Lost Republic

Norman Finkelstein arrested in Israel

Norman Finkelstein, the son of Holocaust survivors, academic and critic, is arrested in “the Middle East’s only democracy,” and banned for ten years.

Grameen Bank Micro-lending in NYC

The Grameen bank is a private bank, pursuing their own interest as they should, but it’s telling that a bank which specializes in anti-poverty micro-lending has chosen to do business in NYC.

The irony is sickening. We’re using tax-payer money to build $200,000 schools, $10,000 retaining walls, multi-million dollar roads in Afghanistan and Iraq like it’s going out of style. We should open a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Queens, or better yet, let American workers keep their salaries and get government out of the business of redistributing wealth, let alone empire-building.

Top Clinton Financier Attempts to Buy Superdelegates for $1 Million

“One of Sen. Hillary Clinton’s top financial supporters offered $1 million to the Young Democrats of America during a phone conversation in which he also pressed for the organization’s two uncommitted superdelegates to endorse the New York Democrat, a high-ranking official with YDA told The Huffington Post.

. . . .

Members of the Young Democrats agonized about the potential fallout of Saban’s call; his financial offer represented one-third of the group’s 2008 budget. Democratic officials and fundraisers were consulted about how to respond, and at times the discussions were ’emotional,’ one participant said. ‘It is scary for them, Haim is very powerful, he has great influence over donors who give to them.’

Another source said that Hardt and others were acutely aware of Saban’s status within Democratic circles and were concerned that their organization would suffer long-term harm if they declined his offer or if news of the proposal became public.

‘I said I thought that the appropriate response was to call Haim back and say thank you but we are not interested,’ said the source. ‘I also said that it was surely the case that this story would get out because it is too interesting not to and they should think about how to deal with it. It was a day or two [before they responded]. They felt afraid. They were like, ‘Holy shit, this is Haim Saban.’

Nevertheless, the group declined the overture. A YDA official cited moral reservations as well as the overwhelming consensus of its members to back Sen. Barack Obama.”

Olmert to U.S.: Impose naval blockade on Iran

Me to Olmert: Do it yourself, asshole

Ron Paul Gets 8% in Kentucky, 15% in Oregon, despite media blackout

He’s still running!

(Read more at dailypaul.com)

McCain blasts Obama for saying Iran poses lesser threat than Soviets

Iraqi Body Counts from Bill Moyers Journal

The counting and the controversy beautifully summarized here on Bill Moyers Journal. Excerpt:

New England Journal of Medicine Iraqi Family Health Survey Study Group
Results: 151,000 civilians deaths between March 2003 and June 2006

John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Results: 654,965 additional civilian deaths between March 2003 and July 2006

Iraq Body Count Project
Results: 81,874-89,353 civilian deaths (as of February 1, 2008)

Opinion Research Business
This British polling agency which has been tracking public opinion in Iraq since September 2005.
Results: 733,158-1,220,580 civilian deaths between March 2003 and September 2007

The Brookings Institute Iraq Index
Results: 103,567 (May 2003 through February 2008)

“Security, security, security. Terrorism, terrorism, terrorism.”

Clinton Pining for the Fiords

from a very funny washingtonpost.com column:

“Customer: ‘Look, matey, I know a dead parrot when I see one, and I’m looking at one right now.’

Pet-shop owner: ‘No, no he’s not dead, he’s — he’s resting! Remarkable bird, the Norwegian blue, isn’t it, aye? Beautiful plumage!’

— From ‘Monty Python’s Flying Circus’

. . . .

2:57 p.m., Yeager Airport, Charleston, W.Va.: A steep descent brings Clinton’s plane to Charleston’s hilltop airport. After an appropriate wait, she steps from the plane and pretends to wave to a crowd of supporters; in fact, she is waving to 10 photographers underneath the airplane’s wing. She pretends to spot an old friend in the crowd, points and gives another wave; in fact, she is waving at an aide she had been talking with on the plane minutes earlier.”

Pathetic.

Obama vs. The Lobby

Two link-rich articles describing the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Golberg “interview” (inquisition) with Obama about his devotion to Israel:

–from Antiwar.com:
“Yet Obama still keeps trying to appease the Lobby. He’s purged staff members who so much as looked cross-eyed at the Israelis, such as one poor adviser who meekly suggested that talking to Hamas might not be such a bad idea. He was out faster than you can say Mearsheimer and Walt.

Speaking of which: the Obama-oids have gone out of their way to distance themselves – i.e., ‘reject and denounce’ – those two hate-criminals, even though, as Philip Weiss trenchantly avers, a book by Obama’s point man on the Middle East says pretty much the same thing. In response to all this, Scott McConnell, editor of The American Conservative, dryly remarked: ‘At this point one wonders whether the people who deny the dramatic influence of the Israel lobby on American politics feel a little bit silly.’

Obama’s latest ritualized act of kowtowing takes place in the pages of the online edition of The Atlantic. In an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg – a male Judy Miller who retailed Ahmed Chalabi’s tall tales of Iraqi ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and other fables while still managing to keep his job and his reputation – Obama jumps through all kinds of hoops with admirable dexterity, while ultimately avoiding abject humiliation and even showing signs of resistance.”

–from Salon.com:
“The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg conducted what he’s calling an ‘interview’ with Barack Obama regarding Israel, but it sounded much more like an inquisition. Goldberg repeatedly demanded that Obama swear his devotion to Israel and affirm prevailing orthodoxies (‘I’m curious to hear you talk about the Zionist idea. Do you believe that it has justice on its side?'”

The Iraq-U.S. Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA)

“Washington drew out a draft proposal for a security deal in January 2008, a preliminary part of which was signed by officials of the two countries on March 17.

. . . .

One look at Article 10 of the treaty makes it apparent that the US administration hopes to quietly impose the binding contract and legitimize its indefinite military presence in the country.

‘As long as Iraqi security/military forces are not well-trained, security hasn’t been ensured, the neighboring states pose a threat, and terrorist attacks continue, the treaty will be officially binding and both parties are obliged to implement it.’

The first article of the treaty allows the US Army to carry out military operations in Iraq at any time and any place.

Under Article 2, American and British troops can arrest suspects at any time without the consent of the Iraqi government.

Article 3 reinforces Article 10 by asserting that there are no time limits for the presence of American forces, thus annulling the 1790 UN Security Council anti-occupation Resolution.

The contents of the treaty will dissipate all hopes of a sovereign Iraq, turning the country into a medieval US colony.

According to Article 4, American servicemen and non-servicemen are not obliged to attend any court hearings in Iraq, literally granting them capitulation privileges.

Article 7 puts the Iraqi ministries of defense, interior and intelligence under the direct supervision of US officials, ensuring Iraq will be officially governed by the United States.

Article 6 allows the US to set up 41 military bases in Iraq; Article 8 provides American forces with the authority to supervise arms sales as well as train Iraqi military and law enforcement personnel.

Article 9 argues that as a member of the international community Iraq must recognize Israel and unconditionally support Washington’s Middle East policies.”

Ron Paul on Competing Currencies

Ron Paul’s recent statement on the House floor.

excerpt: “The first step consists of eliminating legal tender laws. Article I Section 10 of the Constitution forbids the States from making anything but gold and silver a legal tender in payment of debts. States are not required to enact legal tender laws, but should they choose to, the only acceptable legal tender is gold and silver, the two precious metals that individuals throughout history and across cultures have used as currency. However, there is nothing in the Constitution that grants the Congress the power to enact legal tender laws. We, the Congress, have the power to coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, but not to declare a legal tender. Yet, there is a section of US Code, 31 USC 5103, that purports to establish US coins and currency, including Federal Reserve notes, as legal tender.

Historically, legal tender laws have been used by governments to force their citizens to accept debased and devalued currency. Gresham’s Law describes this phenomenon, which can be summed up in one phrase: bad money drives out good money. An emperor, a king, or a dictator might mint coins with half an ounce of gold and force merchants, under pain of death, to accept them as though they contained one ounce of gold. Each ounce of the king’s gold could now be minted into two coins instead of one, so the king now had twice as much “money” to spend on building castles and raising armies. As these legally overvalued coins circulated, the coins containing the full ounce of gold would be pulled out of circulation and hoarded. We saw this same phenomenon happen in the mid-1960s when the US government began to mint subsidiary coinage out of copper and nickel rather than silver. The copper and nickel coins were legally overvalued, the silver coins undervalued in relation, and silver coins vanished from circulation.

These actions also give rise to the most pernicious effects of inflation. Most of the merchants and peasants who received this devalued currency felt the full effects of inflation, the rise in prices and the lowered standard of living, before they received any of the new currency. By the time they received the new currency, prices had long since doubled, and the new currency they received would give them no benefit.

In the absence of legal tender laws, Gresham’s Law no longer holds. If people are free to reject debased currency, and instead demand sound money, sound money will gradually return to use in society. Merchants would have been free to reject the king’s coin and accept only coins containing full metal weight.”

9/11 Questioned in Japanese Parliament (again)

Watch video clip

The Good Guy Wins!!

“B.J. Lawson, endorsed by Ron Paul, overwhelmingly won tonight’s primary contest for U.S. Rep District 4 in North Carolina with over 70% of the vote. The best part about this victory is that his neocon opponent, Augustus Cho, openly attacked Dr. Lawson during a February debate for being a Ron Paul Republican.

Dr. Lawson’s victory makes him the ninth Ron Paul Revolutionary to win primaries so far this year. He now faces Democrat incumbent David Price in the general election.”

Shitting on Palestine (Follow up)

In this earlier post, I linked to Johann Hari’s column describing the meticulous brutality of Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Sewage systems have been designed to dump shit onto Palestinian lands.

Now the author comments about reaction to that column, Israel is suppressing a secret it must face, which appeared in the UK’s Independent.

“My own case isn’t especially important, but it illustrates how the wider process of intimidation works. I have worked undercover at both the Finsbury Park mosque and among neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers to expose the Jew-hatred there; when I went on the Islam Channel to challenge the anti-Semitism of Islamists, I received a rash of death threats calling me ‘a Jew-lover’, ‘a Zionist-homo pig’ and more.

Ah, but wait. I have also reported from Gaza and the West Bank. Last week, I wrote an article that described how untreated sewage was being pumped from illegal Israeli settlements on to Palestinian land, contaminating their reservoirs. This isn’t controversial. It has been documented by Friends of the Earth, and I have seen it with my own eyes.

The response? There was little attempt to dispute the facts I offered. Instead, some of the most high profile ‘pro-Israel’ writers and media monitoring groups — including Honest Reporting and Camera — said I an anti-Jewish bigot akin to Joseph Goebbels and Mahmoud Ahmadinejadh, while Melanie Phillips even linked the stabbing of two Jewish people in North London to articles like mine. Vast numbers of e-mails came flooding in calling for me to be sacked.

Any attempt to describe accurately the situation for Palestinians is met like this. If you recount the pumping of sewage onto Palestinian land, ‘Honest Reporting’ claims you are reviving the anti-Semitic myth of Jews ‘poisoning the wells.’ If you interview a woman whose baby died in 2002 because she was detained — in labour — by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint within the West Bank, ‘Honest Reporting’ will say you didn’t explain ‘the real cause’: the election of Hamas in, um, 2006. And on, and on.

The former editor of Israel’s leading newspaper, Ha’aretz, David Landau, calls the behaviour of these groups ‘nascent McCarthyism’. Those responsible hold extreme positions of their own that place them way to the right of most Israelis. Alan Dershowitz and Melanie Phillips are two of the most prominent figures sent in to attack anyone who disagrees with the Israeli right. Dershowitz is a lawyer, Harvard professor and author of The Case For Israel. He sees ethnic cleansing as a trifling matter, writing: ‘Political solutions often require the movement of people, and such movement is not always voluntary . . . It is a fifth-rate issue analogous in many respects to some massive urban renewal.’ If a prominent American figure takes a position on Israel to the left of this, Dershowitz often takes to the airwaves to call them anti-Semites and bigots.”