Sunday, March 28, 2010

THE REAL POLITIK ISSUE: VOLUME 109, ISSUE 137
THE WORLD WATCHES IN SILENCE
by Malik Isasis



Israeli settlements continue to plague the peace process. It is clear that the Israeli government and its largess, the United States with its billions in aid, and military support, are choosing to digest all of Palestine into Israel so there will never be a two-state solution, just one. And if that is the course, Israel and the United States should stop pretending that it wants peace, rather than land. If there is to be a one-state solution, declare it, but also declare that the Palestinians will be full Israeli citizens with equal rights, or continue to be second class citizens in its own territories under the current apartheid system.

Sunday, March 21, 2010

THE REAL POLITIK ISSUE: VOLUME 109, ISSUE 136
ISRAEL IS BOSS
by Margaret Kimberley, The Black Agenda Report



Corporate media pretend U.S.-Israeli relations are in “crisis,” just as they have many times in the past. It’s all a charade, a play for national and international audiences. In real crises, relationships are called into question. But there has never been any question about who is in charge of this “partnership”: Israel. And don’t you dare forget it.

The United States may invade and occupy Iraq, undermine elected presidents in Haiti and throw its weight around in numerous ways in numerous parts of the world. Yet there is one country it does not dare to confront. Of course, the nation in question is Israel.

Israel and its allies in the United States make certain that no president, no political party, no congressional leader nor any citizen who wishes to be in any way influential, will dare to step outside the lines of proscribed behavior and discourse. The American public, either because they are aware of the pro-Israel grip on power, or because they have swallowed the propaganda whole, remain cowed and silent.

Israel can do whatever it wants not only with the United States, but with other western nations as well. Mossad agents succeeded in murdering Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabouh in Dubai last month by using doctored British, Irish, French, Australian and German passports and credit cards issued to an Israeli-run bank located in South Dakota. None of the nations involved has uttered more than the slightest peep after having their sovereignty violated in such an obvious manner.

ust in case there was any doubt about who is in charge, Israel insulted Vice President Joseph Biden and the United States government when Biden made a recent visit to Jerusalem. Biden made the pro forma journey to go through the motions of requesting that the peace process continue. The Israelis could have nudged, winked and gone through the pretense of moving forward on a just peace process. Instead they announced that more Jewish housing will be constructed on Palestinian land, embarrassing the Vice President and his boss, who wanted to pretend to be even handed when they and the rest of American political leadership are anything but. The Obama administration, like every other presidential administration in the last sixty years, does what Israel wants it to do. There shouldn’t be any reason for Israel to yank the Americans’ chain so hard and so publicly, but why follow the rules of diplomatic niceties when doing otherwise has been so successful?

The only thing worse than the obvious slap in the face, is the phony outrage surrounding it. No one gets anywhere near a presidential nomination without first swearing obedience to the Zionists and their lobby. If Obama and Biden and Hillary Clinton were truly upset with the Israelis, it is only because they were so blatant in making them all look like chumps.

Just a few weeks before Obama was sworn into office, George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice were the victims of an Israeli public beat down. Bush was literally pulled off a stage where he was about to give a speech and forced to take a phone call from then Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert. Rice had worked on a Security Council resolution which merely called for a cease fire in Israel’s massacre of thousands of people in Gaza. Olmert bragged in a press conference, “I said, ‘I don’t care; I have to talk to him.’” Not content to tell the world that he ordered the American president to follow his orders, he took a swipe at Rice too. “He gave an order to the secretary of state, and she did not vote in favor of it — a resolution she cooked up, phrased, organized and maneuvered for. She was left pretty shamed, and abstained on a resolution she arranged.” It isn’t surprising that Israel would repeat the humiliation just a year later with a different president.

It doesn’t matter if David Axelrod goes on the Sunday morning news shows and fakes outrage about Israel’s settlements. It matters that Israel continues to steal Palestinian land and it matters that only those willing to go along with the crime are allowed to entertain any idea of having a role in United States foreign policy decisions.

Far from being angry at Israel, the United States government is actually becoming more and more like that nation. The Obama administration claims the right to carry out extra judicial assassinations just like their Middle East partner in crime. The temporary embarrassment and damage control pronouncements are not worthy of anyone’s attention.

The only lesson to learn from this sorry episode is that nothing new has taken place between the United States and Israel. All Americans are still made complicit in the joint criminality and earn the enmity of most of the world as a result. So don’t believe the hype. There is nothing to see here, just move along.

Sunday, March 14, 2010

THE REAL POLITIK ISSUE: VOLUME 109, ISSUE 135
Palestinians Should Now Declare Their Independence
by Johann Hari, The Independent



Could the Israeli government make it any more obvious they have no intention of sharing the Over-Promised Land with its other inhabitants?

This week the Obama administration - who give Israel $3bn a year, more than they dole out to any other nation on earth - made a meek and craven request for Israelis to simply have a pause in seizing even more land, and to sit down with the Palestinians. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded with a big concrete slap: the announcement of 1,600 more homes to be built on occupied Palestinian land from which Arabs will be forcibly kept out. He has made it plain he will not loosen his grip by an inch, announcing: "Even if [Palestinian President] Abu Mazen comes along and says he's ready to sign a peace deal on the spot, we will restore settlement construction to its previous levels." No compromise. Never.

How does this look to the Palestinians? Their story is so rarely explained without disinformation that it still seems startling when it is stated plainly. Until 1948, the Palestinians were living in their own homes, on their own land - until they were suddenly driven out in a war to make way for a new state for people fleeing a monstrous European genocide. They lived huddled and dazed in the 20 per cent of their land they were allowed to keep. They hardly fought back: they wept and dreamed of return. Then in the 1967 war, even these small strips were conquered with tanks and platoons.

Day by day since then, the remaining Palestinian land has been taken and given to fundamentalist settlers who claim it was given to them by God. They watched while Israeli Prime Ministers said they didn't exist - "there are no Palestinians", announced Golda Meir - or described them as animals: Menachem Begin called them "beasts walking on two legs", while Yitzhak Shamir said they should be "crushed like grasshoppers... heads smashed against the boulders and walls." They tried peacefully resisting, launching a programme of sit-downs and civil disobedience. Yitzhak Rabin responded by ordering the occupying Israeli army to "break their bones." After decades of this treatment, they fought back with violence - some of it targeted horribly and unacceptably at Israeli civilians.

And so today - with the active support of the governments of the Western world - the Palestinians live in a permanent military headlock. They are split in two. The Gaza Strip is blockaded on all sides, its population of 1.5 million imprisoned in a cramped, collapsing concrete maze the size of the Isle of Wight. For nearly three years, the essentials of life have been slowly choked off, in a process one Israeli official described with a chuckle as "putting the Palestinians on a diet". The items blocked from coming in include pasta and children's exercise books. The UN has shown that 70 per cent of Gazans are living on less than $1 a day, and 60 per cent have no daily access to clean water. Every time I go there, I think it can't be worse, yet it is. They used to use cars. Now it's donkeys.

On the West Bank, the land-theft continues. To protect the settlers and their programme of taking Palestinian land, there is a huge military infrastructure, made up of check-points and random searches and settler-only roads. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Richard Ben Cramer offers one story he witnessed that typifies and distils life on the West Bank: "One school headmaster, a dignified elder man, who passed the same checkpoint on his way to school every morning, was made to undress - not once but often - and stand naked while his students passed by. This was richly humorous [to the occupying soldiers]."

There is a solution. Everyone knows it: divide the land. There are two peoples - the Palestinians and the Israelis. Let them live in two states, with 1967 borders, with full compensation for the victims of 1948. Although it is painful to accept swathes of your own dispossession, the Palestinian leadership has supported this programme since 1978, and even Hamas - the ugly fundamentalist group - tacitly accepts it. Yet it has not been offered to the Palestinians. Every time they have sat down to negotiate, even more has been stolen from them: settler numbers doubled during the Oslo "peace process". It culminated in an offer of a series of broken Batustans controlled forever by Israel - one no Palestinian leader could accept.

And now there is an endless ratchet. Swathes of East Jerusalem are being turned into biblical heritage theme parks and settler-belts that cut the city off from the West Bank. In 2008, 4,600 Palestinians lost their residency papers and so were expelled from the city, 20 times more than the year before.

For a long time, I believed that the Israeli people - with their own history of unimaginable suffering - would change their behaviour on their own. They would surely reject life as eternal jailer, after the jail cells they have end-ured. They would surely see that this process of slow strangulation would only make Palestinians more determined to fight back. If nothing else, they would surely see that the Palestinians would - because of their higher birth-rate - soon be a majority between the Jordan river and the sea, and there was no future for Israel as a Jewish minority ruling over a Palestinian majority like some 1980s Afrikaaner tribute band.

While there are some heroic Israelis who argue back - Gideon Levy, David Grossman, Uri Avnery, Gush Shalom, my military refusenik friends - they are disappointingly few. It may be that surviving the most horrific atrocities doesn't make you compassionate, but more often makes you hard, and paranoid. It may make you see the ghost of your murderer even in your victims: Adolf Hitler in a Gazan child. I think of the survivors of the Rwandan genocide I have known, who promptly charged off to pillage Congo, killing millions.

There is very little the Palestinians can do to change their situation alone. They are virtually disarmed, with a few rockets and some stone-throwing kids, against the fourth most powerful army on earth. But international pressure - applied intelligently, without hyperbole - can strengthen their hand, and the Palestinians are considering a move that would catalyse it. They are considering a unilateral declaration of independence, and an appeal for the world to recognise them as a state. It wouldn't cause the occupation to vanish - but it would make the situation plain for all to see. They are a people; they deserve a state, as much as the British or the Israelis. Netanyahu talks about the dangers of Israel being wiped from the map, yet Palestine is being wiped from the map every day by his tanks and his guns. Why should they have to "earn" their right to their own land by proving obedience to an abusive foreign power?

Western governments support this erasure of Palestine: the EU with diplomacy and arms sales and by providing Israel with its largest markets, and the US with hard cash. A declaration of Palestinian independence would force them to either defend that position to (mostly appalled) electorates, or change it. Already, France's Foreign Minister, Bernard Kouchner, has hinted that he would feel obliged to support a declaration. Would Obama veto the creation of a Palestinian state at the UN Security Council?

Netanyahu is clearly panicked. The negotiators would meet as one head of state to another - rather than as a broken supplicant appealing to his master. He has angrily declared that the Palestinians will face "consequences" if they choose this path, including the annexation of settlement blocks. Chief Palestinian negotiator Saed Erekat replied: "The purpose of such a move is to keep hope alive... We're fed up with your time-wasting. We don't believe you really want a two-state solution."

The Palestinians want the same freedom that the Jews pined for - a safe home of their own. They should declare independence. Then it is up to us - the watching billions - to pressure our governments to make it real, rather than a howl in the dark.

Tuesday, March 09, 2010

THE BROKEN MEDIA ISSUE: VOLUME 108, ISSUE 134
MASS EFFECT
by Malik Isasis



The problem with throwing shit against the wall to see what sticks is that, shit actually sticks. For twenty-five years the corporate media’s Jackson Pollack strategy of perpetuating Republican fear, folklore, and paranoia has painted the American political canvas with piles of poo, and the stench is something awful.

It is fashionable for newsreaders and pundits across cable news to over use the phrase Broken Government, while the government is broken, it is the corporate media who are the saboteurs, keeping American citizens schizophrenically uninformed.

When the Democratic Party was in the minority for over six years (four years under President Bush) the corporate media helped the neocons to portray the Democratic Party as obstructionists? Remember that? Of course not, because when Democrats were filibustering President Bush’s Supreme Court nominees, the media bashed the Democrats over the head with the obstructionist title. Here’s Katie Couric for example in April 2005, interviewing President Clinton:

COURIC: Let me ask you one political question, if I could, President Clinton. As you know, Howard Dean is now head of the DNC [Democratic National Committee]. Right now it seems the most effective thing that Democrats are doing on Capitol Hill is blocking various nominations, at least from their perspective. Like, you know, John Bolton, or -- U.S. ambassador to the U.N. -- or head of the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency], or the head of the FDA [Food and Drug Administration]. How can the Democratic Party retool itself so they're not simply seen as obstructionist in terms of the president's agenda?

CLINTON: Well, first of all, I don't think that's fair. I don't think Mr. [John] Negroponte [nominee for national intelligence director] will be blocked. I'm not sure Mr. Bolton will be blocked. There are policy reasons on the environment and food safety for debates on the others. And on judges, that's just a hoax. I mean, the Democrats blocked 10 out of over 200 judges. The Republicans wouldn't even give a vote to 40 of my Court of Appeals judges -- four times as many, just on the Court of Appeals, never mind all the others that they wouldn't have voted. So, this image that, I'm sad to say, you know, you just perpetrated it, it's ridiculous. The Democratic Senate has been nowhere near as obstructionist to President Bush on judges as the Republican Senate was to me. Not even close.


Since the Democratic Party retook the majority in the Congress in the November 2006 mid-term elections, the partisan label of obstructionists, has not been used once to describe the Republican Party who’ve since the Democratic Party has taken over, held their breaths, crossed their arms and stumped their feet like two year olds at every opportunity.

The corporate media is in cahoots with the right-wing hate machine to create mass delusion among the American population. Back in 2007, even with the loss of Republican Congressional power, the media continued to treat the Democratic Party as a nuisance for challenging Bush's destructive foreign policy.




The corporate media didn’t challenge Bush when he was in office, instead they spoke around him as if he had nothing to do with sending troops to Iraq without proper intelligence, training, protective equipment, most importantly, a plan for the occupation of a sovereign country, yet it is the Democratic Party who received the brunt of the criticism. Although the corporate media failed, they tried linking the Democrats to the failures in Iraq, per right-wing guidance. In the world of politics, perception is everything; the Bush Administration had based its whole administration on deceiving the public by pretending to be doing something, without really doing anything. The corporate media took the nothing and spun it into gold on his War on Terror.

Now that Bush has faded into the background, it’s like his presidency never existed. He has left the country in a financial mess, and yet, amazingly, the corporate media has pinned the tail on the wrong donkey. The media talks about the unemployment rates, Iraq, and the economy without mentioning a word about the Bush legacy. It is amazing.

The collusion between the politicians and the corporate media to short change us of ideas, imagination, and creativity has resulted in elected officials who lack ideas, imagination, and creativity.

The corporate whores who sponsor our politicians have trained them to see us as consumers, and if we are seen as consumers then we are seen as fools. Take’em to the woodshed Rachel:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Tuesday, March 02, 2010

THE BROKEN MEDIA ISSUE: VOLUME 108, ISSUE 133
THE CORPORATE MEDIA AND ITS DISCONTENTS
by Malik Isasis




Way back on October 18, 2006 President Bush had both the House and the Senate and from 2001-2006, he and the Republican Party reeked havoc on the economy with its “Starving the Beast” policies, jump started two wars and subs sequent occupations, and thoroughly collapsed the US economy into near bankruptcy, which proved the conservative economic policy of “Starving the Beast”, (creating such deficits through tax cuts that social programs die a seemingly natural death through attrition), worked quite well.

Having already imposed deep program cuts, governors in almost every state will have to make even more excruciating choices before July 1st, the beginning of their next fiscal year. In Massachusetts, officials are considering eliminating funding for a program providing housing vouchers to homeless families. California is facing $1.5 billion in reductions to kindergarten through 12th grade education and community college funding, while New York State may have to reduce payments to health-care providers by $400 million.

The Phoenix

October 18, 2006 was just weeks before the Democratic Party was to take control of the US Senate, which it hadn’t control since President Clinton lost it back in 1994. As political scandal after political scandal marred the Republicans, the Democrats were presented with opportunities to win seats in the unlikeliest districts. On October 18, 2006, I blogged this: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 and rises like the Phoenix, only to repeat the same mistakes.

The Republicans understand that they really don’t have to change they just have to wait. I won’t blame the Republicans for their nature of petulance and incompetence just as I won’t blame a pile of shit for smelling. It’s useless. I can, however, dress-down the corporate media for its nihilism, and festering cynicism that threatens democracy.

Even in the age of Youtube and other neat recording devices, the corporate media divorce the Republican Party and its operatives from its long and disastrous history and give their failed voices authority.



Republicans are exceptional at branding things, just as they have branded themselves the party of moral values, in spite of the opposite; the corporate media has played along. Here is a long list of Republican hypocrisy on moral values.

THE CROOKED REF

The Fourth Estate, formerly known as the media, had/has the role of being a government watch dog, making sure that we had an educated citizenry. Of course now, the corporate media makes sure that keep kicking up dust, to muddle every single issue, even when it’s easy. The corporate media put the same value on a talking point as it does a fact, therefore when Republicans are spewing lies, they weigh it as equally as the fact, cleverly framing debates with Republican talking points by pretending to play Devil’s Advocate. So when people have been misinformed deliberately by the media’s own doing with help from the political operatives of the Republican Party, the corporate media reports the lack of support for health care as if its reporting had nothing to do with the results.


Blogger Alex Thurston at Firedoglake laid out the five biggest Republican folklores that the corporate media allow the Republican Party to get away with.
Republicans are Fiscal Conservatives
Republicans are Strong on National Security
Republicans Defend Individual Rights
Republicans Represent Family Values
Republicans Just Want Everyone to Have the Same Opportunities


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 anymore, 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. They have succeeded in making the consumers of their products vote against their own best interests. The corporate media is broken and should come with a warning label like cigarettes.

Warning: if you consume this product you are at risk for intellectual cancer.