Sunday, November 30, 2008

THE PROPAGANDA EDITION: ISSUE 47, VOLUME 74
BETTER LUCK TOMORROW
by Malik Isasis






















The corporate media feeds images of violence in its most rawest forms without political context, or historical subtext. They report on symptoms of international strife like, blood, guts, tears, and American victimology rather than on the disease, or causes of said conflicts, like neo-colonial capitalism. It is a dumb-down, anti-intellectual formula that makes consumers of their reporting more susceptible to paranoia and irrational fears. For the corporate media is not in the business of advocacy, rather it is in the business of turning citizens into consumers, blind, uncritically-thinking consumers who will respond to such comic-book concepts as War on Terror; consumers who didn’t bat an eye when they were told by Bush during two occupations and a recession to go shop more.

Corporate media is a subsidiary of other conglomerates that are out to protect their assets around the world, and the news, generally reflect this goal by dividing the world up into good versus evil, and guess who is always good?

With the recent spate of hijackings of oil tankers and other cargo ships off the coast of Africa by Somalis, the corporate media is portraying Somalis as the bad guys of course, and America and its allies as the victim. See ABC News’ coverage, all one minute and thirty seconds of it.

Check the tone in a USA Today article on the matter of Somali hijackings:

The U.S. and international military forces are taking more aggressive action off the African coast as bolder and more violent pirates imperil oil shipments and other trade.
The U.S. is "very concerned about the increasing number of acts of piracy and armed robbery" off the Somali coast, he says [Navy Lt. Nate Christensen]. Somalia's weak government has admitted it can't control its territorial waters, and Nigeria is fending off a rebel group.


What’s the theme here? Somalis are violent thieves and America and its allies are victims. This of course is a reoccurring theme, obfuscation—more accurately a justification for American hegemony. Here’s the reality of the Somali hijackings, which has its roots in European and Asian overfishing in Somalia’s coastal waters.

Off the coast of Somalia more than a decade ago, commercial fishing vessels from China , Japan and European countries began illegally fishing in Somalia’s waters, not only that, these commercial fishing vessels overfished and also dumped waste. Since Somalia couldn’t police its own waters due to having a permanent unelected, corrupt Transitional Government (since 1991), fishermen had no federal protection to enforce international fishing laws.

Since then fish stocks have plummeted worldwide, shipping has exploded and ships have become much easier and rewarding to catch than fish. And while it's unlikely that all of today's Somali pirates got their start fishing, the gangs couldn't function without the knowledge and seamanship of those who did.

This is a problem we could see replayed out on a global scale as fishing becomes more difficult everywhere.


THE OIL FACTOR IN SOMALIA

The American government, with the international conglomerates pulling its strings like Gepetto, has purposely kept Somalia unstable. It is in this instability for which the U.S. can take advantage of the politically fractured country through arms sell, and funding of local and foreign militias.



In 1993, the Los Angeles Times wrote an investigative piece on the oil conglomerates’ interest in Somalia.

According to documents obtained by The Times, nearly two-thirds of Somalia was allocated to the American oil giants Conoco, Amoco, Chevron and Phillips in the final years before Somalia's pro-U.S. President Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown and the nation plunged into chaos in January, 1991. Industry sources said the companies holding the rights to the most promising concessions are hoping that the Bush Administration's [daddy Bush] decision to send U.S. troops to safeguard aid shipments to Somalia will also help protect their multimillion-dollar investments there.

Officially, the Administration and the State Department insist that the U.S. military mission in Somalia is strictly humanitarian. Oil industry spokesmen dismissed as "absurd" and "nonsense" allegations by aid experts, veteran East Africa analysts and several prominent Somalis that President Bush, a former Texas oilman, was moved to act in Somalia, at least in part, by the U.S. corporate oil stake.


An investigative report from Media Lens in May 2008 revealed the motivations of the United States when it bombed Somalia under the guise of War on Terrorism, killing 12 twelve people the government said were Islamist militants.

Since 1996 the US has engaged in a continual "low-intensity" war in Somalia that has killed a million of that country's inhabitants, a death toll second only to the Congo during that time. Another million Somalis are homeless, refugees from the fighting. In the US, news of happenings in Somalia is scarce and often misleading. It's worth noting that Somalia sits upon an untapped lake of oil, and has significant uranium deposits as well, making it in the US interest to prevent any viable national government not under its control from coming to power.

When the poor does what the rich do, it is called a crime.

Somali fishermen saw the potential in piracy, and why wouldn’t they when other countries are making hundreds of millions in overfishing in their waters. Last year alone, Somali hijackers, formerly fishermen made $75 million dollars in ransom money taking cargo ships and hostages. This year they’ve made $50 million. It’s lucrative being a pirate—it works for the U.S., China, and Europe. Somalis’ piracy is out front, while neo-colonial piracy hides in plain sight as humanitarianism, capitalism or War on Terrorism.

Friday, November 28, 2008

THE REAL POLITIK EDITION: ISSUE 46, VOLUME 73
Why the Attacks in India Should Surprise Nobody
by Deena Guzder, Common Dreams












Most Americans were shocked to learn that coordinated terrorist attacks struck the heart of Mumbai, India's commercial capital on Wednesday evening. After all, India is not Iraq or Afghanistan or even Pakistan. According to pundits such as Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, India is a shining capitalist success story and the next global superpower. In the pro-globalization narrative, India's eager-beaver working class has benefited greatly from neoliberal economic policies. Intellectuals extol India as the world's largest democracy and an example for the rest of the developing world to follow. Today, India is a popular tourist destination for everyone from backpackers on spiritual voyages to white-collar executives on business meetings.

Americans are largely shielded from the shocking reality of India. According to the World Bank's own estimates on poverty, almost half of all Indians live below the new international poverty line of $1.25 (PPP) per day.[1] The World Bank further estimates that 33% of the global poor now reside in India. [2] Moreover, India also has 828 million people, or 75.6% of the population living below $2 a day, compared to 72.2% for Sub-Saharan Africa.[3] A quarter of the nation's population earns less than the government-specified poverty threshold of $0.40/day. Someone should tell the starving masses who have remained largely marginalized and subjugated that India is a "success story" because that's not reflected in most Indian's lives. Income inequality in India, as measured by the Gini coefficient, is increasing at a disturbingly destabilizing rate.[4] In addition, India has a higher rate of malnutrition among children under the age of three than any other country in the world (46% in year 2007).[5],[6] India is possibly the world's largest democracy by some definitions; however, as Mahatma Gandhi, once asked, "What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?"

Pundits such as Friedman play golf with the global elite and then pontificate on perceived economic trends. In Friedman's book, The World is Flat, he suggests that "Indians should celebrate Y2K as its second independence day." Yet, by some estimates, the high-tech sector employs just 0.2 percent of India's one billion people. Americans are largely unaware of the violent, systemic poverty plaguing India because the country is reduced to a caricature where everyone fielding Americans' inquiries in call centers is prospering. Having lived in India for four years and visited the country every other year, I am painfully aware of the reality on the ground. India is a country where children are forcefully amputated by beggar-masters and sent to elicit money; where poor women sell their bodies to truck drivers and contract HIV at alarming rates; and, where American tourists nonchalantly spend enough money in one day to support a hungry family for months.

The recent attacks in India are morally repugnant, but the debate on how to curb terrorism needs to consider why people engage in such desperate acts in the first place. The perpetrators of yesterday's violence targeted two of Mumbai's most luxurious hotels: Taj Mahal and the Oberioi Trident. One night at either of these hotels costs, on average, Rupees 17,500 (US $ 355) in a country where the annual salary is Rupees 29,069 (US $590).[7] The death of over a hundred people on Wednesday should deeply upset the world, but it should also lead us to question the death of the 18 million people who die annually from the systemic violence of endemic poverty.[8] As Yale professor Thomas Pogge notes, the affects of poverty are felt exponentially more in certain parts of our "unflat" world: "If the developed Western countries had their proportional shares of [gratuitous] deaths, severe poverty would kill some 3,500 Britons and 16,500 Americans per week."[9]

Mahan Abedin, an insurgency analyst, told Al Jazeera after Wednesday nights attacks: "We have seen an increase in recent years in indigenous Indian Muslim organizations beginning to take a violent stance towards the Indian state and sections of the Indian society, particularly the commercial elite of places like Mumbai, in order to highlight, they would say, the sheer inequality of life in India."[10] Abedin continued, "there is a middle class of around 100 million who live very well but 800 million-plus people live in miserable conditions." Even people who commit heinous acts of violence occasionally make a valid point. The latest attacks should not evoke a knee-jerk effort to ratchet up the so-called Global War on Terror but, instead, make us question how to avoid such attacks in the future. By showing genuine concern for the plight of the millions of people who are at risk of death from poverty and by honoring the sanctity of the lives of the most destitute, we have the best chance of defeating the ideologies of hate.[11]

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

THE REAL POLITIK EDITION: ISSUE 46, VOLUME 72
LIBERTY LOVES JUSTICE
by Malik Isasis






















The Republican storm has passed, but the rainbow left behind isn’t enough. It appears President-Elect Obama is picking up the pieces and recycling the same old triangulating politicians from the Clinton administration. The Democratic Party, which even on the eve of their assuming control of both houses of Congress and the White House, will let slip into the night, George W. Bush and his crimes against humanity. For the sake of bipartisanship, the Democratic Party will prove their cowardice for justice.

As Obama announced Gates, Bush’s Secretary of Defense, as his own, I’m trying real hard to give Obama the benefit of the doubt, but history doesn’t bode well because the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. So, the Democratic Party will fail us.

The Case

Under George W. Bush, the United States government has disappeared foreign nationals, and detained them outside of the United States territory in secret Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A) prisons in Jordan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and yet unknown Eastern European countries. Read the harrowing account of Marwan Jabour, here. In these proxy prisons, prisoners are being tortured, as defined by the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. The very reason these people are being held in proxy is because the United States has laws against torture, and places like Jordan, Afghanistan and Pakistan, do not.

In a January 18, 2007 Senate Judiciary Hearing, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said to the panel of senators:

“The Constitution doesn’t say every individual in the United States or citizen is hereby granted or assured the right of habeas corpus. It doesn’t say that. It simply says the right shall not be suspended” except in cases of rebellion or invasion.”

Investigative journalist Robert Parry wrote in response to Gonzales’ statement that it was “one of the most chilling public statements ever made by an Attorney General.”

Habeas Corpus is a common law, which basically states that a person has a right to fight unlawful imprisonment and/or arbitrary State detention. On October 18, 2006, Bush signed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 [Public Law 109-366, 120 stat. 2006] that was passed by the 109th Republican Congress. This act gave Bush the ability to call foreign nationals and U.S. citizens, “enemy combatants” and detain them indefinitely without the Writ of Habeas Corpus, the ability to address one’s imprisonment through the courts.

The Military Commissions Act of 2006 laid to rest, The Posse Comitatus Act which effectively gave Bush the ability to use the U.S. military against U.S. citizens within U.S. borders. Senator John Warner, Republican added the amendment title the John Warner Defense Appropriations Act [House Resolution 5122].

Justice For All

President-Elect Obama you famously stated that a president should be able to walk and chew gum at the same time, so I would expect that justice can be carried out while you are dealing with the economy, and national security.

I am an ardent supporter, however I am always and forever a supporter of Justice.

Monday, November 24, 2008

THE REAL POLITIK EDITION: ISSUE 46, VOLUME 71
The Slow Death of Gaza
The collective punishment of Gaza's civilian population is illegal. But international law was tossed aside long ago
by Andrea Becker, The Guardian


















It has been two weeks since Israel imposed a complete closure of Gaza, after months when its crossings have been open only for the most minimal of humanitarian supplies. Now it is even worse: two weeks without United Nations food trucks for the 80% of the population entirely dependent on food aid, and no medical supplies or drugs for Gaza's ailing hospitals. No fuel (paid for by the EU) for Gaza's electricity plant, and no fuel for the generators during the long blackouts. Last Monday morning, 33 trucks of food for UN distribution were finally let in - a few days of few supplies for very few, but as the UN asks, then what?

Israel's official explanation for blocking even minimal humanitarian aid, according to IDF spokesperson Major Peter Lerner, was "continued rocket fire and security threats at the crossings". Israel's blockade, in force since Hamas seized control of Gaza in mid-2007, can be described as an intensification of policies designed to isolate the population of Gaza, cripple its economy, and incentivise the population against Hamas by harsh – and illegal – measures of collective punishment. However, these actions are not all new: the blockade is but the terminal end of Israel's closure policy, in place since 1991, which in turn builds on Israel's policies as occupier since 1967.

In practice, Israel's blockade means the denial of a broad range of items – food, industrial, educational, medical – deemed "non-essential" for a population largely unable to be self-sufficient at the end of decades of occupation. It means that industrial, cooking and diesel fuel, normally scarce, are virtually absent now. There are no queues at petrol stations; they are simply shut. The lack of fuel in turn means that sewage and treatment stations cannot function properly, resulting in decreased potable water and tens of millions of litres of untreated or partly treated sewage being dumped into the sea every day. Electricity cuts – previously around eight hours a day, now up to 16 hours a day in many areas – affect all homes and hospitals. Those lucky enough to have generators struggle to find the fuel to make them work, or spare parts to repair them when they break from overuse. Even candles are running out.

There can be no dispute that measures of collective punishment against the civilian population of Gaza are illegal under international humanitarian law. Fuel and food cannot be withheld or wielded as reward or punishment. But international law was tossed aside long ago. The blockade has been presented as punishment for the democratic election of Hamas, punishment for its subsequent takeover of Gaza, and punishment for militant attacks on Israeli civilians. The civilians of Gaza, from the maths teacher in a United Nations refugee camp to the premature baby in an incubator, properly punished for actions over which they have no control, will rise up and get rid of Hamas. Or so it goes.

And so what of these civilian agents of political change?

For all its complexities and tragedies, the over-arching effect of Israel's blockade has been to reduce the entire population to survival mode. Individuals are reduced to the daily detail of survival, and its exhaustions.

Consider Gaza's hospital staff. In hospitals, the blockade is as seemingly benign as doctors not having paper upon which to write diagnostic results or prescriptions, and as sinister as those seconds – between power cut and generator start – when a child on life support doesn't have the oxygen of a mechanical ventilator. A nurse on a neo-natal ward rushes between patients, battling the random schedule of power cuts. A hospital worker tries to keep a few kidney dialysis machines from breaking down, by farming spare parts from those that already have. The surgeon operates without a bulb in the surgery lamp, across from the anaesthetist who can no longer prevent patient pain. The hospital administrator updates lists of essential drugs and medical supplies that have run out, which vaccines from medical fridges are now unusable because they can't be kept cold, and which procedures must be cancelled altogether. The ambulance driver decides whether to respond to an emergency call, based on dwindling petrol in the tank.

By reducing the population to survival mode, the blockade robs people of the time and essence to do anything but negotiate the minutiae of what is and isn't possible in their personal and professional lives. Whether any flour will be available to make bread, where it might be found, how much it now costs. Rich or poor, taxi drivers, human rights defenders, and teachers alike spend hours speculating about where a canister of cooking gas might be found. Exhaustion is gripping hold of all in Gaza. Survival leaves little if no room for political engagement – and beyond exhaustion, anger and frustration are all that is left.

Sunday, November 16, 2008

THE TIN FOIL HAT EDITION: ISSUE 45, VOLUME 70
THE MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE
The Art of Money Creation

The Masters of the Universe, that is, the financial class are very deft at pulling the wool over the eyes of the people. They have in fact been so good at what they do that we have been enslaved without even noticing it. Filmmaker Peter Joseph’s Zeitgiest: Addendum exposes this shell game.



Zeitgeist The Movie

Friday, November 14, 2008

THE REAL POLITIK EDITION: ISSUE 44, VOLUME 69
RABID!
by Malik Isasis
















This blog entry is more of a rant than an intelligent string of ideas. The Republicans are out of their rabid-ass minds. They are still unable to assimilate the idea of no longer being in power, so they are acting out like unruly children. It’s fun watching them and their political operatives become Lord of the Flies.

Republican patriotism is pornographic, and self-indulgent and self-serving. It has worked for eight years because the corporate media refused to stand up. They did not question the Bush administration’s adventurism for fear of losing access, financial gain and being labeled as unpatriotic. Ben Bagdikian, a media critic stated in his book, The Media Monopoly, “Unchallenged information is inherently flawed information. If it is in error to begin with, it is not open to correction” (Bagdikian X1IV).

Reality has shown Republicans’ uber love for country to be nothing more than an election gimmick and over the past two election cycles, Americans have thrown them out on their asses. Still, they are unable to accept responsibility for their failure at governance—the loss of millions of jobs, the devalued dollar, two illegal occupations, corporate corruption, deregulation of monopolies, torture, domestic spying, and straight up thievery from the federal treasury.

Since being in control of the Congress from 1994-2006, they and their allies find everyone but themselves to blame. They seem obtuse as to why tax cuts, smaller government, and free-market economy sloganeering hasn’t worked over the last two election cycles—even in the midst of their president growing the government though a bogus War on Terror, giving tax cut to the wealthy, and a free market economy that has ushered in systemic corruption and economic depression, they seem unable to connect the dots of philosophical failure, and a philosophical shift in the country.

They are grieved and are rebuilding, but they are unable to get over their own de-evolution, that is, they don’t value intelligence, only incurious shitbomb throwing monkeys. After eating their weak, they will recess back into the shadows of American politics and get back-to-basics, using their primary skills as political operatives to again, stage a come back when a world crisis presents itself; the corporate media will no doubt welcome its exiled paramour back with opened arms. Until that time, they will use cultural issues to keep their reptilian brained base primed with gays, illegal Mexicans, and Obama the socialists.
Media Matters has followed their ghastly echo chamber in their report.

Women, minorities, autistic children: Conservative radio's vitriol not reserved for Obama…

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

THE REAL POLITIK EDITION: ISSUE 43, VOLUME 68
Obama: Beware the Lessons of '93
by Robert Parry, Consortium News


















Barack Obama seeks a new era of bipartisanship, but he should take heed of what happened to the last Democrat in the White House – Bill Clinton – in 1993 when he sought to appease Republicans by shelving pending investigations into Reagan-Bush-I-era wrongdoing and hoped for some reciprocity.

Instead the Republicans pocketed the Democratic concessions and pressed ahead with possibly the most partisan assault ever directed against a sitting President. The war on Clinton included attacks on his past life in Arkansas, on his wife Hillary, on personnel decisions at the White House, and on key members of his administration.

The Republicans also took the offensive against Clinton’s reformist agenda, denying him even one GOP vote for his first budget and then sabotaging Hillary Clinton’s plan for universal health insurance.

The desperately-seeking-bipartisanship Clinton allowed Republican loyalists to stay burrowed inside the government, and he bowed to the appointment of right-wing special prosecutors (appointed by a Republican-dominated judicial panel) to investigate him and his administration.

In the first two years of the Clinton presidency, radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh emerged as a national phenomenon, regaling his huge audience with three hours a day of mocking attacks on Bill and Hillary Clinton.

At one downtown Washington restaurant, Blackie’s House of Beef, a special area was set aside so Clinton haters could listen to Rush Limbaugh’s show while eating lunch. Limbaugh’s success inspired a new generation of radio talk show hosts who got rich dishing anti-Clinton dirt.

In February 1994, when I covered the annual Conservative Political Action Conference – a kind of trade show for the Right – I was stunned by the volume and variety of hate-Clinton paraphernalia. Never had I seen anything like this well-organized, well-funded determination to destroy a political figure.

In November 1994, a resurgent Republican Party – energized by its hatred of the Clintons – wrested control of Congress from the Democrats. But rather than sating the Right’s anti-Clinton obsession, the success only fed a desire for more.

Impeachment

Behind a relentless investigation by right-wing special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, the Republicans pressed ahead with what became a multi-year drive to impeach President Clinton, exploiting suspicions over Clinton’s old Whitewater real-estate investment as payback for Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal.

Finally, in 1998 after Starr (with the help of a Reagan-Bush stay-behind named Linda Tripp) disclosed Clinton’s sexual dalliance with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky, the Republican-controlled House impeached Clinton, though he survived a Senate trial in 1999.

With President Clinton humiliated, the stage was set for a new Republican/media war on Vice President Al Gore, whose presidential candidacy in 1999-2000 became a whipping boy for Clinton’s enemies frustrated at their inability to drive Clinton from office.

Though Gore managed to claw his way to a narrow popular-vote victory in November 2000, the race was close enough for George W. Bush – with the help of five Republican partisans on the U.S. Supreme Court – to claim the White House.

Now, after eight years of Bush’s catastrophic presidency, another Democrat has been elected to the nation’s highest office and – like Clinton 16 years ago – Barack Obama is being advised by Washington insiders to reach out to the Republicans with an open hand of bipartisanship.

Most significantly, Obama is being urged to forget about holding Bush and other top officials accountable for torture, war crimes, violations of the Constitution and other serious offenses. Obama’s even getting advice that he should leave some senior Bush officials in place as a bipartisan gesture.

Ironically, some of this advice is coming from the same people who were part of Clinton’s decisions in early 1993 to set aside investigations into Reagan-Bush-I wrongdoing and thus to allow a false history of that era to become cemented as a faux reality.

For instance, Lee Hamilton, who in 1993 was an accommodating Democratic congressman, helped sink key investigations into covert Republican relationships with Iran and Iraq. Now, as a senior foreign policy adviser to Obama, Hamilton has spoken favorably of retaining Bush’s Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

I’ve heard other rumblings around Washington that influential Democrats, including some who are under consideration for top national security jobs, oppose pursuing war crimes and human rights abuses committed by the Bush administration on the grounds that the 2008 electoral repudiation should be punishment enough.

Obama also is sure to hear plenty of counsel about “looking to the future, not the past,” about the need to focus on the nation’s pressing problems, not expend energy and political capital “to settle scores” from the last eight years.

Lessons Unlearned

Some Washington Democrats should know better. John Podesta, a co-chair of Obama’s transition team (who accompanied Obama to his Monday meeting with President Bush), was a senior member of Clinton’s White House staff in the 1990s.

Early in the Clinton presidency, I met with Podesta at the White House to ask why historical questions about serious wrongdoing by Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush weren’t being pursued. Podesta told me that those issues simply weren’t “on the radar.”

I learned later that President Clinton himself was an advocate for looking past the scandals of the 1980s and for following the advice of his Fleetwood Mac campaign song, “don’t stop thinking about tomorrow.”

As I wrote in the opening chapter of Secrecy & Privilege, two old acquaintances of mine – Stuart Sender and his wife, Julie Bergman Sender – encountered Clinton in May 1994 at a social event at the White House.

Clinton started talking like one might chat with neighbors about troubles at work. He complained about how rancorous Washington had become, how beleaguered he felt, how horribly the press was treating him.

“He was unburdening himself,” recalled Stuart Sender, a documentary filmmaker from Los Angeles.

Sixteen months into his Presidency, Clinton was getting clobbered by the Republicans – and by the news media – over his Whitewater real-estate deal. There had been a firestorm, too, over allegations from Arkansas state troopers about Clinton’s philandering as governor.

A woman named Paula Jones had emerged from that controversy with claims that Clinton had crudely propositioned her. He also was taking flak over the firing of employees in the White House Travel Office.

Then, there were bizarre suspicions circulating about the suicide of White House deputy counsel Vincent Foster, who had come with the Clintons from Arkansas. Foster shot himself in the head after growing despondent over the harsh press criticism he had received for his role in the Travel Office affair, but some conservatives were spreading rumors of a deeper mystery.

Clinton felt besieged not only by aggressive Republicans but by the national press corps. Since the last Democratic President, Jimmy Carter, left office in 1981, a powerful right-wing media had come into its own, built in part as a defense mechanism to shield Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush from criticism.

Besides Limbaugh and the bevy of other talk radio hosts, right-wing print outlets had grown in number and in influence, the likes of the American Spectator and The Washington Times, not to mention The Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages and conservative columnists in newspapers across the country.

Many of the commentators also appeared on TV political chat shows to reprise their opinions for millions of more Americans nationwide.

Mainstream journalists at outlets such as NBC News and The New York Times also joined in the Clinton bashing, seemingly eager to prove that they could be tougher on a Democrat than any Republican. They were determined to show they weren’t the “liberal media” that the conservatives long had railed against.

Indeed, it was The Washington Post, the newspaper credited with unraveling Richard Nixon’s Watergate mystery, which had led the charge on the Whitewater case with front-page stories that put Clinton in a public relations corner and forced him to acquiesce to a special prosecutor.

Seeking Sympathy

So, during a social event on May 28, 1994, in the ornate East Room of the White House, Clinton was making the rounds of his guests and looking for a sympathetic hearing. “All of a sudden we looked up and there was President Clinton,” Stuart Sender recalled.

The chitchat soon turned to Clinton’s complaints about his ill treatment at the hands of the news media.

“He started the conversation by saying how horrible the press is being to him,” said Julie Bergman Sender, a movie producer and the daughter of songwriters Alan and Marilyn Bergman. “I was looking around at the planters. I was thinking, ‘you’re not standing in your living room, really.’”

But Stuart Sender, who had worked as a journalist on the Reagan-Bush-I-era Iran-Contra and Iraqgate scandals, had a different reaction. He wondered why Clinton had never pursued those investigations of Republican wrongdoing after becoming President in January 1993.

After all, Sender thought, those were real scandals, involving secret dealings with unsavory regimes. Top Republicans allegedly had helped arm Iraq’s Saddam Hussein as well as the radical Islamic mullahs of Iran, violations of law, constitutional principles – and common sense.

Those actions had then been surrounded by stout defenses from Republicans and their media allies. The protection had taken on the look of systematic cover-ups, sometimes even obstruction of justice, to spare the top echelons of the Reagan-Bush-I administrations from accountability.

Indeed, as Clinton was heading into office at the start of 1993, four investigations were underway that implicated senior Republicans in potential criminal wrongdoing.

The Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages case was still alive, with special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh furious over new evidence that President George H.W. Bush may have obstructed justice by withholding his own notes from investigators and ducking an interview that Walsh had put off until after the 1992 elections.

Bush also had sabotaged the investigation by pardoning six Iran-Contra defendants on Christmas Eve 1992, possibly the first presidential pardon ever issued to protect the same President from criminal exposure.

In late 1992, Congress also was investigating Bush’s alleged role in secretly aiding Iraq’s Saddam Hussein during and after his eight-year-long war with Iran. Representative Henry Gonzalez, the aging chairman of the House Banking Committee, had led the charge in exposing intricate financial schemes that the Reagan-Bush-I administrations had employed to assist Hussein.

There also were allegations of indirect U.S. military aid through third countries, claims that Bush and other Republicans emphatically denied.

Lesser known investigations were examining two other sets of alleged wrongdoing: the so-called October Surprise issue (accusations that Bush and other Republicans had interfered with Jimmy Carter’s hostage negotiations with Iran during the 1980 campaign) and the Passportgate affair (evidence that Bush operatives had improperly searched Clinton’s passport file in 1992, looking for dirt that could be used to discredit his patriotism and secure reelection for Bush).

All told, the four sets of allegations, if true, would paint an unflattering portrait of the 12-year Republican rule: two illegal dirty tricks (October Surprise and Passportgate) book-ending ill-conceived national security schemes in the Middle East (Iran-Contra and Iraqgate).

Had the full stories been told the American people might have perceived the legacies of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush quite differently than they do today.

But the Clinton administration and congressional Democrats dropped all four investigations beginning in early 1993, either through benign neglect – by failing to hold hearings and keeping the issues alive in the news media – or by actively closing the door on investigative leads. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

Curious Decisions

Clinton’s disinterest in these scandals had mystified some activists in the Democratic base and some investigators who, like Stuart Sender, had watched as the rug was pulled from under these historic probes.

After the investigations died, some Democrats in Congress, who had participated in the aborted probes, came under nasty Republican attacks as did journalists who had pursued the stories.

Gonzalez had raised the ire of the first Bush administration by revealing that Bush and other senior Republicans had followed an ill-fated covert policy of coddling Saddam Hussein, disclosures that had rained on Bush’s parade after the U.S. military victory over Iraq in the first Persian Gulf War in 1991.

Now, Gonzalez was left looking like a foolish old man, a kind of modern-day Don Quixote tilting at windmills.

The same could be said of Lawrence Walsh, a lifelong Republican who crossed his own party by challenging the cover stories that had shielded top Republicans caught up in the Iran-Contra Affair.

In pressing investigations into alleged obstructions of justice, Walsh had found his reputation under ad hominem attacks from The Washington Times and other parts of the conservative news media for petty matters such as ordering room-service meals and flying first class.

Walsh was so stunned by the ferocity of the Republican defensive strategy that he entitled his memoirs Firewall in recognition of the impenetrable barrier that was built to keep the Iran-Contra scandal away from Reagan and Bush.

Walsh, too, was dismissed as a foolish old man, though the literary metaphor for him was Moby Dick’s Captain Ahab, obsessively pursuing the white whale.

But letting the outgoing Reagan-Bush-I team off the hook hadn’t earned the Democrats any measure of bipartisan protection. By spring 1994, Clinton had begun to sense the rising tide of political danger that the non-stop attacks against him represented. He was looking for allies and some sympathy.

So, as waiters poured coffee at the East Room reception and Clinton was voicing his frustrations to some of his guests, Stuart Sender saw his chance to ask Clinton why he hadn’t pursued leads about the Reagan-Bush-I secret initiatives in the Middle East.

“I had this moment to say to him, ‘What are you going to do about this? Why aren’t you going after them about Iran-Contra and Iraqgate?’” Sender said. “If the shoe were on the other foot, they’d sure be going after our side. … Why don’t you go back after them, their high crimes and misdemeanors?”

But Clinton brushed aside the suggestion.

“It was very clear that that wasn’t what he had in mind at all,” Sender said. “He said he felt that Judge Walsh had been too strident and had probably been a bit too extreme in how he had pursued Iran-Contra. He didn’t feel that it was a good idea to pursue these investigations because he was going to have to work with these people.

“To me what was amazingly telling was his dig at Walsh, this patrician Republican jurist who had been put in charge of this but even the Democratic President had decided that this was somewhere that he couldn’t go. He was going to try to work with these guys, compromise, build working relationships.”

Clinton "really did have this idea that he’d be able to work with these guys,” Sender recalled with a touch of amazement in his voice. “It seemed even at the time terribly naïve that these same Republicans were going to work with him if he backed off on congressional hearings or possible independent prosecutor investigations.

“How ironic that he decides he’s not going to pursue this when later on they impeach him for the Monica Lewinsky scandal.”

False History

Sender, like others who had been in the trenches of the national security scandals of the 1980s, thought the retreat on the investigations by Clinton and the Democrats after they won the 1992 elections was wrong for a host of other reasons, too.

Most importantly, it allowed an incomplete, even false history to be written about the Reagan-Bush-I era, glossing over many of the worst mistakes. The bogus history denied the American people the knowledge needed to assess how relationships had evolved between the United States and Middle East leaders, including Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, the Saudi royal family and the Iranian mullahs.

Though the Middle East crises had receded by the time Clinton took office in 1993, the troubles had not gone away and were sure to worsen again. When that time came, the American people would have a sanitized version of how the country got where it was.

Even government officials responsible for Middle East policies would have only a partial history of how these entangling alliances crisscrossed through the deals and betrayals of the prior two decades.

The Democratic retreat from the investigative battles in 1993 would have another profound effect on the future of American politics.

By letting George H.W. Bush leave the White House with his reputation intact – and even helping him fend off accusations of serious wrongdoing – the Democrats unwittingly cleared the way for a restoration of the Bush political dynasty eight years later.

If investigators had dug out the full truth about alleged secret operations involving George H.W. Bush, the family’s reputation would have been badly tarnished, if not destroyed.

Since that reputation served as the foundation for George W. Bush’s political career, it’s unlikely that he ever would have gained the momentum to propel him to the Republican presidential nomination, let alone to the White House in Election 2000.

Now, eight years later – with Barack Obama’s victory and with solid Democratic majorities again in the House and Senate – the Democrats are back to a spot very similar to where they were at the start of Bill Clinton’s presidency.

They have all the power they need to initiate serious investigations into the widespread criminality of George W. Bush’s presidency, from torture and other war crimes to war profiteering and other lucrative influence peddling.

But President-elect Obama is receiving nearly the identical advice that greeted Bill Clinton after his election 16 years ago: In the name of bipartisanship, let bygones be bygones.

Monday, November 10, 2008

THE RIGHT-WING EDITION: ISSUE 42, VOLUME 67
THE SHIP BE SINKING;THE RATS BE LEAVIN’
by Malik Isasis





















The Republicans rise and fall spectacularly, they always do, it’s in their political DNA. When they fail, they have an extraordinary way of not reflecting, but deflecting their failures and shamelessly blaming others. So they repeat their spectacular failures every generation because when they rise from the ashes, there is no synaptic connections to why they fail, only the mythology that it is their destiny.

According to the Diagnostic Statistic Manual (DSM IV) some of the criteria for 297.1 Delusional Disorder are as follows:

1. For at least one month the patient has had delusions that are nonbizarre (the content is something that could reasonably happen).
2. Functioning and behavior are not markedly affected, apart from direct consequences of the delusions.
3. The disorder is not directly caused by a general medical condition or the use or substances, including prescription medications.

The Republican Party is wondering around Washington D.C. in a daze, like amnesia patients trying to understand how they got to where they are. The exorcism has left them confused and discombobulated. Neocons and the Republican Party have been beguiled, if not possessed by absolute power, which blinded them to their history, which is their ability to reach absolute power and collapse under corruption and incompetence.

The Republican implosion is not new. Throughout the 20th century, there are examples of Republicans reaching the pinnacle of power and then collapsing from the weight of their incompetence and lack of compassion. It’s the Peter Principle, which theorizes that a person will be promoted to the highest level of his/or her competence and eventually advance to a level of incompetence. The modern Republican Party implodes every other generation under its own ineptitude.

Republicans and their neocon brethren are now saying that Obama won based on conservative-values.



This sort of delusion makes sense, especially since Republicans and Neocons moved from reality-based to an ideological faith-based world. They thought the ideologues or the constituents that they created by would not see the contempt that they have towards them, but the Republican Party didn’t expect the Frankenstein-monster they had created to turn on them. Now they are lashing out at one another in anger and frustration. Instead of self-reflection, they continue to deflect the reason why they have lost both houses and a presidency.

The Republican Party and their followers are going through the five stages of grief, with the first stage being denial. As a liberal, I know how you feel, having been on the losing side since the Presidential election of 2000, Congressional elections of 2002, and the Presidential election 2004. It is hard, I know. I hope that when you work your way through the final stage of grief, the acceptance stage, we can heal and come together as a country again.

Thursday, November 06, 2008

RE-ENTER THE MATRIX

Monday, November 03, 2008

TRUE...TRUE


Sunday, November 02, 2008

THE ELECTION EDITION: ISSUE 41, VOLUME 65
JOHN THE ASSHOLLE
by Malik Isasis























John McCain has been trotting out Joe The Plumber, an unlicensed plumber and fraud, from Ohio as an every man, the life and breath of American values at his pep rallies around the country, and even referred to Joe The Plumber as his role model.

It makes sense that he would be your role model John; you vetted him about as thoroughly as you vetted Sarah Palin. Sure the corporate media and the Republicans are going along with you on the narrative that the race is tightening in the polls, because Joe The Plumber exposed Obama for being a radical socialist, or raging terrorist.

"Joe the Plumber," the small business aspirant and overnight media sensation who has endorsed John McCain's presidential campaign, said on Tuesday that he believed a Barack Obama presidency would spell "the death of Israel."

John McCain is a pathetic anti-intellectual like his other role model, George W. Bush. At his stump speeches, he sounds like the angry old bastard who’d enjoyed privilege all his life. His sense of entitlement fuels his nastiness, his drive and motivation to conquer the daddy-issues that has haunted him all of his life. Just what we need, another president with daddy-issues and something to prove to ghosts that keeps him emotionally cripple and insecure. At 72, you should be thinking about living your privileged life out on a yacht somewhere, but no, possessed with the demons of insecurity, you are trying to work out your psychodrama, out on the world stage. Power will not save you from death, my friend. Maybe when all this is over, you will come to appreciate the privilege that has protected your storybook fairytale of heroism and courage, because you clearly exposed that you have neither.

You’re just an asshole just like the rest of your Republican brethren whose only solution to anything and everything is tax cuts and war.

Come Tuesday, both you and your brethren will be back into the minority licking your wounds, and maybe, just maybe doing some reflection on the policies that have destroyed this Republican Democracy.

IF IT CAN HAPPEN TO HOMER, IT CAN HAPPEN TO YOU