Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Month: June 2010

Enough with the Sanctimony over Israel, Jews, Palestine and the Holocaust

By

On June 13, 2010

Comments

Look, enough. Let me lay it out really simply for the dense.

The Palestinians did not deserve to be colonized, displaced and turned into 2nd class citizens in their own land because Europeans tried to kill off the Jewish people.

The morality here is the same as the morality of Iraq and 9/11.  “Well, some folks attacked us, so we’re going to use it as an excuse to beat the shit out of someone who was completely uninvolved.”

So, enough with the sanctimony about Helen Thomas’s statement about Israeli Jews from the usual suspects on the left.

Telling the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors to “go back to Poland” is outrageous. I received a “defense” of Thomas’s remark from a leftwing blogger who suggested that if HE were a refugee in World War II he would not have wanted to live in Israel. Not helpful. Going back to 1948 — let alone suggesting the repatriation of the descendants of European Jews to the countries that annihilated them — is as absurd as it is hideous.

Oh really, is Germany or Poland as bad a place to be a Jew as Gaza or the West Bank are to be a Palestinian?  Why, exactly, did Western nations pay for their sins by giving Jews a nation in the Middle East instead of, say, a chunk of Germany and Poland?  Why take from, why punish, those who had nothing to do with the Holocaust.

Is it really as bad to be told to go back to a first world nation where you would have full citizenship, as it is to be forced to live in a slum where you have no rights, can be starved at will, can’t travel as you choose, can have your house bulldozed and your farm destroyed?  Is it really so “hideous”?

Of course it isn’t.

The fundamental truth of Israel’s existence is that it is a settler nation in the modern world.  Yes, there have been plenty of them, including Canada, the US and virtually every nation in the Americas, but is that an excuse to do it again?  To not learn from the past?  To turn our heads and say “well, too bad for the Palestinians, because we Western nations need to expiate our sins, and we intend to make them pay for what we did wrong?  And hey, whatever, it’s not as bad as what we did to the American Indians, so the Palestinians should just suck it up?”

Obama wanted Helen Thomas gone because she had a habit of asking questions he hated.  She was a fool to walk right into it, but hey, someone who was the soul of discretion wouldn’t have asked the questions over the years Helen asked.

You want eunuchs in the White House press corp?  This is how you get them.

Not Fighting Alito and Roberts Mean the End of Your Democracy

By

On June 12, 2010

Comments

The NYTimes:

In a burst of judicial activism, the Supreme Court on Tuesday upended the gubernatorial race in Arizona, cutting off matching funds to candidates participating in the state’s public campaign finance system. Suddenly, three candidates, including Gov. Jan Brewer, can no longer receive public funds they had counted on to run against a free-spending wealthy opponent…

…

In 2008, the Supreme Court eliminated the Millionaires’ Amendment, which let Congressional candidates raise more money when running against candidates who pay for their own campaigns. In January, in the Citizens United case, the court eliminated limits to campaign spending by corporations. Both cases cited the First Amendment rights of the wealthy, and in that depressing sequence, state finance programs would be the court’s next conquest.

If the court pushes on with its chainsaw, cutting down programs that trigger matching funds, it would threaten systems in Connecticut and Maine, and judicial-race financing systems in Wisconsin, North Carolina and elsewhere. It might even shake New York City’s system, which provides higher matching funds when a well-financed opponent does not participate in the system. Candidates with no prospect of matching funds would be reluctant to join a system that limits their spending. Unless the court veers from its determined path, there will be no limit to the power of a big bankbook on politics.

I remember back when Alito and Roberts were nominated, I expected the Dems to fight.  They were both clearly radical right wingers (spare me about Roberts, it was obvious he was a judicial nutjob).  But hey, whatever…  Even most of my commenters thought I was being unreasonable to expect Democrats to fight, to force the Republicans, if necessary, to use the nuclear option.   It was unreasonable to expect a mutli-million dollar public campaign to the make the two of them noxious to the public (doing so with Alito would have been especially easy.

And if the nuclear option had been used would having done so hurt Dems in any way?  No.  But it would have given Dems one less argument to use against actually doing the right thing in this Congress.  Not, of course, that that would have stopped them from doing all the wrong things, since that’s what the majority of Senators want to do.

The NYTimes is full of it in one respect, though, the influence of money on politics in the US is already decisive.  This is just an attempt to hammer home that advantage, to make it permanent.

Doing so will make the US into a banana republic, of course, assuming one doesn’t consider it already nothing more than a powerful third world nation living on legacy investments from prior generations.

A Gaffe: saying the truth in the worst way possible

By

On June 7, 2010

Comments

As with Helen Thomas when asked what she thought about Israel.  “I think they should get the hell out of Palestine.”

Israel is a colonial power occupying a land whose population was, prior to their getting rid of many of them, majority non-Jewish.  This is why “right of return” is a non-starter, because if all the people pushed out of Israel were allowed to return…

America’s Future Now: We have to get the public to support us to make Obama do the right thing

By

On June 7, 2010

Comments

The interesting thing about the conference so far is the message: if only we organize, we can change what the public thinks and with the public behind us make the President and Congress do what we want.

This was epitomized by a “debate” between Darcy Burner and Deepak Bhargava, where they both agreed that the key to progressive change is organzing: get the public behind us, and change can be made to happen.  FDR wouldn’t have been FDR without the movement behind him.  LBJ wouldn’t have been behind civil rights without the movement.  And so on.

What the evidence, though?

70% of the public supported the public option. Calls against TARP ran from 100:1 to 1200:1.  Obama through the public option under the bus, and whipped hard for TARP, which would not have passed without him.

The evidence that Obama will respond to pressure to do things he really doesn’t want to do (ie. progressive things) is minimal.

Now that’s not to say there’s no reason to pressure him.  Really serious pressure, like the gay lobby pushed on him where they cut off donations, heckled him everywhere, and chained themselves to the White House fence.  Note, however, that this wsasn’t about public opinion, this was about making Obama miserable.

Now, the unions are sending messages through Democratic primaries.  Almost every serious Democratic primary challenge this year has been backed by union muscle and money.  So, whatever is being said here (and CAF is a union proxy), the unions have put a message across Obama’s bow.  Nor is the mood here happy with Obama, the assumption now is that he’s either too spineless to do the right thing, or that he doesn’t want to to do the right thing.

Still, the type of pressure Obama responds too isn’t public opinion, it is when you embarrass him and cost him money that he responds.  Mind you, gays didn’t get everything, but they got something.

Pain.  Obama responds to pain.  You can’t ask nicely, because he won’t listen unless y9u’re hurting him.

One reason why Hooverism is on the rise

By

On June 5, 2010

Comments

As the G20 votes for global Hoverism, aka: disaster, a friend asked why Hooverism is spreading so widely.  Part of the answer has to do with elites, and I’ll deal with that another time, but let’s talk about why the public supports belt-tightening.

The belief amongst the public, I suspect, is that most of the money was spent on bail outs for the rich, not on them.  They have come to see stimulus as code for “bail out” and as such, do not support it.  While, of course, the bailout and the stimulus were two different things, the fact is that more money was spent bailing out the rich than was spent on the middle class and poor.

Likewise the results (spare me apologists) have been anemic at best.  This is the WORST recovery in post-war history. It is bloody abysmal. Yes, it could be worse, you know it and I know it, but ordinary people have not seen a significant improvement in their ability to get jobs.  The stimulus has not “worked”.  It has not been seen to work.  Not enough, anyway.

Forgive me for saying so, but this was predicted repeatedly.  I wrote it the moment I heard the makeup of the stimulus bill.  If you read the President’s own economic advisers, though they were over optimistic they predicted it wouldn’t do the job either(pdf). It was not just us crazy hippies who have a record of being right over and over and over again, and so are not serious people and must not listened to.

The stimulus was very badly put together (not just in tax cuts, but in how its spending was targeted).  It was not large enough.  It was a piece of crap.

If you want something to be considered as viable policy, it must be SEEN to work.  It must not be arguable.  People must feel good as a result.

Though I’m using the US as my example, this is true in many countries, especially when it comes to spending more money on saving the rich than on helping the middle class and poor.  If ordinary citizens are going to have pay the bills for the bailouts, and don’t feel they’re seeing the benefits (they aren’t) the logical reaction is to say “stop!”

Now, of course, this isn’t why the elites are crying for it to stop.  They want it to stop because they’ve been saved.  Corporate profits have pretty much recovered.  So why spend money helping the middle class and poor folks?

Making videoing cops illegal doesn’t make the US a police state, honest

By

On June 4, 2010

Comments

Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up:

In response to a flood of Facebook and YouTube videos that depict police abuse, a new trend in law enforcement is gaining popularity. In at least three states, it is now illegal to record any on-duty police officer.

Evidence of police brutality?  Show it, and we’ll arrest you, too.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodies?

The Jobs Report and the Future

By

On June 4, 2010

Comments

I’m not going to waste a lot of time on the job report, obviously a job report with 411,000 census jobs out of  431,000 total jobs is not, actually, a good one.  Despite their spin, the Obama administration knows this.  They will ram through the jobs bill and try and dump it into the economy as fast as possible.  200 billion is, actually, about as much as the real stimulus per year in the stimulus bill (the tax cuts had no effect on hiring because they went to rent seeking corporate profits).  They will also seek to dump as much of the TARP slush fund as they can.  The insiders seem to have finally realized that if they don’t get a real job recovery before the election, Obama could lose his Congressional working majority or maybe even his majority, and if that happens, the rest of his Presidency will be spent arguing over the equivalent of white stains on dresses.

Can they pull it off?  Well, 200 billion plus another couple hundred billion from TARP is real money.  On the other hand, they are adept at spending tons of money and getting very little for it, plus the Republicans will be as obstructionist as possible: they know that their election chances hang in the balance too.  Add to that the stupidity of conservative Democrats, more concerned with deficits than jobs, and the situation is dicey, especially as Europe goes into hardcore Hooverism with austerity budget after austerity budget and China frets over a housing market which a Bank of China official noted is now further into bubble territory than the US’s was when it burst.

Hang on tight, folks, the economy is going to get a honking big syringe full of adrenaline at the same time as it’s strung out and another bunch of doctors are giving it a pile of benzies.  Hope it can take it.

What would Turkey’s NATO allies do in the case of a Turkish/Israeli throwdown?

By

On June 1, 2010

Comments

The general assumption has been that if push comes to shove between Israel and Turkey, that NATO allies will not support Turkey, and that the US will supply Israel, but not supply Turkey.

I wonder if those two things are both true.

It’s interesting to note that Britain, normally a staunch Israeli ally, in response to the attack on the aid flotilla in international waters called for an end to the Gaza blockade.  As with both Turkey and Israel’s actions, one imagines this may be driven by domestic political concerns.  To put it simply, Britain has a lot more Muslim citizens than Jewish ones, and England’s Jewish residents tend to be liberal and unlikely to become radicalized and blow things up.  Electorally, helping Palestinians may be a winner.

In the US, AIPAC and the Jewish lobby are generally considered amongst America’s strongest lobbies.  But it’s worth putting in perspective—when George Bush senior tackled AIPAC, he crushed them.  The vast majority of likely Democratic voters aren’t that sympathetic to Israel.  And to mess with Israel, all Obama has to do is stop protecting it at the UN, which is completely under his control, and not preferentially ship supplies to Israel in the case of a crisis, something which is also 100% inside the executive’s purview.

Obama has been snippy with the Israelis in the past, as when new settlements were announced during vice-President Biden’s visit.  While it’s hard to read Obama, I think it’s clear that he hasn’t appreciated the way Israel has taken the US’s support for granted.

And hey, changing the conversation from the BP oil spill can only be good.

I also don’t think it’s clear that Israel can use its nukes on Turkey without any other nuclear power threatening retaliation.  Glassing a major metropolis is not something likely to make Britain, the US or France happy.  In the US the idea of using nukes seems to occasion something of a yawn, but in the rest of the world it is the ultimate taboo.

Likewise, I’m not entirely sure that if Israel attacks Turkey’s military vessels in support of what may soon be considered an illegal blockade of Gaza, that other NATO nations won’t back Turkey up if it responds with a naval blockade of its own.  In particular, I’m not sure that the new British government comes in on Israel’s side, nor am I sure France does.  And either of those nations is more than capable of slapping Israel around if Israel gets too big for its britches.

Israel’s been pissing off its friends for a long time now.  This particular attack seems to have been done for domestic political reasons, and was a deliberate flouting of international law, a slap in the face “you won’t do anything about this, we can do whatever we want.”

Works, until it doesn’t.  I don’t know if Israel has crossed the line, but I think it may have.  For Britain, in particular, to come out with a statement calling for the end of the Gaza blockade is not a small thing.

All of which is a long way of saying, I’m not so sure the US, and particularly Britain, will automatically support Israel in any confrontation with Turkey.

Page 2 of 2

Previous

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén