According to Wall Street

By Ian Williams. The Guardian January 15, 2008

Foreign Policy magazine in the US complains this month that "in France and Germany, students are being forced to undergo a dangerous indoctrination. Taught that economic principles such as capitalism, free markets and entrepreneurship are savage, unhealthy and immoral, these children are raised on a diet of prejudice and bias. Rooting it out may determine whether Europe's economies prosper or continue to be left behind."

The article, written by Newsweek's economics chief Stefan Theil, is titled Europe's Philosophy of Failure. In fact, Europe is doing quite well by any objective measures, and it seems somewhat counterfactual to cluck on in this unbalanced way just as the US economy, buoyed only by a continuing flood of Chinese money, teeters on the edge of a crash, as subprime mortgages and derivatives trading erode the financial foundations of Wall Street.

Undaunted by reality, Foreign Policy continues complaining about Germany and France: "Millions of children are being raised on prejudice and disinformation. Educated in schools that teach a skewed ideology, they are exposed to a dogma that runs counter to core beliefs shared by many other western countries. They study from textbooks filled with a doctrine of dissent.Extracting these children from the jaws of bias could mean the difference between world prosperity and menacing global rifts."

Shocked, shocked, as only the country that gave the world Enron, the savings and loan scandal and the almost obligatory half-billion-dollar CEO golden parachute can be, the magazine inveighs: "In both France and Germany, for instance, schools have helped ingrain a serious aversion to capitalism. In one 2005 poll, just 36% of French citizens said they supported the free-enterprise system. In Germany, meanwhile, support for socialist ideals is running at all-time highs - 47% in 2007 versus 36% in 1991."

Portentously the article concludes: "A biased view of economics feeds into many of the world's most vexing problems, from the growth of populism to the global rise of anti-American, anti-capitalist attitudes."

This unsubstantiated prejudice masquerading as economic analysis is pervasive in the US business world. I once interviewed the CEO of an American company that had subsidiaries in Holland and Scotland. He complained that in Holland he had to provide six weeks holiday for the staff and six months of paid sick leave. And although it was not so bad in Scotland, it was far worse than in the US, where he only had to offer two weeks vacation and 10 days sick leave.

I asked him which were his most productive and profitable plants. Holland, Scotland and the US last, he replied. And he could not see the connection. This quasi-theological horror of creeping "socialism" permeates American business, whose leaders have a vision of a Europe mired in perpetual recession.

A country that had built its prosperity behind high tariff walls, with huge government subsidies and infrastructural investments, has spent decades preaching the opposite to a waiting world. George Bush senior had the integrity to call it voodoo economics. The Russians listened and were only rescued from their economic folly when Bush junior's wars quadrupled the price of oil.

The same week that Theil's diatribe was published, the Oxford Economics consultancy calculated that Britain - National Health Service and mandatory holidays notwithstanding - has outstripped the US in terms of GDP per capita. In fact the figures probably understate European living standards compared with the US. While actual workers' income in the US has been stagnant for 30 years and in fact has declined under President Bush, American politicians and business executives have conspired for decades to ensure that the proceeds of the growth in the US economy have flowed overwhelmingly to a tiny
percentage.

In Germany and France, as well as Britain, there is near universal health coverage, and incomes and employment have been growing steadily. The "stagnant" German economy, in taking over East Germany, did the equivalent of the US incorporating Mexico and giving a dollar per peso, and it still grew.

So, serious magazines should really have articles about the amazing country that persuades its students and voters that it has the best health system in the world, when over 45 million of its citizens have no coverage, another 20 million have inadequate coverage and most working people's insurance is effectively revocable at the caprice of greedy executives. They should be pointing out that the US comes 29th in life expectancy, which may also have something to do with the complete absence of legal holidays, statutory paid maternity leave and one in four children in the world's biggest economy living in poverty.

The official excuse for those bloated CEO pay packages is that they make the US economy more productive - but the US comes below "socialistic" Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Switzerland in global competitiveness.

Journalists should really analyse a media and education system that persuades voters that its economy leads the world in growth, when all the proceeds are funnelled to the top 1% of the population; that thinks that tax cuts for that 1% help ordinary Americans prosper; or that it is a "death tax", killing enterprise, for Paris Hilton to pay a percentage of her multimillion-dollar legacy to the IRS.

There are indeed lessons that Europe can learn from the US, but, when the reflexive prejudices are discounted, the statistics suggest that there would be much for Americans to learn from Europe, above all that the road to economic success does not entail widening inequality and impoverishing the working population.

The steps are painful as the barriers fall

[Yet another reason why Mexicans migrate, the interference of plans that benefit others, but not them. Mexico could well do without these invasions.]

Mexican officials said they now must open the shoe market or face sanctions by the World Trade Organization.


LEON, MEXICO — In a three-story mall filled entirely with shoe stores, the worried staff at the Bucker's shop displays a sign next to those advertising their locally made sandals and loafers. "Proudly Mexican," it reads.

About 40,000 factory workers and allies recently echoed the sentiment in the streets of Leon, urging the Mexican government to keep tariffs against Chinese shoes. In a rally tinged with nationalism, protesters chanted "Mexico, yes! China, no!"

The heart of Mexico's shoe industry is closing ranks because a deal expired last month that permitted tariffs to protect them from cheaper Chinese shoes. Mexican officials said they now must open the market or face sanctions by the World Trade Organization.

"We are people, vulnerable, who are fighting to survive. We have to defend our sector," said Ysmael Lopez, the owner of Tecno Shoes, who participated in the protest.

Poorly positioned
The growing pains of globalization have rippled through other key Mexican industries, especially from corn producers who face open competition from the United States as of this year. This removal of barriers under the North American Free Trade Agreement has prompted protests from labor leaders and farmers on both sides of the border.

The crisis in Leon and the ongoing debate over NAFTA reflect unease in some Mexican sectors that they are poorly positioned for a global economy. Mexicans can't match the low wages and cheap production of China, and they can't keep up with the technology and productivity of the United States and other industrialized economies.


Forcing more to U.S.
Government officials and employers say that if Mexico cannot make its economy more competitive, jobs will disappear and even more citizens will be forced to migrate illegally to the United States to search for work.

That reality hits home in Leon and small towns in the rugged state of Guanajuato, which first won fame by capitalizing on a ready supply of leather to produce handcrafted cowboy boots. That work expanded to leather shoes and cheaper plastic sneakers.

There are about 80,000 employees in 2,800 factories in the state's shoe sector. In small towns such as San Francisco del Rincon, the shoe industry accounts for 80 percent of private-sector jobs, according to CICEG, the shoe industry's trade association.


Economical alternative
On a side street in San Francisco del Rincon, Lopez opened his modest factory in 1989, during the shoe industry's boom. Lopez and his 30 employees rely on efficiency and quantity, producing the Tecno sneakers that offer an economical alternative to Adidas and other pricey brands.

Lopez prides himself on treating his employees well. Many start at about $300 a month, well above Mexico's minimum wage and a typical Chinese salary.

Lopez will be going toe-to-toe with China in sneakers, the slice of the shoe industry where China has made its biggest inroads in Mexico, according to industry officials.

Even with Mexican tariffs that can reach 300 percent, Mexico's overall trade deficit with China grew from $500 million in 1995 to nearly $23 billion in 2005.

Lopez and other skeptics of free trade have raised an uncomfortable reality: that Mexico suffers not just because of favorable conditions in their competitors, but also because Mexican taxes and regulations make it difficult for them to compete.

Lopez says he and other small companies are burdened by costly phone lines and utility bills. As he plans an expansion to a facility three times larger, he has been forced to wade through a cumbersome and discouraging permit process.

In October, the World Economic Forum ranked Mexico 52nd out of 131 nations in competitiveness, behind nations such as Tunisia and Latvia. The survey cited Mexican bureaucracy as a key impediment to competing in a global economy.

Luis Fernandez Godard, a columnist with the Leon newspaper A.M., blamed manufacturers and the government for not priming their economy for an open market.

"Today's protests," he wrote, "are the kicking of a drowning man."


Complacent manufacturers
At the Shoe Plaza, the mall where many local and a few imported shoes are sold, general manager Pablo Garcia put the blame on complacent Mexican manufacturers who assumed that their government would protect them.

"You can't compete in the world market having protectionism," said Garcia, a native of Spain. "If people weren't prepared, they should have been."


Proximity to U.S. an asset
Arturo Anguiano, the general manager of shoemaker Grupo Karosso, agreed that the Mexican shoe industry must transform itself, perhaps stressing niche products such as boots. Their low wages and proximity to the United States remain an asset, he said, but those strengths must be supplemented by an investment in machinery to make production more efficient.

Anguiano recently bought high-tech machines from Korea and the Netherlands that helped him win a trial contract to produce Nike sneakers for the domestic market. He says Mexico can survive with higher quality: more durable shoes that will be cheaper than Chinese products in the long run.

"The Mexican doesn't die," he insisted over the whir of machines cutting and combining the shoes' components. "We've already survived many crises."

Jose Antonio Abugaber of CICEG said the industry will present Mexican officials proof of unfair Chinese trade practices with the hope that Mexico will push to keep the tariffs. Mexico and China had signed a "peace treaty" in 2001 allowing tariffs on certain goods.


'Social responsibility'
The transition to a truly open market will take at least a year, according to industry and government officials.

Top officials with Mexico's Ministry of Economy say open markets in shoes and other products will eventually benefit Mexican consumers by lowering prices. Critics say that multinational companies such as Wal-Mart, now Mexico's largest private-sector employer, will reap most of the profits.

Lopez, the shoe factory owner, says he doesn't necessarily discount the economic calculus that has led Mexico to embrace free trade. But he hopes the shoe crisis will cause his leaders to look beyond macroeconomic indicators.

"Either these people make shoes or they go to the U.S.," he said. "I don't understand how the government discounts the humanity that exists in this sector. There needs to be a social responsibility, not just saying, 'Either you live or you die.' "

By OSCAR AVILA

- Hezbollah - Lebanon

While watching Nasrallah’s A’shoura speech being replayed on Mannar, I decided to think loudly on some issues. Yes, I do agree with Hassan Nasrallah’s logic of how Bush was worried over 3 soldiers and their families while overlooking Israel’s butchery and terrorist acts over civilians with over 11,000 detainees.

What Bush doesn’t understand is that the majority of the Lebanese if given the choice between Israel and Hezbollah, they would choose Hezbollah. When I say majority, I surely don’t mean 50% plus 1%, rather like two years ago, almost the whole Lebanese population was with Hezbollah in the middle of the July War.

Bush doesn’t seem to understand that Israel’s past cost Lebanon a lot. Ever since Israel did the Litani operation back in the 1970s, a lot of the South despised Israel. Actually, then they also despised the Palestinians, but more the Israelis for killing their relatives. Almost everyone in the South has a relative who was kidnapped by Israel, killed, wounded, mutilated, shocked in traumas, and had material destruction. When Israel decided to invade Lebanon back in 1982, everyone in West Beirut had known someone who got killed by Israeli shelling. When Israel suddenly pulled out, the majority of the Christians in East Beirut and Mt. Lebanon felt they were abandoned and left to rot in the face of the other camp. When Israel occupied Southern Lebanon till 2000, a lot of families were brutally treated by the SLA, several tortured and even worse. When Israel broke out lashing Lebanon with missiles in 1993 and 1996, the Lebanese sat in anger as they watched helplessly Israeli plans killing fellow citizens. When July 2006 broke out, one quarter of the Lebanese (a whole million) were refugees, 1300 were killed (and still get killed from cluster bombs), 5000 wounded, a lot in trauma shocks, and land/agriculture/different industries were burnt to the ground. Even Samir Jaajaa (Israel’s ex-ally) stated out bluntly that the Lebanese Force sustained three martyrs during the July War. Hence, every Israel remains in the collective memory of the Lebanese as the spoiled prostitute of the United States. The fact Israel remains unpunished, special thanks to the US Veto power at the UN, will never allow peace to reign over between Lebanon and Israel (and even much worse between Palestine and Israel because Israel was constructed at the blood and houses of Palestinians). I also didn’t mention how many times day to day Israel’s warplanes and artillery randomly bombed people’s houses during their occupation.

In a nutshell, peace with Israel will never take place. The Lebanese cannot tolerate such peace with Israel. If given the choice between Israel and Hezbollah, the Lebanese would choose Hezbollah (Christians included) due to the previous butcheries and treacheries of Israel to Lebanon. Meanwhile, what Mr. Cowboy from hell Bush doesn’t understand, his blunders and Israel’s unpunished butchery make Hezbollah stronger and stronger only when it comes between the choice of Israel and Hezbollah. The Israeli humiliated retreat of 2000 transformed Hezbollah from a religious party to a Lebanese National Liberation Party. Nasrallah was smart when he dedicated his victory in the name of all Lebanese when Israel was kicked out from Southern borders. The victory even got anti-Hezbollah parties to respect their military victory. This transformation appeared clearly in the July War. While Israel and the US hoped for a civil war in Lebanon to cripple Hezbollah (probably hoped to give anti-Hezbollah supporters Israeli Air Force support), the Lebanese stood as a single line. Actually, at the ground, that was one rare moment whereby the Lebanese stood as a single line. This doesn’t mean we forget what happened to racist practices towards Palestinians living in Beirut (those who didn’t have a Lebanese identity were locked out of schools).

The other dimension is Bush’s failure to promote Hezbollah as a terrorist organ in the International Arena. So far, only the US administration and Israel recognize Hezbollah as a terrorist organ while all the rest of the world regard Hezbollah as a legitimate body with full rights to be existent in Lebanon. Even European Community members meet with Hezbollah, and the US administration itself meets indirectly with Hezbollah through mediators. Henceforth, the question goes, what did the US do? Get the Christians to support Hezbollah? Well done Mr. Bush. If any proper war against Hezbollah to be waged, get Israel punished severely for its entire war crimes so that the survivors in Lebanon (and I do say survivors, because the whole country since 1982 have been survivors of Israeli aggression, and 1977 the whole South civilians have been survivors). Hezbollah isn’t born out of scratch because certain people are born wicked, may be he should do a research why Hezbollah got all that popularity, and at least why all coalitions would support Hezbollah amidst a war with Israel who pathetically is still trying to promote that their war was not with Lebanon, rather with Hezbollah. All 14th of March, opposition, and independents directed their energy on relieving the refugees by helping them out 2 years ago, and if they didn’t do that, only then the Shiites would have hated Nasrallah and the Israeli plan would have worked to cripple Hezbollah. So again, to all stupid Zionists (and when I say stupid Zionists, I seriously mean that anyone pro-Zionism is stupid), go research history, and not what Israel says…

MFL

Coup D'état To Topple Italy's Communists

Britain and its Nato allies considered organising a coup in Italy in 1976 to prevent the Communist Party from coming to power, Foreign Office papers reveal.

The documents, made public after 30 years, were unearthed by an Italian researcher in the government archives at Kew, Surrey. In 1976, the Cold War was still raging, Henry Kissinger was the US Secretary of State and Italy's political situation was a shambles.

After 30 years of domination by the corrupt Christian Democrat party (DC), the country was ready for change. The Partito Comunista Italiana (PCI), led by the moderate Enrico Berlinguer, was the only political force which seemed to offer it. In an election scheduled for 20 June 1976, there was a strong chance it would beat the Christian Democrats into second place and lead a coalition.

A secret Foreign Office memo dated 6 May 1976, entitled Italy And The Communists: Options For The West, floated one possible course of action as "action in support of a coup d'etat or other subversive action". The authors admitted: "By its nature, a coup d'etat could lead to unpredictable developments." But they added that, in theory at least, "it could be promoted. In one way or another, the force of the right could be counted on, with the support of the police and the army". The idea of a coup to remove the PCI or stop it coming to power "could be considered attractive" – but the idea was rejected as "unrealistic".

The growth of Italian communism had worried politicians in the West all that year. In January, Kissinger told Willy Brandt, the former West German Chancellor and leader of the Socialist International organisation, of his "strong anxiety" for the developing situation. The "political nature" of Nato, Kissinger said, would change if communists seized power of a Nato country.

The rest of the alliance shared his worries. For all its reformism, Berlinguer's PCI was still close to Moscow. The biggest fear was about what would happen to Nato's nuclear security if the PCI came to power. "To put it crudely," as the Ministry of Defence put it, "sensitive documents could end up in Moscow." In the event, the PCI finished second in the election, with 34.3 per cent of the vote to the DC's 38.7 per cent.

* Crowds gathered in east Berlin yesterday to commemorate the assassination of founders of the German Communist Party. Around 8,000 activists from 50 left-wing groups gathered at Friedrichsfelde cemetery to mark the deaths of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. They were killed on 15 January 1919 by right-wing militia.

Published In The Independent 14 January 2008

A Commentary By Richard Moore

I came across a very intriguing article in the NY Times by Peter Goodman , Dec 30: "The Free Market: A False Idol After All?"
(http://WWW.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/weekinreview/)

This headline really grabbed my attention. The free market has been the unquestioned economic story line ever since Reagan's day. What does it mean when the NY Times -- the flagship of US propaganda -- begins undermining that story line? My attention was grabbed even more by this quote I noticed in the article: "Untethered market forces lead to bad things", said Mr. Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute. "You simply can't run an economy as complicated as ours on ideology alone". The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) is a well-known neo-conservative think tank-- from which one expects only neoliberal economic views. What's going on here?? Why are they implicitly but obviously calling for regulatory interventionism? This brings to mind as well the recent statements by the Federal Reserve, implying that new regulations were needed in the credit game.

Keep in mind that this shift from the Economic Policy Institute does not represent any new economic insight on their part. Everyone with any smarts, including them, always knew that the free market was destructive to national economies. Indeed, the purpose of the neoliberal project was to undermine national sovereignty in general.

This EPI statement is a propaganda shift, a shift in 'the story line'.

Also keep in mind that the US has never really observed the principles of neoliberalism. We forced other nations to open their markets, and drop their subsidies and tariffs -- by means of the WTO and IMF -- but we always reserved the right to ignore those principles in our own case, as for example with agricultural subsidies, and the time we prevented China from buying an American-owned oil company. We never have been running our economy "on ideology alone". Again, we see that this statement by the EPI is a change in the story line, not a new insight.

Certainly this EPI shift does not indicate that capitalism is being abandoned, but it does represent a significant turning point. As long as neoliberalism was the unquestioned story line, that meant capitalism was still on the upsurge, still the core of elite management strategy. If neoliberalism is beginning to fall from favor, and if this is going to be reflected in the story line, that suggests the tide of capitalism has passed its highest point, and is beginning to recede. In other words, capitalism may be past its peak as a clique tool, and this NY Times piece might be one of our first signals to that effect, along with the statements by the Federal Reserve.

And there are indeed good reasons why capitalism should be falling from favor in the eyes of our clique -- who always look at everything from a long-range perspective. Capitalism, as a fundamental economic model, no longer makes much sense for them. Growth for growth's sake has been a very powerful tool of wealth accumulation over the centuries; it's done its job well for those at the top of the financial pyramid. But that growth has now collided with an immovable barrier: the finiteness of the Earth and its resources.

Certainly our clique intends to continue exploiting and plundering, but the capitalist formula, objectively speaking, has now served its purpose -- and its dynamics no longer serve our clique as they have in the past. The evidence of this lies before us, as the hyper-inflated capitalist financial bubble is beginning to burst world wide, and the American economy is kaput. Purely from a management perspective, isn't it clear that it's time for a reorganization of the system?

Many of us have feared that an economic collapse was in the works -- there is certainly much evidence for that at the moment, with subprime mortgages, deficits, and all. That fear led us to the fear that martial law would be imposed, in order to control the resulting chaos -- and we saw the Patriot Act as being the preparation for that. That scenario was a core part of the neocon agenda, and that scenario too I think has now been abandoned, or at least postponed indefinitely. There are, given our assumptions, better ways to proceed.

From the clique's perspective, I'd want to set up the next administration to really turn things around -- to take bold steps to create a situation that would move Americans back into their comfort zone. The PNAC agenda was about outright fascism, which made sense if your plan includes a period of economic collapse combined with more aggressive warfare. But if the iron boot of fascism won't be available to control the masses, it makes sense to avoid economic collapse and 'bring the masses back onside' -- to restore American's faith in the system. While Bush gave us only fear and dissent, I'd want the new administration to cheer everyone up, put a smile on their faces. And nothing cheers folks up like a positive economic turn around. If capitalist ideology is no longer sacrosanct, that provides the flexibility needed in order to create such an economic turn around.

What we are likely to see, then, are a bevy of major government economic programs, quite different than those of the New Deal, but on a similar dramatic scale. It's like this time we're getting our New Deal just before an economic collapse was going to hit, without having to actually live through another Great Depression. And indeed, another Great Depression would be inevitable without economic interventions on the scale of the New Deal. Even the bankers are beginning to hint in this direction, as they contemplate their debt write-off nightmare.

According to capitalist economics the US is bankrupt, deeply in debt, and is hemorrhaging cash-flow losses. We have our fingers crossed that China won't dump it's deteriorating dollar holdings, but we certainly can't expect them to fund a New Deal for us by buying up massive new government security offerings. If capitalism is sacrosanct, a neo-New Deal is not feasible. If capitalism is no longer sacrosanct, then a neo-New Deal becomes feasible.

Full article here

By Albert Einstein

This essay was originally published in the first issue of Monthly Review (May 1949).


I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.

The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor—not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules. In this respect, it is important to realize that the means of production—that is to say, the entire productive capacity that is needed for producing consumer goods as well as additional capital goods—may legally be, and for the most part are, the private property of individuals.

For the sake of simplicity, in the discussion that follows I shall call “workers” all those who do not share in the ownership of the means of production—although this does not quite correspond to the customary use of the term. The owner of the means of production is in a position to purchase the labor power of the worker. By using the means of production, the worker produces new goods which become the property of the capitalist. The essential point about this process is the relation between what the worker produces and what he is paid, both measured in terms of real value. Insofar as the labor contract is “free,” what the worker receives is determined not by the real value of the goods he produces, but by his minimum needs and by the capitalists' requirements for labor power in relation to the number of workers competing for jobs. It is important to understand that even in theory the payment of the worker is not determined by the value of his product.

Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.

The situation prevailing in an economy based on the private ownership of capital is thus characterized by two main principles: first, means of production (capital) are privately owned and the owners dispose of them as they see fit; second, the labor contract is free. Of course, there is no such thing as a pure capitalist society in this sense. In particular, it should be noted that the workers, through long and bitter political struggles, have succeeded in securing a somewhat improved form of the “free labor contract” for certain categories of workers. But taken as a whole, the present day economy does not differ much from “pure” capitalism.

Production is carried on for profit, not for use. There is no provision that all those able and willing to work will always be in a position to find employment; an “army of unemployed” almost always exists. The worker is constantly in fear of losing his job. Since unemployed and poorly paid workers do not provide a profitable market, the production of consumers' goods is restricted, and great hardship is the consequence. Technological progress frequently results in more unemployment rather than in an easing of the burden of work for all. The profit motive, in conjunction with competition among capitalists, is responsible for an instability in the accumulation and utilization of capital which leads to increasingly severe depressions. Unlimited competition leads to a huge waste of labor, and to that crippling of the social consciousness of individuals which I mentioned before.

This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career.

I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society.

Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember that a planned economy is not yet socialism. A planned economy as such may be accompanied by the complete enslavement of the individual. The achievement of socialism requires the solution of some extremely difficult socio-political problems: how is it possible, in view of the far-reaching centralization of political and economic power, to prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening? How can the rights of the individual be protected and therewith a democratic counterweight to the power of bureaucracy be assured?


Read the full essay here

Will The US Kill In 2008?

By Dr Gideon Polya

I seem to have been demonstrating against American racism, imperialism, wars and mass murder all my adult life from the Vietnam era of the 1960s and 1970s onwards. Back in the 1960s decent people chanted “Hay, hay LBJ, how many kids will you kill today?” (LBJ being US President Lyndon Baines Johnson who presided over the Indochina War - 13 million excess deaths in total - from the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK) in 1963 to the accession of President Richard Nixon in 1969.

These days we have been chanting “Bush, Blair, CIA, how many kids did you kill today?” or the more general “Hay, hay USA, how many kids did you kill today?” This article by a senior biological scientist attempts to answer this question QUANTITATIVELY using the best available data from UNICEF (see: http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/index.html ) and the UN Population Division (see: http://esa.un.org/unpp/ ).

We can get an UPPER LIMIT estimate from determining the number of children who die avoidably on Spaceship Earth with George Bush in charge of the flight deck. I have published a huge book recently called “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950”. (G.M. Polya, Melbourne; copies in some major libraries; see: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/1375/247/ and http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/ ). Careful research over several years and involving every country in the world ultimately obtained the estimate that 16 million people die avoidably each year (2003 data) of whom 9.6 million are under-5 year old infants.

We can accordingly estimate that Bush US is COMPLICIT in about 9.6 million avoidable infant deaths on Spaceship Earth each year (26,000 daily). However complicity is not the same as actual, actionable RESPONSIBILITY.

However while Bush America cannot be held responsible for every country in the world, under International Law it is certainly responsible for all countries actually violently occupied by the US (Occupied Iraq, Occupied Afghanistan, Occupied Diego Garcia) or by its war criminal surrogates Ethiopia and Racist Zionist-run Apartheid Israel (Occupied Haiti, Occupied Palestine, Occupied Somalia).

This culpability is clearly set out in Articles 55 and 56 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War (see: http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/92.htm ), QUOTE:

Article 55
To the fullest extent of the means available to it the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring the food and medical supplies of the population; it should, in particular, bring in the necessary foodstuffs, medical stores and other articles if the resources of the occupied territory are inadequate.

The Occupying Power may not requisition foodstuffs, articles or medical supplies available in the occupied territory, except for use by the occupation forces and administration personnel, and then only if the requirements of the civilian population have been taken into account. Subject to the provisions of other international Conventions, the Occupying Power shall make arrangements to ensure that fair value is paid for any requisitioned goods.

The Protecting Power shall, at any time, be at liberty to verify the state of the food and medical supplies in occupied territories, except where temporary restrictions are made necessary by imperative military requirements.

Article 56

To the fullest extent of the means available to it, the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring and maintaining, with the cooperation of national and local authorities, the medical and hospital establishments and services, public health and hygiene in the occupied territory, with particular reference to the adoption and application of the prophylactic and preventive measures necessary to combat the spread of contagious diseases and epidemics. Medical personnel of all categories shall be allowed to carry out their duties.

If new hospitals are set up in occupied territory and if the competent organs of the occupied State are not operating there, the occupying authorities shall, if necessary, grant them the recognition provided for in Article 18. In similar circumstances, the occupying authorities shall also grant recognition to hospital personnel and transport vehicles under the provisions of Articles 20 and 21.

In adopting measures of health and hygiene and in their implementation, the Occupying Power shall take into consideration the moral and ethical susceptibilities of the population of the occupied territory. END QUOTE.

Using data from UNICEF it can be estimated that 608,000 under-5 year old infants die ANNUALLY in the US- or US surrogate-occupied Occupied Territories listed above, 90% avoidably - i.e. 550,000 - and due to Occupier war crimes in violation of the Geneva Convention.

A quick inspection of the WHO (World Health Organization) website (see: http://www.who.int/countries/en/ ) reveals that total annual medical expenditure in US dollars permitted by the war criminal Occupiers is only $19 (Occupied Afghanistan), $82 (Occupied Haiti), $135 (Occupied Iraq), ? (Occupied Somalia) and ? (Occupied Palestinian Territory) as compared to the following hugely greater values for the racist, war-criminal, mass pedocidal US Alliance Occupier Countries: $3,123 (Australia), $3,173 (Canada), $3,040 (France), $3,171 (Germany), $2,560 (the UK) and $6.096 (the US).

Accordingly Bush, Dr Rice (aka Dr Death), Bush America and indeed ALL Bush-supporting Americans are responsible for the 550,000 avoidable under-5 infant deaths EACH YEAR in the above Occupied countries. For detailed data and analysis see "US Occupation & Terror & Occupation. War crimes & huge infant deaths": http://mwcnews.net/content/view/11968/42/ , from which one obtains the following summary data:

Year 2005 under-5 infant deaths” / “year 2005 population” is 370,000 / 29.9 million (Occupied Afghanistan); 122,000 / 28.8 million (Occupied Iraq); 82,000 / 8.2 million (Occupied Somalia); 31,000 / 8.5 million (Occupied Haiti); and 3,000 / 3.7 million (Occupied Palestinian Territory) – as compared to 1,500 / 20.2 million (Occupi-er Australia) and 800 / 6.4 million (Occupi-er Israel).

Year 2005 annual under-5 infant death rate” (i.e. as a percentage: deaths for every 100 under-5 year old infants in 2005 in a particular country) was 6.7% (Occupied Afghanistan); 2.8% (Occupied Iraq); 5.5% (Occupied Somalia); 2.7% (Occupied Haiti); and 0.47% (Occupied Palestinian Territory) – as compared to 0.12% (Occupi-er Australia) and 0.12% (Occupi-er Israel).

Total excess deaths for impoverished developing countries is about 1.4 times the total under-5 infant deaths (see "Layperson's Guide to Counting Iraq deaths": http://mwcnews.net/content/view/5872/26/ (for detailed analysis see my book "Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950" (copies in major libraries): http://mwcnews.net/content/view/1375/247/ and http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/ ). Accordingly annual excess deaths in the above Occupied Countries = 608,000 x 1.4 = 850,000.

THE ANSWERS to the questions posed above are that Bush America will be responsible for (a) 850,000 excess deaths in US- or US surrogate-occupied Territories in 2008 (of whom well over 50% will be kids) and (b) 550,000 avoidable under-5 infant deaths in these Occupied Territories in 2008 or 550,000/365 = 1,500 avoidable under-5 year old infant deaths DAILY.

Terrorism whether state terrorism or non-state terrorism is evil and repugnant.

Muslim-origin non-state terrorists have murdered 7,000 Western civilians in the last 40 (FORTY) years (including Israelis and assuming no US or Israeli complicity in 9/11 - ignoring the fact that in November 2007 former President and intelligence-intimate Francesco Cossiga of Italy announced unequivocally that 9/11 was due to the US CIA and Israeli Mossad) (see: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/18569/26/ ).

However the 21st century Bush Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been associated (SO FAR) with post-invasion excess deaths of 1.5-2 million and 3-6 million, respectively; post-invasion under-5 infant deaths of 0.6 million and 2.2 million, respectively; and refugees totalling 4.5 million and 4 million, respectively (see: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/19121/42/ and http://www.countercurrents.org/polya071007.htm ).

From these UN agency- and medical literature-derived figures Bush US is clearly the world's #1 terrorist state and the current world's #1 for mass murder and mass pedocide (mass murder of children).

What sort of human beings can be complicit in such mass murder? What sort of Americans are complicit in this mass murder? What sort of American WOMEN are complicit in this horrendous mass murder of BORN INFANTS? Well, George W. Bush's Secretary of State Dr Condoleezza Rice (aka Wicked Witch of the West, Dr Death), Bill Clinton's Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Hilary Clinton for starters.

Of course ugly, racist Americans such as the Racist Religious Right Republican (R4) Bush-ites might argue that Muslim, Arab, Asian, South Asian, African, or non-European infants "don't count" (that, of course, having been continuous, sustained American policy since the time of the racist, genocidal, God-fearing first European settlers of America 500 years ago) but what about the 20,000 AMERICAN INFANTS who die avoidably EACH YEAR because of Bush policies (see "How Bush killed 100,000 American infants": http://mwcnews.net/content/view/7102/26/ ).

Bush America is undoubtedly well ahead of the rest as the world's #1 climate criminal state, and the #1 for terrorism, and mass pedocide. US state terrorism (USST), US climate criminality, and US nuclear terrorism are the #1 threats facing the world today.

Those who KNOWINGLY deny, ignore, excuse, minimize, obfuscate, support, advocate or are otherwise complicit in the mass murder of CHILDREN have crossed the line separating decent humanity from proto-Nazi barbarism, from the unthinkable but real, barbaric actuality of Bush America.

Small wonder therefore that outstanding Jewish American investor, philanthropist, author, activist, Holocaust hero and Holocaust survivor George Soros has demanded the "de-Nazification" of Bush America (see: "George Soros: Bush America needs de-Nazification": http://mwcnews.net/content/view/12714/26/ ).

What can decent people do to counter this horrendous Bush American barbarism in 2008? Peace is the only way but silence kills and silence is complicity. Decent folk must (a) inform others and (b) act ethically by applying Sanctions and Boycotts in relation to all their avoidable dealings with individuals, corporations and countries complicit in this continuing mass pedocide, this continuing, remorseless Bush-ite mass murder of innocent children.

Dr Gideon Polya published some 130 works in a 4 decade scientific career, most recently a huge pharmacological reference text "Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds" (CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, New York & London, 2003). He has just published “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” (G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2007: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/1375/247/ ).

“Collateral Damage”

By Dan Jakopovich

Great is the hypocrisy of capitalist “civilization”. On the one hand, big business and its media boast of their “democracy” and “freedom,” while at the same time in today’s world they commit the greatest crimes. They spread rhetoric about human rights while stifling human dignity in a myriad of ways. Although several tens of billions of dollars would be enough to eliminate extreme hunger in the world, the USA annually spends approximately 600 billion dollars on its military budget, while approximately 15 million children are dying from starvation every year. It appears that it is still not in the interest of the system to eliminate poverty. War is profitable, and the profits coming from the war in Iraq are evidently more valuable than human lives. Naturally, we are all the same under the skin, and the suffering of men and women is not intrinsically less terrible than the suffering of children. Nonetheless, there is something particularly grotesque in the soulless manner in wich the world powers behave towards the must vulnerable and least culpable generation. Perhaps it is precisely the hypocritical attitude towards them that best reflects the conscience of today's world society.

The First Gulf War, equally absurd as other wars before and after it, started at the beginning of the final decade of the last century. Approximately 90,000 tons of bombs were dropped on Iraq and Kuwait. Nonetheless, Saddam was not deposed. As Sami Ramadani, an Iraqi dissident and professor at the London Metropolitan University, points out, the United States even helped Saddam quell a military rebellion against his authority.

CRIMINAL SANCTIONS
“We Think The Price Is Worth It”
The sanctions that were later imposed against defeated Iraq did not undermine the power of the autocrats but severely afflicted the lives of ordinary people. The sanctions were all-encompassing, perhaps the most restrictive and broadest in history – applying also to food, medicines and other humanitarian necessities. Even chlorine, needed for disinfecting water, was prohibited due to its alleged “dual function“ in the potential manufacture of weapons. UNICEF (http://www.unicef.org/newsline/99pr29.htm) estimated the number of children under five years of age who died as a consequence of the sanctions at 500,000 (five hundred thousand). In 1996, that great liberal, the tastefully attired lady Madeleine Albright (secretary of state under Bill Clinton, whom the stupid, hypocritically moralistic public pilloried for oral sex with Monica Lewinsky and not for aggression waged against numerous countries), responded to a question asked on 60 Minutes as to whether the price of the lives of 500,000 children was worth it as follows: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it.”
Denis Halliday, the former UN humanitarian coordinator for Iraq (appointed in 1997 as an assistant to the secretary-general of the UN), estimated the total number of deaths due to sanctions at 1 million (an inconceivable number of human lives destroyed). In October 1998, after a 34-year career at the UN, he resigned in order to be able to criticize these cannibalistic sanctions freely and stated: “I don't want to administer a program that satisfies the definition of genocide.” Halliday’s successor, Hans von Sponeck, also submitted his resignation after two years in protest (i.e. revulsion) as did Jutta Burghardt, head of the World Food Program for Iraq. The corporate mass media ignored these events as much as they could. The corrupt Oil for Food program has only somewhat alleviated the suffering of the population. In addition to sanctions, this exploitative program is one more stain on the history of modern UN.

THE CURRENT BESTIAL WAR
Although periodical limited bombardment of Iraqi targets continued throughout the 1990s (without any great interest from the corporate mass media), the US and its allies announced a new war on Iraq in 2003. The leading British medical journal, The Lancet, estimated through scientific methods in October 2006 that 655,000 (six hundred fifty-five thousand) people had perished in the war by July 2006, as also confirmed by the elite Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the US.

Dan Toole, director of the Office of Emergency Operations of the United Nations Children's Fund, recently stated: “Children today are much worse off than they were a year ago, and they certainly are worse off than they were three years ago.” He added that Iraqis no longer have safe access to the basic food basket established under Saddam's regime in order to survive international sanctions. At UNICEF there are concerns regarding a potential cholera epidemic because two thirds of the Iraqis do not have access to clean water. The prominent sociologist and professor at the Sorbonne Jean Ziegler, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, stated in 2005 that the rate of malnutrition among Iraqi children had doubled since the beginning of the war in 2003. Nutritional and health indicators have significantly worsened since the beginning of the occupation. According to a study commissioned by the BBC, ABC News, the ARD of Germany and USA Today, 64% of interviewed Iraqis described their family situation as somewhat poor or very poor, which represents an increase in comparison to 30% in 2005. Access to electricity is described by 88% as somewhat poor or very poor, while 65% thought so in 2004. Although 48% described their access to clean water as poor or very poor in 2004, 69% feel this way now.

According to UNICEF, half of the 4 million Iraqis who have fled their homes since the beginning of the war were children. Tens of thousands of children have lost one or both parents. Deprived of many of their rights, frequently exposed to psychological, physical and sexual violence and potentially harmful forms of labor, the future of these children does not appear overly promising.

THE STRATEGY OF TENSION
Viewed politically, the American occupation of Iraq has generated what had been formerly largely nonexistent enmity and sectarian-based conflicts among the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. According to the tried and tested “divide and conquer’’ model, the US is actively promoting these divisions in the Iraqi society. The occupying army has divided the representative bodies, political parties and cities according to these lines. Furthermore, Amnesty International has expressed concern due to the shady trafficking of arms from Bosnia to Iraq, and it appears that the US has imported large shipments of weapons for arming the Sunni militias. Occupying troops have been implicated in cases of terrorist bombings of civilian territories and some of the members of the military forces have been arrested wearing improvised explosive devices that are used for terrorist purposes. For anyone even partly cognizant of the history of the American secret services, for example, this is not a great surprise. In any case, the continuation of foreign occupation has led to further escalation of the conflict, fundamentalism and a civil war that is already raging for its fifth year.

Despair and desire for vengeance have pushed many young people into fundamentalism, which under normal circumstances would be foreign to them. Monstrous violence and fear, isolation, roadblocks, electricity shortages, the destruction of communications links and the general struggle for sheer survival have seriously hindered any serious or realistic dialogue among Iraqis about their common future. The puppet Iraqi government under the control of the US has prohibited strikes, reintroduced the death penalty and imprisoned tens of thousands of people (many without trials). The secular democratic Iraq Freedom Congress has been repressed both by extreme Islamists and the US forces. Under such restrictive conditions, the struggle for the country’s democratization is exceptionally difficult. Meanwhile, the object of this necessary democratization – the Iraqi people – is being subjugated and politically, economically, culturally, physically and psychologically crippled.

WOUNDS BELOW THE SURFACE
Professor Kholoud Nasser Muhssin of the University of Baghdad points out that approximately 60–70% of all Iraqi children suffer from psychological problems. Many of them have also survived traumatic experiences. Psychological wounds are difficult to heal and post-traumatic stress disorder is very common. “New generations, especially this one, will be aggressive,” points out the Baghdad psychiatrist Bilal Youssif Hamid. Many children whom Hamid has tried to treat have witnessed or participated in murders and death. Although parents are frequently too afraid to take their children to a clinic for a medical check-up, much less to school, even the children who go to school have great learning difficulties, as well as anxiety, depression, aggressiveness, nightmares, bedwetting etc. War is always catastrophic for the human psyche.

How can new generations acquire an awareness of the preciousness of each individual when human life is so cheap, the dignity of all people so blatantly ignored and human potentials so suppressed? How can a country be democratized when the most basic rights, such as the right to strike, are prohibited, and the call for vengeance and voice of despair drown out more rational alternatives to imperialism? How to popularize the philosophy of nonviolence?

Dan Jakopovich is the main editor of the left-wing magazine on the territory of ex-Yugoslavia Novi Plamen (www.noviplamen.org).

This Time Around?
Letters From Michael Moore

This is the content of two emails from a friend. The are sequentially related and about United States elections.

I have little concern for events within the borders of that nation except as they might further adversely effect the rest of the world. I am well past believing participation in US elections do more than help perpetuate myths that aid ill advised continuance of that nation's existence. A large share of our readers are from there and may differ. It is in deference to those for whom the emails' contents are spread below.

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January 2, 2008

Friends,

A new year has begun. And before we've had a chance to break our New Year's resolutions, we find ourselves with a little more than 24 hours before the good people of Iowa tell us whom they would like to replace the man who now occupies three countries and a white house.

Twice before, we have begun the process to stop this man, and twice we have failed. Eight years of our lives as Americans will have been lost, the world left in upheaval against us... and yet now, today, we hope against hope that our moment has finally arrived, that the amazingly powerful force of the Republican Party will somehow be halted. But we know that the Democrats are experts at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, and if there's a way to blow this election, they will find it and do it with gusto.

Do you feel the same as me? That the Democratic front-runners are a less-than-stellar group of candidates, and that none of them are the "slam dunk" we wish they were? Of course, there are wonderful things about each of them. Any one of them would be infinitely better than what we have now. Personally, Congressman Kucinich, more than any other candidate, shares the same positions that I have on the issues (although the UFO that picked ME up would only take me as far as Kalamazoo). But let's not waste time talking about Dennis. Even he is resigned to losing, with statements like the one he made yesterday to his supporters in Iowa to throw their support to Senator Obama as their "second choice."

So, it's Hillary, Obama, Edwards -- now what do we do?

Two months ago, Rolling Stone magazine asked me to do a cover story where I would ask the hard questions that no one was asking in one-on-one interviews with Senators Clinton, Obama and Edwards. "The Top Democrats Face Off with Michael Moore." The deal was that all three candidates had to agree to let me interview them or there was no story. Obama and Edwards agreed. Mrs. Clinton said no, and the cover story was thus killed.

Why would the love of my life, Hillary Clinton, not sit down to talk with me? What was she afraid of?

Those of you who are longtime readers of mine may remember that 11 years ago I wrote a chapter (in my first book) entitled, "My Forbidden Love for Hillary." I was fed up with the treatment she was getting, most of it boringly sexist, and I thought somebody should stand up for her. I later met her and she thanked me for referring to her as "one hot shit kicking feminist babe." I supported and contributed to her run for the U.S. Senate. I think she is a decent and smart person who loves this country, cares deeply about kids, and has put up with more crap than anyone I know of (other than me) from the Crazy Right. Her inauguration would be a thrilling sight, ending 218 years of white male rule in a country where 51% of its citizens are female and 64% are either female or people of color.

And yet, I am sad to say, nothing has disappointed me more than the disastrous, premeditated vote by Senator Hillary Clinton to send us to war in Iraq. I'm not only talking about her first vote that gave Mr. Bush his "authorization" to invade -- I'm talking about every single OTHER vote she then cast for the next four years, backing and funding Bush's illegal war, and doing so with verve. She never met a request from the White House for war authorization that she didn't like. Unlike the Kerrys and the Bidens who initially voted for authorization but later came to realize the folly of their decision, Mrs. Clinton continued to cast numerous votes for the war until last March -- four long years of pro-war votes, even after 70% of the American public had turned against the war. She has steadfastly refused to say that she was wrong about any of this, and she will not apologize for her culpability in America's worst-ever foreign policy disaster. All she can bring herself to say is that she was "misled" by "faulty intelligence."

Let's assume that's true. Do you want a President who is so easily misled? I wasn't "misled," and millions of others who took to the streets in February of 2003 weren't "misled" either. It was simply amazing that we knew the war was wrong when none of us had been briefed by the CIA, none of us were national security experts, and none of us had gone on a weapons inspection tour of Iraq. And yet... we knew we were being lied to! Let me ask those of you reading this letter: Were YOU "misled" -- or did you figure it out sometime between October of 2002 and March of 2007 that George W. Bush was up to something rotten? Twenty-three other senators were smart enough to figure it out and vote against the war from the get-go. Why wasn't Senator Clinton?

I have a theory: Hillary knows the sexist country we still live in and that one of the reasons the public, in the past, would never consider a woman as president is because she would also be commander in chief. The majority of Americans were concerned that a woman would not be as likely to go to war as a man (horror of horrors!). So, in order to placate that mindset, perhaps she believed she had to be as "tough" as a man, she had to be willing to push The Button if necessary, and give the generals whatever they wanted. If this is, in fact, what has motivated her pro-war votes, then this would truly make her a scary first-term president. If the U.S. is faced with some unforeseen threat in her first years, she knows that in order to get re-elected she'd better be ready to go all Maggie Thatcher on whoever sneezes in our direction. Do we want to risk this, hoping the world makes it in one piece to her second term?

I have not even touched on her other numerous -- and horrendous -- votes in the Senate, especially those that have made the middle class suffer even more (she voted for Bush's first bankruptcy bill, and she is now the leading recipient of payoff money -- I mean campaign contributions -- from the health care industry). I know a lot of you want to see her elected, and there is a very good chance that will happen. There will be plenty of time to vote for her in the general election if all the pollsters are correct. But in the primaries and caucuses, isn't this the time to vote for the person who most reflects the values and politics you hold dear? Can you, in good conscience, vote for someone who so energetically voted over and over and over again for the war in Iraq? Please give this serious consideration.

Now, on to the two candidates who did agree to do the interview with me...

Barack Obama is a good and inspiring man. What a breath of fresh air! There's no doubting his sincerity or his commitment to trying to straighten things out in this country. But who is he? I mean, other than a guy who gives a great speech? How much do any of us really know about him? I know he was against the war. How do I know that? He gave a speech before the war started. But since he joined the senate, he has voted for the funds for the war, while at the same time saying we should get out. He says he's for the little guy, but then he votes for a corporate-backed bill to make it harder for the little guy to file a class action suit when his kid swallows lead paint from a Chinese-made toy. In fact, Obama doesn't think Wall Street is a bad place. He wants the insurance companies to help us develop a new health care plan -- the same companies who have created the mess in the first place. He's such a feel-good kinda guy, I get the sense that, if elected, the Republicans will eat him for breakfast. He won't even have time to make a good speech about it.

But this may be a bit harsh. Senator Obama has a big heart, and that heart is in the right place. Is he electable? Will more than 50% of America vote for him? We'd like to believe they would. We'd like to believe America has changed, wouldn't we? Obama lets us feel better about ourselves -- and as we look out the window at the guy snowplowing his driveway across the street, we want to believe he's changed, too. But are we dreaming?

And then there's John Edwards.

It's hard to get past the hair, isn't it? But once you do -- and recently I have chosen to try -- you find a man who is out to take on the wealthy and powerful who have made life so miserable for so many. A candidate who says things like this: "I absolutely believe to my soul that this corporate greed and corporate power has an ironclad hold on our democracy." Whoa. We haven't heard anyone talk like that in a while, at least not anyone who is near the top of the polls. I suspect this is why Edwards is doing so well in Iowa, even though he has nowhere near the stash of cash the other two have. He won't take the big checks from the corporate PACs, and he is alone among the top three candidates in agreeing to limit his spending and be publicly funded. He has said, point-blank, that he's going after the drug companies and the oil companies and anyone else who is messing with the American worker. The media clearly find him to be a threat, probably because he will go after their monopolistic power, too. This is Roosevelt/Truman kind of talk. That's why it's resonating with people in Iowa, even though he doesn't get the attention Obama and Hillary get -- and that lack of coverage may cost him the first place spot tomorrow night. After all, he is one of those white guys who's been running things for far too long.

And he voted for the war. But unlike Senator Clinton, he has stated quite forcefully that he was wrong. And he has remorse. Should he be forgiven? Did he learn his lesson? Like Hillary and Obama, he refused to promise in a September debate that there will be no U.S. troops in Iraq by the end of his first term in 2013. But this week in Iowa, he changed his mind. He went further than Clinton and Obama and said he'd have all the troops home in less than a year.

Edwards is the only one of the three front-runners who has a universal health care plan that will lead to the single-payer kind all other civilized countries have. His plan doesn't go as fast as I would like, but he is the only one who has correctly pointed out that the health insurance companies are the enemy and should not have a seat at the table.

I am not endorsing anyone at this point. This is simply how I feel in the first week of the process to replace George W. Bush. For months I've been wanting to ask the question, "Where are you, Al Gore?" You can only polish that Oscar for so long. And the Nobel was decided by Scandinavians! I don't blame you for not wanting to enter the viper pit again after you already won. But getting us to change out our incandescent light bulbs for some irritating fluorescent ones isn't going to save the world. All it's going to do is make us more agitated and jumpy and feeling like once we get home we haven't really left the office.

On second thought, would you even be willing to utter the words, "I absolutely believe to my soul that this corporate greed and corporate power has an ironclad hold on our democracy?" 'Cause the candidate who understands that, and who sees it as the root of all evil -- including the root of global warming -- is the President who may lead us to a place of sanity, justice and peace.

Yours,

Michael Moore


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January 3, 2007

Friends,

There was no doubt about it. The message from Iowa tonight was simple, but deafening:

If you're a candidate for President, and you voted for the war, you lose. And if you voted and voted and voted for the war -- and never once showed any remorse -- you really lose.

In short, if you had something to do with keeping us in this war for four-plus years, you are not allowed to be the next president of the United States.

Over 70% of Iowan Democrats voted for candidates who either never voted for the invasion of Iraq (Obama, Richardson, Kucinich) or who have since admitted their mistake (Edwards, Biden, Dodd). I can't tell you how bad I feel for Senator Clinton tonight. I don't believe she was ever really for this war. But she did -- and continued to do -- what she thought was the politically expedient thing to eventually get elected. And she was wrong. And tonight she must go to sleep wondering what would have happened if she had voted her conscience instead of her calculator.

John Edwards was supposed to have come in third. He had been written off. He was outspent by the other front-runners six to one. But somewhere along the road he threw off the old politico hack jacket and turned into a real person, a fighter for the poor, for the uninsured, for peace. And for that, he came in a surprise second, ending up with just one less delegate than the man who was against the war from the beginning. But, as Joshua Holland of AlterNet pointed out earlier today, Edwards is still the only front-runner who will pull out all the troops and do it as quickly as possible. His speech tonight was brilliant and moving.

What an amazing night, not just for Barack Obama, but for America. I know that Senator Obama is so much more than simply the color of his skin, but all of us must acknowledge -- and celebrate -- the fact that one of the whitest states in the U.S. just voted for a black man to be our next president. Thank you, Iowa, for this historic moment. Thank you for at least letting us believe that we are better than what we often seem to be. And to have so many young people come out and vote -- and vote for Obama -- this is a proud moment. It all began with the record youth turnout in 2004 -- the ONLY age group that Kerry won -- and they came back out tonight en force. Good on every single one of you!

As the only top candidate who was anti-war before the war began, Barack Obama became the vessel through which the people of this Midwestern state were able to say loud and clear: "Bring 'Em Home!" Most pundits won't read the election this way because, well, most pundits merrily led us down the path to war. For them to call this vote tonight a repudiation of the war -- and of Senator Clinton's four years' worth of votes for it -- might require the pundit class to remind their viewers and readers that they share some culpability in starting this war. And, like Hillary, damn few of them have offered us an apology.

With all due respect to Senator Obama's victory, the most important news out of the caucus this evening was the whopping, room-busting turnout of Democrats. 239,000 people showed up to vote Democratic tonight (93% more than in '04, which was a record year), while only 115,000 showed up to vote Republican. And this is a red state! The Republican caucuses looked anemic. The looks on their faces were glum, tired. As the camera followed some of them into their caucus sites, they held their heads down or turned away, sorta like criminals on a perp walk. They know their days of power are over. They know their guy blew it. Their only hope was to vote for a man who has a direct line to heaven. Huckabee is their Hail Mary pass. But don't rule him out. He's got a sense of humor, he's downhome, and he said that if elected, he'd put me on a boat to Cuba. Hey, a free Caribbean vacation!

Bottom line: People have had it. Iowa will go blue (Happy Blue Year, Hawkeyes!). Whomever your candidate is on the Dem side, this was a good night. Get some sleep. The Republicans won't go down without a fight. Look what happened when Kerry tried to play nice. So Barack, you can talk all you want about "let's put the partisanship aside, let's all get along," but the other side has no intention of being anything but the bullies they are. Get your game face on now. And, if you can, tell me why you are now the second largest recipient of health industry payola after Hillary. You now take more money from the people committed to stopping universal health care than any of the Republican candidates.

Despite what your answer may be, I was proud to sit in my living room tonight and see you and your family up on that stage. We became a bit better tonight, and on that I will close by saying, sweet dreams -- and on to that other totally white state of New Hampshire!

Yours,

Michael Moore

# posted by Anonymous @ 1/04/2008 10:38:00 PM

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By Tom Engelhardt

If you don't mind thinking about the Bush legacy a year early, there are worse places to begin than with the case of Erla Ósk Arnardóttir Lilliendahl. Admittedly, she isn't an ideal "tempest-tost" candidate for Emma Lazarus' famous lines engraved on a bronze plaque inside the Statue of Liberty. After all, she flew to New York City with her girlfriends, first class, from her native Iceland, to partake of "the Christmas spirit." She was drinking white wine en route and, as she put it, "look[ing] forward to go shopping, eat good food, and enjoy life." On an earlier vacation trip, back in 1995, she had overstayed her visa by three weeks, a modest enough infraction, and had even returned the following year without incident.

This time – with the President's Global War on Terror in full swing – she was pulled aside at passport control at JFK Airport, questioned about those extra three weeks 12 years ago, and soon found herself, as she put it, "handcuffed and chained, denied the chance to sleep… without food and drink and… confined to a place without anyone knowing my whereabouts, imprisoned." It was "the greatest humiliation to which I have ever been subjected."

By her account, she was photographed, fingerprinted, asked rude questions – "by men anxious to demonstrate their power. Small kings with megalomania" – confined to a tiny room for hours, then chained, marched through the airport, and driven to a jail in New Jersey where, for another nine hours, she found herself "in a small, dirty cell." On being prepared for the return trip to JFK and deportation, approximately 24 hours after first debarking, she was, despite her pleas, despite her tears, again handcuffed and put in leg chains, all, as she put it, "because I had taken a longer vacation than allowed under the law."

On returning to her country, she wrote a blog about her unnerving experience and the Icelandic Foreign Minister Ingibjörg Sólrún Gísladóttir met with U.S. Ambassador Carol van Voorst to demand an apology. Just as when egregious American acts in Iraq or Afghanistan won't go away, the Department of Homeland Security announced an "investigation," a "review of its work procedures" and expressed "regrets." But an admission of error or an actual apology? Uh, what era do you imagine we're living in?

Erla Ósk will undoubtedly think twice before taking another fun-filled holiday in the U.S., but her experience was no aberration among Icelanders visiting the U.S. In fact, it's a relatively humdrum one these days, especially if you appear to be of Middle Eastern background.

Take, for instance, 20-year veteran of the National Guard Zakariya Muhammad Reed (born Edward Eugene Reed, Jr.), who, for the last 11 years, has worked as a firefighter in Toledo, Ohio. Regularly crossing the Canadian border to visit his wife's family, he has been stopped so many times – "I was put up against the wall and thoroughly frisked, any more thoroughly and I would have asked for flowers…" – that he is a connoisseur of detention. He's been stopped five times in the last seven months and now chooses his crossing place based on the size of the detention waiting room he knows he'll end up in. It took several such incidents, during which no explanations were offered, before he discovered that he was being stopped in part because of his name and in part because of a letter he wrote to the Toledo Blade criticizing Bush administration policies on Israel and Iraq.

The first time, he was detained in a small room with two armed guards, while his wife and children were left in a larger common room. While he was grilled, she was denied permission to return to their car even to get a change of diapers for their youngest child. When finally released, Reed found his car had been "trashed." ("My son's portable DVD player was broken, and I have a decorative Koran on the dashboard that was thrown on the floor.") During another episode of detention, an interrogator evidently attempted to intimidate him by putting his pistol on the table at which they were seated. ("He takes the clip out of his weapon, looks at the ammunition, puts the clip back in, and puts it back in his holster.") His first four border-crossing detentions were well covered by Matthew Rothschild in a post at the Progressive Magazine's website. During his latest one, he was questioned about Rothschild's coverage of his case.

The essence of his experience is perhaps caught best in a comment by Customs and Border Protection agent made in his presence: "We should treat them like we do in the desert. We should put a bag over their heads and zip tie their hands together."

Or take Nabil Al Yousuf, not exactly a top-ten candidate for the "huddled masses" category; nor an obvious terror suspect (unless, of course, you believe yourself at war with Islam or the Arab world). According to the Washington Post's Ellen Knickmeyer, Yousuf, who is "a senior aide to the ruler of the Persian Gulf state of Dubai," always has the same "galling" experience on entering the country:

"A U.S. airport immigration official typically takes Yousuf's passport, places it in a yellow envelope and beckons. Yousuf tells his oldest son and other family members not to worry. And Yousuf – who goes by 'Your Excellency' at home – disappears inside a shabby back room. He waits alongside the likes of 'a man who had forged his visa and a woman who had drugs in her tummy'… He is questioned, fingerprinted and photographed."

Despite his own fond memories of attending universities in Arizona and Georgia, Yousuf has decided to send his son to college… in Australia. Knickmeyer adds:

"A generation of Arab men who once attended college in the United States, and returned home to become leaders in the Middle East, increasingly is sending the next generation to schools elsewhere. This year, Australia overtook the United States as the top choice of citizens of the United Arab Emirates heading abroad for college, according to government figures here."

This is what "homeland security" means in the United States today. It means putting your country in full lockdown mode. It means the snarl at the border, the nasty comment in the waiting room, the dirty cell, the handcuffs, even the chains. It means being humiliated. It means a thorough lack of modulation or moderation. Arriving here now always threatens to be a "tempest-tost" experience whether you are a citizen, a semi-official visitor, or a foreign tourist. (After all, even Sen. Ted Kennedy found himself repeatedly on a no-fly list without adequate explanation.) Think of these three cases as snapshots from the borders of a country in which the presumption of innocence is slowly being drained of all meaning.

So far, of course, we've only been talking about the lucky ones. After all, Erla Ósk, Zakariya Muhammad Reed, and Nabil Al Yousuf all made it home relatively quickly. In the final weeks of 2007, a little flood of press reports tracked more extreme versions of the global lockdown the Bush administration launched in late 2001, cases in which, after the snarl, the door clanged shut and home became the barest of hopes.

Take, for example, a December 1st Washington Post piece in which reporter Craig Whitlock revealed one more small part of the CIA's global network of secret imprisonment. We already knew, among other things, that the CIA had set up and run its own secret prisons in Eastern Europe and probably in Thailand; that it had a network of secret sites in Afghanistan like "the Salt Pit" near Kabul; that it may have used the "British" island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, as well as American ships, naval and possibly commercial, to hold prisoners beyond the purview of any authority or even the visits of the International Red Cross; that it ran an air fleet of leased executive jets (including some from Jeppesen Dataplan, a subsidiary of Boeing, which made it back into the news in December because of a lawsuit launched by the ACLU); that these were used to transport terror suspects it snatched up off city streets or battlefields anywhere on the planet to its own "black sites" or which it "rendered" in "extraordinary" manner to the jails and torture chambers of Syria, Egypt, Uzbekistan, and other lands whose agents had no qualms about torturing and abusing prisoners.

Whitlock, however, added a new piece to the CIA's incarceration puzzle: an "imposing building" on the outskirts of Amman, Jordan. This turns out to be the headquarters of the General Intelligence Department, Jordan's powerful spy and security agency (and the CIA's closest Arab ally in the Middle East). Known as a place where torture is freely applied, it has been a way-station for "CIA prisoners captured in other countries." The first terror suspects kidnapped by Agency operatives were, it seems, flown to Jordan and housed in that building before Guantánamo was up and running or the Agency had been able to set up its own secret prisons elsewhere. There, the prisoners were hidden, even from the International Red Cross. To cite but one case Whitlock mentions:

"Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed, a Yemeni microbiology student, was captured in a U.S.-Pakistani operation in Karachi a few weeks after 9/11 on suspicion of helping to finance al-Qaeda operations. Witnesses reported seeing masked men take him aboard a Gulfstream V jet at the Karachi airport Oct. 24, 2001. Records show that the plane was chartered by a CIA front company and that it flew directly to Amman. Mohammed has not been seen since. Amnesty International said it has asked the Jordanian government for information on his whereabouts but has not received an answer."

Also in December, because of that lawsuit against Jeppesen, we got our first insider's account of the CIA "black sites" (and, thanks to Salon.com, even architectural plans for a few of the interrogation rooms and prison cells at those sites, all of which seem to have cameras in them). It was here that "high-value targets" were incarcerated, isolated, and subjected to various "enhanced interrogation techniques."

Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah, a Yemeni, was picked up by the Jordanians in Amman in 2003 and tortured into signing a "full confession" (to acts he had not committed). He was then turned over to the CIA and flown to Kabul (and possibly Eastern Europe as well) where he was imprisoned. He has offered in-depth accounts that give a sense of what those "enhanced interrogation techniques" the Bush administration sponsors so enthusiastically are all about at a personal level. In the end, while in CIA custody, Bashmilah was driven to several suicide attempts, including one in which, using a bit of metal, he slashed his wrist and wrote, "I am innocent," on a cell wall in his own blood.

Here is just part of a description he offered Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! of being prepared for transport by CIA air taxi into black-site hell:

"And then they put… like little plugs inside the ears, plastic. And then they put gauze on that, on the ears. And then they taped that with very strong adhesive tape. And then they put a hood over my head. And then, on top of that, they put a headphone. This is as far as the top of my body was. And then they handcuffed me with a chain, and also they chained my ankles. Then they put a belt above the pants, and then they tied the hands and the ankles to that belt. This was after being slapped and kicked until I almost fainted."

In his cell in a secret prison in Afghanistan, "[i]n the beginning, it was totally dark. It was as if you were inside a tomb. Then, after that, they would turn a light on. Above the door, there was a camera. And there was constant loud music." From then on, neither the lights, nor the music went off. As Mark Benjamin of Salon.com wrote, "His leg shackles were chained to the wall. The guards would not let him sleep, forcing Bashmilah to raise his hand every half hour to prove he was still awake… Guards wore black pants with pockets, long-sleeved black shirts, rubber gloves or black gloves, and masks that covered the head and neck. The masks had tinted yellow plastic over the eyes. 'I never heard the guards speak to each other and they never spoke to me,' Bashmilah wrote in his declaration…

"After 19 months of imprisonment and torment at the hands of the CIA, the agency released him [in Yemen] with no explanation, just as he had been imprisoned in the first place. He faced no terrorism charges. He was given no lawyer. He saw no judge. He was simply released, his life shattered."

No charges, no lawyers, no judge. This is increasingly the norm of – and a legacy of – George Bush's world. In this way, the snarl at the borders melds with the screams of terror in cells worldwide.

By John Pilger

The former Murdoch retainer Andrew Neil, who edited the London Sunday Times, has described James Murdoch, the heir apparent, as a "social liberal". What strikes me is his casual use of "liberal" for the new ruler of an empire devoted to the promotion of war, conquest and human division. Neil's view is not unusual. In the murdochracy that Britain has largely become, once noble terms such as democracy, reform, even freedom itself, have long been emptied of their meaning. In the years leading to Tony Blair's election, liberal commentators vied in their Tonier-than-thou obeisance to such a paragon of "reborn liberalism". In these pages in 1995, the liberal writer Henry Porter celebrated an almost mystical politician who "presents himself as a harmoniser for all the opposing interests in British life, a conciliator of class differences and tribal antipathies, a synthesiser of opposing beliefs". Blair was, of course, the diametric opposite.

As events have demonstrated, Blair and the cult of New Labour have destroyed the very liberalism millions of Britons thought they were voting for. This truth is like a taboo in Britain today. Gone is the bourgeoisie that in good times would extend a few rungs of the ladder to those below. From Blair's pseudo-moralising assault on single parents a decade ago to the government's recent attacks on the disabled, the "British Project" has completed the work of Thatcher and all but abolished the premises of tolerance and decency, however amorphous, on which much of British public life was based. The trade-off has been mostly superficial "social liberalism" and the highest personal indebtedness on earth. In 2007, reported the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the United Kingdom faced the highest levels of inequality for 40 years, with the rich getting richer and the poor poorer and more and more segregated from society. The International Monetary Fund has designated Britain a tax haven, and corruption and fraud in British business are almost twice the global average, while Unicef reports that British children are the most neglected and unhappiest in the "rich" world.

Abroad, behind a facade of liberal concern for the world's "disadvantaged", such as waffle about millennium goals and anti-poverty stunts with the likes of Google and Vodafone, the Brown government, together with its EU partners, is demanding vicious and punitive free-trade agreements that will devastate the economies of scores of impoverished African, Caribbean and Pacific nations. In Iraq, the blood-letting of a "liberal intervention" may well have surpassed that of the Rwanda genocide, while the British occupiers have made no real attempt to help the victims of their lawlessness. And putting out more flags in the pretence of British troops' "withdrawal" will not cover the shame. "The mortality of children in Basra has increased by nearly 30% compared to the Saddam Hussein era," says Dr Haydar Salah, a paediatrician at Basra children's hospital. In January nearly 100 leading British doctors wrote to Hilary Benn, then international development secretary, describing how children were dying because Britain had not fulfilled its obligations under UN security resolution 1483. He refused to see them.

Even if a contortion of intellect and morality allows the interventionists to justify these actions, the same cannot be said for liberties eroded at home. These are too much part of the myth that individual freedom was handed down by eminent liberal gentlemen instead of being fought for at the bottom. Yet rights of habeas corpus, of free speech and assembly, and dissent and tolerance, are slipping away, undefended. Whole British communities now live in fear of the police. The British are distinguished as one of the most spied upon people in the world. A grey surveillance van with satellite tracking sits outside my local supermarket in London. On the pop radio station Kiss 100, the security service MI5 advertises for ordinary people to spy on each other. These are normal now, along with the tracking of our intimate lives and a system of secretive justice that imposes 18-hour curfews on people who have not been charged with any crime and are denied the "evidence". Hundreds of terrified Iraqi refugees are sent back to the infinite dangers of the country "we" have destroyed. Meanwhile, the cause of any real civil threat to Britons has been identified and confirmed repeatedly by the intelligence services. It is "our" continuing military presence in other people's countries and collusion with a Washington cabal described by the late Norman Mailer as "pre-fascist".

In broadcasting, a prime source of liberalism and most of our information, the unthinkable has been normalised. The murderous chaos in Iraq is merely internecine. Indeed, Bush's "surge" is "working". The holocaust there has nothing to do with "us". There are honourable exceptions, of course, as there are in those great liberal storehouses of knowledge, Britain's universities; but they, too, are normalised and left to natter about "failed states" and "crisis management" - when the cause of the crisis is on their doorstep. As Professor Terry Eagleton has pointed out, for the first time in two centuries almost no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist is prepared to question the foundations of western actions, let alone interrupt, as the critic DJ Taylor once put it, all those "demure ironies and mannered perceptions, their focus on the gyrations of a bunch of emotional poseurs ... to the reader infinitely reassuring ... and infinitely useless". Harold Pinter and Ronan Bennett are exceptions.

Britain is now a centralised single-ideology state, as secure in the grip of a superpower as any former eastern bloc country. The Whitehall executive has prerogative powers as effective as politburo decrees. Unlike Venezuela, critical issues such as the EU constitution or treaty are denied a referendum, regardless of Blair's "solemn pledge". Thanks largely to a parliament in which a majority of the members cannot bring themselves to denounce the crime in Iraq or even vote for an inquiry, New Labour has added to the statutes a record 3,000 criminal offences: an apparatus of control that undermines the Human Rights Act. In 1977, at the height of the cold war, I interviewed the Charter 77 dissidents in Czechoslovakia. They warned that complacency and silence could destroy liberty and democracy as effectively as tanks. "We're actually better off than you in the west," said a writer, measuring his irony. "Unlike you, we have no illusions."

For those people who still celebrate the virtues and triumphs of liberalism - anti-slavery, women's suffrage, the defence of individual conscience and the right to express it and act upon it - the time for direct action is now. It is time to support those of courage who defy rotten laws to read out in Parliament Square the names of the current, mounting, war dead, and those who identify their government's complicity in "rendition" and its torture, and those who have followed the paper and blood trail of Britain's piratical arms companies. It is time to support the National Health Service workers who up and down the country are trying to alert us to the destruction of a Labour government's greatest achievement. The list of people stirring is reassuring. The awakening of the rest of us is urgent.

Breaking with the 'National Consensus: Towards Lebanese-Palestinian Reconciliation

[MFL: As always Fawwaz Traboulsi shocks me with his vision and how accurate he always is]

Published on ZMag on October 15, 2007

[Translator's Introduction: The article below by Fawwaz Traboulsi first appeared in Arabic in the Beirut daily as-Safir of September 13, 2007.

For several decades, there was an official dogma regarding Palestinian refugees in Arab countries. According to this dogma, proclaimed by both Palestinian and non-Palestinian leaders, all that the Palestinian refugees wanted was to return to their homeland. True, that yearning was real enough, but understated or willfully ignored was the elementary fact that, before returning to Palestine or to whatever part of it that would be restored, Palestinians wanted their human and civil rights to be acknowledged and respected. Invoking this dogma thus became a way to prevent the implantation of Palestinian refugees and to justify various forms of discrimination they endured in their host countries. Officially, Palestinians were welcomed as fellow Arabs and their rights recognized by the governments of Arab countries where they sought refuge; notwithstanding official recognition, however, Palestinian rights were routinely trampled in practice. In the name of solidarity with the Palestinian cause, invoking this dogma was thus used to serve the interests of local elites totally unrelated to Palestinian welfare.

This official dogma regarding Palestinian refugees continues to this day, though with diminished force, overshadowed by the many conflicts other than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that have engulfed the Middle East in recent years. But the discrimination against Palestinians remains, now justified and enforced by other class and state interests.

In the case of Lebanon in particular, this official dogma has been combined with an elaborate fiction since the 1975-1990 civil war, and sometimes the fiction has become more important than the dogma and eclipsed it altogether. This Lebanese fiction has been to make the Palestinians into an alien presence that is supposedly threatening the very well-being of Lebanon and its citizens -- a fiction cooked up for fraudulent reasons, as Traboulsi carefully explains. What's more, in so doing, Traboulsi places himself squarely at odds with both of the two main camps in the current Lebanese standoff. Both government and opposition politicians routinely talk about the Palestinian presence as a burden Lebanon cannot shoulder or shoulder alone. If there is something on which the two camps agree, it is a refusal to a permanent settling of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. Thus, in an otherwise inane speech to the UN General Assembly on September 28 and without fear of antagonizing either of the two camps back in Beirut, President Lahoud of Lebanon could declare with total confidence that a permanent settling of Palestinian refugees "will dangerously alter the delicate balance of Lebanon's existence as a nation based on diversity and coexistence among a large number of its sects" -- a statement thoroughly debunked by Traboulsi's article.

In years past, Palestinian refugees were ostracized in the name of that dogma that said all they want is to return to Palestine; today, they are further victimized under the pretense that they endanger "Lebanon's existence as a nation."

In the article below, Traboulsi is addressing Lebanese and Arab audiences familiar with events of recent decades, often evoked in passing without further elaboration. A few points to identify these events and place them in their historical context:

(1) Traboulsi refers to the Lebanese civil war of 1975-1990 not as a single war, but as a period of "many wars," which in fact it was. It involved Lebanese parties, armed organizations of the PLO, the Syrian army, and the Israeli army, with frequent infusions of weapons and money from parties further afield. Erstwhile allies often turned on each other during that period, and with increased frequency after the Israeli invasion of 1982.

(2) Traboulsi mentions several individuals and groups that were involved in the 1975-1990 wars; these or their successors all continue to play prominent roles in one of the two contending camps of the current Lebanese standoff. The Lebanese Front is a precursor of the Lebanese Forces, a right-wing organization now headed by Samir Geagea; Geagea is one of the three main leaders of the current pro-government coalition, along with Saad Hariri and Walid Jumblatt. Traboulsi mentions another chieftain of the Lebanese Forces, Elias Hobeika, who led the Lebanese militias involved in the 1982 massacre of Sabra-Shatila, before dissociating himself from the Israeli army and then throwing his lot with the Syrian regime; Hobeika was assassinated in 2002, a few days before testifying in a Brussels court against his former ally Ariel Sharon in a lawsuit brought against the latter by survivors of the massacre. Traboulsi also mentions the "war of the mountain," the "war of liberation," and the "war to unite all guns," commonly referring to different episodes of the 1975-1990 period.

(3) The Taif Accord was an agreement between Lebanese factions of the 1975-1990 wars, convened in the city of Taif, Saudi Arabia, under the auspices of the League of Arab States. The agreement was negotiated in October-November 1989, based on which a cease-fire was enforced by Syrian troops and gradually took effect in the course of 1990. Once the cease-fire was in place, Syrian troops were to withdraw after a cooling-off period, but they did not do so, in violation of the agreement. That Syria was given a free hand in Lebanon throughout most of the 1990's, despite Israel's objections, was in exchange for Syrian participation in Desert Storm, the 1991 US-led campaign to oust Iraqi troops from Kuwait.

(4) The "battle of Nahr al-Barid" is the devastating three-month battle of this past summer, which pitted the Lebanese army against the jihadi group Fateh al-Islam which had ensconced itself in the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr al-Barid in northern Lebanon. It resulted in the total destruction of the camp and the forced displacement of its 30,000 to 40,000 refugee inhabitants.

-- Assaf Kfoury]

After the battle of Nahr al-Barid, much has been said and repeated about a Lebanese "national consensus" regarding the Palestinians in Lebanon, a presumed rejection by all Lebanese of a final settling of Palestinians on Lebanese soil. Many commentators continue to voice their alarm about the "conspiracy" to permanently settle the Palestinians.

The writer of this article, a Lebanese citizen, wishes to openly declare that he will have no part of such a consensus -- and more, that it is time to expose it for the fraud that it is.

This presumed danger of a final settling of Palestinians is another tale in the politics of lies and self-deception that has prevailed since the Taif Accord. In a complex and diverse country such as Lebanon, this accord sought to develop a consensus based on a deception. It sought to achieve national unity by inventing a presumed enemy of all Lebanese, short of finding a real common enemy, or by fabricating a phony scare that would frighten everyone.

There is a history to this tale and the purpose it has served. At the time of the Taif conference, a party had to be found to bear the blame for the disastrous consequences of the many wars fought during the 1975-1990 period. These wars came to an end of sorts, but without an honest reckoning and accounting of the responsibilities that had led to them. And worse, they came to an end by elevating to the seats of power the very warlords that had fought each other mercilessly. The only party left out of this equation were the Palestinians. The other parties at the Taif conference had thus found the perfect scapegoat that would unite them all -- the Palestinian side -- which they thus turned into all of the following: the cause and object of that murky "conspiracy" that had to be feared, the reason that there had been internal wars, and the constant danger to fend off against, then and in the future.

The parties of the Lebanese Front have used the specter of a final settling of Palestinians to justify their blood-soaked history during the 1975-1990 period. They have never tired of declaring that they were fighting "against foreigners". In their account of that period, their history was one of resistance against the "conspiracy" of permanently settling Palestinians on Lebanese soil, conveniently ignoring who instigated the internal wars and who profited from them. Thus, not only have these parties concealed their responsibility for putting the country to the torch, they have also managed to confound the beginnings and ends of the 1975-1990 wars and everything that happened in between.

Twenty-five years ago, in September 1982, was the massacre of Sabra-Shatila. On this occasion, let us not forget that the massacre was planned with the intent to eliminate the "superfluous people" for which there is no room in a settlement of the Middle East crisis. That slaughter of Palestinian civilians took place in a drive to frighten them to leave Lebanon, after the eviction of the PLO and its armed factions in the summer months of 1982. The refusal of a final settling of Palestinians was a euphemism, pure and simple, for their forced migration out of Lebanon under the threat of death.

On the pretense that the many mini-wars in the years 1975-1990 were against the "conspiracy" aiming at a final settling of Palestinians, the conspiracy mongers have wanted us to forget that most of these wars, even after the withdrawal of the PLO and its organizations in 1982, were between Lebanese parties. What was the relationship between this "conspiracy" and what was then called the "war of the mountain" in 1983, which resulted in driving out most of the Christian inhabitants in the Shuf region? Further back, what was the relationship between the refusal of a final settling and the forcible migration of the Muslims out of the Nabaa district in 1976? And what was the connection between this "conspiracy" and General Aoun's decision to ignite the so-called "war of liberation" and the "war to unite all guns"? And what was its connection with the internecine war between the Geagea and Hobeika factions of the Lebanese Forces, or between the Amal movement and Hizbullah?

During the years of Syrian hegemony, from the early 1990's and until 2005, the bogey of a permanent implantation of Palestinians played an important role in rallying a number of politicians, particularly Christians among them, to the side of the Syrian regime. The declared reason was that only the latter would be able to keep the Palestinians in check and disarm their organizations. Thus, incitement against the implantation of Palestinians became another means to justify the presence of Syrian troops on Lebanese territory, although it was in clear violation of the Taif Accord.

What's more, all this talk about the refusal of a permanent settling of Palestinians is a perfect example of the kind of vile repudiation which Palestinians have had to endure, in this case the crass refusal to acknowledge their many and varied contributions to Lebanese life -- from the construction worker to the successful banker, and the many others in all professions from teaching to contracting. If this is what the refusal of a permanent settling means, it is a dark stain on Lebanon's much-trumpeted hospitality, which allows rich Saudi citizens to buy plots of land of one million square meters at the heart of the Lebanese mountains while denying a Palestinian refugee the right to own a dwelling not exceeding a few dozens of square meters!

Let's not overlook that the refusal of a permanent settling also presumes that Palestinians have to be taught lessons in patriotism and how to remain loyal to the idea of an eventual return to Palestine, which in turn presumes that Lebanese can be more concerned than Palestinians in defending the latter's right to return. On this phony presumption, it has been necessary for example to prevent construction material from entering Palestinian refugee camps, so as not to let camp dwellers be seduced by the idea of a permanent stay and aspire to remain in Lebanon! Everyone knows that foreign visitors, who have countries to return to, all aspire and are allowed to remain in Lebanon, so why shouldn't we allow those without a country to aspire to the same? Under repeated policies of encirclement and neglect over the years, the Palestinian camps have become infested with shadowy armed groups, which Lebanese and Syrian security agencies have, by turns, promoted and used to do their dirty work, and then incited to fight each other. And here is Lebanon belatedly awakening to the reality that these groups have the military means to take hostage an entire camp (Nahr al Barid) on the very watch of the proponents of the refusal of a final settling.

Last but not least, the tale of the refusal of a final settling of Palestinians comes in the wake of another issue that is rarely discussed honestly. The proponents of this tale maintain that Lebanon, because of its confessional makeup, cannot sustain the integration of Palestinian refugees who are Muslim in their majority. Because of Lebanon's confessional makeup, they claim, this will create an imbalance between Christians and Muslims in Lebanon. The first flaw in this kind of logic is to equate the right of legal residency in Lebanon with the granting of Lebanese citizenship. Palestinians can be legal residents, with the same rights and duties of all non-citizen residents in Lebanon, without precluding their right to return to whatever part of their homeland that will come under the control of a Palestinian authority according to UN resolutions. But let's pursue this idea to the end: In a country where the confessional power-sharing formula is not based on percentages of the different religious sects in the first place, even if we were to equate the permanent settling of the refugees with the granting of Lebanese citizenship -- which is certainly not maintained by anyone -- what will be the effect of adding another 250,000 Palestinians to the number of Muslims in a country of 4 million where Christians represent no more than one-third of its inhabitants?

Treated with fraudulent remedies, the wounds in Lebanese-Palestinian relations have never ceased to fester and bleed. And here is another new wound caused by the events of Nahr al-Barid, once again treated with fraudulent remedies, as government officials have rushed to promise the rebuilding of the destroyed camp without drawing the necessary lessons for rebuilding relations between the two peoples.

Towards rebuilding harmony between the two peoples, we need to understand that Lebanon can no longer be a base for Palestinian armed organizations. Armed resistance from Lebanon is no longer an option for Palestinians, nor can the country provide the means to sustain such a resistance and serve its purpose. We also need to realize that the issue of Palestinian weapons in Lebanon is the result of fear -- fear caused by a history of massacres, further compounded by the growing racism peddled by politicians -- not to discount the fact that parties and governments have also used it, and continue to use this issue to serve external agendas unrelated to Palestinian interests.

If we want to avoid a repeat of the Nahr al Barid episode, with another terrorist organization abducting an entire Palestinian camp, we need an agreement that will stipulate the removal of all military weapons from Palestinian camps in exchange for the recognition and safeguarding of the Palestinians' civil and political rights. No need to spell out the details of such an agreement here, but the time has come to undertake the necessary steps towards its realization. And the first step on the long road to Lebanese-Palestinian reconciliation is to free ourselves of the fraud called the "conspiracy" to permanently settle the Palestinian refugees!

Fawwaz Traboulsi has taught at the Lebanese American University, Beirut-Lebanon. He has written on history, Arab politics, social movements and popular culture and translated works by Karl Marx, John Reed, Antonio Gramsci, Isaac Deutscher, John Berger, Etel Adnan, Sa`di Yusuf and Edward Said. His most recent book in English is A History of Modern Lebanon (Pluto Press, 2007). The translator, Assaf Kfoury, is Professor of Computer Science at Boston University.