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25/03/10 15:26
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by
Linda
Milazzo
Sunday, March 14, 2010, ushered in two welcome events to Southern California: the inauguration of the headquarters of the bustling Winograd For Congress primary campaign, and an extra hour of daylight to help Marcy Winograd’s swarm of supporters evict Jane Harman, the wealthiest Democrat in Congress, from her eight-term seat in the House.
Photo by Linda Milazzo
This is progressive Democrat Winograd’s second run against blue-dog conservative and AIPAC insider Harman. Winograd’s first effort in 2006 resulted in a respectable 38 percent of the vote after a short three-month campaign. This time, the determined challenger has given herself ample time to meet with residents throughout California’s 36th Congressional District, hear their concerns and identify their most critical needs. Not surprisingly, her industrious boots-on-the-ground campaign has been well received by constituents who were often ignored by their incumbent whose career focused more on rising through the ranks of Congressional 'Intelligence' than on the needs of constituents back home.
Winograd's grassroots momentum so concerned her opponent that Harman retaliated with an ideological assault of minor relevance to most residents in her district. Rather than going toe to toe with Winograd on constituent specific matters, Harman chose Israel as her main campaign strategy. Though Harman and Winograd are both Jewish Americans, they hold radically different views on Israel. Winograd is co-founder of L.A. Jews For Peace and a critic of Israel’s Gaza blockade, West Bank settlement expansion, and refusal to grant Palestinians the right of return. Conversely, Harman is an AIPAC darling who believes Israel can do no wrong. Harman's uncompromising support for Israel has brought her substantial financial rewards. In addition to individual contributions, Harman has received a career total of $103,771 in pro-Israel PAC contributions.
To launch her Israel assault and tap into the psyches and wallets of her Jewish supporters, Harman solicited co-AIPAC loyalist, Congressman Henry Waxman, to compose a letter to Jewish donors blasting Winograd on Israel. Waxman, who like Harman, disdains critics of Israel, willingly obliged. His letter excoriated Winograd, calling her views “repugnant in the extreme.” He went on to say:
“To me, the notion that a Member of Congress could hold these views is alarming. Ms. Winograd is far, far outside the bipartisan mainstream of views that has long insisted that U.S. policy be based upon rock-solid support for our only democratic ally [Israel] in the Middle East.”
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by Ernest Partridge Ph.D.
Last Saturday I heard the news that I
had been dreading: my
good and great friend, Stewart Udall, had died.
In the coming days, many tributes to Stewart will no doubt be written
and
published about his distinguished service to our nation as the
Secretary of
the Interior under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and as an
environmental lawyer, activist
and writer. So there is little need for me to add to these accounts of
his
public life. Instead, I would like to share some personal reflections.
I first met Stewart some thirty years ago, through the initiative of my
mentor, the late Sterling M. McMurrin, a professor of Philosophy and
graduate school dean at the University of Utah, and the U.S.
Commissioner of
Education in the Kennedy Administration. I was, at the time, completing
work
on my anthology, Responsibilities to Future Generations
(Prometheus
Books, 1981), and looking for some noteworthy individual to write a
Foreword
to the book. Sterling immediately suggested his friend, Stewart Udall,
who
promptly and graciously accepted my invitation.
In that Foreword, Udall wrote:
I recall well the infatuation
Americans had with “atomic age” science in the 1960s: we believed
implicitly in those days that the energy problem was ‘solved’ (i.e.,
by
nuclear electricity, which would be ‘so cheap it wouldn’t have to be
metered’) and had a soaring belief that the kinds of minds that had
unlocked the secret of the atom could literally ‘create’ whatever
resources we needed from air, sea, water, or common rock....
It goes without saying that this prospect has withered. In the
remaining
years of this century, we who inhabit this planet will have a preview
of
the future, as nations are forced to lower their sights and deal with
the consequences of resource overutilization.
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by Ramzy Baroud
I basked in the warm Borneo sun, following a long
run somewhere at the edge of a rainforest. The beach was only partly
clean, but the water was most inviting. My children ran excitedly,
collecting what I assumed to be shells and whatever other treasures the
South China Sea had decided to divulge that afternoon. Their movement,
from afar, signaled frenzy and perhaps even a slight panic. I hesitated
at first, then ran to investigate.
At the ages of six and four, my girls Zarefah and
Iman were already the most kindhearted kids. They were actually going
through complete and unmitigated panic, as they had just noticed the
starfish which had been cast off by the waves and which were now dotting
the shoreline as far as the eye could see. The children became
determined to place every single one of them back in the water before
they died.
But most all of them were already dead.
My kids didn’t know this. And I didn’t have the
courage to break the dreadful news. I stood in silence, proud to the
core, as the girls’ shaky voices urged everyone around them to help.
Then I too was summoned. “Dad, what are you waiting for? Please help us
before they all die.” I tried to absolve myself from what seemed to me a
waste of time. But when I saw the tears in Zarefah’s eyes, and heard
the fright in her voice, I joined in – as enthusiastically as the many
other beachgoers-turned-
environmentalists.
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by Tom Engelhardt
Recently, I wrote about a crew of pundits and warrior-journalists
eager not to see the U.S. military leave Iraq. That piece appeared on
the op-ed
page of the Los Angeles Times (and
in alonger
version at TomDispatch.com) and then began wandering the media
world. One of its stops was the military newspaper Stars
and Stripes.
From a military man came this emailed response: “Read your article
in Stars and Stripes. When was the
last time you visited Iraq?”
A critique in 15 well-chosen words. So much more effective than a
long, angry email, and his point was interesting. At least, it
interested me. After all, as I wrote back, I’m a 65-year-old guy who
has never been anywhere near Iraq and undoubtedly never will be. I have
to assume that my emailer had spent time there, possibly more than
once, and disagreed with my assessments.
First-hand experience is not to be taken lightly. What, after all, do I know about Iraq? Only reporting
I’ve been able to read from thousands of miles away or analysis found on
the blogs of experts like Juan Cole. On the other hand, even
from thousands of miles away, I was one of many who could see enough, by
early 2003, to go into the streets and demonstrate against
an onrushing disaster of an invasion that a lot of people, theoretically far
more knowledgeable on Iraq than any of us, considered just the cat’s
meow, the “cakewalk” of
the new century.
It’s true that I’ve never strolled down a street in Baghdad or Ramadi
or Basra, armed or not, and that’s a deficit, if you want to write
about the American experience in Iraq. It’s also true that I haven’t
spent hours sipping tea with Iraqi tribal leaders, or been inside the Green
Zone, or set foot on even one of the vast American bases that the
Pentagon’s private contractors have built in that country. (Nor did
that stop me from writing
regularly about “America’s
ziggurats” when most of the people who visited those bases didn’t
consider places with 15-20 mile perimeters, multiple bus lines, PXs,
familiar fast-food franchises, Ugandan
mercenary guards, and who knows what else, to be particularly
noteworthy structures on the Iraqi landscape and so, with rare exceptions,
worth commenting on.)
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by Francis A Boyle Ph.D. , Putra World Trade Centre, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Little has changed in the imperialist tendencies
of
American foreign policy since the founding of the United States of
America
in seventeen eighty-nine. The fledgling United States opened the
nineteenth
century by stealing the continent of North America from the Indians,
while
in the process ethnically cleansing them and then finally deporting the
pitiful few survivors by means of death marches (a la Bataan) to
Bantustans,
which in America we call reservations, as in instance of America's
manifest
destiny to rule the world.
Then, the imperial government of the United States opened the twentieth
century by stealing a colonial empire from Spain - in Cuba, Puerto Rico,
Guam and the Philippines, then inflicting a near-genocidal war against
the
Filipino people. While at the same time, purporting to annex, the
kingdom of
Hawaii and subjecting the native Hawaiian people to near-genocidal
conditions from which they still suffer today- all in the name of
securing
America's so-called place in the sun.
And today at the dawn of the twenty first century, the world witnesses
the
effort by the imperial government of the United States of America to
steal a
hydrocarbon empire from the Moslem states and peoples, surrounding
central
Asia and the Persian Gulf under the pretext of fighting a war against
international terrorism or eliminating weapons of mass destruction or
promoting democracy which is total nonsense.
For the past two hundred and sixteen years, the imperialist foreign
policy
of the United States of America since its foundation, has been
predicated
upon racism, aggression, genocide, ethnic cleansing, crimes against
humanity, war crimes and outright genocide. At the dawn of the third
millennium of humankind's parlous existence, nothing has changed about
the
operational dynamics of American imperial policy. And we see this today
in
Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and what appears to be an illegal attack
upon
Iran.
Now the topic today is the Middle East Agenda: Oil, Dollar Hegemony and
Islam. So, I'm only going to limit my comments to that subject. We have
to
begin the story with the Arab oil embargo in nineteen seventy-three. As
you
know in nineteen sixty-seven, Israel launched an illegal and preventive
war
against the surrounding Arab states, stole the land and ethnically
cleansed
the people. But eventually Egypt offered a Peace Treaty to Israel which
Israel rejected and the Egyptians and the Arab states decided then to
use
force to recover their lands.
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by Jonathan Cook in Jerusalem
The Israeli government has
indicated that it will press ahead with a plan to enlarge the Jewish
prayer plaza at the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s Old City, despite
warnings that the move risks triggering a third intifada.
Israeli officials rejected this
week a Jerusalem court’s proposal to shelve the plan after the judge
accepted that the plaza’s expansion would violate the “status quo”
arrangement covering the Old City’s holy places. Islamic authorities
agreed to the arrangement after Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967.
The site eyed by Israeli
officials is located at the Mughrabi Gate, an entrance to the mosque
compound known as the Haram al Sharif, the most sensitive site in the
conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Inside are Al Aqsa Mosque
and the golden-topped Dome of the Rock.
Earlier encroachments by Israel
on Islamic authority at the site have triggered clashes between Israeli
police and Palestinians. A heavily armed visit to the compound by Ariel
Sharon in 2000, shortly before he became prime minister, to declare
Israeli rights there sparked the second intifada.
In recent weeks, analysts have
grown increasingly concerned that a third intifada is imminent as
Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has advanced settlement building in East
Jerusalem and declared several places deep in the occupied West Bank as
Jewish heritage sites.
Another assault on Muslim
control so close to Al Aqsa Mosque risked “pouring fuel on the fire”,
said Hanna Sweid, an Arab member of the Israeli parliament who filed the
original planning objections to the Israeli scheme.
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by Bernard Weiner Ph.D.
With the Democrats running the show, the Republican mole "Shallow Throat,"** now a high-priced political consultant, is no longer positioned inside the government, but still has a wide network of administration and party contacts, especially in the GOP. So using our usual code, I asked for a meeting to get Shallow Throat's take on what is going on in Washington a little more than a year after the new president was inaugurated.
As we walked on a shade-covered path near Bethesda, I said: "You know, the same pattern tends to repeat itself when a non-insider becomes president, such as a governor or one-term senator: As new occupants of the White House, they tend to get rolled by the beltway elites until they figure out how things work and how they want to combat that system to make it work for them. It looks like Obama and his advisors have finally started to figure it out, after a pretty rocky and uncertain first year."
"If you're referring to the health-care bill," said Shallow Throat, "one can observe a lot from Obama's trajectory over the past 14 months. Unfortunately, being a frightened centrist, he felt he needed 'cover'. And so he tried for much too long — maybe six to eight months too long — to lure some Republicans to his side. He refused to admit, until nearly too late, that they'd already placed all their chips on taking him down, breaking him, and nothing he could do or say to them would yield him what he wanted.
"Obama also took a page from Bill Clinton's playbook, and gave away the store before the congressional battle even began. In order to get something, anything, resembling serious reform, Obama made his secret deals with big pharma, the hospitals, the insurance companies, and so on. The whole health-care food chain was bought off to either gain their support or to mute their criticisms. They will continue to rake in humongous amounts of profit under the new system, so they're not all that unhappy."
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Untitled Document
by Larry Pinkney
Originally published at BlackCommentator.com
A rotten, poisonous, stinking pie is far worse than no pie at all. Yet, this is precisely what the corporate Democratic Party and corporate “news” media have repeatedly forced down the throats of the ‘American’ people, cloaked in the deceptive rhetoric of “change” and “reform.”
The Democratic Party foxes and the Republican Party wolves are not in the least bit interested in breaking their insidious feeding frenzy with the corporate Wall Street / military industrial complex. However, at this stage in history, it is the Democratic Party foxes who have taken deception, authoritarianism, wars abroad, a de facto police state at home, and constant subterfuge to the lowest depths of political cynicism and manipulation yet to be experienced by this nation.
The authoritarian and discriminatory, so-called health care “reform” of Barack Obama and his confederate Democratic Party foxes is a horrible sham. It is a big, fat financial gift to the corporate elite, which is exactly why back in August of 2009, Barack Obama cut a back room deal with the lobbyists of the pharmaceutical, insurance, and hospital industry’s to kill the “public option”; despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of people supported this option. In relative short order the hurting peoples of this nation may come to realize that they have once again blind-sided and economically pimped by the systemic politicians and their scurvy media allies.
It is apparently not enough that everyday Black, Brown, Red, White, and Yellow people in this nation, as well as people in other nations, are being brutalized by the murderous and unjust U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and elsewhere. No! Corporate brand Barack Obama, the Democratic Party, and his media cohorts cynically engaged in diverting the attention of the people from these horrors to a fake, one-sided monologue re alleged health care “reform” which was in fact never intended to include what the vast majority of people most need and want, i.e. the single payer universal health care public option. As is Obama’s practice, using deception and rhetoric, he cynically utilizing the terrible pain of everyday people against everyday people themselves all in the fallacious name of “reform.”
Moreover, it is apparently not enough that Barack Obama gave a big, fat bail-out gift [of trillions of dollars of the people’s money]to the very corporate Wall Street barons who manipulated, blood-sucked, and brought about the financial melt down that is most impacting everyday Black, Brown, Red, White, and Yellow people who are simply trying to survive this economic horror. Think about it. Obama’s “change” is more of the same only sneakier.
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Thu 25 Mar 2010 |
Written by Daan de Wit Contributor, Atlantic Free Press. | by Daan de Wit, translated by Ben Kearney
'America's Pro-Israel Lobby', as AIPAC calls itself, holds the biggest conference in its history today, yesterday and the day before in Washington. 'This year, the lobby has built its annual conference, and its entire lobbying agenda around the issue of Iran', writes Haaretz. AIPAC is very influential, and Washington fears the long arm of the lobby. One of the resources it employs is the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (TFI). Grant Smith, the director of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy compares the TFI with the OSP, the illustrious Office of Special Plans during the time of George W. Bush in the run-up to the Iraq war.
Just as America needs Israel, AIPAC needs Washington - both for support and for financial resources, and certainly with regard to the Iranian problem. 'When AIPAC activists mount the buses March 23 to go meet their representatives on Capitol Hill, they'll be carrying an advocacy message that emphasizes Iran as the immediate and current concern. In lobbying meetings following the conference, AIPAC will also ask members of Congress to complete the new Iran sanctions bill, which has passed both chambers and is now awaiting reconciliation between the two versions in the conference committee', writes Haaretz. The paper also writes that AIPAC will urge members of Congress to sign a letter to the White House. In the letter, the United States is called on to bypass the UN Security Council by imposing sanctions on Iran.
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by Jonathan Cook in Nazareth
Benjamin Netanyahu arrived in
the United States this week armed with a mandate from the Israeli
parliament. A large majority of legislators from all of Israel’s main
parties had supported a petition urging him to stand firm on the
building of Jewish settlements in occupied East Jerusalem -- the very
issue that got him into hot water days earlier with the White House.
Given the Israeli consensus on
Jerusalem, there was no way Mr Netanyahu could have avoided rubbing that
wound again in his speech on Monday to the annual conference of the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the powerful
pro-Israel lobby group.
He told the thousands of
delegates: “The Jewish people were building Jerusalem 3,000 years ago
and the Jewish people are building Jerusalem today. Jerusalem is not a
settlement. It is our capital.”
Citing his own policy as
inseparable from all previous Israeli governments, he added: “Everyone
knows that these neighbourhoods will be part of Israel in any peace
settlement. Therefore,
building them in no way precludes the possibility of a two-state
solution.”
Mr Netanyahu’s speech appeared
consistent with the new approach agreed by both sides to end this
particular debacle. According to the US media, a policy of “Don’t ask
and don’t tell” has been adopted to avoid making East Jerusalem an
insurmountable obstacle to negotiations.
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by Stephen P. Pizzo
After six and half decades on this planet I’ve come to some conclusions. One of them is that roughly 15% to 20% of Americans are genuinely, provably and incurably, stupid. And, while beauty may only be skin deep, stupid goes all the way to the bone. After a decade of failed governance -- two unnecessary wars and a ruined economy, Republicans had all but run out of enough moderately-sane voters willing to take any further chances with them. That’s when they glommed onto the idea of corralling America’s moron-demographic to plug the gap.
But the ignorant are hard to sway with fact-based policy discussions or green-eyeshade budget details. They need to be “energized” with drama, and plenty of it. Maury Povich and Jerry Springer knew that and built their fame and fortunes on knowing how to “energize” the dumb and dumber among us. It’s all about the drama baby... tabloid quality drama is what gets their blood boiling. Allegations, the wilder the better, and the fewer contradicting facts the better.
For example, you don’t use benign terms like, “End of life counseling” with the moron-demographic. (Too many of them might just stare back blankly and ask, “Ah, why would you want to counsel a dead person?”) Maury would advise, "Death panels,” instead. Death is, of course, the “end of life,”and we’re all going there someday, and as we approach that point of departure I’m sure we and/or our loved ones might appreciate and benefit from some counseling -- including morons. But by calling them “Death panels,” counseling becomes even scarier than death itself. That’s how one gets the moron-blood a-boilin’.
Anyway, I’ve belabored my point more than I had intended. The bottom line is that the GOP, in a desperate bid to regain power, has energized that 15%-20% of genuinely and willfully stupid citizenry. And, if we’ve learned anything from modern history, from Germany circa 1930s, the former Yugoslavia in the 90’s to the genocide in Rwanda during the Clinton years... it’s that once you get the moron-demographic “energized” and they become an angry mob, it’s impossible to control them.
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