Dear Obama; What Happened?

The Barack Obama Story (Updated) - How a Community Organizer and Constitutional Law Professor Became a Robot President

by Tom Engelhardt  - TomDispatch 

President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, D.C. 20500

Dear President Obama,

Nothing you don’t know, but let me just say it: the world’s a weird place. In my younger years, I might have said “crazy,” but that was back when I thought being crazy was a cool thing and only regretted I wasn’t.

I mean, do you ever think about how you ended up where you are? And I'm not actually talking about the Oval Office, though that’s undoubtedly a weird enough story in its own right.

After all, you were a community organizer and a constitutional law professor and now, if you stop to think about it, here’s where you’ve ended up: you’re using robots to assassinate people you personally pick as targets. You’ve overseen and escalated off-the-books robot air wars in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, and are evidently considering expanding them to Mali and maybe even Libya. You’ve employed what will someday be defined as a weapon of mass destruction, launching history’s first genuine cyberwar against a country that isn’t threatening to attack us. You’ve agreed to the surveillance of more Americans every which way from Sunday than have ever been listened in on or (given emailing, texting, and tweeting) read. You came into office proclaiming a “sunshine” policy and yet your administration has classified more documents (92,064,862 in 2011) than any other in our history. Despite signing a Whistleblower Enhancement Protection Act, you’ve used the Espionage Act on more government whistleblowers and leakers than all previous administrations combined, and yet your officials continue to leak secret material they see as advantageous to the White House without fear of prosecution. Though you deep-sixed the Bush administration name for it -- “the Global War on Terror” (ridding the world of GWOT, one of the worst acronyms ever) -- you’ve accepted the idea that we are “at war” with terror and on a “global battlefield” which (see above) you’re actually expanding. You’re still keeping uncharged, untried prisoners of not-quite-war in an offshore military prison camp of injustice that, on the day you came into office, you promised to close within a year. You’re overseeing planning that, according to recent reports, will continue the Afghan War in some form until at least 2017 or possibly well beyond. You preside over an administration that has encouraged the further militarization of the CIA (to which you appointed as director not a civilian but a four-star general you assumedly wanted to tuck safely away during campaign season). You’ve overseen the further militarization of the State Department; you’ve encouraged a major expansion of the special operations forces and its secret presidential army, the Joint Special Operations Command, cocooned inside the U.S. military/ You’ve overseen the further post-9/11 expansion of an already staggering national security budget and the further growth of our labyrinthine “Intelligence Community” -- and though who remembers anymore, you even won what must have been the first prospective Nobel Prize for Peace more or less before you did a damn thing, and then thanked the Nobel Committee with a full-throated defense of the right of the U.S. to do what it pleased, militarily, on the planet! And if that isn’t a weird legacy-in-formation, what is?

I mean, you have my sympathies. The Bush administration did you no favors. You inherited hell for a foreign policy and when it came to matters like Guantanano, the Republicans in Congress hung you out to dry.

Still, who woulda thunk it? Don’t these “accomplishments” of yours sometimes amaze you? Don’t you ever wake up in the middle of the night wondering just who you are? Don’t you, like me, open your eyes some mornings in a state of amazement about just how you ended up on this particular fast-morphing planet? Are you as stunned as I am by the fact that a tanker carrying liquid natural gas is now making a trip from Norway to Japan across the winter waters of the Arctic? Twenty days at sea lopped off an otherwise endless voyage via the Mediterranean Sea, and the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Did you ever think you’d live to see the opening of the Northeast Passage in winter? Don’t you find it ironic that fossil fuels, which helped burn that oceanic hole in the Arctic ice, were the first commercial products shipped through those open waters? Don’t you find it just a tad odd that you can kill someone in distant Yemen without the slightest obstacle and yet you’ve been able to do next to nothing when it comes to global warming? I mean, isn’t that world-championship weird, believe-it-or-not bizarre, and increasingly our everyday reality?

Aren’t you amazed that your Pentagon has recently issued a directive meant to ensure that armed robots will never kill human beings on their own? Not so long ago, that was the stuff of sci-fi; now, it’s the subject of a bureaucratic document. Tell that to Skynet someday, right?

Who could make this stuff up? Maybe William Gibson -- maybe he already did -- but not me and my guess is not you either.

Putting Yourself in a Box

I know that we humans are terrible at predicting the future. Still, if I had told you back in, say, 2003 that, in the wake of a lawless administration, we would vote a constitutional lawyer into the White House as a “peace candidate” and he’d do exactly what you’ve done so far (see, again, above), you wouldn’t have believed it, would you? And if I had told you it would be you, I’ll put my money on your laughing me out of any room (not that I’ve ever been in a room with you).

Just the other day, something leaked by two “administration officials” onto the front-page of the New York Times got me started on this letter. In a piece headlined “Election Spurred a Move to Codify U.S. Drone Policy,” reporter Scott Shane wrote that, fearing you might lose to Mitt Romney, you were rushing to develop “a formal rule book,” including “explicit rules for the targeted killing of terrorists by unmanned drones, so that a new president would inherit clear standards and procedures.” You won the election, of course, but Shane claims you’re “still pushing” -- though at a far more leisurely pace -- “to make the rules formal and resolve... exactly when lethal action is justified.”

To use your term, you are putting “a legal architecture” in place for a process of White House-directed robotic assassination -- you call them “targeted killings” -- that will assumedly be long-lasting. These are acts that in the years before 9/11, as Shane points out, Washington used to condemn when Israel committed them and that most countries consider illegal to this day.

I understand why the idea of Mitt Romney as assassin-in-chief made you nervous and why you wanted to put him in a straitjacket of drone codification. But it’s hard not to ask -- and I’m not the first to do so -- what about you? It’s human nature to trust ourselves over the other guy, but has it occurred to you that some of us might have the same reaction to you at the helm of a globalizing robot war as you had to Mitt?

In any case, haven’t you already managed to do to yourself what you planned to do to him -- without cutting down the killing appreciably, including the deaths of civilians, children, at least four American citizens, and a Yemeni deputy provincial governor who had nothing to do with al-Qaeda? If press reports are to be believed, you’ve already been fully involved in regularizing, bureaucratizing, legalizing, and codifying your drone wars. In other words, you’ve put yourself deep inside a developing system in which you no longer have a hope in hell of imagining the world any other way.

Here’s a little history of the process (not that you of all people don’t already know it): You inherited an ad hoc Bush administration program of CIA drone strikes in the Pakistani tribal borderlands that started in 2004 and was originally aimed at top al-Qaeda types. But as will happen, those “targeted killings” became ever less targeted, spreading to lower level al-Qaeda types, Taliban leaders, Taliban "foot soldiers," and finally what came to be called “signature strikes” against “patterns of behavior.” (A group of military-age males with weapons, say, in an area believed to be controlled by Islamic extremists.)

We know that President Bush took you aside at the changeover moment and urged you to continue the drone wars in Pakistan (along with his cyberwar program against Iran). And though it must have been very new to you, you did so, expanding them in Pakistan and extending them in a major way to Yemen, while ever more drone bases were built in key areas of the world and ever more drones ordered up.

As this happened, those wars became ever less ad hoc, ever more organized and bureaucratic. A regular process for deciding on individual “targets” came into being. You had your “baseball cards” (PowerPoint slides on potential individuals to target) that you discussed in your regular “Terror Tuesday” meetings. Where once George W. Bush kept in his desk drawer a “personal scorecard,” a list of bad guys to cross out whenever one of them was killed, you now have an official “kill list.” Where once these strikes were just launched, you got the Office of Legal Counsel to produce a 50-page legalistic justification for using drones to kill a U.S. citizen. It and other legal memos on drone use have never been released to the public or even to congressional leaders. Still, your top officials feel free to use them to their advantage in public defense of U.S. counterterror policies. (Note that the Bush administration did the same thing with its torture policies, producing Justice Department “torture memos” that “legalized” acts which, in almost any other context, or if committed by any enemy nation, would have been denounced as nightmarish acts of international illegality and that, in the past, the U.S. had prosecuted as crimes of war.)

Now, Shane reports, you’ve had the urge to codify it all and so institutionalize a presidential right to conduct assassination campaigns without regard to Congress, the American people, national sovereignty, the world, or previous standards of legality. And that is an accomplishment of the first order. I mean -- Voilà! -- you’ve officially created the box that no one can think outside of.

You are -- so the story goes -- the most powerful man on Earth. From the Oval Office, you should have the widest of wide-angle views. But sometimes don’t you feel that you’re trapped like a rat inside a maze in part (but only in part) of your own creation?

Dreaming Before It’s Too Late

Of course, I’ve never gotten nearer to the Oval Office than Pennsylvania Avenue, so what do I know about how it's like there? Still, I’m older than you and I do know how repetitive acts rigidify, how one possible way morphs into the only way, how one limited system of living comes to seem like the only option on Earth. It happens with age. It also happens in Washington.

The other day, I noted this little passage in a New York Times report on the discovery of huge quantities of ice on Mercury: “Sean C. Solomon, the principal investigator for [the spacecraft] Messenger, said there was enough ice there to encase Washington, D.C., in a frozen block two and a half miles deep.” I couldn’t help smiling. After all, the Washington I read about already seems enclosed in a block of ice, which is why, when it comes to the world, it so seldom thinks a new thought or acts in a new way.

If only you could reverse time and take a step back into the world of the community organizer. After all, what does such an organizer do, if not try to free people from the rigidities of their lives, the boxes they can’t think outside of, the blocks of ice they’re encased in, the acts that have come to dominate them and regularly wipe out any sense of alternative possibilities? What’s the point of community organizing if not to allow people to begin to imagine other ways of being and becoming?

Maybe you don’t even realize how you’ve been boxed into, and boxed yourself into, the codifications from hell, almost all based on our militarizing way of life. Outside that box where the bureaucratized killing takes place, where the “wars” are fought, and the battle plans are endlessly recalibrated in ways too familiar to matter, outside the airless world of the National Security Complex where one destructive set of ways has become the only way, there surely are other possibilities that could result in other kinds of worlds. After all, just because you’re trapped in a box doesn’t mean that the world is. Look at the Middle East. For better or worse, it visibly isn’t.

Back in 2009 when you first took office, I wrote a speech for you. In it, “you” told the American people that you were “ending, not expanding, two wars.” I knew that you would never give such a speech (no less read mine), but I did believe that, despite the “wisdom” of Washington, you could indeed have put both of Bush’s wars -- Iraq and Afghanistan -- behind you. We’ll never know, of course. You chose another path, a “surge” of 30,000 troops, CIA operatives, special forces operators, private contractors, and State Department types that led to yet more disastrous years in Afghanistan.

Unfortunately, the ghostly what-ifs of history count for nothing. Still, haven’t you ever wondered whether something else wasn't possible? Whether, for instance, sending bombs and missiles into poverty-stricken, essentially energy-less, essentially foodless Yemen was really and truly the way to world peace?

My apologies! I let sarcasm get the better of me. How about: really and truly the way to enhance U.S. national security? Honestly, Yemen? Most Americans couldn’t find it on the map to win the lottery, and according to reports, American drone and air strikes have actually increased membership in al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. And yet you won’t stop. You probably can’t.

Similarly, don’t you ever wonder whether a “pivot” to Asia, mainly involving military power and guaranteed to exacerbate regional relations in the Pacific is the best way to deal with the rising power of China? After all, what would it mean to go to war with the country which now holds well more than $1 trillion in U.S. debt? Wouldn’t it be like shooting ourselves in the foot, if not the head?

And don’t you ever wonder whether a labyrinth of 17 (yes, 17!) major agencies and outfits in the U.S. “Intelligence Community” (and even more minor ones), spending at least $75 billion annually, really makes us either safe or smart? Mightn’t we be more “intelligent” and less paranoid about the world if we spent so much less and relied instead on readily available open-source material?

I mean, there are so many things to dream about. So many ghostly possibilities to conjure up. So many experimental acts that offer at least a chance at another planet of possibility. It would be such a waste if you only reverted to your community-organizer or constitutional-law self after you left office, once “retirement syndrome” kicked in, once those drones were taking off at the command of another president and it was too late to do a thing. You could still dream then, but what good would those dreams do us or anyone else?

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as The End of Victory Culture, his history of the Cold War, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050. You can see his recent interview with Bill Moyers on supersized politics, drones, and other subjects by clicking here.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch book, Nick Turse’s The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare.

Copyright 2012 Tom Engelhardt

Reading the Killing Rule of Law

The “rule of law” and state killings

by Bill Van Auken and David North - WSWS

There are occasions when statements appearing in newspapers are so significant that one can justifiably predict they will be cited for years to come.

Such is the case with the November 29 editorial published by the New York Times entitled “Rules for Targeted Killing.” It marks another critical milestone in the repudiation of core democratic rights and constitutional principles by the US ruling establishment.

The editorial notes approvingly that the Obama administration is “developing rules for when to kill terrorists around the world.”

The drafting of these “rules” has been attributed to concerns within the administration in advance of the elections that “standards and procedures” be put in place in case Obama lost. Undoubtedly a more compelling motivation is the fear that one day they could all be indicted for war crimes. The new rules, and the Times editorial itself, are a tacit admission of criminality.

Nonetheless, the Times hails this “first step toward acknowledging that when the government kills people away from the battlefield, it must stay within formal guidelines based on the rule of law—especially when the life of an American citizen is at stake.”

To call such language Orwellian barely begins to do it justice.

“Targeted killings” or “when the government kills people away from the battlefield” are transparent euphemisms for state assassinations and extrajudicial murders, which are explicitly banned by international law and proscribed by the US Constitution. Over the last four years, the Obama administration has been carrying out such crimes on an industrial scale by means of drone missile attacks.

As for this policy targeting “terrorists,” the word itself has become an essential part of Washington newspeak, used to describe anyone seen as a direct or even potential obstacle to US global interests, and to label, ex post facto, anyone whom the US has killed.

The editorial acknowledges that the CIA, using remotely piloted aircraft, has carried out over 320 attacks in Pakistan alone, killing at least 2,560 people. According to the records kept by the Pakistani government, 80 percent of the dead have been innocent civilians. Many thousands more have been horribly maimed by Hellfire missiles, suffering brain injuries, the loss of limbs and severe burns.

Among those targeted for remote-control assassination have been several Americans, including the New Mexico-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, killed on September 30 of last year, and Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, murdered two weeks later, all three in Yemen.

The Times affirms that “formal guidelines based on the rule of law” should be observed “especially when the life of an American citizen is at stake.” The obvious implication is that murdering noncitizens is no major concern and can be done more or less at will, an odious distinction that exists nowhere in the US Constitution.

The more fundamental conception, however, is that “formal guidelines”—elsewhere the editorial stresses that “rules for killing…need to be rigorous and formalized”—somehow legitimize what is unquestionably the most heinous crime that a government can commit—taking human life without due process of law.

To speak of some set of “rules” or “guidelines” adopted by the executive branch to govern these killings being “based on the rule of law” is both legally fraudulent and morally obscene. The entire program of drone assassinations represents a repudiation in practice of the bedrock principles of law, ranging from habeas corpus to the right to confront one’s accusers and the right to receive a trial by a jury of one’s peers.

An inherently criminal practice cannot be made legal, let alone constitutional, by cloaking it in a set of procedures and regulations drawn up in secret and implemented by high-ranking state officials. In its day, the Nazi regime drew up all sorts of secret procedures that served as a framework for mass killings. The guidelines and rules cooked up by Obama and his military and intelligence aides in the course of “terror Tuesday” sessions can no more legitimize this practice than the voluminous rules and regulations promulgated by the Third Reich could legalize mass murder under the Nazis.

If the US government is empowered to carry out the extrajudicial execution of US citizens and noncitizens alike overseas, it is only a matter of time—that is, a matter of waiting for a carefully crafted political opportunity—before the president orders an assassination within the United States.

This is implicit in the feeble assertion by the Times editorial that, “Standard police methods should be used on American soil.” The fact that the Times feels obliged to include this timid reminder in its editorial can only mean that its publisher and editors are well aware that a practice of targeted killings within the United States is under active consideration by the Obama administration. There is nothing at this point that is “off the table” when it comes to the use of state violence.

The editorial insists that “if an American citizen operating abroad is targeted, due process is required.” What will this “due process” consist of? Certainly, it will have nothing to do with the rights guaranteed by the US Constitution. Rather, it will consist of a set of administrative procedures put in place by a cabal of military officers, intelligence operatives and the US president. They will be authorized to act as judge, jury and executioner.

The New York Times suggests that the formal requirements of due process might be satisfied by “the formation of a special court, like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, that could review the evidence regarding a target before that person is placed on a kill list.”

In other words, the state would set up a Star Chamber—a secret extralegal body—whose function would be to rubber-stamp murders ordered by the CIA and the military, much as the FISA court now acts in relation to the government’s domestic spying.

It goes without saying that every member of this “special court” would be a carefully vetted and longtime member of the state intelligence bureaucracy, pledged to secrecy.

Little more than a decade ago, Washington publicly condemned “targeted killings,” a term invented by Israel to justify its illegal assassination program against the Palestinians. And a generation back, assassinations carried out by the CIA, earning it the nickname Murder, Inc., were the subject of extensive congressional investigations and hearings that resulted in such killings being branded illegal.

On June 5, 1975, the New York Times quoted approvingly the late Senator Frank Church’s condemnation of state assassinations. “I don’t care who may have ordered it. Murder is murder. The United States is not a wicked country and we cannot abide a wicked government.”

Thirty-seven years later, the Times does not have any principled objection to assassinations. It only desires that murders be carried out in accordance with a set of bureaucratically administered rules.

The Times’ editorial provides an insight into the mentality that prevails within growing layers of the ruling elite and its affluent periphery. They will stop at nothing—wars, murder and terror—to get and take what they want.


Bill Van Auken and David North

Canada's UN Policy...

"More settler than the settlers": Canada's UN policy and Israel

by Jon Elmer- AJE

Even before Canada officially cast its "no" vote at the United Nations on Thursday, Palestinians knew which way the Canadian wind would blow. At the gates of Canada's heavily guarded "embassy" in Ramallah the day before the vote, protesters carried signs of Prime Minister Stephen Harper emblazoned with a dogs snout and the dismissive slogan, "this dog doesn't hunt".

The next day in New York, Canada joined Israel, the US, the Czech Republic, Panama and four small countries in the Pacific Islands - including Nauru, population 10,000 - in voting against a General Assembly resolution granting Palestinians Non-Member Observer State status. The final tally was 138 to 9 in favour.

Before the vote, analyst Mouin Rabbani aptly characterised the antagonists: "Those openly opposing this vote can easily be counted on the fingers of an amputated hand: Israel; the United States, which is more pro-Israel than Israel itself; Canada, which is more pro-Israel than even the United States."

Indeed, the very next day Canada voted against six more resolutions on Palestinian rights that were adopted, including one on the "peaceful settlement of the question of Palestine" (163-6).

Canada opposing resolutions dealing with Palestinian rights is not new, nor is it the effect of a particular government or another. Opposing such resolutions has been a core Canadian diplomatic tactic since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 - by both Liberal and Conservative governments.

In the principal study of Canada's role in the creation of the State of Israel, historian David Bercuson described diplomat Lester Pearson - who chaired the pivotal United Nations Special Committee on Palestine - as playing "a unique and crucial role at the UN... Partition might not have been adopted without Pearson's efforts".

In 1974, following Yasser Arafat's landmark "the gun and the olive branch" speech at the UN, the Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau opposed a resolution adopted by the General Assembly granting Palestinians similar observer status under the Palestine Liberation Organisation.

More recently, the Liberal government in 2004 pointedly abstained from a resolution condemning Israel's massive separation wall (150-6) despite acknowledging it violated international law.

While the voting pattern is not new, the Harper government has certainly cranked up the rhetoric, particularly under the current foreign minister, John Baird, who presents himself as far more of a sycophant than a statesman.

"One thing John Baird doesn't do is diplomatic nuance," said one Canadian political journal.

Baird describes his relationship with Israel as "kinship" and he hailed Israel as "breathtaking" and "simply a miracle to behold" at a speech to the Jewish National Fund on the sixth day of last month's Gaza-Israel battle.

Earlier this year, the Jerusalem Post led its coverage of Baird's visit to Israel with an anecdote from a magazine interview with the foreign minister. "If you weren't in politics, what would you want to be doing?"

"Likely working on a kibbutz in Israel," answered Baird.

The Post described Canada as "the gold standard" of support for Israel. "There is not a government on the planet today more supportive of Israel than Harper's Canada."

Baird repeats this phrase at every opportunity. "I think the US is a good friend, too. I like to think we are better - a stronger friend."

During the visit, Israel Hayom, Israel's largest circulation daily newspaper, said: "When he discusses the Palestinian issue, Baird sounds like he could have voted in this week's Likud primaries."

Likudniks agree. At a reception for Baird before departing Israel, Likud Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz mocked in jest, "I think Canada's an even better friend of Israel than we are."

Netanyahu singled out the prime minister at the UN in September. "Same heart and same values," said Netanyahu of Harper.

After Thursday's vote, Saeb Erekat, the most conciliatory of Palestinian politicians in regard to Israel, said Canada was being "more settler than the [Israeli] settlers".

Canada's diplomatic support for Israel is not limited to the United Nations. In September, Canada recalled its diplomats and shuttered its Tehran embassy, declaring it unsafe. The move prompted former CBC and AJE chief, Tony Burman, to quip: "Canada appears to have a new foreign minister. His name is Benjamin Netanyahu."

But the implications of Canada's disposition are potentially deeper than diplomatic verbiage. Classified defence department documents obtained by the Canadian Press detailed a 2011 visit to Israel during which Defence Minister Peter MacKay told Israeli army chief of staff Gabi Ashkenazi, "a threat to Israel is a threat to Canada".

The defence minister's phrasing was a slightly toned down version of a provocative statement made earlier by former junior foreign affairs minister, Peter Kent, that "an attack on Israel would be considered an attack on Canada". The minister described the statement as a paraphrasing of the prime minister's policy.

The consequences of the Harper government's unconditional fawning of Israel have begun to surface. Perhaps most prominently, this one-sided approach played a central role in Canada being denied an elected seat on the United Nations Security Council - for the first time ever.

After 65 years of denying basic rights of the Palestinians, Israel's isolation on the world stage is starker than ever. Both Harper and Baird have acknowledged such. The prime minister calls supporting Israel "a difficult position" internationally, while Baird describes the policy as "not an electoral winner" in Canada either.

Still, this government doesn't seem to mind the consequences; on the contrary, they have doubled-down.

 

Jon Elmer is a Canadian journalist based in the Middle East since 2003, primarily in the West Bank and Gaza.

Follow him on Twitter: @jonelmer


 

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

Chomsky Getting Real on Gaza and the UN Resolution

 

Palestine 2012 — Gaza and the UN resolution

by Noam Chomsky

"We dream of a normal life, in freedom and dignity.”

An old man in Gaza held a placard that reads: “You take my water, burn my olive trees, destroy my house, take my job, steal my land, imprison my father, kill my mother, bombard my country, starve us all, humiliate us all but I am to blame: I shot a rocket back.” [1]

The old man’s message provides the proper context for the timelines on the latest episode in the savage punishment of Gaza. They are useful, but any effort to establish a “beginning” cannot help but be misleading. The crimes trace back to 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled in terror or were expelled to Gaza by conquering Israeli forces, who continued to truck them over the border for years after the official cease-fire. The persecution of Gazans took new forms when Israel conquered the Strip in 1967. From recent Israeli scholarship we learn that the goal of the government was to drive the refugees into the Sinai, and if feasible the rest of the population too.

Expulsions from Gaza were carried out under the direct orders of General Yeshayahu Gavish, commander of the Southern Command. Expulsions from the West Bank were far more extreme, and Israel resorted to devious means to prevent the return of those expelled, in direct violation of Security Council orders. The reasons were made clear in internal discussion immediately after the war. Golda Meir, later Prime Minister, informed her Labor colleagues that Israel should keep the Gaza Strip while “getting rid of its Arabs.” Defense Minister Dayan and others agreed. Prime Minister Eshkol explained that those expelled cannot be allowed to return because “We cannot increase the Arab population in Israel” — referring to the newly occupied territories, already tacitly considered part of Israel. In accord with this conception, all of Israel’s maps were changed, expunging the Green Line (the internationally recognized borders), though publication was delayed to permit UN Ambassador Abba Eban to attain what he called “favorable impasse” at the General Assembly, by concealing Israel’s intentions. [2]

The goals may remain alive, and might be a factor contributing to Egypt’s reluctance to open the border to free passage of people and goods barred by the US-backed Israeli siege.

The current upsurge of US-Israeli violence dates to January 2006, when Palestinians voted “the wrong way” in the first free election in the Arab world. Israel and the US reacted at once with harsh punishment of the miscreants, and preparation of a military coup to overthrow the elected government, routine procedure. The punishment was radically intensified in 2007, when the coup attempt was beaten back, and the elected Hamas government established full control over Gaza.

The standard version of these events is more anodyne, for example, in the New York Times, November 29: “Hamas entered politics by running in, and winning, elections in the Palestinian territories in 2006. But it was unable to govern in the face of Western opposition and in 2007 took power in the Gaza Strip by force, deepening the political split [with Fatah and the Palestinian Authority].” [3]

Ignoring immediate Hamas offers of a truce after the 2006 election, Israel launched attacks that killed 660 Palestinians in 2006, mostly civilians, one-third minors. The escalation of attacks in 2007 killed 816 Palestinians, 360 civilians and 152 minors. The UN reports that 2879 Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire from April 2006 through July 2012, along with several dozen Israelis killed by fire from Gaza. [4]

A truce in 2008 was honored by Hamas until Israel broke it in November. Ignoring further truce offers, Israel launched the murderous Cast Lead operation in December. So matters have continued, while the US and Israel also continue to reject Hamas calls for a long-term truce and a political settlement in accord with the international consensus on a two-state settlement that the US has blocked since 1976, when the US vetoed a Security Council resolution to this effect, brought by the major Arab states.

In late 2012 the US devoted extensive efforts to block a General Assembly resolution upgrading Palestine’s status to that of a “non-member observer state.” The effort failed, leaving the US in its usual international isolation on November 29, when the resolution passed overwhelmingly on the anniversary of the 1947 General Assembly vote on partition. [5] The reasons Washington frankly offered for its opposition to the resolution were revealing: Palestine might approach the International Criminal Court on Israel’s U.S.-backed crimes, which cannot be permitted judicial review for reasons that are all too obvious. A second concern, the New York Times reported, was that “the Palestinians might use the vote to seek membership in specialized agencies of the United Nations,” which could lead Washington to defund these international organizations, as it cut off financing to UNESCO in 2011 when it dared to admit Palestine as a member. The Master does not tolerate disobedience. [6]

Israel had warned that it would “go crazy” (“yishtagea”) if the resolution passed, reviving warnings from the 1950s that it would “go crazy” if crossed — not very meaningful then, much more so now. [7] And indeed, hours after the UN vote Israel announced its decision to carry forward settlement in Area E1 that connects the vastly expanded Greater Jerusalem that it annexed illegally to the town of Ma’aleh Adumim, greatly expanded under Clinton after the Oslo Accords, with lands extending virtually to Jericho, effectively bisecting the West Bank if the Area E1 corridor is closed by settlement. [8] Before Obama, US presidents had barred Israel’s efforts to expand its illegal settlements into the E1 region, so it was compelled to resort to stealth measures, like establishing a police station in the zone. Obama has been more supportive of Israeli criminal actions than his predecessors, and it remains to be seen whether he will keep to a tap on the wrist with a wink, as before.

Israel and the US insist on “direct negotiations” as the only “path to peace.” They also insist on crucial preconditions. First, the negotiations must be under US leadership, which makes as much sense as asking Iran to mediate Sunni-Shiite conflicts in Iraq. Genuine negotiations would take place under the auspices of some neutral party with a claim to international respect, perhaps Brazil, and would have the US and Israel on one side of the table, and most of the rest of the world on the other. A second precondition, left tacit, is that expansion of Israel’s settlements must be allowed to continue in one or another form (as happened, for example, during the formal 10-month “suspension”), with Washington signaling its disapproval while continuing to provide the required support.

The call for “direct negotiations” without substance is an old Israeli tactic to prevent steps towards diplomatic settlement that would impede its expansionist projects. After the 1967 war, the respected diplomat Abba Eban, who was in charge of the effort, was highly praised by Golda Meir and other colleagues in the governing Labor Party for his success at the United Nations in carrying forward “Israel’s peacemaking strategy” of confusion and delay, which came to “take the shape of a consistent foreign policy of deception,” as it is described by Israeli scholar Avi Raz in a detailed review of internal records. [9] At that time the tactics angered US officials, who protested vigorously though to no effect. But much has changed since, particularly since Kissinger took control of policy and the US largely departed from the world on Israel-Palestine.

The practice of delay goes back to the earliest Zionist settlement, which sought to “create facts” on the ground while keeping goals obscure. Even the call for a “Jewish commonwealth” was not made officially by the Zionist organization until a May 1942 meeting at the Biltmore hotel in New York.

Returning to Gaza, one element of the unremitting torture of its people is Israel’s “buffer zone” within Gaza from which Gazans are barred entry, almost half of Gaza’s limited arable land according to Sara Roy, the leading academic scholar of Gaza. From September 2005, after Israel transferred its settlers to other parts of the occupied territories, to September 2012, Israeli security forces killed 213 Palestinians in the zone, including 154 who were not taking part in hostilities, 17 of them children. [10]

From January 2012 to the launching of Israel’s latest killing spree on November 14, Operation Pillar of Defense, one Israeli was reported to have been killed by fire from Gaza while 78 Palestinians were killed by Israel fire. [11]

The full story is naturally more complex, and considerably uglier.

The first act of Operation Pillar of Defense was to murder Ahmed Jabari. Aluf Benn, editor of Ha’aretz, describes him as Israel’s “subcontractor” and “border guard” in Gaza, who enforced relative quiet in Gaza for over five years. [12] The pretext for the assassination was that during these five years Jabari had been creating a Hamas military force, with missiles from Iran. [13] Plainly, if that is true it was not learned on November 14.

A more credible reason was provided by Israeli peace activist Gershon Baskin, who had been involved in direct negotiations with Jabari for years, including plans for the release of the captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. Baskin reports that hours before Jabari was assassinated, “he received the draft of a permanent truce agreement with Israel, which included mechanisms for maintaining the ceasefire in the case of a flare-up between Israel and the factions in the Gaza Strip.” A truce was then in place, called by Hamas on November 12. Israel apparently exploited the truce, Reuters reports, directing attention to the Syrian border in the hope that Hamas leaders would relax their guard and be easier to assassinate. [14]

Throughout these years, Gaza has been kept on a level of bare survival, imprisoned by land, sea and air. On the eve of the latest attack, the UN reported that 40 percent of essential drugs and more than half of essential medical items were out of stock. [15] One of the first of the series of hideous photos that were sent from Gaza in November showed a doctor holding the charred corpse of a murdered child. That one had a personal resonance. The doctor is the director and head of surgery at Khan Yunis hospital, which I had visited a few weeks earlier. In writing about the trip I reported his passionate appeal for desperately needed simple drugs and surgical equipment. These are among the crimes of the US-Israeli siege, and Egyptian complicity.

The casualty rates from the November episode were about normal: over 160 Palestinian dead, including many children, and 6 Israelis. Among the dead were three journalists. The official Israeli justification was that “The targets are people who have relevance to terror activity.” Reporting the “execution” in the New York Times, David Carr observes that “it has come to this: killing members of the news media can be justified by a phrase as amorphous as ‘relevance to terror activity’.” [16]

The massive destruction was all in Gaza. Israel used advanced US military equipment for the slaughter and destruction, and relied on US diplomatic support, including the usual US intervention to block a Security Council call for a cease-fire. [17]

With each such exploit Israel’s global image erodes. The images of terror and destruction, and the character of the conflict, leave few remaining shreds of credibility to the self-declared “most moral army in the world,” at least among people with eyes open.

The pretexts for the assault were also the usual ones. We can put aside the predictable declarations of the perpetrators in Israel and Washington, but even decent people ask what Israel should do when attacked by a barrage of missiles. It’s a fair question, and there are straightforward answers.

One response would be to observe international law, which allows the use of force without Security Council authorization in exactly one case: in self-defense after informing the Security Council of an armed attack, until the Council acts (UN Charter, Article 51). Israel understands that well. That is the course it followed at the outbreak of the June 1967 war, but of course Israel’s appeal went nowhere when it was quickly ascertained that it was Israel that had launched the attack. Israel did not follow this course in November, knowing well what would be revealed in a Security Council debate.

Another narrow response would be to agree to a truce, as appeared quite possible before the operation was launched on November 14, as often before.

There are more far-reaching responses. By coincidence, one illustration is discussed in the current issue of the journal National Interest. The authors, Asia scholars Raffaello Pantucci and Alexandros Petersen, describe China’s reaction after rioting in western Xinjiang province “in which mobs of Uighurs marched around the city beating hapless Han [Chinese] to death.” Chinese president Hu Jintao quickly flew to the province to take charge, senior leaders in the security establishment were fired, and a wide range of development projects were undertaken to address underlying causes of the unrest. [18]

In Gaza too a civilized reaction is possible. The US and Israel could end the merciless unremitting assault and open the borders, and provide for reconstruction — and if it were imaginable, reparations for decades of violence and repression.

The cease-fire agreement stated that the measures to implement the end of the siege and the targeting of residents in border areas “shall be dealt with after 24 hours from the start of the ceasefire.” There is no sign of steps in this direction. Nor is there any indication of US-Israeli willingness to rescind their policy of separating Gaza from the West Bank in violation of the Oslo Accords, to end the illegal settlement and development programs in the West Bank designed to undermine a political settlement, or in any other way to abandon the rejectionism of the past decades.

Some day, and it must be soon, the world will respond to the plea issued by the distinguished Gazan human rights lawyer Raji Sourani while the bombs were once again raining down on defenseless civilians in Gaza: “We demand justice and accountability. We dream of a normal life, in freedom and dignity.” [19]

Notes

[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/the-war-between-israel-and-hamas-has-its-roots-in-britains-shameful-betrayal-of-the-palestinians-8327052.html.

[2] Avi Raz, The Bride and the Dowry (Yale, 2012).

[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/29/world/middleeast/leader-of-hamas-calls-for-palestinian-unity.html?src=twrhp.

[4] Slater, International Security, Nov-Dec 2012. http://www.economist.com/blogs/pomegranate/2012/11/israel-and-palestinians.

[5] http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2012/ga11317.doc.htm.

[6] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/29/world/middleeast/us-and-israel-look-to-limit-impact-of-palestinian-authority-upgrade.html.

[7] Barak Ravid, Ha’aretz, Oct. 26, under the headline “Yisrael Mazhira et Ha-Olam: Ba’al Habayit Yishtagea” (“Israel warns the world: the head of the household will go crazy”). http://www.haaretz.co.il/news/politics/1.1850595.

[8] http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/israel/index.html.

[9] Raz, op. cit.

[10] Roy, http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2012/11/23/roy/sctFniw6Wn2n9nTdxZ91RJ/story.html?s_campaign=8315. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/24/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-conflict.html?ref=global-home.

[11] Ibid.

[12] http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/israel-killed-its-subcontractor-in-gaza.premium-1.477886.

[13] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/world/middleeast/arms-with-long-reach-bolster-hamas.html?_r=0.

[14] http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/israeli-peace-activist-hamas-leader-jabari-killed-amid-talks-on-long-term-truce.premium-1.478085. http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/11/who-started-the-israel-gaza-conflict/265374/. http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2012/11/15/world/middleeast/15reuters-palestinians-israel-deception.html?scp=5&sq=bronner+Jaabari&st=nyt.

[15] Mads Gilbert, 11-17-12.

[16] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/26/business/media/using-war-as-cover-to-target-journalists.html?_r=0.

[17] http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/11/20/us-blocks-un-security-council-call-for-gaza-cease-fire-as-unbalanced-against/.

[18] http://nationalinterest.org/article/chinas-inadvertent-empire-7615.

[19] http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/11/20121117115136211403.html.

Finding Emma Fillipoff in Victoria

Finding Emma Fillipoff in Victoria

Emma has been missing since Wednesday November 28th 2012. Up until this time Emma had been calling her family more then four times a day for the past several weeks asking for them to come and get her or to help her.

Emma does not have alcohol or drug addictions; but is very quite, shy and is dealing with some other health issues. Her family is from back east. Her mother has been postering and leafleting all over the inner city. She is doing this 90% on her own.

Emma's mum doesn't know the city very well or its services. The city police have been working with her and have brought in some detectives to help find Emma. Emma is 26yrs old and was last seen leaving Burdett and Blanchard on Wednesday.

She has been seen in the past few weeks at the Starbucks on Blanchard and Fort, Tim Hortons ( don't know which one), in Fernwood area and riding the #24 bus. Right now I have been driving Emma's mum around at night and talking to various people of the streets. Her mum is here without any family support or with a car.

Most of the time she is on foot and talking to strangers. and Praying that someone will have seen her daughter and that she will be found so that she can get the right support for her. Please if you see Emma
call the police or bring her to one of the shelters so her family will have some kind of peace in just knowing where she is.

At this point I am prepared to continue to offer as much support as possible to locating this sister by helping her mum

Missing since the evening of Wednesday, November 28th

Emma Fillipoff - 26 year old woman, five-feet-five, slim build with
long brown-blond hair

[By all means: Share and spread this around to your networks.]

Please contact Victoria Police at 250-995-7654 if you have any information.

Israel's Other Special Relationship

Canada-Israel: The Other Special Relationship

via Eva Bartlett - In Gaza

Al Jazeera’s newest piece on Canada’s shameful support for the Zionist state (war crimes, occupation, illegal colonies, massacres, and so much more aside…)

A very important reading on Canada’s historical support for the Zionist state and its creation in historical Palestine…and Canada’s current unabashed support for the Zionist state:
Yves Engler’s: Canada and Israel: Building Apartheid — 2010 

Truth Time for Gaza

Truth and Trauma in Gaza

by KATHY KELLY- CounterPunch

Gaza City.

Dr. T., a medical doctor, is a Palestinian living in Gaza City. He is still reeling from days of aerial bombardment. When I asked about the children in his community he told me his church would soon be making Christmas preparations to lift the children’s spirits. Looking at his kindly smile and ruddy cheeks, I couldn’t help wondering if he’d be asked to dress up as “Baba Noel,” as Santa Claus. I didn’t dare ask this question aloud. 

“The most recent war was more severe and vigorous than the Operation Cast Lead,” he said slowly, leaning back in his chair and looking into the distance. “I was more affected this time. The weapons were very strong, destroying everything. One rocket could completely destroy a building.”

The 8-day Israeli offensive in November lasted for fewer days and brought fewer casualties, but it was nonstop and relentless, and everywhere.

“At 1:00 a.m. the bank was bombed, and everyone in the area was awakened from sleep. Doors were broken and windows were shattered. There was an agonizing sound, as if we were in a battlefield.”

“The bombing went on every day. F16 U.S. jets were hitting hard.”

“This is more than anyone can tolerate. We were unsafe at any place at any time.”

U.S. media and government statements are full of accounts about the scattershot Hamas rocket fire that had taken one Israeli life in the months before the Israeli bombing campaign. The U.S. government demands that the Gazans disarm completely. Due to simple racism and a jingoistic eagerness to get in line with U.S. military policy, Western commentators ignore the bombardment of Gazan neighborhoods which has caused thousands of casualties over just the past few years. They automatically frame Israel’s actions as self-defense and the only conceivable response to Palestinians who, under whatever provocations, dare to make themselves a threat.



“Any house can be destroyed. The airplanes filled the skies,” Dr. T. continued. “They were hitting civilians like the one who was distributing water.” The Palestine Centre for Human Rights report confirms that Dr. T is discussing Suhail Hamada Mohman and his ten year old son, who were both killed instantly at 4:30 p.m. on Sunday, November 18, 2012 in Beit Lahiya while distributing water to their neighbors.

Dr. T. then mentioned the English teacher and his student killed nearby walking in the street. The PCHR report notes that on November 16, at approximately 1:20 p.m., Marwan Abu al-Qumsan, 42, a teacher at an UNRWA school, was killed when Israeli Occupation Forces bombarded an open space area in the southeast section of Beit Lahia town. He had been visiting the house of his brother, Radwan, 76, who was also seriously wounded.

And Dr. T. mentioned the Dalu family. “They were destroyed for no reason. You can go visit there.”

The next day, I went to the building north of Gaza City where the Dalu family had lived.

In the afternoon on Sunday, November 18, an Israeli F-16 fighter jet fired a missile at the 4-story house belonging to 52-year-old Jamal Mahmoud Yassin al-Dalu. The house was completely destroyed as were all inside. Civil Defense crews removed from the debris the bodies of 8 members of the family, four women and four children aged one to seven. Their names were:


Samah Abdul Hamid al-Dalu, 27;

Tahani Hassan al-Dalu, 52;

Suhaila Mahmoud al-Dalu, 73

Raneen Jamal al-Dalu, 22.

Jamal Mohammed Jamal al-Dalu, 6;

Yousef Mohammed Jamal al-Dalu, 4;

Sarah Mohammed Jamal al-Dalu, 7;

Ibrahim Mohammed Jamal al-Dalu, 1;

On November 23rd, two more bodies were found under the rubble, one of them a child.

The attack destroyed several nearby houses, including the house of the Al-Muzannar family where two civilians, a young man and a 75year-old woman, also died. They were: Ameena Matar al-Mauzannar, 75; and Abdullah Mohammed al-Muzannar, 19.

One banner that hangs on a damaged wall reads, “Why were they killed?” Another shows enlarged pictures of the Dalu children’s faces.



Atop the rubble of the building is the burned wreckage of the family minivan, flipped there upside down in the blast.

The Israeli military later claimed it had collapsed the building in hope of assassinating an unspecified visitor to the home, any massive civilian death toll justifiable by the merest hint of a military target. Qassam rockets killing one Israeli a year are terrorism, but deliberate attacks to collapse buildings on whole families are not.

“All Palestinians are targeted now,” a woman who lives across the street told us. Every window in her home had been shattered by the blast. She had been sure it was the end of her life when she heard the explosion. She had covered her face, and then, opening her eyes, seen the engine from the neighbor’s car flying past her through her home. She pointed to a spot on the floor where a large rocket fragment had landed in her living room. Then, looking at the ruins of the Dalu building, she shook her head. “These massacres would not happen if the people who fund it were more aware.”

Mr. Dalu’s nephew Mahmoud is a pharmacist, 29 years of age, who is still alive because he had recently moved next door from his uncle’s now-vanished building to an apartment that he built for himself, his wife and their two year-old daughter who are also alive. With his widowed mother and several neighborhood women, he and his wife had been preparing to celebrate his daughter’s birthday. A garland of tinsel still festoons a partly destroyed wall. The blast destroyed much of his home’s infrastructure, but he was able to shepherd his family members and their guests out of the house to safety. Several were taken to the hospital in shock.

“I don’t know why this happened to us,” Mahmoud says. “I am a pharmacist. In my uncle’s house lived a doctor and a computer engineer. We were just finishing lunch. There were no terrorists here. Only family members here. Now I don’t know what to do, where to go. I feel despair. We are living in misery.”

“Any war is inhuman, irreligious, and immoral,” my friend, Dr. T., had told me.

Dr. T. is afraid that Israel is preparing a worse war, one with ground troops deployed, for after its upcoming election. “We are hopeful to live in peace. We don’t want to make victims. We love Israelis as we love any human being.”

“But we are losing the right to life in terms of movement, trade, education, and water. The Israelis are taking these rights; they are not looking out for the human rights of Palestinians. They only focus on their sense of security. They want Palestine to lose all rights.”

Election logic aside, Israel has already violated the ceasefire – at any time the missiles and rockets could start raining down once more. Year round, that is what it means to live in Gaza.

I decided not to bring up the Santa Claus question and instead thanked him for his honest reflections and bade him farewell.




Kathy Kelly (Kathy@vcnv.org) co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence (www.vcnv.org)

Photo credits: Johnny Barber

Cartoon Justice for Assange

The Wikileaks, Julian Assange Diplomatic Standoff -- Animated

by InfobytesTV

 This video was made in an attempt to try an explain some of the specifics relating to the accusations against Julian Assange. It was also made in the hope of shedding some light on the circumstances that have led to the current diplomatic standoff involving the Wikileaks founder.

BBC Plays Taliban, Erases Politically Inconvenient Art

Like the Taliban, BBC Erase Banksy Artwork Which Exposed Their Internal Savile Cover-up

What Do The Taliban And The BBC Have In Common?

by Patrick Henningsen -  The Needle



Before……. and After the Taliban



Before and……and After the BBC

Yes, that’s right, they both destroy great works of art in pursuit of their closed minded ideology.

Banksy, to my mind the UK’s greatest living artist (and actually, yes, I could justify that statement) created a piece of meaningful art outside of BBC Television Centre in central London which summed up just how disillusioned the British public, especially of my generation, feel right now. It was the poignant image of a young boy dropping his ‘Jim’ll Fix It’ medal into a drain. The BBC sent the workmen in to scrub it away.

Why ? Because it implied criticism of the corporation. All great art speaks, all great art stimulates thought, all great art, from Giotto via Manet’s ‘Olympia’ and beyond Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ to the present day, has been provocative.

The cultural philistines at the BBC can have as many Yentob inspired documentaries as they like but until they put artistic creation above managerial expediency they can never be a Corporation that Broadcasts for the British license fee paying public.

And do they own that hoarding ?

Does the BBC actually own that piece of hardboard that Banksy chose to place this artwork ?

And if the BBC are sued because a precious work of art has been destroyed and they didn’t own the hardboard hoarding opposite BBC Television Centre, who pays ?

Not the BBC management on their ludicrously high salaries, but all of us who pay the BBC license fee.

Just like McAlpine’s £185,000.

Debtpocalypse

The Archeology of Decline: Debtpocalypse and the Hollowing Out of America

by Steve Fraser  -  TomDispatch

“Debtpocalypse” looms. Depending on who wins out in Washington, we’re told, we will either free fall over the fiscal cliff or take a terrifying slide to the pit at the bottom. Grim as these scenarios might seem, there is something confected about the mise-en-scène, like an un-fun Playland. After all, there is no fiscal cliff, or at least there was none -- until the two parties built it.

And yet the pit exists. It goes by the name of “austerity.” However, it didn’t just appear in time for the last election season or the lame-duck session of Congress to follow. It was dug more than a generation ago, and has been getting wider and deeper ever since. Millions of people have long made it their home. “Debtpocalypse” is merely the latest installment in a tragic, 40-year-old story of the dispossession of American working people.

Think of it as the archeology of decline, or a tale of two worlds. As a long generation of austerity politics hollowed out the heartland, the quants and traders and financial wizards of Wall Street gobbled up ever more of the nation's resources. It was another Great Migration -- instead of people, though, trillions of dollars were being sucked out of industrial America and turned into “financial instruments” and new, exotic forms of wealth. If blue-collar Americans were the particular victims here, then high finance is what consumed them. Now, it promises to consume the rest of us.

Scenes from the Museum

In the mid-1970s, Hugh Carey, then governor of New York, was already noting the hollowing out of his part of America. New York City, after all, was threatening to go bankrupt. Plenty of other cities and states across what was then known as the “Frost Belt” were in similar shape. Yankeedom, in Carey’s words, was turning into “a great national museum” where tourists could visit “the great railroad stations where the trains used to run.”

As it happened, the tourists weren’t interested. Abandoned railroad stations might be fetching in an eerie sort of way, but the rest of the museum was filled with artifacts of recent ruination that were too depressing to be entertaining. True, a century earlier, during the first Gilded Age, the upper crust used to amuse itself by taking guided tours of the urban demi-monde, thrilling to sites of exotic depravity or ethnic strangeness. They traipsed around “rag-pickers alley” on New York’s Lower East Side or the opium dens of Chinatown, or ghoulishly watched poor children salivate over toys in store window displays they could never hope to touch.

Times have changed. The preference now is to entirely remove the unsightly. Nonetheless, the national museum of industrial homicide has, city by city, decade by decade, grown more grotesque.

Camden, New Jersey, for example, had long been a robust, diversified small industrial city. By the early 1970s, however, its reform mayor Angelo Errichetti was describing it this way: “It looked like the Vietcong had bombed us to get even. The pride of Camden... was now a rat-infested skeleton of yesterday, a visible obscenity of urban decay. The years of neglect, slumlord exploitation, tenant abuse, government bungling, indecisive and short-sighted policy had transformed the city’s housing, business, and industrial stock into a ravaged, rat-infested cancer on a sick, old industrial city.”

That was 40 years ago and yet, today, news stories are still being written about Camden’s never-ending decline into some bottomless abyss. Consider that a measure of how long it takes to shut down a way of life.

Once upon a time, Youngstown, Ohio, was a typical smokestack city, part of the steel belt running through Pennsylvania and Ohio. As with Camden, things there started turning south in the 1970s. From 1977 to 1987, the city lost 50,000 jobs in steel and related industries. By the late 1980s, the years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency when it was “morning again in America,” it was midnight in Youngstown: foreclosures, an epidemic of business bankruptcies, and everywhere collapsing community institutions including churches, unions, families, and the municipal government itself.

Burglaries, robberies, and assaults doubled after the steel plants closed. In two years, child abuse rose by 21%, suicides by 70%. One-eighth of Mahoning County went on welfare. Streets were filled with dead storefronts and the detritus of abandoned homes: scrap metal and wood shingles, shattered glass, stripped-away home siding, canning jars, and rusted swing sets. Each week, 1,500 people visited the Salvation Army’s soup line.

The Wall Street Journal called Youngstown “a necropolis,” noting miles of “silent, empty steel mills” and a pervasive sense of fear and loss. Bruce Springsteen would soon memorialize that loss in “The Ghost of Tom Joad.”

If you were unfortunate enough to live in the small industrial city of Mansfield, Ohio, for the last 40 years, you would have witnessed in microcosm the dystopia of destruction unfolding in similar places everywhere. For a century, workshops there had made a kaleidoscope of goods: stoves, tires, steel, machinery, refrigerators, and cars. Then Mansfield’s rust belt started narrowing as one plant after another went shut down: Dominion Electric in 1971, Mansfield Tire and Rubber in 1978, Hoover Plastics in 1980, National Seating in 1985, Tappan Stoves in 1986, a Westinghouse plant and Ohio Brass in 1990, Wickes Lumber in 1997, Crane Plumbing in 2003, Neer Manufacturing in 2007, and Smurfit-Stone Container in 2009. In 2010, General Motors closed its largest, most modern U.S. stamping factory, and thanks to the Great Recession, Con-way Freight, Value City, and Card Camera also shut down.
 

 

“Good times” or bad, it didn’t matter. Mansfield shrank relentlessly, becoming the urban equivalent of skin and bones. Its poverty rate is now at 28%, its median income $11,000 below the national average of $41,994. What manufacturing remains is non-union and $10 an hour is considered a good wage.

Midway through this industrial auto-da-fé, a journalist watching the Campbell Works of Youngstown Sheet and Tube go dark, mused that “the dead steel mills stand as pathetic mausoleums to the decline of American industrial might that was once the envy of the world.” This dismal record is particularly impressive because it encompasses the “boom times” presided over by Presidents Reagan and Clinton.

The “Pit” Deepens

In 1988, in the iciest part of the Frost Belt, a Wall Street Journal reporter noted, “There are two Americas now, and they grow further apart each day.” He was referring to Eastport, Maine. Although the deepest port on the East Coast, it hosted few ships, abandoned sardine factories lined its shore, and its bars were filled with the under- and unemployed. The reporter pointed out that he had seen similar scenes from a collapsing rural economy “coast to coast, border to border”: shuttered saw mills, abandoned mines, closed schools, rutted roads, ghost airports.

Closing up, shutting down, going out of business: last one to leave please turn out the lights!

Such was the case in cities and towns around the country. Essential public services -- garbage collection, policing, fire protection, schools, street maintenance, health-care -- were atrophying. So were the people who lived in those places. High blood pressure, cardiac and digestive problems, and mortality rates were generally rising, as was doubt, self-blame, guilt, anxiety, and depression. The drying up of social supports, even among those who once had been friends and workmates, haunted the inhabitants of these places as much as the industrial skeletons around them.

In the 1980s, when Jack Welch, soon to be known as “Neutron Jack” for his ruthlessness, became CEO of General Electric, he set out to raise the company’s stock price by gutting the workforce. It only took him six years, but imagine what it was like in Schenectady, New York, which lost 22,000 jobs; Louisville, Kentucky, where 13,000 fewer people made appliances; Evendale, Ohio, where 12,000 no longer made lights and light fixtures; Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where 8,000 plastics makers lost their jobs; and Erie, Pennsylvania, where 6,000 locomotive workers got green slips.

Life as it had been lived in GE’s or other one-company towns ground to a halt. Two travelling observers, Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson, making their way through the wasteland of middle America in 1984 spoke of “medieval cities of rusting iron” and a largely invisible landscape filling up with an army of transients, moving from place to place at any hint of work. They were camped out under bridges, riding freight cars, living in makeshift tents in fetid swamps, often armed, trusting no one, selling their blood, eating out of dumpsters.

Nor was the calamity limited to the northern Rust Belt. The South and Southwest did not prove immune from this wasting disease either. Empty textile mills, often originally runaways from the North, dotted the Carolinas, Georgia, and elsewhere. Half the jobs lost due to plant closings or relocations occurred in the Sunbelt.

In 2008, in the sunbelt town of Colorado Springs, Colorado, one-third of the city’s street lights were extinguished, police helicopters were sold, watering and fertilizing in the parks was eliminated from the budget, and surrounding suburbs closed down the public bus system. During the recent Great Recession one-industry towns like Dalton, Georgia (“the carpet capital of the world”), or Blakely, Georgia (“the peanut capital of the world”), or Elkhart, Indiana (“the RV capital of the world”) were closing libraries, firing police chiefs, and taking other desperate measures to survive.

And no one can forget Detroit. Once, it had been a world-class city, the country’s fourth largest, full of architectural gems. In the 1950s, Detroit had a population with the highest median income and highest rate of home ownership in urban America. Now, the “motor city” haunts the national imagination as a ghost town. Home to two million a quarter-century ago, its decrepit hulk is now “home” to 900,000. Between 2000 and 2010 alone, the population hemorrhaged by 25%, nearly a quarter of a million people, almost as many as live in post-Katrina New Orleans. There and in other core industrial centers like Baltimore, “death zones” have emerged where whole neighborhoods verge on medical collapse.

One-third of Detroit, an area the size of San Francisco, is now little more than empty houses, empty factories, and fields gone feral. A whole industry of demolition, waste-disposal, and scrap-metal companies arose to tear down what once had been. With a jobless rate of 29%, some of its citizens are so poor they can’t pay for funerals, so bodies pile up at mortuaries. Plans are even afoot to let the grasslands and forests take over, or to give the city to private enterprise.

Even the public zoo has been privatized. With staff and animals reduced to the barest of minimums and living wages endangered by its new owner, an associate curator working with elephants and rhinos went in search of another job. He found it with the city -- chasing down feral dogs whose population had skyrocketed as the cityscape returned to wilderness. History had, it seemed, abandoned dogs along with their human compatriots.

Looking Backward

But could this just be the familiar story of capitalism’s penchant for “creative destruction”? The usual tale of old ways disappearing, sometimes painfully, as part of the story of progress as new wonders appear in their place?

Imagine for a moment the time traveler from Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy’s best-selling utopian novel of 1888 waking up in present-day America. Instead of the prosperous land filled with technological wonders and egalitarian harmony Bellamy envisioned, his protagonist would find an unnervingly familiar world of decaying cities, people growing ever poorer and sicker, bridges and roads crumpling, sweatshops a commonplace, the largest prison population on the planet, workers afraid to stand up to their bosses, schools failing, debts growing more onerous, and inequalities starker than ever.

A recent grim statistic suggests just how Bellamy’s utopian hopes have given way to an increasingly dystopian reality. For the first time in American history, the life expectancy of white people, men and women, has actually dropped. Life spans for the least educated, in particular, have fallen by about four years since 1990. The steepest decline: white women lacking a high school diploma. They, on average, lost five years of life, while white men lacking a diploma lost three years.

Unprecedented for the United States, these numbers come close to the catastrophic decline Russian men experienced in the desperate years following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Similarly, between 1985 and 2010, American women fell from 14th to 41st place in the United Nation’s ranking of international life expectancy. (Among developed countries, American women now rank last.) Whatever combination of factors produced this social statistic, it may be the rawest measure of a society in the throes of economic anorexia.

One other marker of this eerie story of a developed nation undergoing underdevelopment and a striking reproach to a cherished national faith: for the first time since the Great Depression, the social mobility of Americans is moving in reverse. In every decade from the 1970s on, fewer people have been able to move up the income ladder than in the previous 10 years. Now Americans in their thirties earn 12% less on average than their parents’ generation at the same age. Danes, Norwegians, Finns, Canadians, Swedes, Germans, and the French now all enjoy higher rates of upward mobility than Americans. Remarkably, 42% of American men raised in the bottom one-fifth income cohort remain there for life, as compared to 25% in Denmark and 30% in notoriously class-stratified Great Britain.

Eating Our Own

Laments about “the vanishing middle class” have become commonplace, and little wonder. Except for those in the top 10% of the income pyramid, everyone is on the down escalator. The United States now has the highest percentage of low-wage workers -- those who earn less than two-thirds of the median wage -- of any developed nation. George Carlin once mordantly quipped, “It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.” Now, that joke has become our waking reality.

During the “long nineteenth century,” wealth and poverty existed side by side. So they do again. In the first instance, when industrial capitalism was being born, it came of age by ingesting what was valuable embedded in pre-capitalist forms of life and labor, including land, animals, human muscle power, tools and talents, know-how, and the ways of organizing and distributing what got produced. Wealth accumulated in the new economy by extinguishing wealth in the older ones.

“Progress” was the result of this economic metabolism. Whatever its stark human and ecological costs, its achievements were also highly visible. America’s capacity to sustain a larger and larger population at rising levels of material well-being, education, and health was its global boast for a century and half.

Shocking statistics about life expectancy and social mobility suggest that those days are over. Wealth, great piles of it, is still being generated, and sometimes displayed so ostentatiously that no one could miss it. Technological marvels still amaze. Prosperity exists, though for an ever-shrinking cast of characters. But a new economic metabolism is visibly at work.

For the last 40 years, prosperity, wealth, and “progress” have rested, at least in part, on a grotesque process of auto-cannibalism -- it has also been called “dis-accumulation” by David Harvey -- of a society that is devouring its own.

Traditional forms of primitive accumulation still exist abroad. Hundreds of millions of former peasants, fisherman, craftspeople, scavengers, herdsmen, tradesmen, ranchers, and peddlers provide the labor power and cheap products that buoy the bottom lines of global manufacturing and retail corporations, as well as banks and agribusinesses. But here in “the homeland,” the very profitability and prosperity of privileged sectors of the economy, especially the bloated financial arena, continue to depend on slicing, dicing, and stripping away what was built up over generations.

Once again a new world has been born. This time, it depends on liquidating the assets of the old one or shipping them abroad to reward speculation in “fictitious capital.” Rates of U.S. investment in new plants, technology, and research and development began declining during the 1970s, a fall-off that only accelerated in the gilded 1980s. Manufacturing, which accounted for nearly 30% of the economy after the Second World War, had dropped to just over 10% by 2011. Since the turn of the millennium alone, 3.5 million more manufacturing jobs have vanished and 42,000 manufacturing plants were shuttered.

Nor are we simply witnessing the passing away of relics of the nineteenth century. Today, only one American company is among the top ten in the solar power industry and the U.S. accounts for a mere 5.6% of world production of photovoltaic cells. Only GE is among the top ten companies in wind energy. In 2007, a mere 8% of all new semi-conductor plants under construction globally were located in the U.S. Of the 1.2 billion cell phones sold in 2009, none were made in the U.S. The share of semi-conductors, steel, cars, and machine tools made in America has declined precipitously just in the last decade. Much high-end engineering design and R&D work has been offshored. Now, there are more people dealing cards in casinos than running lathes, and almost three times as many security guards as machinists.

The FIRE Next Time

Meanwhile, for more than a quarter of a century the fastest growing part of the economy has been the finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) sector. Between 1980 and 2005, profits in the financial sector increased by 800%, more than three times the growth in non-financial sectors.

In those years, new creations of financial ingenuity, rare or never seen before, bred like rabbits. In the early 1990s, for example, there were a couple of hundred hedge funds; by 2007, 10,000 of them. A whole new species of mortgage broker roamed the land, supplanting old-style savings and loan or regional banks. Fifty thousand mortgage brokerages employed 400,000 brokers, more than the whole U.S. textile industry. A hedge fund manager put it bluntly, “The money that’s made from manufacturing stuff is a pittance in comparison to the amount of money made from shuffling money around.”

For too long, these two phenomena -- the eviscerating of industry and the supersizing of high finance -- have been treated as if they had nothing much to do with each other, but were simply occurring coincidentally.

Here, instead, is the fable we’ve been offered: Sad as it might be for some workers, towns, cities, and regions, the end of industry is the unfortunate, yet necessary, prelude to a happier future pioneered by “financial engineers.” Equipped with the mathematical and technological know-how that can turn money into more money (while bypassing the messiness of producing anything), they are our new wizards of prosperity!

Unfortunately, this uplifting tale rests on a categorical misapprehension. The ascendancy of high finance didn’t just replace an industrial heartland in the process of being gutted; it initiated that gutting and then lived off it, particularly during its formative decades. The FIRE sector, that is, not only supplanted industry, but grew at its expense -- and at the expense of the high wages it used to pay and the capital that used to flow into it.

Think back to the days of junk bonds, leveraged buy-outs, megamergers and acquisitions, and asset stripping in the 1980s and 1990s. (Think, in fact, of Bain Capital.) What was getting bought and stripped and closed up supported windfall profits in high-interest-paying junk bonds. The stupendous fees and commissions that went to those “engineering” such transactions were being picked from the carcass of a century and a half of American productive capacity. The hollowing out of the United States was well under way long before anyone dreamed up the “fiscal cliff.”

For some long time now, our political economy has been driven by investment banks, hedge funds, private equity firms, real estate developers, insurance goliaths, and a whole menagerie of ancillary enterprises that service them. But high times in FIRE land have depended on the downward mobility of working people and the poor, cut adrift from more secure industrial havens and increasingly from the lifelines of public support. They have been living instead in the “pit of austerity.” Soon many more of us will join them.



Steve Fraser is a historian, writer, and editor-at-large for New Labor Forum, co-founder of the American Empire Project, and TomDispatch regular. He is, most recently, the author of Wall Street: America’s Dream Palace. He teaches at Columbia University.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch book, Nick Turse’s The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare.

Copyright 2012 Steve Fraser

 

Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook, Zoe Miles, Jim Miles, Janine Bandcroft Mon. Dec. 3, 2012

This Week on GR

by C. L. Cook

The plans have been in the works for a while, and last week Island Timberlands prepared to begin clear-cut logging within the ancient forest of Cortes Island. Locals, organized through 'Wildstands - a Cortes Island community alliance' were ready. Forest access roads were blockaded, legal threats made by the company, and everything was looking like a War in the Woods in the making for Cortes.

That was last week; in the interim few days, Island Timberlands has withdrawn its claws, assuring locals its promised application for an injunction will be delayed for at least this week, while some form of negotiation can commence. It's not the end of the fight for the forests of Cortes - or even the beginning of the end - but it is the end of the beginning. (sorry Winston).

Listen. Hear.


Zoe Miles is a Cortes Island-raised activist and spokesperson for Wildstands, and she'll join us in the first half.

And; last week the United Nations General Assembly, in a historic vote, ratified the Palestinian Authorities application for recognition by that body as a nonvoting observer non-member state. The motion was endorsed by an overwhelming majority, despite (or perhaps because of) weeks of bluster and bullying by Israel's representatives and those of its nearest friends in Canada and the United States. In unprecedented fashion, Stephen Harper's New Government of Canada called back to Ottawa senior diplomats from Israel, the West Bank, and most pointedly, from the UN missions in New York and Geneva. Reacting to domestic and international ridicule, Canada's Foreign Affairs minister, John Baird assured, Canada's diplomats will return to their posts following consultations on what future direction the country will take in dealing with the region. 

Jim Miles is a retired educator, writing on politics, U.S. foreign policy, and the environment. His articles and book reviews are published online at the Palestine Chronicle and Pacific Free Press amongst others. Miles covered the surprise Canadian government reaction to the UN move in the article, 'Congratulation Palestine from an Embarrassed Canadian.' Jim Miles 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 our city's streets and beyond. But first, Zoe Miles and a Mexican Standoff in the woods of Cortes Island.

Chris Cook hosts Gorilla Radio, airing live every Monday, 5-6pm Pacific Time. In Victoria at 101.9FM, 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.ca/

G-Radio is dedicated to social justice, the environment, community, and providing a forum for people and issues not covered in the corporate media.

Cortes Islanders Bring Island Timberlands Back to the Table

Island Timberlands Returns to the Negotiating Table 

 by Wildstands

The first stage of blockading has been successful! Island Timberlands has stated that they will not pursue an injunction for one week, and they are willing to meet in the coming week to discuss modifying their cut block boundaries. We are moving forward into negotiations and are relieved to have some time out of the rain!

We will remain vigilant and watchful of activities around the site but are going to remove 24 hr presence from the road. We are prepared to spring back into action at any time depending on how things unfold in the next week.

A huge thanks to everyone who has supported the forests of Cortes in so many ways. Your messages of support, donations, and word spreading are invaluable parts of this movement. Please stay tuned for ongoing updates as we may need a strong off-island presence in the days following the negotiation process.



Check out the media page for the most recent flurry of stories and follow the story here, facebook and twitter @cortesforest.

Thank you all!!! Please help us by continuing to spread the word and by supporting this work with a financial contribution.