A Tale of Two Americas

I wrote this a few months back; the U.S. military released secondary findings on the investigation into what actually happended the night Pat Tillman died. My December article is pretty much indicative of what they came up with. - {ape}

Two Americans, Two Americas

Two National Football League stars walk away from the game at the height of their lucrative careers for reasons that illustrate the divide in today's America.

Two Americans, Two Americas
C. L. Cook
Dec. 5th 2004

Red Team, Blue Team

There's been much written, in the wake of the recent U.S. elections, of the split in the American political psyche. Some have extrapolated this division to the spiritual sphere, making of it a struggle to find the soul of the nation. The twin tales of the departure from the NFL of star players, Pat Tillman and Ricky Williams serve as analogues of a nation seeking its identity.

Pat Tillman came from a military family. After the 9/11 attacks against America, he began to view football as irrelevant in the broader scope of the nation's affairs. He and his brother, Kevin, a former football professional himself, joined the elite Army Rangers because, in Pat's words,

"A lot of my family has gone and fought wars, and I really haven't done a damn thing."

The brothers were assigned to the same unit, and initially sent to Iraq, before a subsequent transfer to Afghanistan. O­n April 22nd, 2004, they were ambushed while o­n patrol and Pat Tillman was killed.

The army was quick to award Tillman the Silver Star, and released a glowing account of the fatal encounter and Pat's heroism that would later prove to be mostly fiction. The truth was: Tillman's death was the culmination of a series of incompetent decisions made by superiors along the chain of command, compounded by equipment failure. Ultimately, he was killed by "friendly-fire," or in civilian terms, shot by his own side.

Some, o­n the anti-war, anti-empire side of the American bifurcation, used the lies told by the Pentagon, and the media's shameless jingoistic lionization of Tillman, to impugn his character and the accounts of his courage under fire, (completely untrue), while others went so far as to question the intelligence of the man who swallowed the Bush line o­n the "War o­n Terror" whole and ultimately died for a lie (less completely untrue).

Tillman believed he was serving the interests of his country, but he was no dummy. He graduated summa cum laude from Arizona State, while playing football, in less than four years. His friends say he was a voracious reader, and loved to discuss conspiracy theories. Whether he had come to doubt Washington's veracity, or entertain the greatest conspiracy theory of them all before the end is an open question.

Ricky Williams was a Heissman Trophy-winning star Running Back for the Miami Dolphins making millions a year, and o­n pace to break every record in the book. Then he decided to walk away. He'd been troublesome for the Dolphins, failing numerous drug tests for marijuana, and facing fines and suspension from the league. His drug use hadn't always been a problem for the NFL, though.

While recovering from an injury, doctors (and drugs-making giant Glaxxo SmithKline) convinced Williams his aversion to crowds of autograph seekers was due to a condition they called, "social anxiety disorder," or (SAD). He was quickly signed o­n as a "celebrity patient" for Glaxxo's new miracle cure for shyness, Paxil and began making the media rounds promoting the anti-depressant. But the drug didn't sit well with Williams, so he gave it up in favour of weed.

He wasn't shy about the benefits of leaf, saying it was "ten times better than Paxil" and should be made legal. The NFL didn't agree. Just weeks before the 2004 season began, still facing fines and censure, Ricky Williams walked, saying,

"I've realized, both o­n a psychological and physical level, that the things we do in football don't bring more harmony to your life. They just bring more disharmony."

Since his departure, Williams has gone o­n a world-wide odyssey, travelling through Asia, Europe, Australia, and finally home to California, in an effort to find his own path. He's gone vegan, enrolled in a course teaching the ancient Indian holistic medicinal practice, Ayurveda, and, even though faced with law suits from the league and savage attacks by the press, says he's never been happier. At his now defunct website, RunRickyRun.com, he wrote:

"I wish athletes today could have the same impact o­n social reform as they did when he [Jim Brown] was playing. When the likes of Ali, Malcolm X and Jim Brown all sat in the same room and discussed their views o­n America. Nowadays, it seems all some of us are interested in is how much money we can make. I love playing football, and I love making money, but I am starting to realize that those aren't the o­nly reasons God has given me so much talent."

Out of the game for good, Williams won't have the soap-box of professional sport to effect the kind of change he had envisioned, but his Ricky Williams Foundation continues to raise money to educate under-privileged kids in America.

We'll never know what positive contributions Pat Tillman could have made to his country.

Both these Americans, bright, driven, independent, and courageous will fade from the national consciousness, but together they represent the deep divisions of that country in a time when the need for existential soul-searching has never been more relevant.

End Note: The Washington Post published a story today, May 23, '05 detailing Tillman's parent's response to the Army cover-up of the cause of his death.

Chris Cook produces and hosts the public affairs program, Gorilla Radio, heard weekly o­n CFUV Radio, University of Victoria.
http://cfuv.uvic.ca

Run Ricky Run: Football, Pot, and Pain
Fred Gardner
Counterpunch.org
Aug. 7/8, 2004
http://www.counterpunch.org/gardner08072004.html

Ricky Williams at Holistic Medicine School
Associated Press
Nov. 24th, 2004
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6562580/

In the Kill Zone: The Unnecessary Death of Pat Tillman
Steve Coll
The Washington Post
Dec. 5th, 2004
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/120604Y.shtml

Pat Tillman and Ricky Williams
Dec., 5th, 2004
Mickey Z.
http://www.mickeyz.net

The Runaway
Chris Jones
Esquire Magazine
Dec. 2004 Volume 142, Issue 6
http://www.esquire.com/features/
articles/2004/041104_mfe_ricky.html

Former Dolphin Star Goes for Ayurvedic Medicine
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/sports/football/pro/
dolphins/sfl-rickyphgal04,0,5297408.photogallery?coll=sfla-dolphins-front

Ding-a-ling Ring for the Bush Coterie

Global Eye


Ring Them Bells

Chris Floyd
May 6, 2005

An occupational hazard of dissidence in the Age of Bush is the unavoidable necessity of belaboring the obvious. Again and again, you must ring the same bell; over and over, you must repeat the same blatant fact: that George W. Bush and his minions are lying hypocrites with blood on their hands.

But what can you do? Each week -- each day -- brings fresh confirmation of this damning truth. And until the American people redeem their lost national honor by rising up in their millions -- taking to the streets with the patriotic cry, "These murderous jackals no longer represent us!" -- the Bush crimes will go on, and must be documented. So grab the bell-rope: Here we go again.

Last week saw a bumper crop of death-dealing hypocrisy, as the freedom-lovin', terrorist-fightin' he-men of the Bush Regime were caught in flagrante delicto with some rough trade indeed: genocidal rape-fiends, diabolical flesh-boilers and tyrannical peddlers of violent, ignorant religious extremism. And no, it wasn't a meeting of the Republican National Committee.

First the Bushists rolled out the red carpet for one of Osama bin Laden's former partners, Sudan's intelligence chief Salah Abdallah Gosh, the Los Angeles Times reports. Gosh was Osama's designated minder in the 1990s, when the ex-CIA ally was comfortably ensconced in Sudan. Gosh is also accused -- by members of his own government -- of directing military attacks on civilians in Sudan's Darfur region, where the janjaweed militia is carrying out a government-backed "ethnic cleansing" program of rape, pillage and murder against the region's black Muslims. At least 400,000 have died in the carnage, with 2 million more driven into exile.

Last year, the Bush Regime itself officially declared the Darfur despoliation a "genocide," and called Gosh's gang of terrorist-coddling goons "an extraordinary threat" to America's national security. But that was before the 2004 election, when Bush had to drag his "compassionate conservative" crapola out of mothballs for a few months to mollify soccer moms distressed at the pictures they saw on CNN of those poor little Ewoks dying in -- where was it? Biafra? Burundi? Rwanda? Rangoon? Once Bush had his teeny-tiny mandate in hand, it was back to business.

That's oil business, of course. Sudan has become one of the chess pieces in the "Great Game" of petropolitics, as the "full spectrum dominators" of the Bush Regime plant their "military footprints" all over the globe in a relentless crusade to stem the inexorable rise of China and India as rivals to "the world's only superpower." It just so happens that China has become the leading player in Sudan's burgeoning oil industry, securing fat concessions in choice fields. Gosh and his goon squads gorge on these oil profits to fuel their mass terrorism in Darfur. Now Bush wants a piece of that action; and if he has to abet the murder of a few hundred thousand desert darkies to get it, who cares? Certainly not those soccer moms, now fretting about high gas prices for their SUVs: "Get us more cheap oil, Georgie, pronto!"

And so Bush has bedded down with Gosh, who for his part is happy to swap a minor league privateer like Osama for a big-time state terrorist with unlimited resources. Gosh was flown to Washington for high-level "consultations" with his new partners in the CIA -- just as the Sudanese government was announcing that "abundant" oil reserves have been found in Darfur, the Sudan Tribune reports. At the same time, Bush moved -- secretly -- to gut legislation that would freeze financial assets of the genocidists and increase international protection for Darfur's people, The New York Times reports. Happy coincidences all around!

Meanwhile, the killing in Sudan goes on. Just days before Gosh's extra-special visit, the janjaweed launched a "senseless and premeditated attack" in Darfur, "burning everything in their paths and leaving in their wake total destruction," Amnesty International reports. What's more, Bush's new allies in Khartoum knew the attack was coming and deliberately blocked African Union peacekeepers from intervening. But the cries of the raped and dying never reached Washington, where Gosh and the Bushists were happily plotting "joint security operations" -- and no doubt divvying up the new Darfur oilfields.

How is such two-faced cynicism possible? It's easy: The Bushists don't regard the people of Darfur as human beings. They're just counters in the game of greed and power, to be shifted or discarded as the need arises.

The same holds true for the people of Uzbekistan, now being abducted, tortured and boiled alive by Bush buddy Islam Karimov. Last week, Bush's "strategic relationship" with the Uzbek Boiler was laid bare in rich detail by The New York Times. Bush has lavished more than $500 million on Karimov's marauding security services. In return, he tortures Bush's own uncharged, "rendered" prisoners, while providing the Pentagon with a big ole "footprint" for dominating Central Asian oil.

Bush capped Hypocrisy Week by strolling hand-in-hand with Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah: de facto ruler of the fiercest religious tyranny on earth; mentor to the Taliban; fount of corruption, bribery and baksheesh and longtime Bush Family business partner. With his embrace of the hereditary despot, Bush gave the lie to months of high-flown jive about lighting "fires of freedom" in the Middle East. As always, Bush's real message to those longing for liberty, at home and abroad, was clear as a bell: "Tough luck, suckers."

Annotations


Official Pariah Sudan Valuable to US War on Terrorism
Los Angeles Times, April 29, 2005

Oil Found in Sudan's Darfur
Sudan Tribuine, April 16, 2005

Sudan Becomes US Ally in 'The War on Terror'
The Guardian, April 30, 2005

Sudan: Continuing Human Rights Violations
Amnesty International, April 13, 2005

Great Gaming Around in Khartoum
The Financial Express, July 21, 2004

Oil Underlies Darfur Tragedy
Zaman, July 7, 2004

Oil and the Civil War in Sudan
Yale Insider, June 28, 2002

US Recruits a Tough Ally to Be a Jailer
New York Times, May 1, 2005

Day 113 of President's Silence
New York Times, May 3, 2005

So We Turn a Blind Eye to Genocide, Again
International Herald Tribune, April 18, 2005

China's Oil Imports From Sudan Draw Controversy
Voice of America, July 21, 2004

Zoellick's Appeasement Tour
American Prospect, April 29, 2005

Hypocrisy on Darfur
International Herald Tribune, April 7, 2005

Sudan's Final Solution
New York Times, June 19, 2004

The Wahhabi Movement
Northfield Mt. Hermon School

The Good and the Bad: Islam and Wahhabism
National Review, Nov. 18, 2002

Gordo on Steroids? Arnold's California Budget Cuts

Gordo on Steroids? Arnold's California Budget Cuts




http://www.governor.ca.gov/
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There's little, to distinguish the Governator from our own dear Gordo. Save for their, er physical dimensions, the two are philosophical twins: Take money from the disabled? Hasta la vista, crip! Cut wages for healthcare workers? You'll be back, nursie! Tinker with the law? Guilty! With our own mini-Arnold ready for a sequel in B.C., a look at Arnold's "End of Days" budget in California could provide a prequel for what British Columbians can expect of a Gordon Campbell re-run. -{ape}

http://www.cbp.org/whatsnew.htm

http://www.carpentersunionbc.com/
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Governor's Plan to Restructure MEDI-CAL is Finacially Risky
and Could Undermine Access to Affordable Health Coverage
California Budget Watch
May 2005



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Governor Schwarzenegger has proposed a multi-pronged plan to restructure the Medi-Cal Program, which provides health coverage to 6.6 million Californians with low incomes and limited resources. The Administration plans to seek waivers, including two Section 1115 waivers, from the federal government to implement key components of the plan.

The restructuring plan could have a range of impacts, including threatening California’s financial ability to provide Medi-Cal services by capping federal funding for certain Medi-Cal services and bene. ciaries.

This report analyzes five components of the plan, including proposals to impose premiums, restructure the safety-net hospital financing system, and shift more Medi-Cal beneficiaries into managed care.

KEY FINDINGS This report finds that:

• Section 1115 waivers would cap federal funding for certain Medi-Cal services and beneficiaries. The Administration would have to obtain a Section 1115 waiver to impose premiums on more than 500,000 Medi-Cal bene. ciaries and is planning to proceed under Section 1115 to restructure the state’s safety-net hospital financing system. In both cases, the federal government would provide no more than a fixed amount of funds for the beneficiaries or services subject to the waiver – regardless of California’s actual expenditures – rather than paying a fixed percentage of Medi-Cal costs. Currently, the federal government pays half the costs of Medi-Cal expenditures, whether such costs are higher or lower than
projected.

• Section 1115 funding caps would shift more of the financial risk for Medi-Cal from the federal government to California. Section 1115 funding caps would restrict California’s ability to meet its residents’ needs in the event of an unanticipated occurrence such as an epidemic, a natural disaster, or the availability of a new drug or technology. If one or more of these events occurred, federal funds would not automatically increase to cover the costly hospital services or the needs of beneficiaries subject to the caps. Consequently, California
would have to pay all the costs that exceed the caps or reduce costs by scaling back benefits, increasing beneficiaries’ out-of-pocket costs, and/or reducing reimbursement rates paid to Medi-Cal providers.

• The Governor’s proposal to impose premiums on more than 500,000 Medi-Cal beneficiaries could reduce enrollment of eligible persons in Medi-Cal and increase other state costs. More than 90,000 children and adults without disabilities, elderly individuals, and people with disabilities could lose Medi-Cal coverage under this proposal. While the state may realize short-term savings due to lower Medi-Cal enrollment, costs would likely be shifted to other parts of California’s health care system to the extent that individuals who leave Medi-Cal seek alternative sources of care, such as in clinics or emergency rooms.

• The Governor’s proposed restructuring of the current safety-net hospital financing system could have a signi. cant impact on hospitals’ ability to serve the state’s Medi-Cal and uninsured populations. The federal government has raised several concerns with the state’s hospital financing proposal. The outcome of the negotiations with the federal government will be critical to California’s safety-net hospitals and to the state’s health care system.

• The Governor’s proposal to cap adult dental bene. ts at $1,000 per year could prevent some beneficiaries from obtaining appropriate and timely dental care and increase Medi-Cal costs per beneficiary. The state may realize short-term General Fund savings due to lower dental benefit costs. However, capping dental benefits could increase other Medi-Cal health care expenditures. For example, untreated dental needs could lead to other health problems that would require more costly Medi-Cal services.

• The Governor’s proposal to shift more than 800,000 Medi-Cal bene. ciaries, including children and people with dis-abilities, to Medi-Cal managed care plans poses significant
implementation issues to ensure that beneficiaries, particularly seniors and people with disabilities, maintain access to services.

• The Governor’s proposal to allow a centralized contractor to process certain Medi-Cal applications for children would not result in faster enrollment and could add new administrative requirements that would increase costs.

• California can improve the Medi-Cal Program without negatively affecting beneficiaries. For example, California could simplify Medi-Cal eligibility rules to reduce the paper-work burden on Medi-Cal beneficiaries and counties.

BACKGROUND

In January 2005, Governor Schwarzenegger released a proposal to restructure the Medi-Cal Program, which provides health coverage to 6.6 million Californians who have low incomes and meet other eligibility criteria. The Governor proposes to restructure the program “in order to advance the twin imperatives of maintaining health care coverage to eligible Californians, while containing costs and maximizing operational efficiencies.”

Key Components of the Governor’s Restructuring Plan

This report examines key components of the Governor’s Medi-Cal restructuring plan, including proposals to:

• Impose monthly premiums on more than 500,000 children and adults without disabilities, seniors, and people with disabilities;

• Restructure the state’s safety-net hospital financing system;

• Establish an annual cap of $1,000 for dental services for adults, except for services required by the federal government;

• Expand the use of managed care for children, families, elderly individuals, and people with disabilities; and

• Process certain Medi-Cal applications for children through a centralized contractor, rather than through county welfare offices.

The Governor’s Proposals Could Have a Range of Impacts

In assessing the Governor’s proposal, the state should weigh the potential impacts of each component on the state’s overall health care delivery and financing system. For example, the waiver required to implement premiums could shift more of the financial risk for Medi-Cal from the federal government to California, since the waiver would cap the amount of federal funds that California receives for Medi-Cal beneficiaries subject to the waiver. Currently, the federal government pays half the cost of Medi-Cal expenditures, whether such costs are higher or lower than projected.

For more, please see:

California Budget Project
http://www.cbp.org/2005/0505_medicalrestructure.pdf
921 11th St., Ste. 502
(916) 444-0500
Sacramento, CA 95814-2820
FAX (916) 444-0172

Dealing the Dirt on Enron

Hollywood Does Enron:
A Review of The Smartest Guys in the Room
HEATHER WILLIAMS


http://www.uncoveror.com/enron.jpg


CounterPunch.org
Weekend Edition
May 7 / 8, 2005

For armchair prophets who declared half a decade ago that share prices were bound to rise forever and make the whole world rich, watching Producer/director Alex Gibney's new documentary, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is bound to be like looking at snapshots of a party with where they got drunk with strangers, put lampshades on their heads, and ended up unconscious on the couch with their wallets gone and the house trashed.

In the fog of morning-after regret there is the echo of the gibberish of the night before: The Dow Jones was going to hit 20 thousand! Stock market prices weren't inflated because this was a "market renaissance!" Globalization would float all boats! Why, in the New Economy, workers wouldn't need unions because they'd all be wealthy shareholders!

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Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, adapted from Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind's book by the same name, rightly rekindles a public discussion about the price the world paid for general credulity about the notions of ever-rising markets based on the virtues of corporate self-maximization. Although it seems incredible given the magnitude of the financial scandals that have in the last two decades gutted public utilities, pension funds, credit unions, workers' personal savings, and a significant number of treasuries and national banking systems around the world, the public has still never fully come to grips with the implications of these debacles.

Making a serviceable film about a corporate scandal that everyone ought to have seen coming might seems a straightforward task. The moral story Big Business Gone Bad after all is a fable of right over wrong that even the most docile members of the mass media have mastered. For those who didn't cut their teeth in the 1980s and 1990s on BCCI's arms deals, Michael Milken's insider trading, Chase Manhattan's handling of Raul Salinas' drug and bribe money, the plundering of the Savings and Loans, the untoward bailouts of investment banks caught in the East Asian Financial Crisis, the Federal Reserve's intervention in the hedge fund world of Long Term Capital Management, the new century brought us plenty more graft, lies, and hapless workers cheated out of billions at Worldcom, Tyco, Halliburton, and finally Enron.

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Given that head start, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room does more with its subject matter than anyone has done before. While righteous pundits at CNN or the Lehrer Report featured tired pieces about the decline in corporate ethics or the need for greater vigilance at the Securities and Exchange Commission--with the underlying inquiry being that of how on earth could the executives at Enron have gone so far astray--Gibney's film suggests that there was nothing about Skilling, Lay, Fastow, or any of the other principals that was, in corporate terms, particularly nefarious. The film points out that executives at Enron were ambitious, to be sure, determined to make big profits, little concerned about their employees and eager to cut out the competition, but that none had any grand plan to scuttle the corporation and run away with billions in cash.

In fact, despite the self-consciously macho culture of the corporation, in which employees were charged yearly with voting up to 15 percent of the workforce Survivor-style out of the corporation, the film suggests through close-ups of the traders that most of the people who took home the millions were former high school dorks. One doesn't know whether to laugh or cry, for example, at an interview with Charles Wickman, a former trader whose rubbery broad face lends him an uncanny resemblance to Mr. Potatohead, recalling his motivations at the corporation: "If I'm going to my boss's office to talk about compensation, and if I step on some guy's throat and that doubles it, then I'll stomp on that guy's throat."

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The visuals are entertaining and well-assembled: workers in rumpled suits carrying their pink slips and desk effects in cardboard boxes with the steel-and-glass Enron skyscraper gleaming behind them; naked strippers and champagne; corporate jets and luxury cars emitting the coiffed figures of now-infamous executives Jeff Skilling, Andrew Fastow, and Ken Lay, shots of dad and son Bush and their industry colleague Dick Cheney sending their Enron friends their best wishes in personal video greetings. Between theses images, the film relies smartly on a mixture archival footage and solid, smart interviews with journalists who wrote book-length accounts of the scandal, ex-Enron people, and various other players in the drama, including a hapless Gray Davis in lights-out California.

Beyond its elegance, the film's strongest point is its ambiguity. Like a mystery novel with the last chapter torn out, Gibney's film never offers the viewer a clear answer as to who or what was to blame for the Enron fraud. Was it Ken Lay, who built the company and was known to tolerate misconduct and graft among in the upper ranks at times? Perhaps, but Lay would have been nowhere without his right-hand man Jeff Skilling, who figured out how to make fictive profits with so-called mark-to-marketing treatment, which enabled the accountants to put down projected future profits as current assets. But then the film reminds us that Skilling could never have done what he did without a cooperative Securities and Exchange Commission to legalize his accounting scheme or an eager Arthur Andersen to conjure the fictive profits and make yearly losses into gains and please the shareholders.

Skilling also needed the magic of Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow who, for $45 million in skimmed-off fees, set up shell corporations where Enron could hide $30 billion dollars in debts from its investors. And because Enron was doing little in the energy industry in the 1990s that was actually bringing in revenue, it was clearly the Wall Street brokers who were recommending the stock to their clients and keeping the share prices booming and the cash flowing to Enron were more than minor players. But then, the same analysts point out self-righteously that if they asked too many questions about Enron, their bosses in the brokerages and financial groups threatened their jobs because parent companies stood to lose lucrative investment banking deals with Enron, who, after all, was leading the market in derivatives. And all of this would have been impossible to maintain if Enron's savage securities traders hadn't been able to define the derivatives market in gas and oil futures in the first place by finding loopholes in new deregulation laws big enough to drive a truck through, and that of course was the fault of visionless politicians who blithely handed public trusts to the private sector in the name of efficiency.

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The chain of deferred culpability that so strongly links the boardroom to the halls of government gives the film great narrative strength, but it also suggests one false conclusion, which is that Enron achieved what it needed politically through the Bush family and the Republican party. This may be convenient four years after the exit of Democrats from the White House, but it obscures the reason why Enron or any of the other corporate scandals that broke after January 2001 did not become campaign issues in the last election cycle. The California deregulation bill that infused a faltering Enron with no less than 5 billion dollars in extorted rates was after all passed in 1996 by an Assembly controlled by Democrats. Likewise, the Bush Administration who was blamed for not putting an end to the California energy crisis did in fact cap prices after five months in June 2001. The Clinton Administration, by contrast, stood by for nineteen months of energy gaming between May 1999 and January 2001.

The Democratic Party was just as whorish as the Republican Party when it came to Enron's money, just a little less pricey. Between 1999 and 2000, the Republican Party took in about $1.1 million from Enron in soft money contributions, but the Democratic Party was happy to take in $532,000. Enron also saw clear to grease the campaigns of 70 Senators in 1989-2001, including 27 Democrats.

Given the constraints of a two-hour film, the fairest statement may be that an account of the Enron's fall ought to supplemented at some point by a prequel that shows something about how such a corporate behemoth rose in the first place. Such a cinematic sibling would feature the cast of characters in the Clinton administration who could not do enough for Enron, domestically or internationally, or a set of powerful New Democrats working with Joe Lieberman who bent over backwards to do what they could for Enron and took plenty of their money and legislative suggestions.

The prequel would also feature Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright's State Department bullying public officials in Mozambique, Brazil, and Argentina into accepting Enron's terms on pipelines, or turning a blind eye while Enron-backed thugs in Maharashtra, India beat up citizens who were protesting the $3.2 billion gas plant going up their front yards. Perhaps there might be an interview with Mack MacLarty, Clinton's advisor and turned Enron project director who helped run political interference for the company when its projects were turned down by the World Bank, who considered them unviable.

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Thanks to a Democratic White House, Enron instead got $2.4 billion in loans and loan guarantees from the Export-Import Bank and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation. Of these loans, U.S. taxpayers would eventually mop up $1 billion in unpaid debts left by the corporation after it went bankrupt. Finally, there may be footage somewhere of Enron executives attending meetings of the World Trade Organization, where Clinton's Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin was happy to help Enron and its accounting partner Arthur Anderson help dictate the content of the General Agreement on Trade and Services, which, not incidentally, helped export and standardize Arthur Anderson's creative accounting methods to the rest of the world.

After leaving public office, the esteemed Mr. Rubin would later go to work for Citigroup and use his connections at Treasury to try and bail out Enron in mid 2001. Then there's the odious role of neoliberal environmental groups, such as NRDC, which shilled for the deregulation of electric utilities and lobbied on behalf Enron's raid to acquire local power companies such as Portland General Electric. NRDC's energy guru Ralph Cavanagh told the skeptical residents of Oregon that Enron was a company they could "trust."

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These very significant omissions aside, the film does what a film should do: it puts the mega-corporation back in the spotlight and suggests that the demise of Enron and the disappearance of 60 billion dollars in equity ought not to have shocked anyone and will likely happen again with a similar cast of characters. Detailing the decade-long chronology of Enron's rise, the film makes it clear that the company's collapse was actually years overdue, and all its deceptions were orchestrated with complicity of all the major players in the market and most of the agencies charged with overseeing corporate activities. In so doing, Gibney actually manages to lay out a compelling logical framework for a colossal scandal that we have yet to fully process.

Heather Williams is an Associate Professor of Politics at Pomona College; hwilliams@pomona.edu

Blair's Florida?

Watching the Spring birds fly before the Olympic Mountain Range on my horizon just now, I wondered: "How could so many Britons support Tony Blair; at this late date?" It's not like their Americans!

Then, I came upon this.... -{ape}

http://www.georgewalkerbush.net/
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Electoral Fraud Widespread In UK Election
by Various • Friday May 06, 2005 at 02:12 PM

As was the case in the US in 2004, it appears that this vote was also rigged. I'd cling desperately to power if I had committed War Crimes, too. I just hope the British People won't sit idly by and watch this happen like the Americans have. Not while Fascism is again on the march.

Brown's in charge
BILL JACOBS AND IAN SWANSON

CHANCELLOR Gordon Brown emerged from yesterday’s General Election as the real British Prime Minister.

Although Tony Blair was celebrating a historic and unprecedented third successive Labour victory, it was clear that much of his power had ebbed to his Downing Street neighbour.
http://news.scotsman.com/politics.cfm?id=488822005

Blair declared winner in Sedgefield amidst reports of fraud
http://unspun.mithuro.com/content/view/90/36/

20,000 missing votes heighten Birmingham postal fraud fears
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,19809-1600 737,00.html

Postal vote to be probed
http://news.scotsman.com/politics.cfm?id=488522005

BEGG SEAT POLL PROBE
http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/tm_objectid=1548 6025&method=full&siteid=89488&headline=begg-seat-p oll-probe-name_page.html

Postal voting fraud is widespread, Straw told
http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/n ews/2005/05/06/nelecstraw.xml

Police ordered to stop investigating vote rigging in Blair's constituency
http://unspun.mithuro.com/content/view/82/36/

‘Taint’ in polls to mother of parliament
There are charges that many votes have been stolen. Political parties are set to demand that suspect results should be overturned.
http://www.deccanherald.com/deccanherald/may62005/ foreign174556200555.asp

John Humphrys claims his postal vote was stolen
By Louisa McLennan, Times Online

The radio journalist John Humphrys and television presenter Mariella Frostrup have complained that they were prevented from voting yesterday due to alleged failures with the postal voting system.

Mr Humphrys, the presenter of the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, revealed that he had gone to the polling station, only to be told that he couldn’t vote because someone had already applied for a postal vote in his name.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,19809-1600 918,00.html

Voting fraud exposed in Bethnal Green and Bow
http://www.respectcoalition.org/?ite=762

New postal vote safeguards urged
Postal votes were requested by around five million voters
Election watchdogs have demanded new safeguards to prevent postal voting fraud which they say has undermined confidence in the electoral system.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/vote_2005/f rontpage/4520893.stm

Of course, they'll pretend to be concerned about the NEXT election, and leave this one be ...

Berlusconi Reveals Planned Italian Retreat from Iraq

Berlusconi Reveals Planned Italian Retreat from Iraq

Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi admits Italy's Iraq withdrawal "timeline." His announcement comes a day after he defiantly denied Italian troop deployments would be effected by the heavily criticized "no fault" findings of American investigators looking into the March shooting of journalist, Giuliana Sgrena and Italian secret agent, Nicola Calipari in Iraq. {-ape}

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Lost in the Translation:
Mixed Messages on Italian Iraq Pullout

C. L. Cook
May 6, '05

Will he Stay, or Will he Go?

While Britain's Guardian newspaper is reporting Silvio Berlusconi's commitment yesterday to "stay the course" in Iraq, today, AGI, an Italian news service with close ties to the PM's office says Berlusconi has revealed a withdrawal timeline for Italian troops now in Iraq. The embattled Mr. Berlusconi wouldn't give further details, but said he had discussed the timeline with the Iraqi leadership, Tony Blair and George Bush.

Berlusoni has been under tremendous pressure to quit Iraq. Italians have consistently rejected the invasion and subsequent occupation and ignoring public opinion has cost the Prime Minister dearly. His tremulous coalition government was crucified in last month's mid-term elections, losing 11 of 13 ridings, forcing Berlusconi to dissolve the government and forge a new, far weaker ruling coalition. Now, loud calls from prominent Italian politicians from both within the coalition and without appear behind today's withdrawal announcement. It's now just a matter of time, or timeline, before the Anglo-American alliance loses another partner.

Italians, already bitter about Berlusconi's arrogance and his close allegiance to George Bush, were outraged last month by American pronouncements on the infamous U.S. military attack against prominent journalist, Giuliana Sgrena and the man sent to Iraq to negotiate her release from insurgent kidnappers, Nicola Calipari. The pair and their secret service driver came under heavy fire from an American squad stationed on the road to the Baghdad airport. The offical results of a joint Italian-American military inquiry into the incident have worsened the situation, with the overwhelming reaction by Italians being calls of "Whitewash."

Though Italy's military contingent in Iraq is relatively small, approximately three thousand strong, the symbolism of fractures appearing in the so-called, "coalition of the willing" can only embolden the resistance, who are now mounting almost 200 attacks daily against the occupiers and their Iraqi collaborators. And with recruitment in the U.S. falling short of it's goals in each of the last three months, finding feet to fill those Italian boots on the ground lost could prove more significant than the numbers suggest.

Tony Blair's re-election rebuke in Britain, too should have the Bush camp worried. Though securing another majority mandate, Blair is fully aware of the unpopularity of his Iraq adventure, as are his fellow New Labour members. There's already talk of a leadership challenge.

All in all, not a good week for the trilateral partners in conquest.

Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, a weekly public affairs program, broad/webcast from the University of Victoria, Canada. He also serves as a contributing editor to the progressive news site, PEJ.org.

You can check out his blog at: http://gorillaradioblog.blogspot.com

A Muted Blair: Lies! What Lies?

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MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media
May 5, 2005

MEDIA ALERT: BURYING THE LEGAL ADVICE FOR WAR - PART 2

The crucial, deceptive importance of the idea that journalists can and should report ‘objectively’ was made all too clear last week.

As discussed in Part 1 of this Media Alert, on April 28, the press published the Attorney General’s March 7, 2003 advice on the legality of war with Iraq. Peter Hennessy, a professor of political history at London University, commented:

"The whole thing reeks. Even if the prime minister wins handsomely on polling day this will stain him and his premiership as long as people remember it, just as Anthony Eden's name is forever associated with the Suez crisis." (‘Revealed: the government's secret legal advice on Iraq war,’ Richard Norton-Taylor, The Guardian, April 28, 2005)

The following day, this astonishing exposé of government lying and criminality was simply dropped by the broadcast media. There was not one substantive discussion of the legal advice on BBC 18:00 News, the ITN 18:30 News, or the Channel 4 19:00 News. The issue was almost completely invisible in the days that followed.

Senior lawyers have not been called into TV studios to examine the possibility that Blair, Goldsmith and others might be tried, and jailed, by the International Criminal Court. Government insiders have not been invited to challenge the claim that the Attorney General’s reservations, doubts and caveats were discussed in full, point by point, with his cabinet colleagues.

Why? The BBC’s Andrew Marr and ITN’s Nick Robinson were candid in explaining that the two main parties were keen to move on from Iraq - both Labour and the Tories feared the issue was generating votes for the Liberal Democrats. Therefore, apparently, it was also appropriate for the media to move on.

This is a good example of how the media establishment works with the political establishment to limit public debate. American media analyst, Robert McChesney, notes that early last century the rise of ’professional journalism’ entrenched massive media bias masquerading as ‘objectivity‘.

A key bias involved the media regarding “anything done by official sources, for example government officials and prominent public figures, as the basis for legitimate news”. (McChesney, in Kristina Borjesson, ed., Into The Buzzsaw - Leading Journalists Expose The Myth Of A Free Press, Prometheus Books, 2002, p.367)

As a result: “If the elite, the upper 2 or 3 per cent of society who control most of the capital and rule the largest institutions, agree on an issue then it is off-limits to journalistic scrutiny.” (Ibid, p.369)

This is why the public is psychologically strangled by media discourse. It is why the horror inflicted on Iraq was almost completely ignored in media election coverage before being forced onto the agenda by an insider leak in the penultimate week of campaigning.

Media Tenor research institute analysed the content of the news coverage of political figures on the evening news broadcasts of BBC1, BBC2, ITN and ITV between April 1-15. The analysis shows that foreign politics - including the Iraq conflict - accounted for only 1.2% of all information on ITN news, with only a slightly greater share on BBC1 (1.4%) and ITV (1.7%). (‘Economy dominates news while Iraq coverage slows down,’ www.mediatenor.com, April 22, 2005)

It is why a racist debate on the perils of immigration dominated election coverage in one of the world's richest societies running the third largest economy. It is why the near-identical business-friendliness of the leading parties was not a subject for impassioned criticism and debate. It is why the corporate domination of political, economic and cultural life - a catastrophe that has tripled obesity in children in under ten years - was not an issue for discussion.

With the world falling apart before our eyes, it is why the climate catastrophe was simply ignored as someone else‘s problem.

It is not that this is what people want. Broadcast magazine compared ratings for BBC and ITV bulletins before and after the election was called. For the three weeks before the election was announced, BBC One's Six O'Clock News had an average of 4.7 million viewers, which has since slipped to 4.5 million. ITV Evening News bulletin has dropped from 4.6 million to 4.4 million, while its later broadcast has also lost an average of 200,000 viewers since before the election campaign.

Conor Dignam, editor of Broadcast, claimed: "For all their efforts to 'connect' with viewers, broadcasters are experiencing the same problem as the politicians - TV audiences are simply finding the campaign a bore." (‘Election news “proves a turn-off”', http://news.bbc.co.uk, April 28, 2005)

In truth, it is agony to follow media election coverage, not because it is trivial and boring, but because it is fundamentally insane. Media debate is a form of state-corporate incarceration with individual members of the public treated as political battery hens - the limited scope, honesty and rationality of the debate would be deeply offensive to any sane human being. That this form of cultural madness is then passed off as ‘jolly good fun’ by the media’s grinning Oxbridge battery farmers merely adds insult to insanity.

The reality of mainstream media reporting is that individual journalistic rationality - the common sense view of what is humanly important - is subordinated to a ‘higher‘, ‘professional’ end, which, in reality, is the chosen agenda of the upper 2 or 3 per cent of society who “control most of the capital and rule the largest institutions“.

This is why conformity is not a cause of concern in media journalism; it is a badge of professional credibility. When media executives wear identically severe black rectangular glasses, when they deliver ‘pieces to camera’ with the exact-same stilted emphasis (lampooned by comedians like Brass Eye’s Chris Morris, and always absurd at a decade’s remove), when reporters’ photos glare with the same stern expression at the reader, this conformity is rooted in the dogma of ‘objective‘ and ’professional’ standards that are in fact all hopelessly biased in favour of powerful interests. Actually they are coded signals indicating obedience.

The beauty of ‘objective professional standards’ is that they rationalise the abdication of personal responsibility for thinking for ourselves and caring for others while vast sums are pocketed. Journalists imagine they are paid so well for selling their extraordinary talent. In fact state-private power does not care much for talent - souls are the required resource.

Just as the priests of earlier times insisted they were mere conduits for the ‘Word of God’ - with which no mere mortal could possibly presume to argue - so corporate journalists insist they are acting as a passive medium for the transmission of 'objective' Truth. The very term ‘media’ is deceptive.

In his 2004 autobiography, My Trade, the BBC’s political editor, Andrew Marr, wrote:

"Gavin Hewitt, John Simpson, Andrew Marr and the rest are employed to be studiously neutral, expressing little emotion and certainly no opinion; millions of people would says that news is the conveying of fact, and nothing more." (Marr, My Trade, Macmillan, 2004, p.279)

Nothing could be further from the truth.


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Email: andrew.marr@bbc.co.uk

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The Ritual Murder of God's Banker

Roberto Calvi
http://www.ecomancina.com/
images/calvi.jpg


The Ritual Murder of God's Banker
by ape
Cinquo de Mayo, '05

Twenty-three years ago, Italian financier-extraordinaire Roberto Calvi disappeared. Calvi was the Vatican's main money man, thus known as "God's Banker." That a man of Calvi's prominence simply evaporated created a storm of media interest, both in Italy and beyond. But the buzz created by his Rapture-like vanishing was nothing next to the astonishing circumstance of his discovery. Calvi was located, hanging by the neck, his pockets filled alternately with cash and bricks, beneath London's Blackfriar's Bridge. Last week, Italian authorities made four arrests of suspects in the Roberto Calvi murder.

Blackfriar's Bridge - London

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/

june/19/newsid_3092000/3092625.stm

In 1983, the Financial Times' correspondent in Italy, Rupert Cornwell wrote "God's Banker: An Account of the Life & Death of Roberto Calvi." It's an account of power, religion, greed and perversion; stories that ring strangely familiar in today's corpo/political milieu. - {ape}

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The Nuclear Fundamentalists

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Nuclear Fundamentalism and the Iran Story
NORMAN SOLOMON
May 5th, 2005

San Francisco, California- Years from now, when historians look back at agenda-building for a missile attack on Iran, they should closely examine a story that took up the USA's most coveted space for media spin -- the upper right corner of the New York Times front page -- on the first day of May 2005.

Under the headline "Threats Shadow New Conference on Nuclear Arms," the lead article in the Sunday edition set a tone that was to echo in U.S. media during the next several days. The review conference for the Non-Proliferation Treaty "was meant to offer hope of closing huge loopholes in the treaty, which the United States says Iran and North Korea have exploited to pursue nuclear weapons," the Times reported. "Instead, the session appears deadlocked even before it begins, according to senior American officials and diplomats."

But the Times could have led off by pointing out that "huge loopholes in the treaty" have been exploited by the United States and a few other countries to maintain their nuclear-arms dominance. And, instead of resorting to fuzzy euphemisms, the story could have clearly reported that the U.S., Japanese and French governments are so committed to the commercial nuclear power industry that they still insist on promoting it -- and further boosting nuclear arms proliferation in the process.

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For more than five decades now, U.S. government leaders -- along with countless reporters and pundits -- have insisted that the split atom can be wondrous rather than just ominous. In a speech to the United Nations in December 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower proclaimed a commitment to "atoms for peace." He portrayed nuclear power as redemptive: "The United States pledges before you -- and therefore before the world -- its determination to help solve the fearful atomic dilemma -- to devote its entire heart and mind to find the way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life."

One-third of a century later, the New York Times was in the midst of a protracted crusade on behalf of the Shoreham nuclear power project on Long Island. In July 1986, Jack Newfield wrote in the Village Voice that he had counted 22 different times when the New York Times had editorialized in favor of the Shoreham nuclear plants during the previous 40 months. As it happened, members of the Times board of directors also sat on the boards of nuclear-invested utilities and banks.

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Grassroots activism was often successful when it challenged the utilities seeking to generate more electricity with atomic power. Along the way, activists pointed out that nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons share the same basic fuel cycle. And the anti-nuclear movement warned that fervent efforts to export nuclear power technology all over the globe would lead to the development of atomic weapons in more and more countries. But enormous media campaigns on behalf of the nuclear power industry are still with us.

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On May 4 -- despite the dangers of catastrophic reactor accidents, the horrendous folly of creating massive amounts of atomic waste, and the proven role of nuclear power technology in nuclear weapons proliferation -- a New York Times editorial contended "there is mounting evidence that damage from global warming may dwarf any environmental risk posed by nuclear power. It is therefore critical to keep nuclear power as part of the nation's energy mix." Such commentaries encourage us to believe that widespread conservation and renewable resources aren't viable, as if the only real choices are a radioactive future or an overheated globe.

This kind of nuclear fundamentalism is exactly what has smoothed the way for countries to acquire nuclear weapons technologies -- and in some cases nuclear bombs -- in recent decades. Like an institution run by religious fanatics, the New York Times still cannot let go of its corporate faith in the great god nuclear power.

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These days, there is ugly irony in the emergence of Jimmy Carter as an advocate for nuclear sanity. In 1979, when the Three Mile Island nuclear power disaster occurred in Pennsylvania, President Carter went out of his way to flack for the atomic-energy industry. And like his predecessors and successors in the Oval Office, he pushed nuclear power on people in many other countries. Now Carter is singing a somewhat different tune. In an oped piece that appeared in the International Herald Tribune on May 2, he warned: "Iran has repeatedly hidden its intentions to enrich uranium while claiming that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only. This explanation has been given before, by India, Pakistan and North Korea, and has led to weapons programs in all three states."

Meanwhile, Carter is suitably adamant about the importance of not allowing nuclear test explosions. "The comprehensive test ban treaty should be honored," he wrote in the same article, "but the United States is moving in the opposite direction." You wouldn't know it from Carter, or from the U.S. media, but his administration chose to jettison the appreciable prospects that a comprehensive test ban could have been locked into place a quarter-century ago.

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When I visited the State Department early in the fourth year of the Carter presidency, an arms-control specialist asked me to turn off my tape recorder before he talked about ways that top officials at the government's nuclear weapons labs were successfully sinking the test-ban efforts. Several months later, in October 1980, I summed up the situation in a Nation magazine article: "While proclaiming a desire to halt the nuclear arms race, the U.S. government has been quietly undermining chances for the most far-reaching disarmament treaty on the horizon -- a comprehensive international ban on atomic bomb tests. The latest round of talks in Geneva ended in failure -- with the United States' tactics of delay drawing criticism from other delegations. And no wonder: The Carter administration has caved in to the nuclear-weapons laboratories, which want to continue to test bombs and are opposed to a meaningful agreement that will stop the spread of nuclear weapons."

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In 2005, it's bad enough that such history is scarcely on the U.S. media radar screen, while propaganda looms larger for an attack on Iran either by the Pentagon or by the U.S.-backed Israeli government. But in the present day, the hypocrisy of Washington's righteous finger-pointing toward Iran is extremely dangerous. Carter has it right when he now calls the United States "the major culprit" in erosion of the Non-Proliferation Treaty: "While claiming to be protecting the world from proliferation threats in Iraq, Libya, Iran and North Korea, American leaders not only have abandoned existing treaty restraints but also have asserted plans to test and develop new weapons, including antiballistic missiles, the earth-penetrating 'bunker buster' and perhaps some new 'small' bombs. They also have abandoned past pledges and now threaten first use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states."

The odds are good that if the Pentagon doesn't launch a major missile attack on Iranian facilities in the next year or so, the Israeli government will -- with a wink and nod from President Bush. Yet, unlike Iran's government, Israel is not even a signer of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. With a nuclear bomb stockpile now estimated at more than 200 warheads, Israel is fueling the nuclear arms race in the Middle East. But, from the White House to Capitol Hill to newsrooms across the United States, the Israeli nuclear arsenal draws scant mention let alone criticism.

A former U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq who previously served as Australia's ambassador to the United Nations, Richard Butler, astutely wrote on May 1 in the Sydney Morning Herald that the U.S. government "can be expected to seek to draw attention away from its policies and actions by attempting to insist that the most significant issue at the review conference should be the potential breakout by Iran and North Korea." Butler added: "In this context, it was remarkable to see the Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, during his recent visit to President George Bush's Texas ranch, call on the U.S. to take urgent steps against Iran's nuclear weapons program -- the intelligence on which is quite divided. Neither side made any reference to the world's largest clandestine nuclear weapons program -- Israel's."

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The person who has done more than anyone else to inform the world about that nuclear weapons program, Mordechai Vanunu, left his job as a technician at Israel's Dimona nuclear facility before spilling the beans to the Sunday Times of London in 1986. The Israeli government promptly sent agents to kidnap Vanunu from Rome and take him back to Israel. As a result, Vanunu spent 18 years behind bars, mostly in solitary confinement. Since his release in April 2004, the Israeli authorities have imposed a travel ban along with other restrictions on Vanunu -- and they're threatening to put him back in prison if he keeps talking to journalists.

If Vanunu were Iranian instead of Israeli, the U.S. press would be hailing him as a hero instead of giving him short shrift.

Like almost every other mainstream U.S. media outlet, the New York Times has provided little coverage of Vanunu, so the American public has scant knowledge of his real-life experience with truth and consequences. Likewise, the Times has little to say about Washington's extreme hypocrisies while the newspaper and the government denounce certain other countries for their nuclear programs.

But the New York Times has not skimped on coverage that adds to momentum for a military attack on Iran. And evidently the newspaper of record is just getting started.

Norman Solomon's latest book, "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death," will be published in early summer. His columns and other writings can be found at: www.normansolomon.com

And On....

The Bush crimes will go on
Deadly Hypocrisy is Business as Usual
By CHRIS FLOYD

05/04/05 - - An occupational hazard of dissidence in the Age of Bush is the unavoidable necessity of belaboring the obvious. Again and again, you must ring the same bell; over and over, you must repeat the same, blatant irrefutable fact: that George W. Bush and his ghastly minions are lying hypocrites with blood on their hands.

But what can you do? Each week--each day--brings fresh confirmation of this damning truth. And until the American people redeem their lost national honor by rising up in their millions--taking to the streets with the patriotic cry, "These murderous jackals no longer represent us!"--the Bush crimes will go on, and must be documented. So grab the bell-rope: here we go again.

Last week saw a bumper crop of death-dealing hypocrisy, as the freedom-lovin', terrorist-fightin' he-men of the Bush Regime were caught in flagrante delicto with some rough trade indeed: genocidal rape-fiends, diabolical flesh-boilers and tyrannical peddlers of violent, ignorant religious extremism. (And no, it wasn't a meeting of the Republican National Committee.)

First the Bushists rolled out the red carpet for one of Osama bin Laden's former partners, Sudan's intelligence chief Salah Abdallah Gosh, the Los Angeles Times reports. Gosh was Osama's designated minder in the 1990s, when the ex-CIA ally was comfortably ensconced in Sudan. Gosh is also accused--by members of his own government­ of directing military attacks on civilians in Sudan's Darfur region, where the Janjaweed militia is carrying out a government-backed "ethnic cleansing" program of rape, pillage and murder against the region's black Muslims. At least 400,000 people have died in the carnage, with 2 million more driven into exile.

Last year, the Bush Regime itself officially declared the Darfur despoliation a "genocide," and called Gosh's gang of terrorist-coddling goons "an extraordinary threat" to America's national security. But that was before the 2004 election, when Bush had to drag his "compassionate conservative" crapola out of mothballs for a few months to mollify soccer moms distressed at the pictures they saw on CNN of those poor little Ewoks dying in--where was it? Biafra? Burundi? Rwanda? Rangoon? Once Bush had his teeny-tiny mandate in hand, it was back to business.

That's oil business, of course. Sudan has become one of the chess pieces in the "Great Game" of petropolitics, as the "full spectrum dominators" of the Bush Regime plant their "military footprints" all over the globe in a relentless crusade to stem the inexorable rise of China and India as rivals to "the world's only superpower." It just so happens that China has become the leading player in Sudan's burgeoning oil industry, securing fat concessions in choice fields. Gosh and his goon squads gorge on these oil profits to fuel their mass terrorism in Darfur. Now Bush wants a piece of that action; and if he has to abet the murder of a few hundred thousand desert darkies to get it, who cares? (Certainly not those soccer moms, now fretting about high gas prices for their SUVs: "Get us more cheap oil, Georgie, pronto!")

And so Bush has bedded down with Gosh, who for his part is happy to swap a minor league privateer like Osama for a big-time state terrorist with unlimited resources. Gosh was flown to Washington for high-level "consultations" with his new partners in the CIA--just as the Sudanese government was announcing that "abundant" oil reserves have been found in Darfur, the Sudan Tribune reports. At the very same time, Bush moved--secretly--to gut legislation that would freeze financial assets of the genocidists and increase international protection for Darfur's people, the New York Times reports. Happy coincidences all around!

Meanwhile, the killing in Sudan goes on. Just days before Gosh's extra-special visit, the Janjaweed launched a "senseless and premeditated attack" in Darfur, "burning everything in their paths and leaving in their wake total destruction," Amnesty International reports. What's more, Bush's new allies in Khartoum knew the attack was coming and deliberately blocked African Union peacekeepers from intervening. But the cries of the raped and dying never reached Washington, where Gosh and the Bushists were happily plotting "joint security operations"--and no doubt divvying up the new Darfur oilfields.

How is such two-faced cynicism possible? It's easy: the Bushists don't regard the people of Darfur as human beings, unique individuals of infinite worth and intrinsic value. They're just counters in the game of greed and power, to be shifted or discarded as the need arises.

The same holds true for the people of Uzbekistan, now being abducted, tortured and boiled alive by Bush buddy Islam Karimov. Last week, Bush's "strategic relationship" with the Uzbek Boiler was laid bare in rich detail by the New York Times. Bush has lavished more than $500 million on Karimov's marauding security services, In return, he tortures Bush's own abducted, uncharged, "rendered" prisoners, while providing the Pentagon with a big ole "footprint" for dominating Central Asian oil. Again, the individuals being served up for Tashkent gumbo don't matter; only the game is important.

Bush capped Hypocrisy Week by strolling hand-in-hand with Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah: de facto ruler of the fiercest religious tyranny on earth; mentor to the Taliban; global propagator of the vicious Wahhabi distortion of Islam; fount of corruption, bribery and baksheesh; longtime Bush Family business partner. With his warm embrace of the hereditary despot, Bush gave the lie to months of high-flown jive about lighting "fires of freedom" in the Middle East. As always, Bush's real message to those longing for liberty, at home and abroad, was clear as a bell:

"Tough luck, suckers."

Chris Floyd is a columnist for The Moscow Times.

Visit his website http://www.empireburlesquenow.blogspot.com

Tightening the Screw: Bolton Faces His Past Further

Bolton's Proudest Moment
By GARY LEUPP
CounterPunch.org
Boston, Mass.

Those campaigning against John Bolton's nomination for U.N. ambassador continue to collect anecdotes testifying to his bullying, abrasive style. (Seems the Brits were so peeved by his behavior in the Anglo-American negotiations with Libya's Col. Qaddhafi, which resulted in Libya's agreement to dismantle its nuclear weapons program, that they asked he be removed from the talks.) And daily we learn more about his lies and exaggerations, most recently about those publicly raised in late 2001 concerning Sudan's supposed interest in biological weapons. In response to the controversy, Rice, Cheney and Bush continue to express confidence in Bolton, insisting he's just what the doctor ordered for the ailing United Nations.

Thomas M. Boyd, an assistant attorney general under the Reagan administration and former Bolton deputy, is another important Bolton defender. He sheds light on Bush's choice, and focuses on what is surely the Bolton achievement most likely to evoke public support, in an op-ed piece in the Boston Globe April 27. He opens with the frank observation that Bolton is indeed a bull in a china shop. But "[w]hile it is certainly true that Bolton sometimes breaks china," Boyd declares, "it is also true that he carefully selects the pattern first." Bolton's crowning moment of destruction? December 16, 1991, when the United Nations General Assembly repealed, by a vote of 111 to 25 (and 30 abstentions) the 1975 resolution that described Zionism as a form of racism. As the debate heats up this will be the bully's chief selling point.

Resolution 3379 had originally passed with 72 votes for, 35 against, and 32 abstentions. Largely symbolic, with few practical ramifications, it did what the U.S. State Department's "terror list" does today: it denounced what the judges found reprehensible and endeavored to shame and isolate the target. Condemned in the U.S. press as "abominable," "repulsive," "odious" and "the UN's greatest sin" and condemned by a joint Congressional resolution in 1985, its passage was chalked up to the growing power of oil-rich Islamic states, the influence of the Soviet Union, and general anti-Semitism. To this day the corporate media ignores the possibility that there might have been some persuasive logic in the anti-Zionist critique. This is not something one can freely discuss in this free country. In any case, in 1975 67% of nations voting (52% of the total membership) had agreed that Zionism was a form of racism. But in 1991, 82% of voting members (67% of the total member nations) somehow determined that no, actually, this was in fact not the case after all. Not that they gave any explanation for the about-face.

It was a stunning reversal. Bolton himself has hailed the moment. The day Condoleezza Rice announced his nomination, he referred to Resolution 3379 as "the greatest stain on the UN's reputation" and its reversal "one highlight of my professional career." But he didn't at the time describe his particular role in wiping away the stain. Boyd's piece merely hints at this; according to him, Bolton as assistant secretary of state for international organizations made the repeal of the resolution a personal campaign. He "took matters into his own hands," tirelessly calling ambassadors around the world and "each time using his keen mind and reputation for bluntness to their full effect In time, his perseverance began to winnow down the nay-sayers."

This vote, occurring after the first Gulf War and just ten days before the collapse of the Soviet Union, marked a turning point in the UN's history. The U.S. had become the sole superpower, and although it was to soon discover the limits to that power (in Somalia the following year), it was in a position to dictate especially to its aid recipients what stance they should take on this issue. The U.S. had traditionally protected Israel from UN Security Council censure by casting its veto, but from this point acted more aggressively in pursuit of Israeli interests (or at least what it reckoned those to be). It vetoed reappointment of Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the UN Secretary-General supported by every other member of the UN Security Council, in December 1996. The Egyptian Christian was the first secretary-general to be denied a second term. His offense? Despite an active role in Arab-Israeli peace talks, he was considered too critical of Israel. He was replaced with Kofi Annan, a Ghanaian with an American wife well liked by U.S. administrations. He had, for example, called Resolution 3379 an "affront" to the Jewish people and incitement to racial and ethnic hatred.

Only when, at the height of arrogance, Washington sought a UN rubber stamp for its attack on Iraq did the tide start to turn against the U.S. After the fact, Annan was obliged (however timidly and reluctantly) to term the U.S. attack on Iraq "illegal." This brought Annan himself into the crosshairs. Annan is now targeted by Bolton and others who will not forgive his opposition to neocon objectives. Meanwhile Bolton has spearheaded the U.S. drive to deny Mohammed ElBaradei, the Egyptian head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, a third term. This is because he finds no cause to declare Iran in violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, something Bolton has angrily and unreasonably demanded of the IAEA. So far this anti-ElBaradei effort has found little international support, and reports of U.S. electronic eavesdropping on ElBaradei's UN office are unlikely to produce much support for the U.S. position.

But Bolton's role in the rescinding of Resolution 3379 is being applauded on various right wing blogs as sufficient validation in itself of Bush's UN choice. Many Zionists (Christian as well as Jewish) depict the resolution as an anti-Semitic "slur" and suggest that whatever means were used to overturn it, they were surely appropriate. It is hard to change the minds of those who believe that Israel, having been established by God in fulfillment of a promise to His Chosen People, is a good thing by definition, and that Zionism (as the modern movement to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine) a noble and even divine cause. Or to change the minds of the secular who believe that God or no God, the state of Israel is necessary to ensure the survival of the Jewish people. I will not bother debating the point here but merely point out that there are differences of opinion in the world, including among Jews, concerning the historical origins, nature and legitimacy of the Jewish state. In my own opinion, Zionism as defined by Webster's ("a movement formerly for reestablishing, now for advancing, the Jewish national state in Israel") doesn't necessarily entail racism, and I have friends who consider themselves Zionists who do not strike me as racists. But when the Zionist project displaces, humiliates and oppresses people native to the land it claims by right it deserves to be called what it's become.

Both Bishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela have referred to the treatment of Palestinians by Israel as a type of apartheid, which is to say, racism, and hundreds of millions of people agree with them. And many understand that the U.S., while championing Zionism, opposed resolution 1761 in 1962, which condemned South Africa's apartheid system. Moved in the General Assembly by Sweden,the anti-apartheid resolution was adopted by 146 votes in favor, with only two countries---the U.S. and U.K.---voting against. Recall how the Reagan administration stood by South Africa as "America's closest ally in Africa" and how current Vice President Cheney voted against a Congressional resolution urging the release of Nelson Mandela in 1986 since he considered him a "terrorist." It is quite understandable that people would link the boundless U.S. support for South African apartheid to Washington's militant defense of Zionism.

Every Arab nation, and almost all Muslim nations, opposed the repeal of the resolution of 3379. So did the Third World in general. But Bolton was not content to concede to the world's ambassadors their own opinions. Informed by the Near East bureau of the State Department that a belligerent campaign to overturn 3379 might damage U.S. priorities in the Middle East, he (according to Boyd) "instructed his staff to change votes, and he set his considerable energies to first changing minds." This all sounds like a quiet missionary exercise. But in fact Bolton engaged in the sort of arm-twisting tactics that have recently drawn much attention. A sometimes member of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) Bolton wedded U.S. and Israeli interests, deploying Washington's resources to defend an ideology thrown on the defensive by the obvious ongoing reality of Palestinian suffering.

Resolution 4686 overturning 3379 was among the shortest ever passed in UNGA history: "The general assembly decides to revoke the determination contained in its resolution 3379 (XXX) of 10 November 1975." Fitting that there should be no explanation, since the change was not due to any substantial public debate but rather to the application of coercive U.S. power behind the scenes. I distinctly remember reading, fourteen years ago, of the indignation of Third World ambassadors complaining of unprecedented heavy-handedness by the first Bush administration in producing the revisionist Zionist-friendly result. Basically they were ordered to switch votes. They were told, "There's no USSR to help you now, we're the boss, you have no opinion, obey or lose." But surfing the web to try to revisit that reportage years ago I get nothing but sites deploring the "odious" resolution and registering righteous satisfaction at its overthrow.

Only one majority Muslim nation (Albania, emerging from a state of enforced official atheism, in a state of transition and hungry for U.S. aid) voted for 4686. All the rest voted against or abstained. Of non-Muslim nations, Cuba, one of the many cosponsors of 3379, opposed it. So did Vietnam. India, which had voted for 3379, for some reason changed its mind. China, an erstwhile 3379 supporter, discreetly absented itself.

Boyd hails Bolton's "bluntness." We may hear more bluntness in the next few weeks, as Iran reaches what the Israelis say will be a point of no return in its nuclear program, and as the IAEA meets and decides the future of ElBaradei and considers U.S. proposals for changing the rules to selectively target Iran. Some are predicting a U.S. or Israeli strike against Iran in June. If Bolton is at the UN, he will rage against the predictable Chinese and Russian opposition to the sanctions it insists must be imposed on Iran, or bristle against any condemnation of U.S. or Israeli aggression. Having publicly opined that the UN is useless, he may sabotage the venerable institution rather like the Japanese delegate Masuoka Yosuke did the League of Nations in 1933. Surely this is one game plan. Bush sees Bolton as the right stuff to achieve it if necessary.

Senator Jesse Helms, a well-known racist and Christian-Zionist fundamentalist with whom Bolton has worked closely, told the American Enterprise Institute in early 2001 that, "John Bolton is the kind of man with whom I would want to stand at Armageddon, if it should be my lot to be on hand for what is forecast to be the final battle between good and evil in this world." That final battle is mere biblical myth, but the Bush administration pursuing its neocon-authored agenda may provoke a cascade of catastrophes in the near future. One can expect that Bolton at the UN will insist on the righteousness of each outrage, refining hypocrisy to a high art form while lashing out viciously at all honest opposition. Perhaps he is indeed the right man for the job. But the job of promoting imperialism and its attendant racisms, and bludgeoning those who oppose them, is itself abominable, repulsive, odious, sinful, and in the "final" analysis, evil.

Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia: Imperial Crusades.

He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu

Pantheon of Delusion

Pantheon of Far Right-Wing Delusion:
Plaut Calls the Fascist Kettle Black
Kurt Nimmo
May 03, 2005



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Zionist settler Steve Plaut is up to his tricks again. In a recent article on ChronWatch, Plaut, a snobbish professor in Israel who believes one has to have an academic degree to form a political opinion (thus relegating billions of people to the status of insensate farm animals), the Zionist professor of Israeli economics believes the “correct representation of the political arena is as a circle, with the Far Left and the Neonazi Right smack alongside one another and closely collaborating,” a rather startling paranoid delusion, even for an Israeli settler.

In Plaut’s bizarre world, shaped (or warped) by radical Zionism, anybody who disagrees or is morally outraged by settlers killing Palestinian school kids (and 545 of them have been killed by Israelis since the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada in September 2000) is a “neonazi.” It is hardly unique or surprising that over-the-deep-end right-wingers so effortlessly redefine the political lexicon to suit their propagandistic purposes. Plaut, however, takes this revisionism to new heights.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, defines a neo-Nazis as a “member of a fringe group inspired by Adolf Hitler’s Nazis,” a term more suitable for right-wingers who embrace racist nationalism and national expansion (as defined by the above dictionary), for instance the Likudites in Israel who are demonstrated racists simply because they assign an inferior status to members of non-Jewish ethno-national groups, the same way the racists in the Antebellum South of the United States did before the Civil War (actually it is more accurate to characterize the Zionist racists as Afrikaner nationalists who embrace apartheid; “God created the Afrikaner People with a unique language, a unique philosophy and their own history and traditions,” declared an Afrikaner in 1944, “in order that they might fulfil a particular calling and destiny here in the southern corner of Africa,” a sentiment shared by many Orthodox Jews in Israel who believe their God gave them the right to steal land at gunpoint and ethnically cleanse indigenous people).

Actually, the history of Zionism is a closer match to Nazism (or more accurately, fascism) than anything on the so-called far left, as Plaut would have it. Avraham Stern, the founder and leader of the Zionist underground terrorist organization later known as Lehi and also known as the “Stern Gang,” attempted to make an agreement with the Nazis in 1941. “Stern felt that the only salvation for the Jews was to produce their own Zionist form of totalitarianism,” writes Lenni Brenner. “He had seen the WZO [World Zionist Organization] make its own accommodation with Nazism by means of the Ha’avara; he had seen [Ze’ev] Jabotinsky [an admirer of Mussolini] entangle himself with Italy; and he personally had been intimately involved in the Revisionists, dealings with the Polish anti-Semites.” The Revisionist Party eventually mutated into Herut and finally Likud, the current political party ruling in Israel. Even though Likud is based on racism, terrorism, violence, territorial expansion, rabid nationalism, and ethnic cleansing, as was its predecessors, Steven Plaut believes Likud is guilty of “cowardice” (even as it repeatedly violates the Geneva Conventions and ignores United Nations resolutions by the dozen). In other words, according to Plaut, the Likudites are wimps and Ariel Sharon, indicted as a mass murderer and war criminal, is too “timid.”

As a scurrilous fabricator of lies and half-truths, Plaut likes to throw around the Nazi label, even as he ignores the very real fascistic past of his own political ideology, closer to Nazism than Noam Chomsky or Juan Cole will ever be. As a liar and unethical propagandist for the likes of Horowitz’s hate pubs (amply lubricated with far right-wing money), Plaut has no problem spinning slanderous lies—for instance, that I have something to do with the alleged “Holocaust Denial Barnes Review,” a revisionist publisher I never heard of until Plaut, who obviously has a Holocaust denial fetish and likes to poke around on anti-Semitic websites more than your garden variety skinhead, made mention of it.

For the careful observer, Plaut’s lies and character assassination is nothing less than a desperate attempt to obfuscate the truth, as pointed out by Cole, Chomsky, Justin Raimondo (all deemed “neonazis” by Plaut), and others of various political stripe—Plaut’s adopted homeland is predicated on a history of systematic mass murder and ethnic cleansing and is currently ruled by a party with ideological roots based on extraordinarily vicious racism and active collaboration with both Italian and German fascists.

Addendum

It should be noted that Steven Plaut writes for Betar Tagar UK, another example of his affinity for fascism. As Tom Barry notes in his portrait of Douglas Feith, Betar was “a Zionist youth movement founded by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, an admirer of Mussolini. Betar, whose members wore dark brown uniforms and spouted militaristic slogans modeled after other fascistic movements, was associated with the Revisionist Movement, which evolved in Poland to become the Herut Party, which later became the Likud Party.”

Betar Tagar UK enshrines the following “Betaris” as “brave individuals: Zeev Jabotinski, Menachem Begin, Joseph Trumpeldor, Shlomo Ben Yosef, Yaakov Weiss, and other Zionist fanatics and land stealers. Joseph Trumpeldor was the leader of the Haganah, created to fight “against an Arab horde” (as the “Betaris” in the UK call the people of Palestine). Part of Haganah splintered into the notorious Irgun Zvai-Leumi, famous for killing Arabs and Brits. Betar was created after Trumpeldor was killed “defending” the Upper Galilee against Arabs who didn’t take kindly to being evicted and killed by Zionists.

Shlomo Ben Yosef was an Irgun terrorist (see this photo of the lad in his fascist inspired uniform) who was sent to the gallows by Brit colonialists after shooting up an Arab bus (demonstrating that the Zionists have not changed much over the last sixty odd years). Yaakov Weiss was another Irgun terrorist hanged by the Brits.

Menachem Begin, of course, was the prime minister of Israel, demonstrating how dearly loved terrorists are there (Begin was the leader of Irgun and responsible for the bombing of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, killing 91 people). Amnon Kapeliouk has quoted the soft and fuzzy Begin as declaring the Palestinians are “beasts walking on two legs” before the Knesset, the only “democratic” government in the Middle East (democratic, that is, if you’re not an Arab).

Betar UK states the following in regard to Betar’s (brownshirt) ideology: “The love of the entire land of Israel. Betar supports the concept of a Jewish state with a Jewish Majority in its biblical-homeland (check out this map to see precisely where that “homeland” is)… The entire land of Israel as given to the Jewish people by G-d with it’s eternal capital Jerusalem.

We therefore wholeheartedly support the settlement of all of Israel including Judea, Samaria, Gaza and the Golan Heights… When can it truly be said that our country has ceased to be ‘Palestine’ and become Eretz Yisrael?

Only then, when there will be more Jews that non-Jews; for the first condition of a national state is national majority… the basis upon which is founded the entire Betarian viewpoint of building a Jewish state. It means the creation of a state comprising a Jewish majority on both sides of the Jordan.”

In other words, Betar (with its vaguely socialistic ideology, or rather socialism for Jews at the expense of everybody else who lives in the neighborhood) demands further expansion—primarily into Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan—and the displacement (ethnic cleansing) of the people who live there. In other words, Betar and the Zionists embrace a truly Nazi geopolitical concept: Lebensraum.