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At what point does Israel and its complicated settlement situation become a liability for the United States as Americans cope with the growing pain of recession and decline?

The United States has been an enthusiastic partner of Israel’s worst Iron Wall policies since the beginning of the state in 1948 and, most intimately, in the years following the 1967 war. The decision to see the West Bank, Gaza and all of Jerusalem as conquered, militarily occupied territory and the acceptance or encouragement of a settlers’ movement has led to a world-class impasse and growing international anger at Israel.

The madness has gotten to the point that, even if leaders of the United States and Israel suddenly woke up one morning and accepted a Palestinian state, the state of Israel would be at odds with its own settlers it sent out to colonize the conquered areas. Accepting a Palestinian state would require Israel to take on some of its most volatile citizens with military force to dislodge them.

Israeli settlers and two settlements

The more Israel insists on its role as conqueror of Palestinian territory, the more dicey Israel’s hold on international respect becomes. And it all seems to be coming to some kind of a head this month as the hurricane known as The Arab Spring heads into totally uncharted waters.

“We’re watching a potential train wreck,” a senior western diplomat (speaking anonymously due to the gravity of the situation) told The New York Times.

Among the many shameful and cowardly things that President Barack Obama has and has not done, few can rival his complete unwillingness to express outrage at the Israeli military’s murder of a young American teen executed at close range during the Israeli Defense (sic) Force assault on the Turkish-flagged aid ship the Mavi Marmara in international waters in the Mediterranean Sea back on May 31, 2010.

Furkan Dogan, born in the US to Turkish parents, both legal residents of the U.S., and educated in the US, was a volunteer on the Mavi Marmara, the flag ship in a six boat aid flotilla that tried to sail with humanitarian aid from Turkey to the Israeli prison colony known as Gaza only to be stormed and captured and pirated to Israel.

When IDF forces boarded the ship from helicopters and speed boats they shot and killed nine people, one of them young Dogan.

When the assault occurred, there was no protest from the White House, even though an American citizen had been killed. (There was little reporting on the murder either in the U.S. corporate media, which consistently referred to him as Turkish-American–a designation usually reserved for immigrants–despite his being native born in the U.S.).

Nor was there any protest from the White House when the Turkish Council of Forensic Medicine reported a month later that the autopsy conducted on Dogan showed that, like most of the other eight IDF victims, he had been shot in the back and in the back of the head, as well as in the face — hardly the kind of killing that would have resulted had he and the others — as the Israeli government claimed, been “attacking” the IDF boarders. (In fact a smuggled video shows two IDF officers brutally kicking a person identified by the filmer as Dogan while he is lying on the deck of the ship, and then shooting him repeatedly with their weapons, which my colleague Linn Washington says appear to be pump-action Remington 870 shotguns — a deadly gun popular around the world and among police for “riot control” actions. The weapon is part of the IDF arsenal.)

A UN High Commissioner for Human Rights who investigated the IDF assault on the Mavi Marmara concluded that Dogan, far from “assaulting” IDF forces, had been trying to video-tape their slaughter of others when he was attacked and slain.

As for President Obama, who is forever echoing his predecessor George W. Bush about his important job of “protecting Americans”?
Furkan Dogan, American teen murdered by Israeli troops, ignored by President Obama and the US government

London – Simon Woolley, the Executive Director of the London based Operation Black Vote, was one of the first British citizens to fly into the U.S. following the 9/11 attacks when he participated in a tour of America sponsored by the U.S. State Department.

Woolley was originally scheduled to fly into the U.S. on September 12, 2001 but the cancellation of all commercial air flights in and into the U.S. in the wake of the attacks postponed his trip for a couple of days.

When Woolley arrived stateside he was amazed at what he encountered.
“There was a truly historical, magical movement of unity during the days after 9/11,” Woolley said.

Unknown to most Americans, nearly 70 British citizens died when the twin World Trade Towers in New York City collapsed during the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the highest death total of any single country behind Americans.

“I stood in a line for an hour in the rain outside of the U.S. embassy ten years ago to sign the book of condolence. People forget how much empathy there was for the USA post 9/11,” London resident Paul Bower said.

“The biggest wreath was from the Communist Party of Kurdistan.”

Many Muslims came to the U.S. embassy to pay their respects.
9-11 Sculpture in London made from steel from the Twin Towers in New York (photo by Linn Washington)

When you are the New York Times, or in this case, one of the only real liberal columnists working for the Times anymore, there are apparently some things you just cannot mention.

How else to explain how a seemingly intelligent economist like Paul Krugman can scorch the Republicans in Congress and President Obama in a Labor Day column for failing to deal with the crisis of joblessness and deepening economic collapse in the U.S., but never once mention the endless and pointless wars into which the country is pouring hundreds of billions of dollars a year?

Here’s Krugman:

“I don’t mean to dismiss concerns about the long-run U.S. budget picture. If you look at fiscal prospects over, say, the next 20 years, they are indeed deeply worrying, largely because of rising healthcare costs. But the experience of the past two years has overwhelmingly confirmed what some of us tried to argue from the beginning: The deficits we’re running right now–deficits we should be running, because deficit spending helps support a depressed economy — are no threat at all.”

What planet is Prof. Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, living on?

The U.S. has over the past decade spent some two trillion dollars on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and on the so-called “War” on Terror. The actual spending has been much higher (as the honest Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz has explained), because only about 50% of the U.S. budget each year, including expenditures for “intelligence” and the military, is covered by tax collections from individuals, corporations, import duties and other federal fees and collections. The rest is financed with borrowed money, all of which has to be repaid in later years with interest. This country has spent another $5 trillion or so on the bloated military budget over the last decade, to finance a military complex that costs as much as the rest of the world combined spends on war and preparing for war. And again, only half of that amount was actual tax revenues. The rest has to be paid back over coming years with interest, because it’s all been borrowed.

Hey Krugman! Why don’t you tell people the real reason why the U.S. has a “deeply worrying” fiscal problem looming over the next couple of decades? Isn’t it really because we’ve got to pay for all these wars and all the militarism that we’ve been buying on credit? Be honest. It’s not future health care spending that’s the problem. It’s current and future military spending.
Spending on war and military power does little for the economy in the short term and it devastates economies over the long term.

This faux “workers’ holiday” on Monday is not a day for celebrating for American workers.

The official unemployment rate, just released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, showed unemployment in July to be 9.1%, which is exactly the same as the rate was in June, and which is an increase from the months in the spring. But that’s not even the real picture.

Worse than the official number of unemployed is the BLS’s official number of unemployed together with those who are part-time employed, usually in marginal low-paid jobs, but who want to work full-time. That figure hit 16.2% in July. Things are likely to get worse, though, because the BLS also reported at the same time that in August, no net new jobs were added in the U.S. — the first time the new jobs figure was zero since 1945.

But even that is only part of the story of the miserable economic situation facing American workers. The BLS doesn’t even count people who have stopped trying to find a job because they’ve tried for so long unsuccessfully that they have realized the effort is pointless. Many of these are people who are now staying home, perhaps helping to raise children. Many others have decided to retire earlier than planned (and earlier than they can afford to). Adding these people to the mix raises the unemployed rate to 17.7%

The Gallup polling organization, which uses a different methodology to count the unemployed, found the total of unemployed and under-employed in August to be 9.1 and 9.4 percent respectively, or a total of 18.5%. That is up 0.5% from 18.0 percent in Gallup’s July survey.

All of these numbers still don’t tell the real story, though, but a little math can help.
Being jobless is no picnic and Labor Day shouldn't be either

It’s a sad reality of our day that denial and bullshit seem the most useful talents to getting elected and to govern in America.

Bullshit is meant in the sense used by Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt in his popular book titled On Bullshit. He defines bullshit as language with no basis in truth or fact focused on obtaining power. A liar knows the truth and tries to sell falsehoods; bullshitters simply don’t care what the truth is.

Some of the most popular candidates for the Republican Party (think Rick Perry and Michelle Bachman) are classic bullshitters who completely disdain rational analysis. For them it’s OK to say anything, like Perry and others’ denial of evolution and global warming. Reason and responsible history are for the weak.

Even “liberals” like Barack Obama are masters of bullshit. You can’t be elected President of the United States as a “peace” candidate and then run three wars, expand the use of lethal drones and special ops assassination teams and attempt to jail NSA whistleblowers, without being an excellent bullshitter. Obama’s bullshit is less the counter-Enlightenment stuff of Perry and Bachman; his bullshit is the art of seeming to fight for change as he really nestles into the status-quo.

In such a climate of bullshit is it any wonder Americans are living through such unprecedented stress and difficulty? And all indications suggest it will only get worse before it gets better.

Harry Frankfurt, left, Rick Perry and President Barack Obama

The problem is the current raft of bullshitters insist on propagating a master narrative from the 19th and 20th centuries that no longer works for the reality of the nation as it moves into the 21st Century. Master narratives are based on national myths and are found in the nostalgic assumptions of identity that people believe and want to keep alive in the future. The key myth in this context is the Myth of American Exceptionalism that says we Americans are the best of history and humanity — a super-nation at the pinnacle of global political evolution destined by our affluence and narcissistic assumptions of greatness to be the world’s role model and policeman.

Dig a little deeper and read some responsible history and it becomes clear we’re a complex nation — like all humanity, a struggle of opposites like good and evil — founded and sustained by ambition, violence and conquest. Now, in the unfolding 21st century, the whole project is running low on gas. The sense of exceptionalism is becoming more nostalgic, making sustaining the myth more costly and more detrimental to a good future. This means greater and greater amounts of bullshit.

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Newfane, VT — A classic David vs. Goliath battle is taking shape in the courtroom and in the streets and fields of Vermont as Entergy Nuclear of Louisiana tries to overturn Vermont law in the federal courts.

The state has thoughtfully and repeatedly voted no to the extension of Entergy’s Vermont Yankee nuclear reactor’s license, which is due to expire on March 21, 2012. Results of Town Meeting votes, a 26-4 vote by the Vermont Senate, and a pivotal gubernatorial race all have shown that the state does not see Vermont Yankee as a reliable or economical partner for its energy future. Forty years’ accumulation of radioactive waste on the banks of the Connecticut River is enough.

Entergy was stunned when their corps of high-priced lobbyists failed to prevail at the statehouse, but they are counting on their high-powered legal team to carry the day for them in the favorable atmosphere of the federal court system–packed as it is these days with judges named by Reagan and two Bushes. And even though the Supreme Court claims to support the concept of states’ rights, it is not clear that that bias will over-ride their love for corporate personhood/rights. Meanwhile, their distaste for so many things that Vermont, (as personified by its socialist Senator Bernie Sanders), stands for and represents are likely to override any professed passion for states’ rights, which tend to coincide with right-wing issues. So although the state government has taken all appropriate action (and continues to do so in the courts), it ultimately may have to be the power of the citizens who will have to shut down this leaky, decrepit reactor as scheduled.

Secretary of Energy Steven Chu made clear on NPR what it is that citizens need to do, when he explained that the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump project was abandoned because of “concerted, growing, local opposition”.

Vermonters are not taking a wait-and-see approach. With their neighbors from New Hampshire and Massachusetts, they are organizing a movement. They promise to close down the plant by direct action if it continues to operate past March 21, 2012. Activists are discovering that support for direct citizen action is growing throughout the region. From senior citizens to harried single moms, people are volunteering and vowing to get arrested or whatever else it will take to close down the reactor. Non-violent civil disobedience training sessions are being conducted throughout the region and organizers are working in a variety of ways to build a region-wide movement.
The Vermont Yankee plant, one of America's oldest, is a decrepit, leaking relic, but its owner wants to keep it running anyhow

 
Second in a series: “Rediscovering America”
 

Leading black-skinned representatives of the “hegemon”, as Cynthia McKinney calls President Barak Obama and Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, could hardly expect to win any votes from the standing-room-only crowd at her anti-war tour last night at Calvary Church in Philadelphia.

Speaking before nearly 300 people–two-thirds of them black, the remainder white and hispanic–in her T-shirt proclaiming that “war kills”, the former U.S. congresswoman said:

“We need someone in the White House who thinks like us and not just one who looks like us. We have to act like we’re free if we want to be free. We have to liberate ourselves from war-mongering political parties.”

Philadelphia was one of the last cities on McKinney’s International Action Center-sponsored “Report from Libya: Impact of U.S. war in Africa” tour, which hit 21-plus cities. The Philadelphia meeting was co-sponsored by several community groups and left-wing political parties, including the Green Par,ty which ran Mckinney as its candidate during the last presidential campaign.

In addition to McKinney, representatives of the community and Sara Flounders, co-director of the IAC, spoke. Pam Africa of the International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu Jamal said, “This meeting is about action to stop the wars over there and here at home. And Amy Goodman [Democracy Now anchor] needs to stop ignoring the word brought to us by Cynthia McKinney.” A brust of applause reenforced this viewpoint.

A representative of an anti-police brutality group encouraged people to vote for Diop Olugbala for mayor as the only anti-imperialist running against the pro-corporate Mayor Michael Nutter.

McKinney led a delegation to Libya last May-June in opposition to the US-NATO assault on that country, which began in March and destroyed much of Tripoli and other cities that were controlled by the government of Muamar Gadsafy. She witnessed some of the bombing and its destruction of life and of the country’s infrastructure.

“I speak with a heavy heart, knowing that places I visited no longer exist. Migrant workers camped out in tents close to ‘The Door to Africa’ as Gaddafi’s residence, Bab al-Azizia, is known. They are gone now, many split into pieces; only rubble remains,” said McKinney.
Former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney on Libyan state TV displaying anti-personnel weapons dropped by NATO forces..

Journalists from ThisCantBeHappening! took on the Philadelphia Inquirer. the nation’s third-oldest surviving daily, this morning, conducting a leafletting “happening” in front of the paper’s soon-to-be-sold headquarters building on Broad Street.

A one-page flyer, written in Old English and featuring a replica of the masthead of Benjamin Franklin’s original one-page broadsheet, the Pennsylvania Gazette, accused the oft re-sold and steadily downsized and gutted Inquirer of abandoning its Fourth Estate role in favor of entertainment and profits.

Inquirer editors, reporters and other workers entering and leaving the building for the most part willingly accepted the fliers, sometimes reading them on the spot, and sometimes carrying them off to read later. A few stopped to talk with the TCBH! leafleters, who included one activist from the Philadelphia Independent Media Center.
TCBH 'Red Squad' garbed in their new TCBH! T-shirts, challenges the Philly Inquirer: Ron Ridenour, John Grant and Dave Lindorff (from left), (photo by Rich Gardner)

One man, asked if he was an Inquirer worker, laughed wryly, saying, “I am until November 18.” He explained that after working at the paper for nearly three decades, he had received notice two weeks ago that he was being sacked. “28 years,” he said, shaking his head. Reading the short broadsheet, which was published on antique-looking fake parchment, and which listed some of the news stories and issues that the Inquirer has consistently ignored, blacked-out or grossly misreported, he said, “It’s true. Every time this paper has changed hands things have gotten worse.”

Others agreed.

Workers passing by on the way to jobs in Center City or at the neighboring Board of Education building just up the street from the Inquirer were nearly unanimous in agreeing that the Inquirer–and other local media — were doing a poor job of informing the public about many important issues. Only a handful of people refused to accept a copy of the flyer, shown below: