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Netanyahu's Strategy: Divide and Conquer |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=63"><span class="small">Marc Ash, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Tuesday, 27 January 2015 15:06 |
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Ash writes: "There is a lot of speculationright now that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's rather unusual visit to Congress next month could backfire. I should say so."
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. (photo: Platon/Vanity Fair)
Netanyahu's Strategy: Divide and Conquer
By Marc Ash, Reader Supported News
27 January 15
 here is a lot of speculation right now that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rather unusual visit to Congress next month could backfire. I should say so.
To say that it is a risky gambit is painfully redundant, because everything Netanyahu has done during his political career could easily be defined as high-risk behavior. Not only can this backfire for Netanyahu, it can put the United States, Israel, and the entire Middle East in jeopardy.
Throughout Israel’s short history the U.S. has lavished aid and protection on the Jewish nation seemingly without question, at least in Washington. The extent of the aid has been seen as so fundamental to Israel’s survival and prosperity that Israeli cooperation with policy makers in Washington was often considered a given. No more.
Apparently Netanyahu has come to believe that the relationship can be gamed. That spineless U.S. politicians would value their petty disagreements more than Americans’ best interests, and that he is more capable of leading America politically than its elected officials. He’s about halfway there … or here, as it were. He’s either very, very smart or very, very stupid.
In accepting an offer to address the U.S. Congress, exclusively at the behest of Republican lawmakers, he serves short-term Republican political interests and short-term Israeli right-wing interests, but risks a backlash that could destabilize U.S.-Israel relations permanently. This is Netanyahu following the Bush Doctrine: tactics over statesmanship.
In putting all of his eggs in the GOP basket, he is really viewing a good midterm election showing by the Republicans as a trend he can bank on long-term. That ignores an Obama administration that is now free from the political concerns associated with a future reelection campaign, and is thus free to act forcefully on its policy agenda. But it also gambles on a “Republican” candidate winning the White House in 2016. Not a Democrat or a Tea Party candidate, either of whom might act to reign in the Israeli right wing for another four or eight years longer.
Effectively, Netanyahu has put the U.S. on a path that could easily lead to a constitutional crisis. He has pitted Congressional Republicans against a Democratic president in hopes that he can keep the U.S. cash and arms pipeline open until a new president or Congress takes office.
All of this pales in comparison to to the risks involved if Netanyahu and his right-wing Israeli allies decide to roll the dice and launch a significant military campaign in the region. Just this past week, Israeli war planes launched an attack on Hezbollah and Iranian military leaders in Syria.
While Iran and Hezbollah have long been defined as adversaries by the U.S. and other Western powers, including Israel, the leaders targeted and killed were engaged in fighting ISIS forces. Instead of aiding a regional alliance to confront ISIS, Israeli right-wingers used American-supplied arms to accomplish a result that is sure to further destabilize the situation and aid ISIS. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the trouble Israel could cause if it truly wanted to take the region and the U.S. into a major military engagement.
An appropriate analogous graphic would be Netanyahu standing before Congress with a five hundred pound U.S. bomb strapped to his chest and detonator clenched in his teeth trying to speak.
Will the U.S. remain a house divided at Netanyahu’s pleasure, and what will be the cost? Israeli right-wing aggression will be curbed. The question is when.
Marc Ash was formerly the founder and Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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All Lives Matter: From Ferguson to Palestine |
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Tuesday, 27 January 2015 14:55 |
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Schotten writes: "At the same time as Brown was murdered, the world watched as Israel was given free reign to murder Palestinian people in the streets of the Gaza Strip (and beaches, cafes, hospitals, even their own homes) with impunity."
Gaza and Ferguson. (photo: Robert Pratta/Reuters/Charlie Riedel/AP)
All Lives Matter: From Ferguson to Palestine
By Heike Schotten, Ma'an News Agency
27 January 15
 n the United States, "Ferguson" -- the name of the town where unarmed black teenager Michael Brown was shot to death by police last summer -- has become a shorthand name for the free reign given to police officers to murder black people in the streets (and parks, stores, even their own homes) with impunity.
At the same time as Brown was murdered, the world watched as Israel was given free reign to murder Palestinian people in the streets of the Gaza Strip (and beaches, cafes, hospitals, even their own homes) with impunity.
In the US, people are therefore beginning to see the connections between Ferguson and Palestine. The fact that Israel and the US share police training and tactics, not to mention weaponry and military strategy, seems increasingly significant.
Residents of Ferguson describe their small Missouri town -- largely black, run by a largely white police force via rampantly racist, economically devastating police tactics -- as "occupied."
Ferguson protesters were moved and taken aback when Gazans sent them messages of solidarity on Twitter along with advice about how to handle tear gas from militarized police.
Of course, the struggles of African Americans and Palestinians are not identical. African Americans are not occupied the same way as are Palestinians, who are being deprived of their land as well as their rights. The legacies of chattel slavery and colonial dispossession, however vile, are not interchangeable histories of oppression.
Nevertheless, yet another commonality faced by folks in struggle from Ferguson to Palestine is the all-too-frequent refusal to recognize their oppression as oppression.
For example, in public discourse, I have noticed a consistent rhetorical positioning of police officers and Israel -- rather than unarmed black people and Palestinians -- as the real victims of brutality and violence.
I first struggled with this rhetorical casuistry during Israel's Operation Cast Lead, back in 2008-09. In those days, any criticism of Israel's actions -- which included killing almost 1,500 Palestinians, leveling Gaza's civilian infrastructure and residences, and unleashing illegal chemical weapons on noncombatants, amongst other atrocities -- was met with the unmoved reply, "But what about the rockets?"
This past summer, as Israel re-visited genocidal terror on the Gaza Strip for the third time, "What about the rockets?" was updated to "But what about Hamas?" (Alternative versions of this question include the demand that anyone who criticizes Israel affirm that Hamas is a terrorist organization.)
An echo of Israel's explicit rationalization of Operation Protective Edge, "But what about Hamas?" alleges that the people "in charge" of Gaza are terrorists. Therefore it is appropriate, even necessary, to destroy its hospitals, mosques, schools, and disabled persons facilities, as well as catastrophically traumatize, injure, and murder the people who live there.
(As we pass the 13th anniversary of the opening of the prison at Guantánamo Bay and read the completely unsurprising if nevertheless still shocking Senate Torture Report, one shudders to think what Americans must deserve for having twice elected George W. Bush into office -- much less Barack Obama, drone war trailblazer extraordinaire.)
Further proof that Gazans deserve the havoc and destruction visited upon them is the specious claim that they use children as human shields. To this day unproven, the human shields argument provided ideological cover for Israel's extermination of more than 500 children during this war and solidified the empire-serving propaganda that Palestinians don't value life, much less the lives of their children, the same way civilized Israelis do.
The human shields argument had particular resonance in the US, where it trickled down to street level protest. In Boston, Zionist counter-protesters assembled at every anti-Protective Edge demonstration, responding to our chants of "Free Palestine!" with "…from Hamas!" Most telling was the sign brandished by paid Zionist agitator Chloé Simone Valdary (who graced us with her presence more than 1,500 miles away from her New Orleans hometown, where she is also a student), clearly illustrating the difference between "us" and "them" on the issue of the value of human life:
I was reminded of these moments as I listened to reports of #Black Lives Matter counter-protesters who assembled in ostensible defense of police officers in New York City. In the frequent criticisms of Ferguson protesters as "violent" and the dismissal of street demonstrations as "looting," I hear clear echoes of the criticism of Palestinians as "violent" and the dismissal of Palestinian political violence as "terrorism."
For example, in response to the chant, "Hands Up Don't Shoot!," a nationwide refrain of #Black Lives Matter demonstrations across the country (and an invocation of Brown, who was shot dead by Officer Darren Wilson with his hands in the air in the universal sign of surrender), counter-protesters yelled back in response "Hands Up Don't Loot!"
Further investigation on Twitter revealed an even more vicious version of this re-purposed chant: "Pants Up Don't Loot!"
These street-level counter-protesters were matched by the higher-ups, most prominently former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, who grabbed media attention by invoking the specter of "black on black" crime. Sidestepping the fact that Ferguson raises the issue of unaccountable state violence against black people, Giuliani changed the subject to focus instead on the criminal and dysfunctional nature of black people themselves (incidentally casting himself as a great savior of black lives along the way).
Indeed, remember the spinning of Michael Brown as "no angel" in the immediate aftermath of his murder? Without even a mention of the officer who killed him, the Ferguson police department proceeded to release surveillance video of Brown stealing cigarillos from a convenience store and accused him of smoking marijuana.
The implied conclusion of this line of reasoning is apparently that shoplifting and pot-smoking mean Michael Brown deserved to die. Or, more precisely, that he deserved to be murdered by police. (I wonder if the same holds true for Giuliani's daughter.)
From Ferguson to Palestine, there are chilling parallels in these reactionary responses. One is the claim that the very nature of the people in question renders them deserving targets of state violence. Palestinians are terrorists who don’t love their children. African Americans are lazy, stupid criminals. The proliferation of tweets under the hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown highlights the rhetorical sleight-of-hand whereby black people are held responsible for their own deaths at the hands of police.
Another parallel is the suggestion that it is actually the marginalized and oppressed who are victimizing themselves.
Giuliani's "black on black crime" talking point is not only a throwback to the "culture of poverty" thesis long ago abandoned by social science. It also suggests that cops aren’t really killing black people after all. It is actually black people who are killing black people.
This is structurally similar to Israel's claim regarding human shields: it’s not Israel who is killing Palestinian children. In hiding weapons or fighters in civilian areas, it is actually Palestinians who are killing Palestinian children. Netanyahu made clear this was the force of the argument when he declared that Hamas sought "telegenically dead" Palestinians in order to score pity points from the world community.
Each of these "arguments" purports to justify state violence. In the first, Palestinians and African Americans deserve death because of their terrorist and/or criminal natures. Killing happens because the nature of the murdered invites it. In the second, Palestinians and African Americans are actually the ones doing the killing, not cops or Israel, so there's not really a problem with state violence at all. Killing happens because the murdered are killing themselves.
It doesn't matter that these arguments are inconsistent with one another, much less which one of them is, uh, "true." Like a racist shell game, the only thing that matters is the one thing that is consistent between them: the reversal whereby the victim is portrayed as the aggressor and the aggressor, the victim.
For Giuliani, David Brooks, Darren Wilson, and the likes of FOX News, it is white people in general and white police officers in particular who are the victims of demonic, terrifying, criminal black people. For Netanyahu, Charles Krauthammer, and the rest of the Zionist lineup, it is Israel who is the victim of evil, terroristic, life-denying, Muslim/Arab Palestinians.
In another place, I have described arguments like these as a form of slave morality. They are reactionary attempts to portray oneself as a victim of forces beyond one’s control and a moralizing justification of extracting compensatory revenge against them.
The thing is, when it comes to American cops and Israeli soldiers, they are not the weaker power. They are avatars of the state -- two of the most powerful and heavily armed states in the world at that. Their victims are the subordinated, segregated, and formerly enslaved, on the one hand, and dispossessed, indigenous refugees on the other. To drop the white hankie and play victim is fundamentally to obscure the unequal relations of power that characterize white supremacy in America and Zionist supremacy in Palestine.
Recently, a delegation of US black activists and youth leaders from Ferguson and beyond returned from a 10-day solidarity trip to Palestine. In crossing checkpoints, they were reminded of US prisons. In witnessing Palestinians' limited freedom of movement, they gained new insight into apartheid and the seemingly infinite permutations of white supremacy.
As #BlackLivesMatter co-founder Patrisse Cullors recently tweeted:
These are the kinds of connections African Americans and Palestinians are beginning to make, and they’re not on the wrong track.
The conservative guardians of the social order had best be on notice.
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Bjork Talks Sexism: "Everything That a Guy Says Once, You Have to Say Five Times." |
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Tuesday, 27 January 2015 14:46 |
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McFadden writes: "Bjork is of a certain generation that mostly believes in the idea of a meritocracy - do the work and shine in doing the work and others will notice."
Bjork. (photo: Twitter)
Bjork Talks Sexism: "Everything That a Guy Says Once, You Have to Say Five Times."
By Syreeta McFadden, Feministing
27 January 15
 ack in 2004, when I read Alex Ross’s New Yorker profile of Bjork, I was largely unaware of previous criticism of her last album, Vespertine. Ross’s profile introduced me to Bjork’s extensive and thoughtful creative process, painting a vivid portrait of the artist crafting beats and sounds on her laptop, a catalogue of tunes to weave together for the final product. That effort produced a Grammy nomination for best alternative rock album in 2002. Since then I’ve admired the artist’s intense work ethic and the care she takes to make her masterpieces.
While the album received critical praise for its strange, intricate, erotic and delicate melodies, gorgeous lyrics mixed with her sharp, searing vocals, a chunk of the praise was directed toward the men she collaborated with during post production of the album. Bjork rarely discusses these micro-aggressions in the press. But yesterday, Pitchfork previewed a new interview with the singer/songwriter/producer, in which she breaks her silence:
Pitchfork: The world has a difficult time with the female auteur.
B: I have nothing against Kanye West. Help me with this—I’m not dissing him—this is about how people talk about him. With the last album he did, he got all the best beatmakers on the planet at the time to make beats for him. A lot of the time, he wasn’t even there. Yet no one would question his authorship for a second. If whatever I’m saying to you now helps women, I’m up for saying it. For example, I did 80% of the beats on Vespertine and it took me three years to work on that album, because it was all microbeats—it was like doing a huge embroidery piece. Matmos came in the last two weeks and added percussion on top of the songs, but they didn’t do any of the main parts, and they are credited everywhere as having done the whole album. [Matmos’] Drew [Daniel] is a close friend of mine, and in every single interview he did, he corrected it. And they don’t even listen to him. It really is strange.
 (photo: Twitter)
Bjork is of a certain generation that mostly believes in the idea of a meritocracy — do the work and shine in doing the work and others will notice. And she herself worries that to push back against this repeated slight, to assert any more authority, is to risk appearing to whomever — male or female, sexist or not — as “pathetic” or “desperate.” But this is where we witness how sexism replicates in culture. In covering her magnificent achievement in music making, critics were simultaneously trying to erase her from the achievement.
She adds:
When I met M.I.A., she was moaning about this, and I told her, “Just photograph yourself in front of the mixing desk in the studio, and people will go, ‘Oh, OK! A woman with a tool, like a man with a guitar.’” Not that I’ve done that much myself, but sometimes you’re better at giving people advice than doing it yourself. I remember seeing a photo of Missy Elliott at the mixing desk in the studio and being like, a-ha!
The optics seem to always matter. Seeing is believing — if there is a picture of it, we can embrace it as fact. Maybe this is the real problem: that our society relies heavily on pictures as proxy to solve our culture wars. We need to see women photographed in the workplace, doing manual labor, building airplanes, being executives, to make it more than true, extra real, because here’s the photograph to prove it. The repetition of seeing multiple images of women in a variety of roles breaks old paradigms and normalizes new identities. When we can imagine female bodies occupying positions of creative authority and power, more of us can follow suit. We can believe women are meritorious in their accomplishments. Ava DuVernay, the black woman director managing a film set. Kathyrn Bigelow sitting opposite film executives at major studios negotiating the terms of her film’s budget, resources, team, and later its distribution. Beyonce giving production crew notes days or weeks before the show runs, sitting in the recording booth, sitting with engineers perfecting the production of her album. Missy Elliot operating the controls behind the production of hers or someone else’s album. Susan Rice advising top military brass.
 (photo: Twitter)
She also speaks honestly about how she learned to validate her male collaborators in order to get the work done: “I’ve been guilty of one thing: After being the only girl in bands for 10 years, I learned—the hard way—that if I was going to get my ideas through, I was going to have to pretend that they—men—had the ideas.” I’ve been guilty of applying her formula myself in previous jobs — used soft power, gently infusing my suggestions so that men would adopt them as their own, in order to convey my ideas and solutions to thorny problems. On my most frustrating of days when I worked in one very male-dominated industry, there was a high probability that I was blasting “Army of Me” in my headphones to prepare myself for the kind of office power dynamics I had to face.
Rebecca Solnit so deftly conveys our behavioral impulse to protect the dignity of blithe menfolk and and the way that our silences preserve this gender dynamic. We demure to be polite, and sometimes to achieve higher aims. Solnit writes in Men Explains Things To Me:
“Every woman knows what I’m talking about. It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.
But Bjork’s right in speaking out and connecting to the zeitgeist: “I want to support young girls who are in their 20s now and tell them: You’re not just imagining things. It’s tough. Everything that a guy says once, you have to say five times.” I love her so much for her offering us another gift of music, and I’m so glad she’s finally speaking her truth to power about some of this “sexist evil” in order to smite it.
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FOCUS | Wall Street's Threat to the American Middle Class |
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Tuesday, 27 January 2015 13:25 |
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Reich writes: "Presidential aspirants in both parties are talking about saving the middle class. But the middle class can't be saved unless Wall Street is tamed."
Economist, professor, author and political commentator Robert Reich. (photo: Richard Morgenstein)
Wall Street's Threat to the American Middle Class
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
27 January 15
 residential aspirants in both parties are talking about saving the middle class. But the middle class can’t be saved unless Wall Street is tamed.
The Street’s excesses pose a continuing danger to average Americans. And its ongoing use of confidential corporate information is defrauding millions of middle-class investors.
Yet most presidential aspirants don’t want to talk about taming the Street because Wall Street is one of their largest sources of campaign money.
Do we really need reminding about what happened six years ago? The financial collapse crippled the middle class and poor — consuming the savings of millions of average Americans, and causing 23 million to lose their jobs, 9.3 million to lose their health insurance, and some 1 million to lose their homes.
A repeat performance is not unlikely. Wall Street’s biggest banks are much larger now than they were then. Five of them hold about 45 percent of America’s banking assets. In 2000, they held 25 percent.
And money is cheaper than ever. The Fed continues to hold the prime interest rate near zero.
This has fueled the Street’s eagerness to borrow money at rock-bottom rates and use it to make risky bets that will pay off big if they succeed, but will cause big problems if they go bad.
We learned last week that Goldman Sachs has been on a shopping binge, buying cheap real estate stretching from Utah to Spain, and a variety of companies.
If not technically a violation of the new Dodd-Frank banking law, Goldman’s binge surely violates its spirit.
Meanwhile, the Street’s lobbyists have gotten Congress to repeal a provision of Dodd-Frank curbing excessive speculation by the big banks.
The language was drafted by Citigroup and personally pushed by Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase.
Not incidentally, Dimon recently complained of being “under assault” by bank regulators.
Last year JPMorgan’s board voted to boost Dimon’s pay to $20 million, despite the bank paying out more than $20 billion to settle various legal problems going back to financial crisis.
The American middle class needs stronger bank regulations, not weaker ones.
Last summer, bank regulators told the big banks their plans for orderly bankruptcies were “unrealistic.” In other words, if the banks collapsed, they’d bring the economy down with them.
Dodd-Frank doesn’t even cover bank bets on foreign exchanges. Yet recent turbulence in the foreign exchange market has caused huge losses at hedge funds and brokerages.
This comes on top of revelations of widespread manipulation by the big banks of the foreign-exchange market.
Wall Street is also awash in inside information unavailable to average investors.
Just weeks ago a three- judge panel of the U.S. court of appeals that oversees Wall Street reversed an insider-trading conviction, saying guilt requires proof a trader knows the tip was leaked in exchange for some “personal benefit” that’s “of some consequence.”
Meaning that if a CEO tells his Wall Street golfing buddy about a pending merger, the buddy and his friends can make a bundle — to the detriment of small, typically middle-class, investors.
That three-judge panel was composed entirely of appointees of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.
But both parties have been drinking at the Wall Street trough.
In the 2008 presidential campaign, the financial sector ranked fourth among all industry groups giving to then candidate Barack Obama and the Democratic National Committee. In fact, Obama reaped far more in contributions from the Street than did his Republican opponent.
Wall Street also supplies both administrations with key economic officials. The treasury secretaries under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush – Robert Rubin and Henry Paulson, respectfully, had both chaired Goldman Sachs before coming to Washington.
And before becoming Obama’s treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner had been handpicked by Rubin to become president of Federal Reserve Bank of New York. (Geithner is now back on the Street as president of the private-equity firm Warburg Pincus.)
It’s nice that presidential aspirants are talking about rebuilding America’s middle class.
But to be credible, he (or she) has to take clear aim at the Street.
That means proposing to limit the size of the biggest Wall Street banks; resurrect the Glass-Steagall Act (which used to separate investment from commercial banking); define insider trading the way most other countries do – using information any reasonable person would know is unavailable to most investors; and close the revolving door between the Street and the U.S. Treasury.
It also means not depending on the Street to finance their campaigns.
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