANNITY: That’s somewhat frightening, you’re going to close Guantanamo Bay, you don’t know what’s going to happen, you don’t know where you’re going to put these people. [1/23/09]

GLENN BECK: Somebody told me that if this goes through and we put 200 people into this system, that it will shut down our justice system. Our justice system just won’t be able to do it.[1/20/09]

BRIAN KILMEADE: You’re talking about the worst of the Taliban, the worst of al Qaeda, and we have to let them go, give them trials? Why do we need to do this and compromise the CIA and our intelligence bureau — a lot of the intelligence was built on these guys, was done using our clandestine operations. So we have to expose that for these trials? [1/22/09]

Rep. Jack Murtha (D-PA) said last week that the U.S. could hold the detainees in federal prisons, just like we hold thousands of other dangerous inmates. This morning, Fox and Friends responded by sending a reporter to Murtha’s district to flash photos of suspected terrorists — their only identification being Muslim headgear — and ask residents, “Would you want a guy like this living in your backyard?” Watch it:

Despite Fox’s suggestion that detainees could be pitching a tent in your backyard, Guantanamo detainees transferred to the U.S. for trials would be housed in federal prisons — where dozens of dangerous terrorists are already held. In fact, the United States has already successfully prosecuted 145 terrorism cases in federal court, a sharp contrast to the series of debacles in Guantanamo prosecutions.

Later in the segment, the Fox hosts repeated some of the right wing’s favorite myths about Guantanamo. They endorsed the “great idea” conservatives have been pushing of sending detainees to Alcatraz or a “haunted” prison in West Virginia:

CLAYTON MORRIS: We’ve got Alcatraz that exists. We give tours out there. Put them out on an island on Alcatraz, which is under our jurisdiction. What about Moundsville State Penitentiary? Someone from West Virginia wrote me and said it’s a haunted prison. It’s vacant.

In other words, Fox News and the right wing would prefer to send Guantanamo detainees to theme parks rather than to maximum-security federal prisons.

Then, we have that:

Rove: ‘One year from now, Gitmo won’t be closed.’

In a recent speech at the University of Miami, Karl Rove expressed his pessimism that President Obama will be able to carry through on his pledge to close Guantanamo:

“One year from now, Gitmo won’t be closed…. If it is, there will be an uproar in the U.S. about where to put these people.”

Indeed, it will be very difficult to close Guantanamo, made harder in fact by the incompetence of the Bush administration. This weekend, the Washington Post reported that the administration’s plans to “quickly close the military prison there were set back last week when incoming legal and national security officials — barred until the inauguration from examining classified material on the [Gitmo] detainees — discovered that there were no comprehensive case files on many of them.”

Update: Today’s Progress Report debunks the right-wing myths about closing Guantanamo.

And then, we have that as well:

Gregory allowed 61-detainee falsehood to stand unrebutted on Meet the Press

On the January 25 edition of NBC's Meet the Press, host David Gregory allowed House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) to repeat the falsehood that, in Boehner's words, "we've already found" that 61 detainees released from the detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay are now "back on the battlefield." In fact, the figure, which comes from the Pentagon, includes 43 former prisoners who are suspected of, but have not been confirmed as, having "return[ed] to the fight." Moreover, even the Pentagon's claim that it has confirmed that 18 former Guantánamo detainees have returned to the battlefield has been questioned by experts.

After Gregory asked if President Obama's executive order requiring that the detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay be closed within a year was "realistic," Boehner responded: "[W]hat do you do with these 270 prisoners? Some of them you might be able to release, but we've already found 61 of those that we've released back on the battlefield."

Gregory did not note that according to the Pentagon, the 61-detainee figure includes 43 former prisoners who are suspected of, but have not been confirmed as, having engaged in terrorist activity -- detainees who have not been "already found [...] back on the battlefield," as Boehner asserted. Indeed, as Media Matters for America noted, during a January 13 press conference, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell stated: "The new numbers are, we believe, 18 confirmed and 43 suspected of returning to the fight. So 61 in all former Guantanamo detainees are confirmed or suspected of returning to the fight."

Further, the Pentagon's definition of "returning to the fight" has been challenged by some analysts. As CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen noted on the January 23 edition of Anderson Cooper 360: "[R]eturning to the fight, in Pentagon terms, could be engaging in anti-American propaganda, something that's not entirely surprising if you have been locked up in a prison camp for several years without charge." Bergen further stated: "[W]hen you really boil it down, the actual number of people whose names we know are about eight out of the 520 that have been released [from Guantánamo], so a little above 1 percent, that we can actually say with certainty have engaged in anti-American terrorism or insurgence activities since they have been released. ... If the Pentagon releases more information about specific people, I think it would be possible to -- to potentially agree with them. But, right now, that information isn't out there."

Additionally, Seton Hall University School of Law professor Mark Denbeaux -- who has written several reports about Guantánamo detainees, including some challenging the Pentagon's definition of "battlefield" capture and published detainee recidivism rates -- has disputed the Pentagon's figures.

Now, here's the underlying problem:

1 in 4 Americans believe the Bush administration committed war crimes

In a new telephone survey, Rasmussen Reports has found that 25 percent of voters “believe President Bush and senior members of his administration are guilty of war crimes.” Forty-four percent of Democrats and 21 percent of unaffiliated voters believe that war crimes were committed while just 4 percent of Republicans believe the same.

Only 25% percent of Americans realize, or understand, or accept the reality that war crimes have been committed - are still being committed - in their names.

Which falls pretty much in line with this older poll which revealed that 44% of Americans approve torture.

As I said before:

(...) the barbarians and their savage followers are still living among us indeed ... and they are doing everything they can to keep us down to their primitive, uncivilized and savage level.

The problem here is that the primitive mind-thinking barbarians and savages appear to constitute the majority ...

Vive la civilisation, eh?

Once again: we have met the enemy ... and the enemy is ourselves.

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The (Complex) "Russia Equation"

I found this (very lenghty) essay discussing the current realities and problems of today's Russia, with an eye-opening historical perspective.

I encourage everyone to take the time and read it - it is definitely worth it.

I know I've learned a lot about what currently drives Russia ...

The end of Russia?
By Yury Afanasiev

On its present course, Russia is doomed, claims the distinguished historian, Yury Afanasiev. Why did reform change nothing? Why has the wheel of history turned back to autocracy? 500 years of oppression are reaching a terrible climax. In this important, excoriating essay, he challenges his people to face the truth about their history

Part One Are we not slaves?

I Russia's rulers behave like a government of occupation. So why do the people support them uncritically?

II Understanding the terrible enthusiasm of the masses

III The intelligentsia: as unfree today as in the past.

IV Imperial expansion versus freedom: an elite long ago co-opted

V Today's intelligentsia: the chorus of support

VI The wheel of history comes full circle: returning to "the Russian path"

Part Two 1917

I ‘Building socialism': Russia leaves the beaten track, sets about building the Kingdom of Heaven on earth

II Recipe for building socialism: eliminate the human element

III Social organization is replaced by crime and corruption

IV Moscow the Third Rome: a nation in the grip of mythological thinking

V A history of foreign policy annexations leads to Stalin's final solution: dependent individuals in place of society

Part Three The Character of Russian Power

I The Magna Carta v Genghis Khan's Great Yasa

II Russia looks to the past, Europe to the future

III After five centuries of civil war, only power is left standing

Part Four Late 1980's- early 1990's: Russia blows its latest historic chance

I Laying the foundations for catastrophe

II Yeltsin and Putin's key blunders

III The post-Soviet mutant: corporation-state + patrimonial state

IV The Yeltsin years: liberal ends, Bolshevist means

V The Putin years- onward to the past

VI "Rising from our knees", reaching a climax, facing the end of Russia

Part One Are we not slaves?

I Russia's rulers behave like a government of occupation. So why do the people support them uncritically?

In recent months we have witnessed a series of actions from the Russian government that seem at first glance paradoxical. I will list some of the most important:

• for the first time since the withdrawal of the Soviet army from Afghanistan, Russian armed forces began and ended a "real" (not "cold") war" outside Russia (in Georgia);
  
• for the first time since the collapse of the USSR, strategic bombers and ships of the Russian armed forces and navy have been sent to Latin America.
  
• the return to "cold war" rhetoric has reached the point where the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs used obscene expressions when talking with a foreign (British) colleague
  
• Russian ships stationed in Sevastopol fought in the Black Sea against Georgia, in defiance of the Ukrainian president's ban on deploying them without informing Ukraine;
  
• Prime Minister Putin played the atomic blackmail card against the Czech Republic and Poland, using that "special" KGB way of his, loaded and enigmatic.
  
• with the blatant and increasing polarisation in the material wealth of the Russian population, the military budget has been increased by almost 30%;
  
• the President of Russia welcomed the election of the new US President with a promise that he would station rockets in the Kaliningrad Oblast which would threaten America's European allies.

These things seem paradoxical. After all, we're living in a nuclear age.

None of these events fit into the contemporary picture. Yet they can all be explained unparadoxically. However, in my opinion, this explanation will be even gloomier and more alarming than the "apparent paradoxes", the reality which is, as it were, shrouded in mist.

Take a look at what is happening before our very eyes. Take a good, hard look at it - realistically, rationally, in its historical context. If you do that, you start thinking you've gone mad, or at least that you're well on the way to it.

If these thoughts seem altogether too terrifying or strange, if you're so confident of your mental state that you can dismiss them, then what you what you are feeling will be no less terrible. For you will be feeling the void enveloping you.

A government of occupation

It is not an absolute void, of course. Here and there, however rarely, you can still find people who see things more or less as you do. For me, they are like shining lights. I try to take a steer from them in the darkness.

But even then the feeling of emptiness remains. For it has more than one cause. The problem is not just the government. If this were the case, then the darkness could at least partly be dispelled by understanding - even the grimmest actions of the authorities can at least be understood. However, even once you've done that you can't dispel that feeling of emptiness, because you don't know what to do with your understanding.

If you think things through properly, if you interpret them rigorously, the government's behaviour can only really be explained as alienated from its people. It is a government of occupation, a "Golden Horde" that is illegitimate and criminal as well.

Even when you are quite sure, even when your ideas are well-founded and supported by the facts, where do you turn to with this understanding? Obvious, you would think: you turn not to the government, but to the people.

II Understanding the terrible enthusiasm of the masses

But turning to the people only makes the emptiness worse. For the emptiness is coming from there too, from those "masses" at whom the grim actions of the authorities are directed. Those "masses" are not just putting up with the actions of the authorities in silence. They have started supporting them enthusiastically, as they did in the 1930s.

What makes matters worse is that it has happened before, this enthusiastic response of the masses to being manipulated and ridden roughshod over: it happened before the First World War and immediately after it. Then, the people and the Bolsheviks were so close that it is still not clear who gave whom more support and who was directing whom. But we do more or less know what the result of this coming together was. We know that it was lasting and fatal for both sides - vis the year 1991.

At the same time, we also know that the Russian people has never regarded the state as "a friend", and the normal response to state coercion has always been cunning, wiles, and finding ways around the law. While appearing to toe the line and be submissive, the people have always kept a clenched fist in their pockets. These outward signs of submissiveness and obedience were regarded (and still are) as a predisposition for patient endurance, and this habit can, if we wish, be interpreted as the people's support for the government.

At the moment Putin and his president appear to enjoy universal support. As the slogan, doggedly and regrettably repeated in Russia goes: "The people and the government are one". What this means is that neither the government nor the people have a modern, rational understanding of what either one or the other. It is not just the government that is questionable in this respect, but the people too. They have not yet started playing an active role in their own history. They remain a mass, a crowd. It's only in the last 18-20 years that the amorphous, atomized Russian-Soviet mass has started to become structured. But alas, the result is not the development of a civil society, but of something more like criminal clans.

Some may find this concept upsetting. They'll be inclined to conclude that "with your ideas about the people, you're never going to get through to them". I understand this. That's why I say that we're facing the void here too.

Periodic uprisings

Over many centuries, our people have endured sufferings which, as Karamzin put it, "you have to be villainous to endure". Hence the cunning, wiles and dual morality. But at the end of the 18^th century, Karamzin was not to know that for the Russian people the greatest sufferings and the most morally corrupting consequences were yet to come.

From time to time we rose up against intolerable sufferings and the government. Once a century, with Razin, Pugachev or Lenin we celebrated our "wild freedom". Then we put our clenched fist back in our pockets and returned to our customary brutish existence.

Some people regarded these uprisings, joyfully or cynically, as an awakening. But in their sufferings, reckless protests, and savage anger, our people remained and remain a mass. A crowd that is worthy of sympathy and quiet sorrow, a crowd that is sometimes terrifying and loathsome. This is why the only people who have been able to get through to them in their usual state of unconsciousness, their permanent readiness for rebellion have been Lenin and Stalin, then Yeltsin and Putin. Who knows,perhaps in the near future someone like Zhirinovsky and Limonov may be able to do so too?

III The intelligentsia, as unfree today as in the past

The feeling of emptiness only gets worse when you try and get to grips with the views held by our creative and other intelligentsia, when you try and make out its voice and civic position.

This permits of many variations, and here and there, rarely, a few shining lights. For me, for example, one of them today is the film director Alexei German. But they are like lights in the darkness, in the biblical sense: the light either breaks through the darkness, or the darkness swallows it. This is what has happened in our history, alas, and in our time. The emptiness became even worse after the murders of Dmitry Kholodov, LarisaYudina, Galina Starovoitova, Sergei Yushenkov, Anna Politkovskaya and Magomed Evloev, after Andrei Piontkovsky was charged with "extremism" and Mikhail Beketov was brutally beaten up.

The emptiness gets even worse if you try and listen to our contemporary intellectuals not so much as individuals, but collectively, as the distinct voice of a particular "ethnos", or ethnic group. In short, our intellectuals today (except for a handful of outstanding people) are on the side of the government, not of the wider population. In my view this is the main reason why the population are still merely "the population", and have not become a "people".

If anything, the feeling of emptiness emanating from our intelligentsia gets worse when you consider the tradition of the last hundred years or more. This is something which it is not done to discuss out loud or to write about it as something that really exists and is understood down to the last detail. Thus the very problem of "the tradition of the Russian intelligentsia", vanishes into the void, enveloped in darkness.

This is not accident. This too can be explained.

IV Imperial expansion versus freedom: co-opting the elite

I'm talking about the traditional attitude to power of the Russian intelligentsia before 1917. This attitude stems from the fact that in one Russia two cultures have co-existed and confronted one another.

These two cultures were so different socially as well as spiritually that in the 18^th century they even spoke different languages. So complete was the mutual incomprehension between them that throughout their history Russian intellectuals (and even the finest of our ‘liberal' Russian intelligentsia), were doing more than merely helping to build Russian power. Generally, they were on the side of the government, rather than the people.

What's more, the government they were helping to build was essentially autocratic, if not despotic. This explains why the Enlightenment has left so slight a trace on our national traditions of power.

If you look at the larger picture of Russian history, then the reasons why the Russian intelligentsia is as it is becomes far clearer. Ever since the 15^th century, when Moscow started to build its Orthodox empire, the priority has been territorial expansion, without regard for the effect of this on the country's internal development. As the empire was expanding in very straitened economic conditions, the effect was of a progressive movement from freedom towards slavery: the last juice had to be squeezed out of the population by force.

This is every bit as true today. This absence of change has become an oppressive national problem, becoming a defining feature of Russianness in all its aspects, including the ascendancy of the state and the oppression of the individual.

This tradition of the intelligentsia backing the government is realized in the traditional split in the Russian spirit between freedom and empire, between the Russian will and Russian power.

Our renowned historian, philosopher and journalist Georgy Fedotov put it even more distinctly. According to him, after Pushkin "the gulf between empire and freedom in the Russian conscience became irrevocable. <...> Those who built or supported the empire drove out freedom, while those who fought for freedom destroyed the empire. The monarchic state could not withstand this suicidal disunity of spirit and force. The collapse of imperial Russia was primarily the consequence of this inner cancer that ate it up from the inside".

With the help of Georgy Fedotov, (who lived through the revolution and the world wars of the 20^th century), I would like to return to the contemporary problem of "empire - freedom - personality". How is it being resolved today intellectually and in practice? Let us look at those people who, by virtue of their professions, embody the thinking and the spirit of Russia, and to determine its future now, in the 21^st century.

I repeat: merely to consider this question will cast you willy-nilly into the void. For you find very few people in sympathy with your ideas. The government has already destroyed many of those who are.

The dominant voice, the social stance of enlightened, intellectual Russia, our "thinking class", is fully attuned to the position of our present government. Writers, scientists, theatre people and film directors, printed and electronic media journalists, university professors and the hierarchy of the Orthodox Church do not merely put up with the government silently and passively. They justify and support it. They resort to theoretical investigations, historical traditions, and their own understanding of moral values to try and rationalize its actions.

V Today's intelligentsia: the chorus of support

We could cite long lists of books and newspaper articles by way of confirmation. We could point to virtually the whole television broadcasting network, and to the school and university textbooks recently approved by the government. I will take just one (special) issue: "Five centuries of empire" in the magazine Expert on 31 December 2007. This magazine has recently become a kind of barometer for way that the governing class is thinking, and the intellectual elite that serves it.

The editorial article "The complex fate of empire" casts serious doubt on Russia's democratic prospects: "This form of rule is generally very vulnerable and unstable, and if there is no consensus in society that the country needs democracy, then it is impossible in principle. It is unrealistic to support a democratic regime if large and influential groups in society have the goal of destroying it".

This would all be very well - one can of course doubt whether democracy is suitable for Russia... If it weren't for the fact that what is offered as an alternative is not only doubtful, but also at the very least alarming.

From an article in the same issue, "Russia to the pessimists": "Territorial expansion has dominated Russia's view of world development. But there is no need to feel apologetic about this. We should be no less proud of the great nation that was built by our ancestors than the Swiss are of their watches, the French of their cuisine or the Italians of Renaissance art. And just as these achievements of other nations are not just a cause for pride, but a source of income, Russia's expanses, with their countless wealth and strategic positions, are paying themselves off for us today a hundredfold.

"The same can be said about our ability to live in harmony with our neighbours, and if necessary to fight them.

"This goes too for our ability to impose our own political culture, and the art of studying a foreign culture and accepting it as one's own.

"Russia has accepted everyone who wanted to become a part of it, everyone who was prepared to serve it.

"This is what freedom means for Russia's subjects. If for a Polish gentleman it lay in the right not to obey, if for an English lord it lay in the right to control the way his taxes were used, for a Russian nobleman freedom was expressed through his ability to take part in the great task of building the empire. Judge for yourself who had more freedom - the Pole whose disobedience, whose arrogance did not really matter to anyone or the Russian, whose readiness to serve made him the co-creator of world history?"

These are the guideline values, this is the world view of today's Russian intellectuals as expressed ideologically in the magazine Expert. The same motive runs through all the domestic and international policies of the Russian government. For all of them, the condition of freedom "in the grand historical scheme of things" is the GULAG, and Russia's great contribution to world civilization, compared with all other countries, is its imperial essence, the result of five centuries of expansion.

How the Russian nobleman became enslaved

Of course we should not be apologizing for the territorial expansion of the past. Our history is in itself neither a source of pride nor shame. We need to consider it, and to understand it. Each individual, and society as a whole, finds themselves and their identity in our ongoing efforts to find meaning in the events of the past,

If we're strictly faithful to the facts, we're forced to the conclusion that in his readiness to serve the empire and help build it, the Russian nobleman was expressing not his freedom, but his servility.

At the end of the 15^th century, when Ivan III needed a large standing army to protect the large state and conquer new territories, but had no money to support it, they came up with a solution. The cavalry was formed, on the basis of conditional land ownership. These soldiers of the cavalry became the first group of noblemen to be enslaved. They were given land, but deprived of the right to choose. They could not change the landowner whom they had to serve. They could not do anything at their own discretion. They could only serve their owner. Some time later, they were given peasants too, and they enslaved these peasants, just as they themselves had been enslaved.

The Russian nobleman thus became doubly constrained: from the top by the obligation to serve the state, and from the bottom by the need to serve at the expense of the serfs, at the expense of "baptized property", as they were called at the time. This is not a matter that calls for judgment, or justification.

Today's "patriotically engaged" intellectuals have "no choice"

But the claim that "for the Russian nobleman, freedom was expressed in the readiness to serve, in the ability to take part in the great building of the empire" can be seen as the kind of key that unlocks the particular attitude to the past, and to Russian historical traditions, of those intellectuals grouped around the magazine "Expert". They think of themselves as "nationally concerned" and "patriotically engaged", but they also claim to be innovative and strictly scientific. "In order to develop a common view on history," reads their editorial, "we need a new, non-ideological approach. Of course, we cannot completely do away with the influence of ideology in studying the history of the country - the creation of a "canonic version", even with all possible variations, is impossible without a certain ideological position. But biased politicization is completely unacceptable."

If you think through to their logical conclusion some of the events which I described as paradoxes at the beginning of this article, they reveal a reality that is not just frightening, but terrifying. Before, you felt as if you were sinking into a void, as if no one understood, or seemed capable of reacting adequately. Now instead you see a vision. The outline of Putin's achievement rears up in front of you, the edifice he has created with his domestic and international politics. All you can say about this structure is that you don't want to believe your eyes.

The Nazism of Hitler and Stalin, we should note, were also not seen immediately, and their danger was felt when it was already too late - and furthermore, they have still not been felt by everyone, and not to the end.

The particular issue of Expert magazine quoted here is just one of many indicators. It gives you an idea of the extent of Putin's strategy of returning to the policies of Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union. Another indicator, an embodiment of the "canonical version" of Russia history, was the mass publication of that school textbook.

The authors of "Expert", who claim to be taking a strict scientific approach that does not allow biased politicization, write: "the history of the Russian Empire is not so different from the history of other European empires. In many ways it was even more humane. But in any case, Russia had no choice whether to be an empire or a ‘normal European democratic nation'. There was a choice whether to be an empire or a colony."

The statement that "it was even more humane" should be left on the authors' conscience, especially if one remembers that the history of the Russian empire does not end in 1917.

The statement that "there was no choice" should also be left on the authors' conscience. Our entire life - for every person, for every country - is a constant, never-ending choice. Understanding the meaning of history involves finding an answer as to why this particular choice was made, and not another that was equally possible.

But let us imagine that even after analyzing all the arguments "for" and "against" a choice, using all the rules of a "strict scientific approach" and without "biased politicization", we come to the conclusion that yes, there "was no choice". Does this mean that we need to continue the path which we took to reach the present? Not forgetting that the intermediary points on this path were 1917, 1991 and 2008.

To judge by everything that is happening in the country, by the direction state thinking is taking, the consensus seems to be that we must continue on this path.

Russia's choice today

Russia is once more facing a choice: the Horde-Byzantine political policy of rule, the traditional Russian geopolitics, the Soviet messiahship, the all-consuming corruption and Putin's purge of the Russian political space ­- all of which can be seen quite clearly in the reality that surrounds us. Or...

I'm not sure that we have the time to think about any alternatives. Let alone putting them into practice.

Russia's war against Georgia marks the moment when two lines in our history crossed. In the short-term perspective, over the last 8-10 years, we have seen: the liquidation of elections, the court system and of independent media and political parties. We have seen the castration of legislative power. We have seen the law-enforcement bodies becoming repressive and criminal. We have seen rampant corruption, led from the top. We have seen sensational unsolved murders, and the deterioration of relations with neighboring (and not only neighboring) countries.

Then there is the very long term perspective. The war against Georgia is another episode in the wars of annexation that have continued for centuries. These have been aggravated by similar wars of non-liberation within the country.

VI The wheel of history turns full circle: returning to "the Russian path"

At the point where these two lines cross modern Russia returns full circle, to the Russian and Soviet path. We should talk briefly about what exactly we mean by these concepts... What creates this path, this repetition, this constantly changing permanency? I will only point out what are perhaps the most important components of this concept: Russia's geographical position and the size of its territory; the characteristics of its land and soil; the density, composition and dynamics of the population, and finally the nature of Russian power.

These are merely the objective, material, "substantial" and institutional elements which make up this "path", however. Lacking in spiritual content, they are dead in themselves, and cannot give rise to any repetition or rotation. Just as important, if not more so for this "path" are its spiritual elements: the Russian Orthodox church, the Messiah-complex and expansionism, the habits of a people and their ideology. All these elements taken together intertwine, interact, and change (sometimes beyond recognition) to create this "Russian path" to which we seem to have returned today.

"The Russian path"

When we talk of a "return", we mean that several times before - or at least once - we left the place that we are returning to. This applies to an ordinary return. But here we are not talking about an "ordinary" return, but a return "Russian style". In this country, it seems, we can only "sort of" return. In fact, "returning" in the Russian sense means to find ourselves once more in a place which, if we look carefully, we find we never even left.

As in any other history, there have been countless regressions in our history: from reforms to counter-reforms, from times of change to "stagnation", from "frosts" to "thaws".

But we have kept following the same path, the same direction. In fact, it's the path we have been on for 500 years. Chaadaev and Berdyaev called it not so much a progression as a blundering round the circle of history. Several times Russia, in the course of its historical movement, found itself at a crossroads. At these moments it looked as if we could have left the well-trodden path and taken the other.

In fact, the history of Russia as a united state began at one of these crossroads. The historian Alexander Zimin has given us the wonderful image of a "Knight at the crossroads", who could have come from a divided Rus' to a freer Russia. But the "knight" did not have the strength to break free from the constraints (the coercion of authority and submission of the people), which already had society in its thrall. He kept on the same road - the road of Russian autocracy, then of serfdom. "The Russian path" was the result of the coming together of these two basic components. It was the path of non-freedom.

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Still Even More Harper, Economics And Incompetence

Remember this, from back there, regarding the need to spend a lot on infrastructure in order to significantly stimulate our failing economy (emphasis added):

What will work is direct government spending on infrastructure. Canada's cities have billions of dollars worth of projects costed and planned sitting on mayor's desks. We should and could start with these within a few weeks. Taking a little longer would be major renewal projects such as the construction of new subway lines in major cities. Finally, there are longer-term projects such as the building of new high-speed rail systems in the corridor from Quebec City to Windsor, from Edmonton to Calgary and from Moncton to Halifax. Refitting houses across the country for greater energy efficiency belongs on the list. So too, does large scale job training and the investment of funds to reduce barriers to post-secondary education.

All of these measures would be investments in Canada's future. These projects would increase the nation's productivity. The returns on these investments would defray the cost of making them.

Scale matters here. Anything less than $50 billion a year, for the next few years ($50 billion is about three per cent of Canada's GDP) will be insufficient. This level of spending, and more, would create jobs for hundreds of thousands of Canadians. Without such stimulus, the job losses we have seen in construction, manufacturing, forest products, retail, and even in the petroleum sector, can be expected to continue apace. The presence, or absence, of such a program on this kind of scale is how we should judge the budget.

To which I reasoned, considering the mentioned $34B deficit for 2009 (and another of $30B for 2010):

Hence, it looks like regardless whether Harper and Flaherty inject all their cherished tax cuts or not, the deficit spending amounts already leaked for the upcoming budgets of the next two years will fall quite short of the $50B mark.

Falling quite short?

Man, I was not even close on this one (emphasis added):

Budget to include $7B for infrastructure, Baird says

The federal budget will include $7 billion for infrastructure projects with an emphasis on getting "shovels in the ground as soon as possible," Transport Minister John Baird announced.

Baird, speaking in Ottawa on Monday, said $4 billion will be spent over two years to help fund provincial, territorial and municipal infrastructure projects.

"A big part of our economic action plan will include investing in our road, bridges, and water and sewer systems and in public transit," Baird said.

"By getting shovels in the ground on these types of projects we not only create jobs and allow our economic activity to grow but we also improve our economic competitiveness for decades to come."

The Tories are also spending $2 billion to support repairs, maintenance and accelerate construction at colleges and universities across Canada and $1 billion for a green infrastructure fund.

So - that's $7B over two years.

With $4B over two years for roads, bridges and stuff.

Along with $2B for maintenance and stuff for colleges and universities and a whopping $1B to serve as a green infrastructure fund.

And that's what Baird touts proudly as a big part of the coming Harper economic plan?

Well, bless my heart indeed:

"We did not start this economic crisis but we will take steps to protect Canadians and our country from it," Baird said.

To which I reply:

ARE. YOU. FUCKING. KIDDING. ME?!?

(It just grinds my stones when utter incompetents like Harper and his Harpies think me an ignoramus and an idiot)

Competence, Prime Minister? Competence?

I think not.

And you are supposed to be an economist, Prime Minister?

Where did you get your diploma - in a Cracker Jack box?

What a pathetic joke you are, sir.

And the same goes to your equally out of touch, ideology-driven, hypocritical, incompetent nincompoops.

Unfortunately, the joke ends up being on all of us Canadians ...

... yet deservedly so.

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A Lesson On How To Spin A Poll

From back there (emphasis added):

Harper not trusted to handle economy: poll

Few Canadians have faith in the ability of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government to address the economic crisis, suggests a poll released Wednesday.

It found just one in four Canadians believe Harper's government is doing a good or very good job of dealing with the crisis, and more than 40 per cent have little or no confidence the government can make things better.

The poll was conducted by Nanos Research on behalf of the National Union of Public and General Employees.

In total, 1,003 Canadians were surveyed by phone between Jan. 3 and Jan. 7.

Apparently not happy with this turn of events, the Ottawa Citizen grabed at the results on another poll to put a spin on this lack of trust of Canadians for the great Mini Leader (emphasis added):

Tories trusted, but Grits gaining

Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservatives remain most trusted by Canadians to manage the economy, but Michael Ignatieff and the Liberals are gaining ground, according to an Ipsos Reid poll.

The results of the poll, conducted for Canwest News Service and Global National, come as Canada's parliamentarians return to work today. Gov. Gen. Michaëlle Jean, who granted Mr. Harper's request to suspend Parliament on Dec. 4, will deliver the government's speech from the throne this afternoon.

Tomorrow, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty will table the most anticipated federal budget in years, revealing what tax and spending measures the public can expect as the government posts a deficit next year of $34 billion.

Respondents were asked which of the main federal parties they most trust to manage the economy. Forty-four per cent chose Mr. Harper and the Conservatives, down one percentage point from pre-budget polling in 2008.

... and never you mind that overall 56% of Canadians do not trust harper and his harpies, nevertheless - according to this same poll.

Propaganda, anyone?

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Reloaded: Fearmongering Primitive Minds

The usual suspects are at it again - aided and abetted by the media, of course:

To Favor Due Process Is to Favor Terrorists' Rights
by Glenn Greenwald

The Associated Press has an article today discussing the closing of Guantanamo and what type of proceedings should be established for the remaining detainees to determine their guilt or innocence. This was the headline AP chose, one that, as is typically the case, was then repeated in newspapers and on news websites around the country:

The same manipulative, Orwellian slogan adopted today by AP -- "terrorists' rights" -- is what Bush followers have used for years to justify their extremist torture, surveillance and detention policies and to demonize anyone who opposed those policies as being "soft on Terrorism" or even "pro-Terrorist." Here, for instance, was the headline of a 2004 Op-Ed by John Yoo in the Wall St. Journal, arguing that the U.S. had no obligation to abide by the Geneva Conventions in its treatment of Guantanamo detainees (a position which the U.S. Supreme Court, two years later, emphatically rejected in Hamdan):

As it turned out, of course, hundreds of the detainees imprisoned at Guantanamo when that 2004 Op-Ed was published -- ones which most of the country was calling "Terrorists" -- weren't "Terrorists" at all. They were guilty of absolutely nothing. In fact, the Bush administration subsequently acknowledged as much by eventually releasing hundreds of them -- after they had been put in cages for years with no trial of any kind. There still continues to be grave doubts about the guilt of many of the remaining detainees, including ones that have been there for years and are probably irrevocably broken as human beings.

In fact, just two months ago, a right-wing, Bush-43-appointed federal Judge ordered five detainees released on the ground that there was never any "credible evidence" to justify their detention. Despite that, they had been imprisoned in Guantanamo for six years and were subjected to barbaric treatment that drove several of them close to insanity. They were released only after this judicial exoneration as part of a habeas corpus hearing in a federal court -- exactly the kind of hearing which the 2006 U.S. Congress, when it enacted the Military Commissions Act (with the support of most of the Washington Establishment), voted to abolish (an act that was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in its 2008 Boumediene decision, which restored habeas rights). Advocates of the Military Commissions Act, and those who now want to deny normal due process to accused Terrorists, argued then and still argue now the AP/Yoo line: Terrorists have no rights.

It's not really "complex" to understand this: the fact that the U.S. Government accuses someone of X does not mean that they are actually guilty of X. That's true even where "X = Terrorist." That's why, in America, we have these things called "trials" and "due process." Sometimes the Government is wrong. Sometimes it is inept. Sometimes it is corrupt and tyrannical. Therefore, these things we call "checks" are necessary before we assume that Government accusations are true and before we allow the Government to put people into cages for life. We don't actually know that someone is a "Terrorist" until a trial, with due process, establishes that the Government's accusations are true.

Is that such a difficult concept to understand? This isn't actually a new or exotic idea for the United States. It's actually about as fundamental to the American founding as an idea can get. Thomas Jefferson articulated it pretty clearly in a 1789 letter to Thomas Paine: "I consider [trial by jury] as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution."

It's a good thing that there was no Associated Press around (let alone Wall St. Journals and John Yoos) during debates over the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eight Amendments. AP would have run articles describing the proposed guarantees of Due Process and prohibitions on Cruel and Unusual Punishment as "Murderers' rights." John Yoo would have written Op-Eds arguing that "Child Molesters Have No Rights" and the Journal would have run Editorials accusing advocates of those safeguards as being "Soft on Crime" and "pro-Rapist."

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Fearmongering Primitive Minds: A Fourteen-Case (Micro) Study

Following up on today's earlier post, as well as from this other previous one ...

Yet again - what was it that I already wrote concerning primitive minds?

Ah, yes:

It never ceases to amaze me to what levels of utter irrationality the fundamentalists, neocons and other right-wing madhaters are willing to descend into.

They lie, they misrepresent, they use decoy arguments and make ad hominem attacks. For them, the use of duplicity, of secrecy, of arguments of (non-existent) conspiracy, of fact (and non-fact) selectivity/cherry-picking, of quacks/fake experts, as well as putting forth logical fallacies, are simply means to an end.

And this "end" is the following: to promulgate, support and defend their beliefs or their ideologies.

Truth be told: these are the only things that truly matter to them.

Well, the usual suspects continue their all-out campaign of fearmongering with regards to letting go of renditions, indefinite detentions and torture - and here are fourteen more examples, as a means of "documenting the atrocities":

Case #1: Media advance falsehood that Pentagon has confirmed that 61 former Guantánamo detainees have returned to battlefield

Since President Barack Obama signed an executive order requiring that the detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay be closed within a year, numerous media figures and outlets -- including CNN's Campbell Brown, MSNBC's Chris Matthews, Fox News' Sean Hannity, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and ABCNews.com -- have repeated or failed to challenge the claim that 61 former detainees held at Guantánamo have returned to the battlefield. Hannity, the Globe, and the Los Angeles Times, in particular, falsely asserted that the Pentagon has confirmed this figure. In fact, as Media Matters for America documented, according to the Pentagon, the 61-detainee figure includes 43 former prisoners who are suspected of, but have not been confirmed as, having "return[ed] to the fight." Indeed, during a January 13 press conference, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell stated: "The new numbers are, we believe, 18 confirmed and 43 suspected of returning to the fight. So 61 in all former Guantanamo detainees are confirmed or suspected of returning to the fight." Additionally, as Daily Kos contributing editor Joan McCarter noted, Seton Hall University School of Law professor Mark Denbeaux has disputed the Pentagon's figures, asserting: "Once again, they've failed to identify names, numbers, dates, times, places, or acts upon which their report relies. Every time they have been required to identify the parties, the DOD has been forced to retract their false IDs and their numbers."

Media repeating or failing to challenge the claim that 60 or more Guantánamo detainees have returned to the battlefield include:

• During the January 22 edition of Fox News' Hannity, speaking with Kate Obenshain, vice president of the Young America's Foundation, Hannity falsely asserted: "But we know, Kate, 61 Gitmo detainees that have already been released, according to the Pentagon, went right back to the battlefield with their fanaticism."

• The Boston Globe falsely asserted in a January 23 article: "Pentagon statistics show that of the hundreds of detainees that have been released from Guantanamo since it opened in early 2002, at least 61 have returned to terrorist activities."

• The Los Angeles Times falsely reported on January 23: "The Pentagon has said that 61 former detainees have taken up arms against the U.S. or its allies after being released from the military prison in Cuba."

• On January 23, the San Francisco Chronicle uncritically reported: "Republicans also claimed that 61 detainees already released have been 'found back on the battlefield.' "

• During the January 22 edition of CNN's Campbell Brown: No Bias, No Bull, Cliff May, president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, asserted of Guantánamo detainees, "Many hundreds have been released. About 60 of them -- a little more than that -- have returned to the battlefield." Brown did not challenge May's assertion.

• During the January 22 edition of MSNBC's Hardball, Matthews failed to challenge Sen. Kit Bond's (R-MO) claim that "we know already that more than 60 of the people who have been released have been killing our troops, our Americans and civilians on the battlefield."

• A January 22 ABCNews.com article by Jake Tapper, Jan Crawford-Greenburg, and Huma Kahn uncritically reported House Minority Leader John Boehner's (R-OH) statement: "Do we release them back into the battlefield, like some 61 detainees that have been released we know are back on the battlefield?"

Case #2:MSNBC graphic falsely claims Pentagon has asserted as fact that "61 fmr. Gitmo detainees have returned to fight against U.S."

Media Matters has documented that the 61 figure includes 43 former detainees who the Pentagon says are "suspected" of, but not confirmed as, having "return[ed] to the fight" and that Seton Hall University School of Law professor Mark Denbeaux has disputed the Pentagon's figures.

Case #3: Pentagon's terror 'recidivism' claims blasted as 'propaganda'

Ever wonder how many of President Bush's terror war detainees were released, only to "return to the fight"?

"Their numbers have changed from 20, to 12, to seven, to more than five, to two, to a couple, to a few, 25, 29, 12, and then 24," quoted Keith Olbermann on Thursday's edition of Countdown.

The latest figure, 61, which was carried unchallenged by CNN, the MSNBC host noted, appears to be nothing but "propaganda."

A study published by Seton Hall Law Professor Mark Denbeaux on Jan. 15 finds the Pentagon wrongly altered its figures on terrorist 'recidivism' 43 times, with the latest figure being "the most egregiously so."

Denbeaux first shared his findings a week prior with MSNBC host Rachael Maddow.

"Once again, they’ve failed to identify names, numbers, dates, times, places, or acts upon which their report relies," the professor wrote. "Every time they have been required to identify the parties, the DOD has been forced to retract their false IDs and their numbers. They have included people who have never even set foot in Guantánamo—much less were they released from there."

"They have counted people as 'returning to the fight' for their having written an Op-ed piece in the New York Times and for their having appeared in a documentary exhibited at the Cannes Film Festival. The DOD has revised and retracted their internally conflicting definitions, criteria, and their numbers so often that they have ceased to have any meaning—except as an effort to sway public opinion by painting a false portrait of the supposed dangers of these men."

"... All of which are seriously undercut by the DoD statement that 'they do not track' former detainees," concludes Professor Denbeaux.

Case #4: Fox anchor Guilfoyle, torture is "necessary" sometimes; if torture doesn't work, "don't call it torture"

Case #5: Rep. King Fear-Mongers On Obama’s Plan To Close Gitmo: It Could Give 9/11 Mastermind A ‘Path To Citizenship’

Discussing Obama’s plan to close Guantanamo on Mike Gallagher’s radio show yesterday, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) claimed that Obama’s actions could be “the beginning of shutting down…the activities of the CIA.” When Gallagher said that Obama wanted to “bestow American citizenship rights to somebody from another country” who wants “to murder civilian Americans,” King claimed that closing Gitmo could put 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed “on a path to citizenship”:

KING: Let’s just say that, that, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, is brought to the United States to be tried in a federal court in the United States, under a federal judge, and we know what some of those judges do, and on a technicality, such as, let’s just say he wasn’t read his Miranda rights. … He is released into the streets of America. Walks over and steps up into a US embassy and applies for asylum for fear that he can’t go back home cause he spilled the beans on al Qaeda. What happens then if another judge grants him asylum in the United States and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is on a path to citizenship. I mean, I give you the extreme example of this.

Case #6: House Republicans Introduce Bill Banning Gitmo Detainees From U.S. Soil

With President Obama ordering the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility within the year, House Republicans today introduced legislation to prohibit federal courts from ordering the release or transfer of detainees from the facility onto U.S. soil.

“Closing Guantanamo Bay presents a clear and present danger to all Americans," said House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Lamar Smith. "These suspected terrorists must now be relocated and if they are transferred to military prisons in the U.S., they automatically will be granted rights far beyond those given to enemy combatants by any other country."

“The result is that many will petition friendly federal judges who may order their release into U.S. communities," he continued.

The legislation, known as the Enemy Combatant Detention Review Act, has the backing of Minority Leader John Boehner and other prominent House Republicans.

In addition to preventing courts from bring enemy combatants into the U.S., the bill requires that an alien captured and detained abroad during wartime cannot be admitted and released into the country.

Case #7: Boehner’s Alternate Reality: Gitmo Detainees Get ‘More Comforts Than A Lot Of Americans Get’

Earlier today, President Obama signed an executive order directing the closure of the U.S. military prison at Gitmo. Asked during a news conference for his reaction to the order, House Minority Leader John Boehner made it clear that he wasn’t even sure why anyone would want to close the prison in the first place. After all, he explained, the detainees there get “more comforts than a lot of Americans get”:

QUESTION: A lot of members of Congress on both sides of the aisle say that Guantanamo Bay has just given the United States a black eye on the world stage. Isn’t that part of the problem, too? […]

BOEHNER: I don’t know that there’s a terrorist treated better anywhere in the world than what has happened at Guantanamo. It is — we have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build a facility that has more comforts than a lot of Americans get.

Boehner has not been paying attention. Just last week, Susan Crawford, the top Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether to prosecute Gitmo detainees, revealed that she had concluded that Mohammed al-Qahtani was tortured by the U.S. military and consequently could not be prosecuted. As the Washington Post reported:

“For 160 days his only contact was with the interrogators,” said Crawford, who personally reviewed Qahtani’s interrogation records and other military documents. … Qahtani “was forced to wear a woman’s bra and had a thong placed on his head during the course of his interrogation” and “was told that his mother and sister were whores.” With a leash tied to his chains, he was led around the room “and forced to perform a series of dog tricks,” the report shows.

The Post also reported that al-Qahtani’s treatment was so extreme he had to be hospitalized twice and at one point his heart rate dropped to 35 beats per minute. In 2007, an FBI report found that detainees “were chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor for 18 hours or more, urinating and defecating on themselves.” Similarly, in 2004, the Red Cross reported “cruel, inhumane and degrading” treatment which was approaching “torture.”

Boehner’s conception of a Club Med-style prison camp at Gitmo is pure fantasy. He should spend less time listening to Rush Limbaugh and more time focusing on the actual realities of detainee treatment and abuse.

Case #8: Murtha Attacked For Offering To House Gitmo Detainees In PA: They Might Indoctrinate Other Inmates!

One day before President Obama ordered the closing of Guantanamo Bay, Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) said he would be willing to facilitate the process by bringing some of the detainees into his district. “Sure, I’d take them,” Murtha said. “I mean, they’re no more dangerous in a prison in my district than they are in Guantanamo.”

Fox News’s Glenn Beck called Murtha a “clown” yesterday because of the proposal. But Diane Gramley, president of the American Family Association of Pennsylvania, may have won top prize for the most absurd reaction. Calling the idea “ludicrous,” Gramley’s main complaint seems to be that the al Qaeda suspects will indoctrinate the other American inmates:

“I don’t think the average murderer or rapist hates all Americans or hates what America stands for like the terrorist prisoners from Guantanamo,” said Gramley, who lives in Venango County. “You intermix them with the prison population, and there’s the very real possibility they would influence those individuals in prison.”

While one local chamber of commerce president said he does not “see any downside” to Murtha’s idea because it would mean bringing jobs to the area, Pentagon officials are eying other military prisons in South Carolina, Kansas, and California.

Case #9: Kansas Politicians Standing In The Way Of Closing Gitmo

Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius (D) added her voice yesterday to a predictable chorus of Kansas politicians campaigning to prohibit any detainees from Guantanamo ending up at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Ft. Leavenworth when President-elect Obama closes the prison. Concerns about future acts terrorism are understandable, if misguided, in the debate surrounding the closure of Guantanamo. Yet, it is not enough to say Guantanamo is a problem and it must be closed and then refuse to be part of the solution. Home-state politicians screaming “not-in-my-back-yard” (NIMBY) will certainly become a major feature of the debate surrounding Guantanamo in the weeks and months to come. Sen. Sam Brownback (R) is driving this effort which has led to legislation being introduced at the local, state, and national level to keep Guantanamo detainees out of Kansas.

Case #10: Detainees could end up in South Carolina

Senior Pentagon sources in November identified the Naval Consolidated Brig in North Charleston as a possible home for detainees transferred from Guantanamo Bay, along with Fort Leavenworth in Kansas and Camp Pendleton in California.

"Transferring detainees from Guantanamo Bay to U.S. soil will endanger American lives," Sen. Jim DeMint, a Greenville Republican, said of Obama's order to shut down the military prison. "If the new administration tries to move these known terrorists to South Carolina, they should be ready for a fight."

Not all of the 245 or so detainees who remain at Guantanamo, in fact, are "known terrorists." The United States hasn't disclosed its evidence against many of them for fear of compromising intelligence sources or of revealing intelligence-gathering methods.

Some of the detainees would likely be returned to their countries of birth or residence, while others might be released. Obama ordered a review of each detainee's status and case background to determine the appropriate action.

Case #11: Wash. Times editorial whitewashed Bush administration's role in detainee abuse

A January 23 Washington Times editorial asserted that "[j]ust as a few MPs at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq acted disgracefully ... there may be legal wrongs and/or morally questionable acts that interrogation personnel conducted at Gitmo or other sites." But in suggesting that responsibility for detainee abuse at those detention facilities was limited to "a few MPs" at Abu Ghraib and "interrogation personnel" at Guantánamo, the Times ignored the conclusions of a 2008 Senate Armed Services Committee report released jointly by chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) and ranking member John McCain (R-AZ). That report found: "The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of 'a few bad apples' acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees."

Case #12: Kit Bond Defends Torture But Doesn't Want to Call It Torture

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Kit Bond making one of the most convoluted arguments I've ever heard about why Gitmo should stay open and what defines torture. He resorts to the latest GOP talking point that if we allow the prisoners at Gitmo to be brought to US prisons we should all be very afraid that they're going to escape and kill us all. Way to keep that fear mongering up Sen. Bond. He also claims that anyone wanting to prosecute the Bush administration for war crimes is suffering from the "ultimate in Bush derangement syndrome".

Case #13: Laura Ingraham: America is already less safe under Obama

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Bill O'Reilly was harping on his recent favorite theme -- that Obama needs to keep America a torturing nation in order to keep us safe from imminent terrorist attack -- with Laura Ingraham last night, and she chimed in thus:

Ingraham: We want to understand here, Bill, if America is safer today or less safe than she was on January 19. And I think any objective review of what's being done -- and you're right, he promised to do these things and he's doing them -- shutting down the military tribunals temporarily, a 120-day pause, closing Gitmo by 2010, and doing away with [scare quotes] "harsh interrogation methods" -- I think you can make a pretty compelling case that we're less safe today. And Barack Obama apparently is willing to roll the dice on that. Because he made these promises and -- he campaigned on them.

And Case #14: Thiessen Cranks Things Up A Notch....

Just yesterday, Marc Thiessen, up until recently George W. Bush's chief speechwriter, wrote a rather twisted op-ed for the Washington Post, engaging in the kind of shameless demagoguery that's so over the top, it almost reads like a parody. Today, Thiessen went even further.

Yesterday, Thiessen argued that if Barack Obama changes Bush's national-security apparatus in anyway, he'll invite domestic terrorism and will shoulder the blame for American deaths. Today, writing for the National Review, Thiessen believes Obama is the most dangerous president "ever."

Less than 48 hours after taking office, Obama has begun dismantling those institutions without time for any such review. The CIA program he is effectively shutting down is the reason why America has not been attacked again after 9/11. He has removed the tool that is singularly responsible for stopping al-Qaeda from flying planes into the Library Tower in Los Angeles, Heathrow Airport, and London's Canary Warf [sic], and blowing up apartment buildings in Chicago, among other plots. It's not even the end of inauguration week, and Obama is already proving to be the most dangerous man ever to occupy the Oval Office.

This is not only a rather hysterical rant, it's rather silly.

For example, a CIA program was not "singularly responsible for stopping al-Qaeda from flying planes into the Library Tower in Los Angeles." What Thiessen neglects to mention is that the Library Tower plot was an idea that "had not gone much past the conceptual stage." Many within the intelligence community eventually concluded that the Library Tower scheme was never much more than "talk." We literally tortured this idea out of detainees, but that doesn't make it a thwarted terrorist plot. What's more, the evidence to bolster Thiessen's other examples is no more compelling. (And this puts aside the notion that we might be able to get intelligence without torturing suspects.)

As for the notion that Obama is already the most dangerous president ever, the estimable Greg Sargent, blogging from his new home at WhoRunsGov.com, challenges Thiessen's "toxic" assertion nicely.

And as for Thiessen, maybe he's gunning to be a guest host for Limbaugh or Hannity, but these ridiculous pieces aren't doing him any favors.

All of the above lead me to conclude yet again:

(...) the fundamentalists, neocons and other right-wing madhaters are the same ignorant, fearful and surperstitious primitives that our ancestors were, thousands upon thousands of years ago - except that they now use newspapers, magazines, television, radio, politics, and the internet, to spread their intellectual sloth-driven non-understanding of the world and, consequently, working hard at bringing us down to their level of ignorance.

Yes folks - the barbarians and their savage followers are still living among us indeed ... and they are doing everything they can to keep us down to their primitive, uncivilized and savage level.

We have a long way to go ... a very long way to go.

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The Fearmongering Primitive Minds Strike Back

As I previously warned, the primitive mind-thinking barbarians and their savage followers remain among us, folks.

Hence why we have a long way to go ... a very long way to go.

Here's more on the matter:

The Newest Fear-Mongering Campaign From the Right and the Media
by Glenn Greenwald

The latest fear-mongering campaign in the U.S. -- this one devoted to scaring Americans that they will be slaughtered if Guantanamo is closed and Terrorism suspects are brought into the U.S. for real trials -- is now in full swing. The New York Times today prints a front-page article, based entirely on an anonymous source, claiming that a detainee released from Guantanamo last year has now become "the deputy leader of Al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch" (it's always amazing how bureaucratically structured Al Qaeda is alleged to be and how well we can discern the structure: "Deputy Leader, Yemen Branch"; do they have business cards and organizational charts?).

But the real fear-mongering is focused on all of the attacks that American communities will suffer if we imprison dangerous Terrorists inside the U.S. rather than in Guantanamo. House Majority Leader John Boehner wants you to be frightened: "I think the first thing we have to remember is that we're talking about terrorists here. Do we bring them into our borders?" GOP House Minority Whip Eric Cantor warned: "Actively moving terrorists inside our borders weakens our security. Most families neither want nor need hundreds of terrorists seeking to kill Americans in their communities." The always frightened Wall St. Journal Editorial Page shrieks that any place that houses Al Qaeda Terrorists will become a "target" for attack:

The military base [at Ft. Leavenworth] is integrated into the community and, lacking Guantanamo's isolation and defense capacities, would instantly become a potential terror target. Expect similar protests from other states that are involuntarily entered in this sweepstakes.

National Review's Jim Geraghaty spent all day yesterday fantasizing about all the scary things that could happen if we have Al-Qaeda Terrorists in our communities (near nuclear facilities and airports!). Former Bush aide and chief speechwriter Marc Thiessen warned yesterday in The Washington Post that if there is a Terrorist attack on U.S. soil, Americans will blame Obama because he stopped torturing and closed Guantanamo, and Democrats will be "unelectable for a generation." Today, at National Review, Thiessen, citing yesterday's Executive Orders, declared Obama "to be the most dangerous man ever to occupy the Oval Office." And yesterday, of course, The Washington Post's Fred Hiatt echoed the standard claim that our regular federal courts were inadequate to try dangerous Terrorists.

All of this is pure fear-mongering -- the 2009 version of Condoleezza Rice's mushroom cloud and Jay Rockefeller's "we'll-lose-our-eavesdropping-capabilities" cries. Both before and after 9/11, the U.S. has repeatedly and successfully tried alleged high-level Al Qaeda operatives and other accused Islamic Terrorists in our normal federal courts -- in fact, the record is far more successful than the series of debacles that has taken place in the military commissions system at Guantanamo. Moreover, those convicted Terrorists have been housed in U.S. prisons, inside the U.S., for years without a hint of a problem. Here is but a partial list of the accused Muslim Terrorists who have been successfully tried and convicted in U.S. civilians courts and who remain imprisoned inside the U.S.:

• Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, convicted, 1996, U.S. District Court (before then-U.S. District Judge Michael Mukasey) -- plotting terrorist attacks on the U.S. (currently: U.S. prison, Butler, North Carolina);
• Zacarias Moussaoui, convicted, 2006, U.S. Federal Court -- conspiracy to commit the 9/11 attacks (currently: U.S. prison, Florence, Colorado);
• Richard Reid, convicted, 2003, U.S. Federal Court -- attempting to blow up U.S.-bound jetliner over the Atlantic Ocean (currently: U.S. prison, Florence, Colorado);
• Jose Padilla, convicted, 2007, U.S. Federal Court -- conspiracy to commit terrorism (currently: U.S. prison, Florence, Colorado);
• Iyman Faris a/k/a/ Mohammad Rauf, convicted, 2003, U.S. Federal Court -- providing material support and resources to Al-Qaeda, conspiracy to commit terrorist acts on behalf of Al Qaeda (currently: U.S. prison, Florence, Colorado);
• Ali Saleh al-Marri, accused Al Qaeda operative -- not yet tried, held as "unlawful enemy combatant" (currently: U.S. Naval Brig, Hanahan, South Carolina);
• Masoud Khan, convicted, 2004, U.S. Federal Court -- conspiracy to commit terrorism as part of Lashkar-e-Taiba and Islamic jihad (currently: U.S. prison, Terre Haute, Indiana);
• John Walker Lindh, convicted, 2002, U.S. Federal Court -- providing material support to the Taliban (currently: U.S. prison, Florence, Colorado).

That's just a partial list. Both pre- and post-9/11, there are numerous other individuals who have been convicted in U.S. civilian courts of various acts relating to terrorism inspired by Islamic radicalism, including many alleged to be high-level Terrorists, who are now serving sentences inside the U.S., in U.S. prisons. Moreover, terrorists accused of being members of Al Qaeda and affiliated groups have been successfully tried in the regular courts of other countries -- including Britain and Spain -- and currently sit in those countries' regular prisons, without a whiff of a problem.

(Keep reading ...)

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Late Friday Night Ode To ... Being Only Human

With all our flaws, glitches and yes, even grotesqueries, Humanity nevertheless has so much potential for greatness.

The trick that we have to learn once and for all is not to repeat our mistakes, but to learn from them.

And learn from our successes as well.

Someday ... maybe.

So - for tonight's Ode to being only human, I offer a triple-play of (yet another) awesome Canadian band - Our Lady Peace.

First, we have Is Anybody Home?

Second, we have Somewhere Out There:

And for the closer - Innocent:

Keep on rockin' ... indeed.

(And a huge wave of the hand to Impolitic).

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Paranoid-Driven Security State Domestic Spying: Another Update

From back here and here, yet another recent development which makes me think that there may be indeed hope still in stemming/stopping the slow march toward the Authoritarian Security State:

Maryland Legislators Introduce Bill to Ban Police Spying

The days of unwarranted snooping by the Maryland State Police may be over.

Democratic state legislators on Jan. 22 introduced a bill to protect the First Amendment rights of dissenters.

Entitled the Freedom of Association and Assembly Protection Act of 2009, the bill would require the police to have at least “reasonable suspicion” before they could start collecting dossiers on individuals.

The bill is an outgrowth of the controversy that erupted last year when it was revealed that Maryland state troopers had been gathering intelligence on—and infiltrating groups of—nonviolent anti-war and anti-death penalty groups. Dozens of individuals and groups were surveilled, and the state police accused some of being suspected terrorists.

Sponsors of the bill include Senators Jamie Raskin and Brian Frosh; and Delegates Sheila Hixson, Sandy Rosenberg, Heather Mizeur and Tom Hucker.

“The State Police are not Maryland's thought police,” says Senator Raskin. “Marylanders have a right to work for environmental protection, an end to the death penalty, marriage equality, peace, and bike lanes without being spied upon and called terrorists by law enforcement officials.”

Delegate Hixson was equally outspoken. “My colleagues and I were shocked and appalled to learn of the covert police surveillance of our neighbors who were simply expressing their beliefs regarding the death penalty, the war in Iraq and environmental concerns,” she said. “Still further and inconceivably, we learned that their names were entered on a ‘terrorist’ list. We ask: What has happened to our freedom to express ourselves?”

Yet another ray of brightness in the remaining cloud of darkness hanging over us all ...

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Israel-Gaza: What's Next?

Good question indeed ...

Gaza: the war after the war
Paul Rogers

Israel's leaders claim victory in Gaza. The evidence from the ground and the long-term fallout of the conflict suggest otherwise.

Israel's unilateral ceasefire on 17 January 2009 ended its three-week operation in Gaza in good time for the inauguration of Barack Obama in Washington. By the moment the new United States president entered the White House on 20 January, the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the whole of Gaza had been completed. A day later, the Israeli defence minister Ehud Barak declared victory: "We won in a big way. Hamas was dealt a blow it never imagined and will be quiet for a long time now". This is a view already being contested in Israel as elsewhere, in ways that are likely to grow (see Gideon Levy, "Gaza war ended in utter failure for Israel", Ha'aretz, 22 January 2009).

Indeed, the defence minister's optimism was confounded by a report the same day that border tunnels being Egypt and Gaza were already being reopened; TV footage showed workers clearing blocked tunnels, bulldozers engaged in repairs and a fuel-truck being filled with petrol imported from Egypt. An Israeli source even indicated that smuggling had continued throughout the war (see Anshel Pfeffer & Barak Ravid, "Sources: Hamas arms smuggling never stopped during IDF op in Gaza", Ha'aretz, 22 January 2009).

Ehud Barak is right in one respect: Israel did inflict great damage on Hamas's infrastructure. The Egyptian newspaper al-Ahram reported the admission of a senior Hamas official, Khaled Meshal, that the intensity and duration of the Israeli onslaught had been much greater than expected. Hamas had it seems been ready for a three-day attack, and did not anticipate what was to occur: an intensive seven-day air assault followed by a two-week ground invasion.

The impact of war

The results are still being digested by all sides - and by international media. Many local journalists and those from regional TV channels such as al-Jazeera operated in Gaza throughout the war and were able to send hour-by-hour reports to regional broadcasters; these had a wider impact as western TV channels - prevented by Israeli censorship from entering Gaza and reporting directly on the conflict - took feeds from their Arab counterparts.

When the west's journalists were able to enter the territory and catch up, the sheer scale of the destruction in Gaza began to be registered in their reports. An awareness of what had happened was heightened by the visit to Gaza of United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-moon - pointedly on the day of Obama's inauguration, a studied decision that reflected the deep anger in UN headquarters over Israeli targeting of UN schools and aid-depots.

The damage is indeed enormous. Around 20% of Gaza's entire housing-stock was hit - 4,000 homes destroyed and 20,000 severely damaged. The UN estimated on 19 January that 1,314 people were killed in the war, including 412 children (with more bodies awaiting recovery from the rubble); over 5,000 people were injured. The figures released by the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) on 21 January are very similar: 1,284 Gazans killed and 4,336 wounded. The evidence that white phosphorus-shells and other anti-personnel weapons were used against civilians in urban areas continues to grow (see Ethan Bronner, "Israeli use of phosphorus shells under investigation", International Herald Tribune, 21 January 2009).

The pattern of assaults echoed that in the West Bank attacks in 2002, with systematic targeting of government buildings - including the parliament building, ministries, police stations and Gaza's university (see Sabrina Tavernise, "Many Civilian Targets, but One Core Question Among Gazans: Why?", New York Times, 19 January 2009). But the level of destruction went wider, according to a Costa Rican former diplomat and more recently a Gaza-based Oxfam aid worker. Elena Qleibo says: "The destruction wrought on Beit Lahiya, in northern Gaza, and the Zeitoun suburb in eastern Gaza city is immense. The sewage is flowing in the streets. Electricity pylons, water and sewage works, municipal and medical buildings, and homes have been levelled" (see Mel Frykberg, "Gazans Do Not Blame Hamas", Terra Viva/IPS, 20 January 2009).

The aim and the result

The wrecking of much of the infrastructure supporting Hamas is not matched by a decisive reduction in the movement's paramilitary capabilities, however. In part this is because the Israeli ground forces did not attempt to fight their way through the packed urban areas, but even more because Hamas militias mostly avoided open conflict with Israeli ground troops.

This was a rational choice: Israel's huge military advantage - including tanks, artillery, helicopter-gunships and strike-aircraft - meant there was little advantage for Hamas in confronting Israeli forces directly, as long the latter kept mainly to more open areas.

Indeed, it is becoming clear that the entire Israeli operation was concerned far less to destroy Hamas and putting an end to rocket-attacks on Israel than to demonstrate its conventional superiority in an extreme manner. The early indications are that the results, as measured in Ehud Barak's confident prediction, are not promising for the Israelis.

There is bitter and in all probability sustained resentment in Gaza and across the Arab world at the loss of life, especially of children (412 children killed out of Gaza's population of 1.5 million is equivalent to 16,000 children in a country the size of Britain). The extended family relationships characteristic of Palestinian society mean that almost everyone in Gaza will know of somebody who died. In such circumstances, the likely result of the Israeli operation is an even more deeply rooted antagonism to Israel.

The politics of recovery

In the long term, however, the greater problem for Israel may lie elsewhere. An extraordinary aspect of Israel's planning for the aftermath of war is that it expected to be able to ensure that the process of reconstruction in Gaza would be organised primarily by the Fatah movement of Mahmoud Abbas, the West Bank-based president of the Palestinian Authority centred on Ramallah (see "After Gaza: Israel's last chance", 17 January 2009). This is looking unlikely in the context of a sharpening regional competition by state actors over which local agents can do most to rebuild the territory; there is every prospect of Hamas being in charge.

Saudi Arabia has already pledged $1 billion in aid, and Qatar - with its massive natural-gas reserves and increasingly active diplomatic posture - could match this sum after its initial guarantee of $250 million. These subventions will continue a tradition of financial support for Gaza from the western Gulf states, especially Saudi Arabia. Newer forms of media-led and citizen-centred aid in the region are also being mobilised. European Union member-states are likely to contribute a further $200 million. All this before Iran enters the frame.

The extent of Hamas's dependence on Iran can be exaggerated; the movement is not, as it is sometimes depicted, a front organisation for Tehran. Many of the actions attributed to it (such as the firing of rockets into Israel) have come from other militias that are at most only loosely allied to Hamas. Iran's backing of Hamas (including significant military support) and its role in Gaza's reconstruction will be only one of several currents in a fluid and competitive post-war environment.

The Israelis also tend to assume that Egypt will now be much more active in controlling the smuggling. That is far from certain. Egypt's president, Hosni Mubarak, is in a difficult domestic position after a war that saw his government's intense mediation efforts produce little result and Hamas (a close ally of Egypt's own opposition Islamist movement) win increasing sympathy among his people (see Tarek Osman, "Egypt's dilemma: Gaza and beyond", 12 January 2009). Egypt is in no hurry to be seen to be doing Israel's work.

Indeed, even if Mubarak were to order more sustained efforts to control the Philadelphi corridor on the Egyptian side of the border, there is no guarantee that local functionaries would observe their assigned tasks in this respect. After all, the profitable smuggling economy sustains Egyptian livelihoods in Sinai; and in any case the task of distinguishing between a huge volume of everyday domestic and consumer goods and far smaller amounts of weapons or weapons-parts would require stringent control of a population that now is more sympathetic to Hamas.

Moreover, there are indications that Iran is already starting the process of resupplying Hamas; Israeli intelligence sources are warning of the possibility of longer-range rockets being smuggled across the border in the coming months. These may include the seventy-kilometre-range Fajr missile which could easily reach Tel Aviv. The Fajr range is larger than the thirty-five-kilometre-range Grad, but there are indications that it can be brought in as small components and then assembled in Gaza (see Yaakov Katz, "Iran renews efforts to supply Hamas", Jerusalem Post, 20 January 2009).

The next generation

All this does not mean that a renewed outbreak of war is likely - indeed Hamas may now concentrate for many months on rebuilding its administrative facilities and social services as well as its paramilitary forces, while also extending its support on the West Bank.

(Keep reading ...)