American Prosperity and the Four Horse Race

Power Politics vs. American Prosperity

by Ian Fletcher

I had one of those “Aha!” moments recently.

I was engaged in an e-mail dialogue with a moderately prominent individual active in America’s international trade relations.  He’s a former high-ranking public official, important enough to matter but not a household name.  You might recognize him if you follow trade politics closely. Democrat, left-of-center, but nothing radical.

Anyhow, what I realized, in the course of this discussion, was that we were, in fact, arguing at cross purposes.

I viewed the American economy as a thing whose purpose is to provide income and a living standard to Americans. 

He viewed it as a thing whose purpose was to provide a platform for projecting power in the world.

I mean, he didn’t say it quite so explicitly, but that was the bottom line of every train of argument we pursued.  It was the only interpretation of his words under which they made any sense.

I can’t give you any more details because of my need to respect confidentiality.  But I think his attitude explains a lot about how we are governed, because I think this is how America’s ruling elite really thinks.

I believe our ruling elite isn’t merely greedy for money.  I believe they’re also greedy for something far worse.  I believe they’re also greedy for world power beyond any extent to which this either serves American national security—or, for that matter, makes them richer.

I believe they privately view this country as their horse, upon which they ride in a global jousting tournament with rival elites.  And they only really care about America, and the strength of its economy, insofar as it gives them a better horse to ride on.

The rest of the time, they’re mainly thinking about how to keep the horse obedient, hard at work, cheaply fed, and docile. That’s their goal as they pull the strings of both parties.

Why? Because power itself is a direct emotional stimulant, a tonic for the ego.  So our foreign relations, including our trade relations, don’t need to have any direct connection to economics.

Our economic policy isn’t about economics.

Everyone has an ego, and the pleasures of the ego are just as real as the pleasures of driving a nice car, eating well, or living in an expensive house.  So, once you’ve got plenty of money, why would money be more important than power?

It wouldn’t.

Poor naïve old Karl Marx had no idea.  He thought everything elites do is about money, albeit often money dressed up as something else. “Men’s material life determines their consciousness,” he used to say.

Wrong.  People’s  emotions determine their consciousness, and they only care about money because of the emotional satisfactions it accords. So power politics can easily wind up in the driver’s seat of economic policy.

All obvious enough, once baldly stated.  But this isn’t the standard assumption of our political discourse. The standard assumption is that economic policy, including trade policy, is about economics.

Nobody openly says, “We need economic policy X because it will enable us to throw our weight around, regardless of the economic consequences.” But that’s how our policymakers often think. 

This disconnect explains why so much of our economic policy makes no sense.  It’s not even trying to make sense as economic policy.

Instead, our rulers have been running this country’s trade relations with the rest of the world with the sophistication of a high-school clique in a lunchroom contest with rival cliques.

The new Trans-Pacific partnership, for example?  This has less economic logic to it than the euro.  It’s all about showing China that we have more friends in that part of the world than they do.

The whole thing was actually dreamed up by the government of Singapore, which is culturally mostly Chinese but still feels the need to remind Beijing it’s not their lapdog.

Think serious governments with trillions in GDP and nuclear weapons don’t engage in childish contests over prestige and ego? Think again.

Of course, all the cool kids in the lunchroom have a shared identity as cool kids, and these rival cliques can get together in a flash when something unites them against the uncool. That’s why they throw a party for themselves at Davos every year. 

The uncool?  That’s you and me, friend: the populists, the mass citizenry, ordinary folk and the politicians—they still exist, here and there—who serve our interests.

We the Peasants.

We, in the elite’s eyes, are the boring nobodies, the unsophisticated rubes watching television and eating corn dogs in places like Indiana where no member of the elite would dream of living.

They’d never admit it, but they positively enjoy our inferiority.  They enjoy the sense of their own superiority that our own pathetic unhipness gives them. 

They pretend to wrinkle their noses in disgust, but they actually find our existence reassuring.  Because you can’t be superior without being superior to somebody. 

What the elite likes even more is the feeling of dominating us, the feeling of cracking the whip and digging their spurs into the side of the horse. I suspect they even enjoy a bit of pushback, as overcoming it makes them feel more powerful.

I also think they enjoy seeing a bit of pain.  I think it’s an unstated thrill for them to know that Detroit is in ruins because they decreed that it should be. It’s like tossing the vodka glasses into the fireplace when you’re finished with them.

Usually this thrill is deeply sublimated in technocratic blather about “shifting comparative advantage in industry” and “creative destruction being the basis of economic growth,” but the underlying feeling is the same: the joy of watching the world be dominated by you and your friends.

Some readers probably think I’m nuts for saying all this.  Surely serious economic decisions made on computer spreadsheets in shiny glass skyscrapers can’t be about something so base? Isn’t power something clean and technocratic, not some weird Freudian morass?  Isn’t this all just too subjective?

Well, no.  I don’t think power is cool and rational. I don’t think economics is. And I’m not the first economist to realize this.  Not to deflate my own bubble here, but every idea in this article is stolen straight from Thorstein Veblen.

He’s the once-famous American economist (1857-1929) mainly remembered today for his book The Theory of the Leisure Class.

What’s more incredible is that he was once elected president of the American Economic Association. If you’re not an economist, that latter fact probably doesn’t mean much to you.  But it should. Because it means that economists once understood how base—and uneconomic!—are the impulses that drive economic reality.

Lost in their mathematical ice castles, they mostly don’t anymore. It’s economics as if people were robots.

Anyhow, this all suggests to an interpretation of what may be going on with Romney and Obama right now.

Romney, I increasingly suspect, represents a section of the establishment that is finally starting to fear that the hollowing out of the American economy, and our craven economic surrender to China, may have gone too far for the good of America’s ruling elite.

So they’re willing to cut the peasants—you and me—some slack, because they need to. That’s why Romney may well genuinely mean what he says about cracking down on China’s abusive trade relations with the United States.  Which would go a long way towards solving the trade mess that has put a damper on everything we’ve tried to do to revive our economy.

In some sense, this is obviously good news.  Our rulers have realized they can’t starve the horse they’re riding on.  One might wish for better motivations, but at least they’ve gotten the point.

They’ve had a good run starving their obedient horse for profit, but the grown-ups among them know they can’t take this too far, or they risk ending up riding a dead horse. Or—less likely but still possible—electing a genuinely populist government that would take a chunk of their money away and give it to the plebes.

My guess is that if Romney is elected, the strings will be pulled to create an economic recovery in fairly short order.  Strings like choking imports to force our trade back into balance, which would redirect hundreds of billions dollars a year of demand back into our own economy, ending the leakage that has sabotaged Obama’s Keynesian “pump priming” so far.

Then, when recovery comes (as it eventually would have anyway), Romney can pose as the new Ronald Reagan, coast to a second term, and leave Obama  as discredited as Jimmy Carter. A whole new myth cycle of Democratic recession and Republican recovery will be created, and the Republican party will have bought itself another 20-year lease on life.

I don’t traffic in conspiracy theory, but it’s not beyond imagination that this same establishment helped Obama into power in 2008 precisely in order to discredit economic liberalism  by handing an unready candidate a situation of which nobody could have made good. A poisoned chalice for an unready prince.

Tricky, huh?  Well, don’t forget that these guys are good.

After all, they rule the world. We don’t.

Ian Fletcher is Senior Economist of the Coalition for a Prosperous America, a nationwide grass-roots organization dedicated to fixing America’s trade policies and comprising representatives from business, agriculture, and labor. He was previously Research Fellow at the U.S. Business and Industry Council, a Washington think tank, and before that, an economist in private practice serving mainly hedge funds and private equity firms. Educated at Columbia University and the University of Chicago, he lives in San Francisco. He is the author of Free Trade Doesn’t Work: What Should Replace It and Why.

When the Warmaker Comes to Charlottesville

Welcoming a Warmonger to Town on Wednesday

by David Swanson - War is a Crime

Wow, it's been a while, but protests of war makers in Charlottesville will be back big time next Wednesday. It seems like ages since we protested John Yoo, or even since our threatened protest of Dick Cheney scared him out of coming to town. But opportunity is knocking and a massive nonviolent protest is sure to answer.

How could it not?

On Wednesday, Charlottesville will host a man who has escalated war in Afghanistan and continued it in the face of overwhelming public opposition. He's invented a new kind of war using drones and launched such wars in numerous nations, building intense hostility toward the United States. He keeps a list of "nominees" for murder. On the list are adults and children, Americans and non-Americans. He holds meetings with his staff on Tuesdays to decide whom to kill next, and then kills them. He'll have one of these Terror Tuesday meetings the day before his visit to our town.

We're dealing here with someone who has launched a war on Libya against the will of Congress, presumably an act even worse than telling Congress obvious lies and getting its approval, as Bush did on Iraq. This new war maker campaigned for office on expanding war in Afghanistan, expanding the size of the U.S. military, and using the U.S. military broadly. He's kept his promises.

The military is larger and more expensive than it ever was under Bush. It's more secretive, with the CIA fighting some of the wars. It's more privatized. It's more profitable. It's in more nations. And it's sucking down a greater share of government spending.

Having replaced imprisonment and torture with murder, this new warmonger has established as open policy, no longer illicit, process-free imprisonment, rendition, and the option to use torture "if necessary." He has forbidden the prosecution of CIA torturers. He has created a legal and bipartisan acceptance of what we recently protested as scandalous outrages. He has launched a campaign of unprecedented retribution against whistleblowers. And now he has announced that the United States, without Congressional authorization or public approval, is engaged in assisting one side in a civil war in Syria -- even while continuing to threaten war on Iran.

I could go on. This new official has outdone others in the areas of corporate trade agreements, fossil fuel subsidies, tax breaks for the rich, bailouts for Wall Street and for health insurance corporations, and on and on. But just on the issue of militarism I've clearly said enough to mobilize those who have protested war makers in recent years.

Unless there's something different this time.

Perhaps it's more important to cheer for and apologize for one half of a corrupt government than it is to push that government in a democratic direction. Maybe the world is changed most effectively by behaving as spectators rooting for one side of a surface-level dispute between two corrupt forces mutually agreed on our destruction. Maybe the civil rights movement should have shut up and campaigned for Democrats. Maybe women voted themselves the right to vote. Perhaps the labor movement was really built through the electoral tactics that are currently destroying it.

You know, on second thought, I think I'll buy an Obama shirt and speak only when spoken to. He's the candidate of change, and I want to do whatever is most likely to change things.

Drone Overhead: The Real Civilian Death Toll of Obama Drone Attacks

Civilian Deaths from US Drone Attacks Much Higher than Reported

 by TRNN

 

Gareth Porter: New investigative work shows that civilian deaths in Pakistan, including from second wave attacks, higher than Pentagon reports

Can the Gulf of Mexico Survive BP?

Can the Gulf Survive?

With startling imagery and intimate accounts, Can the Gulf Survive? chronicles the activities of a number of individuals taking part in the first response whose work and expertise is especially critical in stopping the spill at the well head and cleaning up its effects in the weeks and months that follow.

With exclusive access to BP's clean-up operations, National Geographic investigates what happened to the 4.9 million barrels of oil that poured from the sea floor in one of the worst environmental disasters of all time.

From the front lines of the cleanup efforts, NGC follows the first two months after the spill, tracking cleanup efforts as experts seek to learn the ongoing effects and BP battles the spill and the public outcry.

Watch the National Geographic documentary  here.

Gaza Reacts to Egyptian Tunnel Closures

by TRNN

Israel benefits from Egypt’s closing of tunnels after attacks in Sinai

Hollow Center: America's Spreading Sacrifice Zones

A World of Hillbilly Heroin
The Hollowing Out of America, Up Close and Personal
By Chris Hedges
Illustration by Joe Sacco

from TomDispatch

During the two years Joe Sacco and I reported from the poorest pockets of the United States, areas that have been sacrificed before the altar of unfettered and unregulated capitalism, we found not only decayed and impoverished communities but shattered lives.  There comes a moment when the pain and despair of constantly running into a huge wall, of realizing that there is no way out of poverty, crush human beings.  Those who best managed to resist and bring some order to their lives almost always turned to religion and in that faith many found the power to resist and even rebel.

On the Pine Ridge Lakota reservation in South Dakota, where our book Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt opens, and where the average male has a life expectancy of 48 years, the lowest in the western hemisphere outside of Haiti, those who endured the long night of oppression found solace in traditional sweat lodge rituals, the Lakota language and cosmology, and the powerful four-day Sun Dance which I attended, where dancers fast and make small flesh offerings.

In Camden, New Jersey, it was the power and cohesiveness of the African-American Church.  In the coalfields of southern West Virginia, it was the fundamentalist and evangelical protestant churches, and in the produce fields of Florida, it was the Catholic mass.

Those who are not able to hang on, fall long and hard.  They retreat into the haze of alcohol -- Pine Ridge has an estimated alcoholism rate of 80% -- or the harder drugs, easily available on the streets of Camden: from heroin to crack to weed to something called Wet, which is marijuana leaves soaked in PCP.  In the produce fields, drinking was also a common release.

In West Virginia, however, the drug of choice was OxyContin, or “hillbilly heroin.”  Joe and I went into some old coal camps, largely abandoned, and there it was as if we were interviewing zombies; the speech and movements of those we met were so bogged down by opiates that they were often hard to understand. This passage from the book is a look at some of those West Virginians, discarded by the wider society, who struggle to deal with the terrible pain of rejection and purposelessness that comes when there is a loss of meaning and dignity. Chris Hedges, August 2012

A Community on Overdose

About half of those living in McDowell County depend on some kind of relief check such as Social Security, Disability, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, retirement benefits, and unemployment to survive. They live on the margins, check to check, expecting no improvement in their lives and seeing none. The most common billboards along the roads are for law firms that file disability claims and seek state and federal payments. “Disability and Injury Lawyers,” reads one. It promises to handle “Social Security. Car Wrecks. Veterans. Workers’ Comp.” The 800 number ends in COMP.

Harry M. Caudill, in his monumental 1963 book Night Comes to the Cumberlands, describes how relief checks became a kind of bribe for the rural poor in Appalachia. The decimated region was the pilot project for outside government assistance, which had issued the first food stamps in 1961 to a household of fifteen in Paynesville, West Virginia. “Welfarism” began to be practiced, as Caudill wrote, “on a scale unequalled elsewhere in America and scarcely surpassed anywhere in the world.” Government “handouts,” he observed, were “speedily recognized as a lode from which dollars could be mined more easily than from any coal seam.”

Obtaining the monthly “handout” became an art form. People were reduced to what Caudill called “the tragic status of ‘symptom hunters.’ If they could find enough symptoms of illness, they might convince the physicians they were ‘sick enough to draw’... to indicate such a disability as incapacitating the men from working. Then his children, as public charges, could draw enough money to feed the family.”

Joe and I are sitting in the Tug River Health Clinic in Gary with a registered nurse who does not want her name used. The clinic handles federal and state black lung applications. It runs a program for those addicted to prescription pills. It also handles what in the local vernacular is known as “the crazy check” -- payments obtained for mental illness from Medicaid or SSI -- a vital source of income for those whose five years of welfare payments have run out. Doctors willing to diagnose a patient as mentally ill are important to economic survival.

“They come in and want to be diagnosed as soon as they can for the crazy check,” the nurse says. “They will insist to us they are crazy. They will tell us, ‘I know I’m not right.’ People here are very resigned. They will avoid working by being diagnosed as crazy.”

The reliance on government checks, and a vast array of painkillers and opiates, has turned towns like Gary into modern opium dens. The painkillers OxyContin, fentanyl -- 80 times stronger than morphine -- Lortab, as well as a wide variety of anti-anxiety medications such as Xanax, are widely abused. Many top off their daily cocktail of painkillers at night with sleeping pills and muscle relaxants. And for fun, addicts, especially the young, hold “pharm parties,” in which they combine their pills in a bowl, scoop out handfuls of medication, swallow them, and wait to feel the result.

A decade ago only about 5% of those seeking treatment in West Virginia needed help with opiate addiction. Today that number has ballooned to 26%. It recorded 91 overdose deaths in 2001. By 2008 that number had risen to 390.

Drug overdoses are the leading cause of accidental death in West Virginia, and the state leads the country in fatal drug overdoses. OxyContin -- nicknamed “hillbilly heroin” -- is king. At a drug market like the Pines it costs a dollar a milligram. And a couple of 60- or 80-milligram pills sold at the Pines is a significant boost to a family’s income.

Not far behind OxyContin is Suboxone, the brand name for a drug whose primary ingredient is buprenorphine, a semisynthetic opioid. Dealers, many of whom are based in Detroit, travel from clinic to clinic in Florida to stock up on the opiates and then sell them out of the backs of gleaming SUVs in West Virginia, usually around the first of the month, when the government checks arrive. Those who have legal prescriptions also sell the drugs for a profit. Pushers are often retirees. They can make a few hundred extra dollars a month on the sale of their medications. The temptation to peddle pills is hard to resist.

We meet Vance Leach, 42, with his housemates, Wayne Hovack, 40, and Neil Heizer, 31, in Gary. The men scratch out a meager existence, mostly from disability checks. They pool their resources to pay for food, electricity, water, and heat. In towns like Gary, communal living is common.

When he graduated from the consolidated high school in Welch in 1987, Leach drifted. He went to Florida and worked for the railroad. He returned home and worked in convenience stores. He held a job for 11 years for Turner Vision, a company that took orders for satellite dishes. He lost the job when the company was sold. He worked at Welch Community Hospital for six months and then as an assistant manager of the McDowell 3, the Welch movie theater. His struggle with drugs, which he acknowledges but does not want to discuss in detail, led to his losing his position at the theater. He is preparing to start a course to become licensed as a Methodist minister and serves the two local United Methodist churches, neither of which muster more than about a half dozen congregants on a Sunday. The 20 theology classes, which cost $300 a class, are held on weekends in Ripley, about four hours from Gary.

Leach is seated in his small living room with Hovack, who bought the house when his home was destroyed by flooding, and Heizer. Hovack was given $40,000 from the Federal Emergency Management Authority to relocate. Heizer tells us how he almost lost his life from an overdose a few weeks before.

The three men are the sons and grandsons of coal miners. None of them worked in the mines.
“My dad worked with his dad,” Heizer says, nodding towards Leach. “My grandfather died in the coal mines in 1965. He had a massive heart attack. Forty-nine years old.”

“It was good growin’ up in McDowell County twenty-plus years ago,” Leach says.
“Except for when the mines would go on strike,” adds Hovack. “That was rough. I can remember that.”

“Welch used to be a boomin’ place,” Vance says. “When you went to Welch you really thought you went somewhere.”

“Used to be about three thee-ay-ters in Welch many, many years ago,” Leach says.
“All them stores,” says Hovack. “I can remember my mom goin’ to take me to Penny’s and Collins. An’ H&M. But when the U.S. Steel cleaning plant went out, that was it for this county.”

“I went to school here in Gary, and when the plant closed down I was ’bout twelve or thirteen and my friends in school would say, ‘My dad and mom, we’re movin’ ’cause they have to go look for work,” Hovack says.

“You seen a lot of people depressed after that, wonderin’ how they were gonna make it, how they were gonna pay their bills, how they were gonna live, how they were gonna pay their mortgage,” says Leach. “It was devastating. A lot of people didn’t have a good education, so there wasn’t anything else to turn to. The coal mines was all they ever knew. My dad, he didn’t finish high school. He quit in his senior year, went right into the mine.”

Heizer speaks in the slowed cadence of someone who puts a lot of medication into his body. He recently lost his car after crashing it into a fence. His life with his two roommates is sedentary. The three men each have a television in their bedrooms and two more they share, including the big-screen television that, along with an electric piano for Hovack, were bought with Heizer’s first disability check. The men spent the $20,000 from the check in a few days.

“I became disabled back in late 2006,” Heizer tells us. “I had degenerative disc disease and I hurt my back. I was workin’ at this convenience store. They knew that I had a back injury, but yet they had me come in on extra shifts and unload the truck. Now I’ve got four discs jus’ layin’ on top of each other, no cushion between them. For three years I lived here without an income, and my dad helped support me, and then last November I finally was awarded my disability.”

Heizer, who is gay, saw his drug addiction spiral out of control four years ago after his boyfriend committed suicide. He tells us he has been struggling with his weight -- he weighs 324 pounds -- as well as diabetes, gout, and kidney stones. These diseases are common in southern West Virginia and have contributed to a steady rise in mortality rates over the past three decades.

OxyContin takes a few hours to kick in when swallowed. If the pills are crushed, mixed with water, and injected with a syringe, the effect is immediate. Heizer says that after the drug companies began releasing pills with a rubbery consistency, they could not be ground down. Heizer heated the newer pills in a microwave and snorted them -- leading to his recent overdose. It took place at his mother’s house. He went into renal failure. He stopped breathing. His kidneys shut down. He was Medevac’d to a hospital in Charleston, the capital of West Virginia, where he stayed for four days.

“I was just sittin’ around watching TV and started aspiratin’,” Heizer says flatly. “The medication was goin’ into my lungs. You gurgle with every breath. You are drownin’, basically. I remember walkin’ down my mom’s steps and gettin’ in the ambulance. I remember at Welch, they put me on the respirator and then transferred me. After they put me on the respirator, I stopped breathing on my own. And then I remember in Charleston wakin’ up an’ they had my hands restrained so I wouldn’t pull the tubes out. I had a real close call.”

The men sit in front of their flat-screen television and chat about friends, classmates, and relatives who died of overdoses. Hovack talks about a niece in her early twenties, the mother of two small children. She recently died of a drug overdose. He tells us about a high-school classmate, an addict living in a shack we can see from the window. The shack has no electricity or running water. The men, who rarely leave the house, mention the high bails being set for selling drugs, with some reaching $50,000 to $80,000. They joke about elderly grandmothers being hauled off to prison for drug dealing.

“I’ve seen a lot of busts in the county over the last few years, and a lot of the people that have been arrested are elderly people that are sellin’ their medication just to live,” Vance says. “When I was workin’ at the hospital I seen ODs all the time. Young people were comin’ in. It’s bad. The depression and the pain. I guess some people that hang and live in this area, they just have to turn to somethin’.”

“Since the drug problem is so bad you see the crime rate as well,” Leach says. “People breakin’ into homes, stealin’ whatever they can to sell or pawn, just to keep up with their drug habit.”

Heizer, seven weeks later, dies of a drug overdose, sitting on the living room couch in front of the big-screen television.

Chris Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and writes a weekly column for Truthdig. He was part of the New York Times team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for the paper's coverage of global terrorism. He has written for numerous publications including Harper's Magazine, the Nation, Granta, and Foreign Affairs, and is the author of the bestsellers Death of the Liberal Class, Empire of Illusion, and War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. The above excerpt is from his new book, Days of Revolt, Days of Destruction.

Joe Sacco is widely hailed as the creator of war-reportage comics. He is the author of Palestine, Footnotes in Gaza (winner of the Ridenhour Book Prize), and Safe Area: Gorazde.

Copyright 2012 Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco

This excerpt is taken from Days of Revolt, Days of Destruction by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco (Nation Books), pp. 153-158.  All rights reserved.

By the Numbers: Escalating Violence Perpetrated by Jewish Israelis Against Palestinians and Other Non-Jews

FACT SHEET: A Culture of Impunity: Violence Against Non-Jews in Israel & the Occupied Territories
IMEU, Aug 20, 2012

Last week, two incidents involving Jewish Israeli civilians attacking Palestinians made headlines in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. On August 16, 2012, a firebomb was thrown at a Palestinian taxi in the occupied West Bank, injuring six members of one family, and the next day four Palestinian young men were beaten, one of them severely, by a mob of dozens of Jewish teens in Jerusalem. These incidents come just a few weeks after the US State Department Country Report on Terrorism for the first time described settler violence against Palestinians as "terrorism."

While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials frequently condemn violence by settlers and other Jews against Palestinians, human rights organizations, the United Nations, and European Union officials have questioned their sincerity, accusing the Israeli government of being complicit in, and even encouraging, violence against Palestinians and other non-Jews living in Israel and the occupied territories.

To put these latest acts of violence and the response of Israeli authorities into context, the IMEU offers the following fact sheet:

A CULTURE OF IMPUNITY: VIOLENCE AGAINST NON-JEWS
 in ISRAEL and the OCCUPIED TERRITORIES

Jump to a section:

Increasing Violence by Jewish Israelis Against Palestinians & Other Non-Jews

--Recent High-Profile Cases

--Skyrocketing Settler Violence

Israeli Government Complicity

--Failure to Investigate & Racism in the Legal System

--Incitement by Jewish-Israeli Politicians

--Incitement by Jewish Religious Leaders

INCREASING VIOLENCE BY JEWISH ISRAELIS AGAINST
PALESTINIANS & OTHER NON-JEWS

- Recent High-Profile Cases-

• On August 17, 2012, four young Palestinian men were attacked without provocation and severely beaten by a mob of dozens of Jewish teens in Jerusalem. According to witnesses, the teens had been roaming the neighborhood searching for Arabs to beat up. One of the victims was admitted to hospital in critical condition. Police and an eyewitness described the attack as a "lynching."

• On August 16, 2012 a firebomb was thrown at a Palestinian taxi traveling in the occupied West Bank. Six Palestinians, all members of the same family, were injured, including two four-year-old boys. As the car was clearly identifiable as belonging to a Palestinian, bearing a Palestinian license plate that distinguishes it from settler vehicles, and the attack took place in daylight, the perpetrator is believed to be a Jewish settler.

• In May 2012, a wave of anti-African racism and violence, including physical assaults and a string of arson attacks, hit Tel Aviv and other parts of Israel, fueled by inflammatory statements made about asylum seekers by Israeli politicians including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Interior Minister Eli Yishai. (See below: Incitement by Jewish-Israeli Politicians.)

• Also in May 2012, an Israeli settler was caught on video shooting at Palestinians near the city of Nablus in the northern West Bank, hitting one man in the face, while Israeli soldiers stood idly by.

• In March 2012, hundreds of mostly young, Jewish-Israeli soccer fans of the Beitar Jerusalem team entered the Malha Mall in West Jerusalem chanting "Death to the Arabs," jumping on tables, and attacking Palestinian workers.

- Skyrocketing Settler Violence -

• In July 2012, the UN and human rights organizations including B'Tselem and Al Haq, released a report documenting a sharp increase in the number of settler attacks against Palestinians and their property in recent years. According to the report, there has been approximately a 150% rise in violent settler attacks against Palestinians each year since 2008, with 154 attacks in the first half of 2012 alone.

• According to an April 2012 report from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, in 2011 three Palestinians were killed and 183 injured by Israeli settlers, and approximately 10,000 Palestinian-owned trees, primarily olive trees, were damaged or destroyed by settlers.

• In recent years, settlers have carried out a string of arson and vandalism attacks against mosques in the occupied territories and Israel. In 2011, there were 10 such attacks, part of the "price tag" campaign waged by hardline settlers in response to Israeli government actions they deem harmful to the settlement movement.

Click here for more on settler violence

ISRAELI GOVERNMENT COMPLICITY

• In June 2012, Dan Halutz, former chief of staff of the Israeli Army, said that the Netanyahu government isn't serious about stopping settler violence, stating: "If we wanted, we could catch them [settlers who are attacking Palestinians] and when we want to, we will."

• In March 2012, the Guardian newspaper reported that senior European Union officials had drafted a confidential report concluding that Jewish settlers are engaged in a systematic and growing campaign of violence against Palestinians and that "settler violence enjoys the tacit support of the state of Israel."

• Also in March 2012, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs released a report documenting the growing use of threats, violence and intimidation by Jewish settlers to deny Palestinians access to their water resources in the West Bank. The report criticized Israeli authorities for having "systematically failed to enforce the law on those responsible for these acts and to provide Palestinians with any effective remedy."

• In February 2012, it was revealed that Israeli Justice Minister Yaakov Neeman had been offering advice to extreme right-wing activists on how to seek pardons for Israeli Jews convicted of violent attacks against Palestinians and others.

- Failure to Investigate & Racism in the Legal System -

• According to Israeli human rights group Yesh Din, of the 642 cases of settler violence Palestinians reported to Israeli police between 2005 and 2012, 90% were closed after authorities failed to mount a proper investigation.

• Between September 2000 and December 2011, Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem lodged 57 complaints against Israeli soldiers who stood by and did nothing to prevent settler violence against Palestinians or their property. Of the 57 complaints, investigations were opened into only four, two of which were closed with no action taken.

• In July 2012, a Jewish teenager was sentenced to just 8 years in prison for brutally murdering a Palestinian man in February 2011, prompting renewed accusations that Israel's legal system treats Jews who commit violent acts against Palestinians more leniently that it does Palestinians accused of violence against Jews. The teen and three friends beat and stabbed a Palestinian to death after provoking a fight with him with racist verbal abuse.

• In August, 2012, in a plea deal with prosecutors, the only Israeli soldier to face serious charges stemming from Israel's bloody military assault on Gaza in the winter of 2008-9, was sentenced to just 45 days in prison for shooting and killing a 64-year-old Palestinian woman and her 37-year-old daughter who were carrying white flags. The decision again prompted criticism that Israel's military justice system doesn't place as much value on Palestinian lives as it does on Jewish Israeli lives.

- Incitement by Jewish-Israeli Politicians -

• In May 2012, Israeli politicians, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, helped incite a wave of anti-African racism and violence targeting asylum seekers from countries such as Sudan and Eritrea. According to press reports, Netanyahu warned members of his cabinet that the "phenomenon of illegal infiltrators from Africa is extremely serious and threatens Israel's social fabric and national security." A few days later, a surge of violence against Africans, including physical assaults and arsons, erupted following a Tel Aviv rally where members of the Israeli parliament made inflammatory remarks. Miri Regev, of Netanyahu's Likud party, told the crowd that Sudanese asylum seekers were a "cancer in our body."

• In June 2012, Shas party leader and Interior Minister Eli Yishai told an interviewer that Israel "belongs to us, to the white man." The previous month, Yishai helped fuel anti-African violence, complaining that African asylum seekers threatened to "bury the Zionist dream."

• In July 2012, Israeli parliamentarian Aryeh Eldad called publicly for the destruction of Al Aqsa mosque in occupied East Jerusalem's Old City and for a new Jewish temple to be built in its place. Eldad is reportedly planning to introduce an extremely provocative bill to the Knesset calling for the mosque to be opened for Jewish prayer half of the time.

• Following the wave of racist incitement and violence against African asylum seekers in May 2012, a poll by the Israel Democracy Institute found that 52% of Israeli Jews agreed with the claim made by parliamentarian Miri Regev, of Prime Minister Netanyahu's Likud party, that Africans living illegally in Israel were a "cancer" in the body of Israel, and that 33.5% of Israeli Jews said they supported violent attacks against Africans.

Click here for more on institutionalized discrimination against non-Jews in Israel

- Incitement by Jewish Religious Leaders -

• In May 2012, Rabbi Aharon Leib Steinman, the spiritual leader of the United Torah Judaism party, which is a part of Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition government, told a conference in the city of Beit Shemesh that non-Jews are "murderers, thieves and senseless," stating: "Today they say there are eight billion people in the world. And what are they all? Murderers, thieves and senseless. Did God create the world for these murderers? The world was created for the righteous people who study Torah. That is the purpose of creation ... The nations of the world have no redeeming qualities."

• Also in May 2012, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the spiritual leader of the Shas party, which is part of Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition government, said that doctors who were religious Jews shouldn't treat non-Jews on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, even if the patient's life was in danger, stating: "If a gentile were to get injured in a car accident during Sabbath, and he is brought to the hospital – Israel must not treat him." He concluded "the Torah forbids to violate the Sabbath for gentiles." (See below for more on Yosef's history of making racist and inflammatory remarks.)

• In February 2012, the influential chief rabbi of settlements in Hebron and Kiryat Arba, Dov Lior, called President Barack Obama a "kushi," a derogatory term for individuals of African descent, and compared him to Haman, a biblical enemy of the Jewish people. He also called for increased settlement activity in the occupied Palestinian West Bank, in order to "eradicate the jungle."

• In September 2011, Lior, who's salary is paid by the Israeli government, told a conference that Arabs are "wolves," "savages," and "evil camel riders." Earlier in 2011, he warned Jewish women against marrying non-Jewish women, stating: "Gentile sperm leads to barbaric offspring."

• In October 2011, former Chief Military Rabbi Avihai Rontzki told an interviewer that Palestinians suspected of being involved in militant activity should "be shot, exterminated," and killed "in their beds," instead of being arrested.

• In the summer of 2011, the chief rabbi of the city of Safed, Shmuel Eliyahu, who is also on the government payroll, told reporters: "Arab culture is very cruel; a Jew should not run away from an Arab. A Jew should chase away Arabs," and "Expelling Arabs from Jewish neighborhoods is part of the strategy." Eliyahu had previously decreed in 2010 that it was forbidden for Jews to rent or sell property to non-Jews, advocated the carpet bombing of Gaza, and called on the government to hang the children of Palestinian militants.

• In December 2010, dozens of municipal chief rabbis on the government payroll signed a letter supporting Eliyahu and his decree prohibiting Jews from renting property to Gentiles. One of the signatories, Rabbi Yosef Scheinen, head of the Ashdod Yeshiva, stated, "Racism originated in the Torah…The land of Israel is designated for the people of Israel."

• Also in December 2010, the wives of 30 prominent rabbis signed an open letter calling on Jewish women not to date or work with non-Jews. The letter stated: "For your sake, for the sake of future generations, and so you don't undergo horrible suffering, we turn to you with a request, a plea, a prayer. Don't date non-Jews, don't work at places that non-Jews frequent, and don't do national service with non-Jews."

• In September 2010, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the spiritual leader of the Shas party, which is part of Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition government, declared that non-Jews were created to "serve" Jews, stating: "Goyim [non-Jews] were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world - only to serve the People of Israel... Why are gentiles needed? They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi and eat."

• In August 2010, on the eve of peace talks between Palestinian and Israeli leaders in Washington DC, Yosef delivered a sermon describing Palestinians as "evil, bitter enemies" and calling on god to make them "perish from this world" by striking them with a plague. Previously, in 2001,Yosef gave a sermon in which he stated: "It is forbidden to be merciful to [Arabs]. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable…The Lord shall return the Arabs' deeds on their own heads, waste their seed and exterminate them, devastate them and vanish them from this world."

• In August 2010, Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, head of a state-funded religious school in the West Bank settlement of Yitzhar, published a book condoning the murder of non-Jewish children because they may grow up to pose a threat to the state, writing that non-Jews are "uncompassionate by nature" and attacks against them "curb their evil inclination." The book was subsequently endorsed by a number of other high-profile rabbis. In July 2012, an investigation by Israeli authorities into allegations that the book amounted to incitement was closed without any charges being filed.

Pussy Riot Cat's Paw of Western NGO's

Pussy Riot, The Unfortunate Dupes of Amerikan Hegemony

 

By Paul Craig Roberts

My heart goes out to the three Russian women who comprise the Russian rock band, Pussy Riot. They were brutally deceived and used by the Washington-financed NGOs that have infiltrated Russia. Pussy Riot was sent on a mission that was clearly illegal under statutory law.

You have to admire and to appreciate the spunk of the young women. But you have to bemoan their gullibility. Washington needed a popular issue with which to demonize the Russian government for standing up to Washington’s intention to destroy Syria, just as Washington destroyed Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, and as Washington intends to destroy Lebanon and Iran. 

By intentionally offending religious worshipers--which would be a hate crime in the US and its European and British puppet states--the talented young women violated a statutory Russian law.  

Prior to the women’s trial, Russian President Putin expressed his opinion that the women should not be harshly punished. Taking the cue from Putin, the judge gave the women, deceived and betrayed by the amerikan-financed NGOs, two years instead of seven years. 

I am advised that after six months, Putin will see that the women are released.  But, of course, that would not serve the propaganda of the Amerikan Empire.  The instructions to the Washington-financed fifth column in Russia will be to make any government leniency for Pussy Riot impossible. 

Washington-organized protests, riots, property damage, assaults on state and religious images by Washington’s Russian dupes will make it impossible for Putin to stand up to nationalist opinion and commute the sentences of the Pussy Riot women.

This is what Washington wants. As Washington continues to murder vast numbers of people around the globe, it will point its finger at the fate of Pussy Riot. The western bought-and-paid-for presstitute media will focus on Russia’s evil, not on the evil of Washington, London, and the EU puppet states who are slaughtering Muslims by the bucket-full.

The disparity between human rights in the west and in the east is astonishing. When a Chinese trouble-maker sought protection from Washington, the Chinese “authoritarian” government allowed the person to leave for America.  But when Julian Assange, who, unlike the presstitute western media, actually provides truthful information for the western peoples, was granted political asylum by Ecuador, Great (sic) Britain, bowing to the country’s amerikan master, refused the obligatory free passage from the UK.

The UK government, unlike the Chinese government, doesn’t mind violating international law, because it will be paid buckets of money by Washington for being a pariah state.

As Karl Marx said, money turns everything into a commodity that can be bought and sold:  government, honor, morality, the writing of history, legality. Nothing is immune to purchase.  

This development of capitalism has reached the highest stage in the US and its puppet states, the governments of which sell out the interest of their peoples in order to please Washington and be made rich, like Tony Blair’s $35 million. Sending their citizens to fight for Washington’s empire in distant parts of the world is the service for which the utterly corrupt European politicians are paid. 

Despite the wondrous entity known as European Democracy, the European peoples and the British are unable to do anything about their misuse in Washington’s interest. This is a new form of slavery. If a country is an amerikan ally, its people are amerikan slaves.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. www.paulcraigroberts.org/

US Drone Strikes Target Rescuers in Pakistan – and the West Stays Silent

Attacking rescuers – a tactic long deemed by the US a hallmark of terrorism – is now routinely used by the Obama administration

By Glenn Greenwald

August 20, 2012 "Information Clearing House" ----   The US government has long maintained, reasonably enough, that a defining tactic of terrorism is to launch a follow-up attack aimed at those who go to the scene of the original attack to rescue the wounded and remove the dead. Morally, such methods have also been widely condemned by the west as a hallmark of savagery. Yet, as was demonstrated yet again this weekend in Pakistan, this has become one of the favorite tactics of the very same US government.

A 2004 official alert from the FBI warned that "terrorists may use secondary explosive devices to kill and injure emergency personnel responding to an initial attack"; the bulletin advised that such terror devices "are generally detonated less than one hour after initial attack, targeting first responders as well as the general population". Security experts have long noted that the evil of this tactic lies in its exploitation of the natural human tendency to go to the scene of an attack to provide aid to those who are injured, and is specifically potent for sowing terror by instilling in the population an expectation that attacks can, and likely will, occur again at any time and place:

"'The problem is that once the initial explosion goes off, many people will believe that's it, and will respond accordingly,' [the Heritage Foundation's Jack] Spencer said … The goal is to 'incite more terror. If there's an initial explosion and a second explosion, then we're thinking about a third explosion,' Spencer said."

Assange Speaks from Ecuador's London Embassy

by Democracy Now!

Goring Vidal's Political and Literary Legacy

'The Man Who Knew Everyone' - Gore Vidal Through The Eyes Of The One Per Cent Press

by David Edwards - Media Lens

Gore Vidal took great delight in demolishing the fragile confections of ‘mainstream’ politics. While corporate journalists typically portray US Presidents as benign demigods, Vidal described George W. Bush as ‘the stupidest man in the United States’. In 2008, Vidal said of the 2003 war on Iraq:

‘You can see little Bush all along was just dreaming of war, and also Cheney dreaming about oil wells and how you knock apart a country like Iraq and of course their oil will pay for the damage you do. For that alone, he should have been put in front of a firing squad… They - Cheney, Bush - they wanted the war. They’re oilmen. They want a war to get more oil. They’re also extraordinarily stupid. These people don’t know anything about anything.'

When asked how he wanted to be remembered, Vidal replied: ‘I don’t give a goddamn.’

Just as well. As the above comments make clear, not only did Vidal's analysis lack any semblance of what corporate journalists call ‘nuance’, he poured scorn on their entire profession:

‘I tried to explain to the press club what it is they do that they don't know they do. I quote David Hume: “The Few are able to control the Many only through Opinion.” In the eighteenth century, Opinion was dispensed from pulpit and schoolroom. Now the media are in place to give us Opinion that has been manufactured in the boardrooms of those corporations - once national, now international - that control our lives.’ (Vidal, Virgin Islands - Essays 1992-1997, Andre Deutsch, 1997, p.188)

This, of course, is the same 'press club' that has been reviewing Vidal's life and work since his death on July 31.

Sex, Flag, Foetus

A celebrated novelist, essayist and screenwriter, Vidal's primary focus in the last two decades of his life was overwhelmingly on radical political analysis. He wrote books with titles likes ‘Perpetual War For Perpetual Peace’ (2002), ‘Dreaming War – Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta’ (2003), and ‘Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia’ (2004). Vidal argued that corporate power had overthrown democracy in the United States and was waging a permanent war for profit around the planet.

So how much attention would we expect the corporate media to afford Vidal's political dissent in accurately and honestly reviewing his oeuvre? This comment from 1998 indicates his own expectation:

‘When a ruling establishment will not let daylight in on their workings because they own the media as well as the permanent rental of most of Congress, judiciary and executive, that doesn’t leave much to talk about at election time except sex, the flag, the foetus and, in the good old days, Communism. So the fact that Clinton’s sex life is now central to our political discourse is par for the current course.' (Vidal, ‘New World Ordure,’ The Observer, January 25, 1998)

And indeed reviews of Vidal’s own life have mostly focused on ‘sex, the flag, the foetus’, as it were, with literary editors leading the way. In the Independent, Boyd Tonkin opened with:

‘One evening, when I dined with Gore Vidal, he told me all about the time he outpolled his good friend Jack Kennedy. There: does that capture the late Master's sleek tone of name-dropping omniscience?’

Gaby Wood, Head of Books at the Telegraph, wrote:

‘There was a time when a visit to Gore Vidal at his villa in Ravello was the literary equivalent of Lourdes… He was related to Jackie Kennedy, he campaigned (unsuccessfully) with Eleanor Roosevelt. He would shake his head over stars of Hollywood’s golden age as if he were their maiden aunt mourning an unfortunate choice of boyfriend (“Well, Rita [Hayworth] never had any luck”)… ’

And so on…

Thus is the life of an important political dissident boiled down and strained through the ‘culture’ pages of the one per cent press, leaving a glutinous residue of ‘celebrity’ and ‘glamour’. Wood added:

'It does not, perhaps, fall to strangers to wonder whether the great literary socialite was bitter because he was lonely. But eventually, his famous bon mots became so outlandish that they rattled many of his sometime admirers. Was it the drink, the passing of time, or a consistent commitment to the holding of unpredictable opinions? Some rolled their eyes, others laughed, and one or two, at least, took it upon themselves to hold him to account.'

In the Telegraph, Philip Hensher noted that Vidal was ‘the man who knew everyone’. But there was a dark side: ‘an immense series of perverse, but massively well-informed, anti-readings of American history’ and ‘even more perverse essays on public and literary matters’.

This recalled Steve Crawshaw’s comment in the Independent on how ‘Chomsky knows so much... but seems impervious to any idea of nuance.’ (Crawshaw, ‘Furious ideas with no room for nuance,’ The Independent, February 21, 2001)

Hensher had nothing serious to say about why Vidal’s reading of American history should be considered ‘perverse’. In the Independent, Christopher Hawtree described how Vidal would often look at the country of his birth ‘askance’. Again, readers had to work out for themselves what that might mean, with Vidal’s ‘opposition to the Israeli lobby within America’ offered as a throwaway clue.

Quoting Vidal in the Sunday Times, Andrew Sullivan provided a rare mainstream glimpse of what Hensher and Hawtree surely had in mind:

‘There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party... and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats... But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.’ (Andrew Sullivan, ‘The twin sources of Vidal's vitriol; The death of a young love and despair for his country gave the writer his voice,’ Sunday Times, August 5, 2012)

Clearly, then, Sullivan observed, when it came to covering 20th century America, Vidal’s ‘anger, bile and resentment got the better of him’.

Alas, the same weakness afflicted the late Harold Pinter. In The New York Times, James Traub found the playwright’s politics ‘so extreme... it is hard to think of anyone save Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal who would not choke on Pinter's bile’. (Traub, ‘Their Highbrow Hatred of Us,’ New York Times, October 30, 2005)

The sage minds of the corporate media occasionally puzzled over Pinter’s malfunctioning moral gallbladder. In the Independent, the precocious Johann Hari wrote:

‘Ever since Pinter was a teenager, he has been relentlessly contrarian, kicking out violently against anything that might trigger his rage that day.’

Pinter was just a classic left loon, then, the target of his ire incidental.

Sullivan at least found a little more method in Vidal’s madness:

‘Why such anger? That's the question of his life.’

‘His soulmate died in warfare at the age of 19… Vidal carried this wound for a lifetime - building an armoury of wit, bile and erudition to protect himself from another. But another was coming. For Vidal, his other great love, the American republic, died of warfare in 1941. So much of his writing after that is rooted in anger.’

To this psycho-political babble, Sullivan added the standard smear:

‘Vidal ruined his case by exaggeration, of course, and absurd moral equivalence. There were times when he blithely dismissed the horrors committed by America's enemies - such as the Vietcong or Al-Qaeda - while never failing to note America's own hypocrisy and paranoia and occasional clumsy cruelty abroad.’

It is tempting to psychoanalyse Sullivan’s own view of America’s cruelty as ‘occasional’, ‘clumsy’ and 'abroad'. He concluded of Vidal: ‘his [gay] sexual orientation was surely central to this: it fuelled a grief that he could never be the statesman he once yearned to be, in a country he subsequently loved to hate’.
There is an alternative explanation: Vidal had a functioning brain and heart, and a sufficiently independent mind to perceive the mass killing of innocents in pursuit of maximised US profit.

David Aaronovitch wrote in The Times:

‘Bit by bit Vidal transformed himself from thinker to polemicist. His political essays, much loved in the anti-American press over here, began to take on a mildly unhinged quality.’ (Aaronovitch, ‘Praise to the man who beat about Mr Bush; Gore Vidal dazzled in his early novels and essays, but gradually turned into a mildly unhinged isolationist,’ The Times, August 2, 2012)

Readers will struggle to find a better example of what psychologists call ‘projection’.

Echoing the standard obsession, a Guardian article was entitled: ‘Adam Mars-Jones my lunch at the Dorchester with Gore Vidal.’ Mars-Jones commented: ‘few writers have shown so much flair in using television to maintain their public image’.

In fact, as Vidal made clear, his political analysis had long been banished from our screens:

‘The press won't report me, television is shut to me, I've been erased. Noam Chomsky never had a chance, he never had a great public; but I had one through my books and movies and plays and of course essay writing. Now I am no longer a guest on anything where I might cause trouble, where I might say something that they would find embarrassing, which would be practically anything I would say about how the country is run. So I am the perfect example of censorship in the United States.’ ('I am the perfect example of censorship in the United States'. Gore Vidal talks to Michael March about history, the cold war and who really runs America, the Guardian, March 29, 2001)

Consider, as discussed, that Vidal was a rare honest and articulate opponent of the Iraq war. In October 2002, we checked the Guardian/Observer website and found that it had mentioned Iraq in some 2,381 articles in that crucial year of propaganda hype before the war was launched in March 2003. By October 19, the words ‘Bush’ and ‘Iraq’ had been mentioned in 1,263 of these articles. The words ‘Gore Vidal’ and ‘Iraq’ had been mentioned in seven articles.

Precisely because Vidal's dissent was excluded by the media, the Telegraph obituary was able to get away with this dumbed down version:

‘By the 1980s, Vidal observed, politics had become trivialised by television, its substance and debate replaced by flickering images, its figures transmuted into talking heads allowed only seconds to make arguments about the future of the nation and the world.’

He ‘detected a failure of education, manners on the decline, and political leaders cynical, ignorant and blinded to the realities of the outside world’.

The analysis was itself a good example of the kind of trivialisation it was describing. Quite simply, since Vidal's death the corporate media have had nothing serious to say about his political dissent warning against the dominance of corporate power.

Vidal's summing up certainly generalises to UK politics and media:

‘The bullshit just flows and flows and flows, and the American media is so corrupt and so tied into it that it never questions it.’

Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook, Rod Marining, Ramzy Baroud, Janine Bandcroft Aug. 20, 2012

Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, airing live every Monday, 5-6pm Pacific Time. In Victoria at 101.9FM, 104.3 cable, and on the internet at: http://cfuv.uvic.ca.  He also serves as a contributing editor to the web news site, http://www.pacificfreepress.com. Check out the GR blog at: http://GorillaRadioBlog.blogspot.com

Every day seems to bring news of more proposed pipelines and projects in British Columbia, and though the citizenry has overwhelmingly voiced opposition to the new carbon rush sweeping the land, Stephen Harper has vowed unstoppable support. The two best known project proposals for the province are the so-called "twinning" of the existing Kinder Morgan pipeline, that has until now quietly issued Tar Sands product all the way from Alberta's Satanic Mills, disgorging at the Port of Vancouver, and the proposed creation of the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline, that hopes to see the Tar Sands goo transported to Kitimat, then transshipped through the treacherous coastal fjords and inland islands en route to China's insatiable industrial maw. Lesser known than these though is the Pacific Trail Pipeline, designed to facilitate gas Fracked from B.C.'s Northwest. Earlier this month, the Caravan to Wet'suwet'en launched from towns and cities across B.C. and North America, to converge at the Pacific Trail/Enbridge Northern Gateway right-of-way.

Rod Mariner is a long-time environment defender, a co-founder of Greenpeace International, navigator of the Sea Shepherd vessels Farley Mowat and Steve Irwin, among others, Chair of the BC Environmental Network, Listserve manager for the Landwatch Campaign, and Coordinator for PATH, or People's Action for Threatened Habitats. Rod departed with the Caravan to Wet'suwet'en from the lower mainland a couple of weeks back, and joins us in the first segment with reports of the caravan and their getting in the path of a promised pipeline at the heart of B.C.

And; they're baaack. Yes, the Neocons have resurfaced! Rebranded and up to their bloody elbows in mischief again, the folks that brought you the Balkans, Iraqs I and II, Afghanistan, and Libya, are front and centre of the Washington war lobby pack and afroth at the mouth for more gore. Syria is just one project for the Foreign Policy Initiative, or FPI. That is the new monicker for the war mongers formerly known as the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). You remember them don't you: William Kristol, Robert Kagan, Prince of Darkness, Richard Perle? You may recall too some of their fellow travelers: Daniel Pipes, Paul Wolfowitz, James Woolsey, Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, and the rest who spent thousands of hours between them convincing the world, - yeah convincing - that bin Laden did 9/11, and Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, etc., etc. Oh, it's just like old times on the Potomac. Yes, with war and rumours of war in the air, Suite 325 11 DuPont Circle, Washington, D.C.  is the address to go to to find Kristol's and Kagan's reformed war factory, busy spinning truth, justice, and the American way.

Ramzy Baroud is a Palestinian-American journalist, editor, educator, and former Al-Jazeera producer. Ramzy is currently Editor-in-Chief of the Palestine Chronicle and author of the books, 'Searching Jenin: Eyewitness Accounts of the Israeli Invasion,' 'The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People's Struggle,' and his latest book, 'My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story.' Ramzy's work can also be found at his website, ramzybaroud.net. Ramzy Baroud and Neocons on the Wing over Syria in the second half.

And; Victoria Street Newz publisher and CFUV Radio broadcaster, Janine Bandcroft will join us at the bottom of the hour to bring us newz from the city's streets and beyond. But first, Rod Marining and the next stage of resistance to Big Oil in B.C.