March 7, 2013

El comandante has left the building

March 6, 2013

By Pepe Escobar

Now that would be some movie; the story of a man of the people who rises against all odds to become the political Elvis of Latin America. Bigger than Elvis, actually; a president who won 13 out of 14 national democratic elections. No chance you will ever see such a movie winning an Oscar - much less produced in Hollywood. Unless, of course, Oliver Stone convinces HBO about a cable/DVD special.

How enlightening to watch world leaders' reactions to the death of Venezuela's El Comandante Hugo Chavez. Uruguay's President Jose Mujica - a man who actually shuns 90% of his salary because he insists he covers his basic necessities with much less - once again reminded everyone how he qualified Chavez as "the most generous leader I ever met", while praising the "fortress of democracy" of which Chavez was a great builder.

Compare it with US President Barack Obama - in what sounds like a dormant cut and paste by some White House intern - reaffirming US support for "the Venezuelan people". Would that be "the people" who have been electing and re-electing Chavez non-stop since the late 1990s? Or would that be "the people" who trade Martinis in Miami demonizing him as an evil communist?

El Comandante may have left the building - his body defeated by cancer - but the post-mortem demonization will go on forever. One key reason stands out. Venezuela holds the largest oil reserves in the world. Washington and that crumbling Kafkaesque citadel also known as the European Union sing All You Need is Love non-stop to those ghastly, feudal Persian Gulf petro-monarchs (but not to "the people&quot in return for their oil. By contrast, in Venezuela El Comandante came up with the subversive idea of using oil wealth to at least alleviate the problems of most of his people. Western turbo-capitalism, as is well known, does not do redistribution of wealth and empowerment of communitarian values.

in full: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/World/WOR-02-060313.html

March 5, 2013

The Dangerous Logic of the Bradley Manning Case

March 1, 2013

After 1,000 days in pretrial detention, Private Bradley Manning yesterday offered a modified guilty plea for passing classified materials to WikiLeaks. But his case is far from over—not for Manning, and not for the rest of the country. To understand what is still at stake, consider an exchange that took place in a military courtroom in Maryland in January.

The judge, Col. Denise Lind, asked the prosecutors a brief but revealing question: Would you have pressed the same charges if Manning had given the documents not to WikiLeaks but directly to the New York Times?

The prosecutor’s answer was simple: “Yes Ma'am.”

The question was crisp and meaningful, not courtroom banter. The answer, in turn, was dead serious. I should know. I was the expert witness whose prospective testimony they were debating. The judge will apparently allow my testimony, so if the prosecution decides to pursue the more serious charges to which Manning did not plead guilty, I will explain at trial why someone in Manning's shoes in 2010 would have thought of WikiLeaks as a small, hard-hitting, new media journalism outfit—a journalistic “Little Engine that Could” that, for purposes of press freedom, was no different from the New York Times. The prosecutor's “Yes Ma'am,” essentially conceded that core point of my testimony in order to keep it out of the trial. That's not a concession any lawyer makes lightly.

The charge of "aiding the enemy" is vague. But it carries the death penalty—and could apply to civilians as well as soldiers.

But that “Yes Ma'am” does something else: It makes the Manning prosecution a clear and present danger to journalism in the national security arena. The guilty plea Manning offered could subject him to twenty years in prison—more than enough to deter future whistleblowers. But the prosecutors seem bent on using this case to push a novel and aggressive interpretation of the law that would arm the government with a much bigger stick to prosecute vaguely-defined national security leaks, a big stick that could threaten not just members of the military, but civilians too.

in full: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112554#

February 27, 2013

Former Insiders Criticise Iran Policy as U.S. Hegemony

By Gareth Porter Reprint

Review of Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett's "Going to Tehran: Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran" (Metropolitan Books, 2013)

WASHINGTON, Feb 25 2013 (IPS) - “Going to Tehran” arguably represents the most important work on the subject of U.S.-Iran relations to be published thus far.

Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett tackle not only U.S. policy toward Iran but the broader context of Middle East policy with a systematic analytical perspective informed by personal experience, as well as very extensive documentation.

More importantly, however, their exposé required a degree of courage that may be unparalleled in the writing of former U.S. national security officials about issues on which they worked. They have chosen not just to criticise U.S. policy toward Iran but to analyse that policy as a problem of U.S. hegemony.


Their national security state credentials are impeccable. They both served at different times as senior coordinators dealing with Iran on the National Security Council Staff, and Hillary Mann Leverett was one of the few U.S. officials who have been authorised to negotiate with Iranian officials.

- See more at: http://www.ipsnews.net/2013/02/former-insiders-criticise-iran-policy-as-u-s-hegemony/#sthash.IGi6nRkp.dpuf

February 26, 2013

Democracy Now: Billionaires for Austerity: With Cuts Looming, Wall Street Roots of "Fix the Debt"

Campaign Exposed.

With $85 billion across-the-board spending cuts, known as "the sequestration," set to take effect this Friday, a new investigation reveals how billionaire investors, such as Peter Peterson, have helped reshaped the national debate on the economy, the debt and social spending. Between 2007 and 2011, Peterson personally contributed nearly $500 million to his Peter G. Peterson Foundation to push Congress to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — while providing tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy. Peterson’s main platform has been the Campaign to Fix the Debt. While the campaign is portrayed as a citizen-led effort, critics say the campaign is a front for business groups. The campaign has direct ties to GE, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. Peterson is the former chair and CEO of Lehman Brothers and co-founder of the private equity firm, The Blackstone Group. For more, we speak to John Nichols of The Nation and Lisa Graves of the Center for Media and Democracy. [includes rush transcript]


Guests:

John Nichols, political writer for The Nation. His latest article is "The Austerity Agenda: An Electoral Loser."

Lisa Graves, executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy and an editor of Pete Peterson Pyramid, a new website that connects the dots between billionaire Pete Peterson and the Campaign to Fix the Debt.


AARON MATÉ: We begin with the Capitol Hill showdown over the $85 billion across-the-board budget cuts taking effect this Friday. The White House and analysts fear the so-called "sequester" could jeopardize hundreds of thousands of jobs. While Republicans and Democrats largely agree the cuts are ill-advised, they are far from reaching any sort of agreement. President Obama wants Republicans to end tax breaks, mostly for the wealthy; Republicans are insisting government spending be cut first. This is House Speaker John Boehner.

SPEAKER JOHN BOEHNER: The president says we have to have another tax increase in order to avoid the sequester. Well, Mr. President, you got your tax increase. It’s time to cut spending here in Washington. Instead of using our military men and women as campaign props, if the president was serious, he’d sit down with Harry Reid and begin to address our problems. The House has acted twice. We shouldn’t have to act a third time before the Senate begins to do their work.

in full: http://www.democracynow.org/2013/2/26/billionaires_for_austerity_with_cuts_looming

February 14, 2013

Israel's democracy myth

February 13, 2013

Israel's attack of a Hezbollah convoy is more complicated than we think, writes Perry.



Back in 1993, just months before signing the Oslo Peace Accords with Yasser Arafat in Washington, then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was asked by a group of journalists which Arab leader he trusted the most. He didn't hesitate when he said: "Hafez Assad." The answer took some in the group by surprise - Rabin had not only never met Assad, he'd spurned an American suggestion the year before that concluding a peace agreement with Syria would be easier than concluding one with the Palestinians.

But Rabin was adamant. "Hafez Assad keeps his word," he explained and then, after a moment's hesitation, he added, "and he knows how to deal with Islamists." Rabin's matter-of-fact statement needed no further explanation, for everyone knew what he meant: nary a single shell had been fired from Syria into Israel since Assad had agreed to a ceasefire with Israel in the wake of the 1973 war - and when threatened with an uprising by Islamist groups in Hama in February 1982, he sent his younger brother Rifat into the city, along with 12,000 troops, to crush it. The resulting "Hama Massacre" levelled the city and took the lives of more than 20,000 Hama residents - and 1,000 of the regime's soldiers.

If Rabin had made his declaration in America, and in public, it might have become known as "the Rabin Doctrine" and extolled as a sanguine expression of "realpolitik" - that, given a choice, the Government of Israel not only prefers Arab dictators to Arab democracies, but finds dealing with Arab democracies (something it has not had to do until very recently) messy and unpredictable.

'Israel's Arab Spring problem'

From Israel's point of view, this makes perfect sense: the Rabin Doctrine not only keeps intact Israel's irksome claim to be "the only democracy in the Middle East" (updated, now, to "the only real democracy in the Middle East" - whatever that means), it makes Israel's neighbours pliable, which is just how Israeli leaders like them. Put another way, Israel found it commonly easy to deal with, say, an Egypt ruled by Hosni Mubarak because it believed what he believed: that the best place for an Islamist was in a jail cell - or swinging from a gallows.

in full: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/02/2013210102718996794.html

February 6, 2013

New route to justice for poorest being denied to millions

February 5, 2013


People who have their economic, social and cultural rights routinely trampled on are set to gain a fresh route to justice via the UN – but once in force it will only immediately apply to citizens of 10 nations, Amnesty International said.

The new complaints mechanism, established by the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural rights (the Protocol), will allow individuals and groups to seek justice from the UN if their rights – including adequate housing, food, water, sanitation, health, work, social security and education – are violated and their government fails to provide justice.

“Access to justice is essential for victims of all human rights violations and the Protocol is a key step towards accomplishing this,” said Salil Shetty, Secretary General of Amnesty International.

“Almost 40 years after the equivalent Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights came into force we have finally achieved parity between the two treaties and meaning to the principle of indivisibility of all rights.

in full: http://www.amnestyusa.org/news/news-item/new-route-to-justice-for-poorest-being-denied-to-millions

February 2, 2013

Inequality Is Holding Back the Recovery

Joseph Stiglitz

The re-election of President Obama was like a Rorschach test, subject to many interpretations. In this election, each side debated issues that deeply worry me: the long malaise into which the economy seems to be settling, and the growing divide between the 1 percent and the rest — an inequality not only of outcomes but also of opportunity. To me, these problems are two sides of the same coin: with inequality at its highest level since before the Depression, a robust recovery will be difficult in the short term, and the American dream — a good life in exchange for hard work — is slowly dying.

Politicians typically talk about rising inequality and the sluggish recovery as separate phenomena, when they are in fact intertwined. Inequality stifles, restrains and holds back our growth. When even the free-market-oriented magazine The Economist argues — as it did in a special feature in October — that the magnitude and nature of the country’s inequality represent a serious threat to America, we should know that something has gone horribly wrong. And yet, after four decades of widening inequality and the greatest economic downturn since the Depression, we haven’t done anything about it.

A fifth of our kids live in poverty — an aberration among rich nations.

There are four major reasons inequality is squelching our recovery. The most immediate is that our middle class is too weak to support the consumer spending that has historically driven our economic growth. While the top 1 percent of income earners took home 93 percent of the growth in incomes in 2010, the households in the middle — who are most likely to spend their incomes rather than save them and who are, in a sense, the true job creators — have lower household incomes, adjusted for inflation, than they did in 1996. The growth in the decade before the crisis was unsustainable — it was reliant on the bottom 80 percent consuming about 110 percent of their income.

Second, the hollowing out of the middle class since the 1970s, a phenomenon interrupted only briefly in the 1990s, means that they are unable to invest in their future, by educating themselves and their children and by starting or improving businesses.

in full: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/19/inequality-is-holding-back-the-recovery/

January 30, 2013

Israel's 'Great Book Robbery' unravelled

Documentary sheds light on large-scale pillaging of books from Palestinian homes in 1948, when Israel was founded.

Dalia Hatuqa Last Modified: 29 Jan 2013 09:28

Ramallah, occupied Palestinian territories - Rasha Al Barghouti takes a few steps towards one of several large bookcases in her Ramallah home, treading slowly just four months after having hip replacement surgery. She takes out a thick blue book, and opens it to a bookmarked page, allowing her fingertips to trace the words as she reads out loud.

The book was written by her grandfather, the late Omar Saleh Al Barghouti, a leading figure of Palestinian resistance who took part in the national movement against the British occupation. During the 1948 war, when Al Barghouti was forced into exile, hundreds of his books, documents, newspapers and intimate memoirs were looted from his Jerusalem home.

The irreplaceable items representing a slice of Palestinian intellectualism were never located, except for a few - which, to Rasha's surprise, were found in Israel's National Library . "For years, we wondered what happened to my grandfather's books," said the 61-year-old, who works at Birzeit University, just outside Ramallah. "One day my sister and I looked up his name on the website of the National Library … and we found two of his books."

Rasha later found out that a whole section of the library was dedicated to her grandfather's books, a revelation that to this day moves her to tears. Al Barghouti's large collection is part of some 70,000 books that were looted just before and during the Nakba (or "catastrophe&quot of 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled or forced to flee their homes.

in full: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2013/01/201312114556875749.html

January 28, 2013

It's inequality, stupid

What the great and the good in business will not be discussing at the Davos summit.

26 Jan 2013

Amsterdam, The Netherlands - Billions of people would apply the Groucho Marx rule to Davos - the exclusive club meeting in the Swiss Alps allegedly gathering the great and the good of business; "I wouldn't want to belong to a club that accepts me as a member".

Well, to start with, those billions wouldn't get past the bouncers, because the pompously self-defined World Economic Forum is indeed about exclusion. Yet even if - by divine design - they might, what's the point?

The austerity mantra devastates large swathes of Europe. The US remains mired in the fiscal cliff maelstrom. The Japanese are about to unleash an economic tsunami - devaluation of the yen at all costs.

Double-dip recession rules.

On the other hand, growth does apply to parts of the BRICS group of emerging nations, and even more to some selected members of the N-11 (the mini-BRICS in the making); certainly Indonesia, Mexico, Philippines, Turkey, South Korea and Vietnam.

remainder: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/01/201312612182907642.html

January 18, 2013

Carmen Ortiz Strikes Out ( Scott Horton, Harper's )

January 18, 2013

Congress prepares to slap down prosecutors linked to the suicide of Aaron Swartz

U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz is fighting to hold on to her job, and to avoid an embarrassing grilling in Congress and possible professional disciplinary proceedings. Her prospects look grim. Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.), chair of the House Committee on Oversight is pledging a vigorous and critical inquiry into her management of the dubious criminal prosecution of Aaron Swartz, one of the greatest computer prodigies of his generation, who committed suicide a week ago, apparently convinced that out-of-control prosecutors had destroyed his life. While Issa’s prior attempts to take aim at the DOJ have fizzled, this one is garnering significant bipartisan support: Zoe Lofgren (D., Calif.) is introducing “Aaron’s Law,” expressly overturning the interpretations upon which Ortiz proceeded against Swartz, while Jared Polis (D., Colo.) blasted the prosecutor’s case as “ridiculous and trumped-up.” Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.), who would have a say in the appointment of Ortiz’s successor, was unstinting in her praise for Swartz as a person who “wouldn’t hurt a fly” and whose acts demonstrated a “powerful commitment” to the betterment of society. Nancy Gertner, a recently retired federal judge who is intimately familiar with both prosecutors, lambasted them in a broadcast interview, parsing and ridiculing the claims they had made against Swartz and suggesting that the case should have been dismissed. At funeral services in Highland Park, Illinois, on Tuesday, Swartz’s father charged that his son had been “killed by the government.” While some might ascribe this to the anguish of a bereaved father, scholars and investigators poring over the record of the Swartz prosecution are increasingly shocked at the scope and outrageousness of the prosecutorial misconduct that he faced.

Prosecutors Ortiz and Stephen Heymann turned to a standard trick while pursuing the case, mounting a total of thirteen felony counts against Swartz and arguing that his college prank aimed at “liberating” a collection of academic articles with little commercial value was a serious crime. Although each of these counts bordered on the preposterous, Ortiz and Heymann clearly reckoned that at least one or two would stick during the jury-room bargaining process. More to the point, they assumed that the risk of their success even on bogus charges would be enough to pressure Swartz into accepting a guilty plea on all the counts in exchange for a reduced sentence — which is what they offered him. The process was fundamentally corrupt and shameful. But observers of the American criminal-justice system also know that it was a common one.

The details that have emerged since Swartz’s death have only strengthened calls for the removal and punishment of the prosecutors. Swartz’s lawyers revealed, for example, that when their client’s suicidal nature was noted during their failed efforts to get the charges reduced to a misdemeanor level, Heymann responded by saying “Fine, we’ll lock him up.” Prosecutors were also revealed to have offered a reduced sentence, but only if Swartz pleaded guilty to every charge. This is clear evidence of oppression geared to advance prosecutorial careers, not to serve the interests of justice. Britain’s Daily Mail showed that Swartz was not the only youthful alleged hacker whom Heymann had hounded to suicide — twenty-four-year-old Jonathan James took his own life in 2008, six months after his home was searched in a raid coordinated by Heymann. The DOJ undertook no internal probe of that case, instead giving Heymann an award for “distinguished service.” In the Swartz case, the prosecutors claimed they were acting on behalf of two injured parties — JSTOR and MIT. But JSTOR disagreed with this characterization, including the attorneys’ use of the word “theft,” and demanded that they drop the case. And unnamed sources at MIT this week pointed their fingers at the federal prosecutors, insisting that their unreasonableness and intransigence had kept the case moving despite dishonest charges.

Ortiz’s first defender was her husband, who, without disclosing their relationship, issued a series of false statements on Twitter before being exposed and then deleting them. Now Ortiz has come forward to speak for herself. Her statement offers no apology to Swartz’s family; audaciously whitewashes the facts by stating that she never claimed Swartz sought to profit from the publication of the papers, when in fact she repeatedly implied exactly that; and shows no remorse or contrition. She states that she is unable to respond to charges that her conduct led to Swartz’s death, but tenaciously insists that what she did was “appropriate.”

in full: http://harpers.org/blog/2013/01/carmen-ortiz-strikes-out/