November 29, 2009

With food stamp use at record highs and climbing every month, a program once scorned as a failed welfare scheme now helps feed one in eight Americans and one in four children.

It has grown so rapidly in places so diverse that it is becoming nearly as ordinary as the groceries it buys. More than 36 million people use inconspicuous plastic cards for staples like milk, bread and cheese, swiping them at counters in blighted cities and in suburbs pocked with foreclosure signs.

Virtually all have incomes near or below the federal poverty line, but their eclectic ranks testify to the range of people struggling with basic needs. They include single mothers and married couples, the newly jobless and the chronically poor, longtime recipients of welfare checks and workers whose reduced hours or slender wages leave pantries bare.

While the numbers have soared during the recession, the path was cleared in better times when the Bush administration led a campaign to erase the program’s stigma, calling food stamps “nutritional aid” instead of welfare, and made it easier to apply. That bipartisan effort capped an extraordinary reversal from the 1990s, when some conservatives tried to abolish the program, Congress enacted large cuts and bureaucratic hurdles chased many needy people away.

From the ailing resorts of the Florida Keys to Alaskan villages along the Bering Sea, the program is now expanding at a pace of about 20,000 people a day.
There are 239 counties in the United States where at least a quarter of the population receives food stamps, according to an analysis of local data collected by The New York Times.
The counties are as big as the Bronx and Philadelphia and as small as Owsley County in Kentucky, a patch of Appalachian distress where half of the 4,600 residents receive food stamps.

In more than 750 counties, the program helps feed one in three blacks. In more than 800 counties, it helps feed one in three children. In the Mississippi River cities of St. Louis, Memphis and New Orleans, half of the children or more receive food stamps. Even in Peoria, Ill. — Everytown, U.S.A. — nearly 40 percent of children receive aid.

While use is greatest where poverty runs deep, the growth has been especially swift in once-prosperous places hit by the housing bust. There are about 50 small counties and a dozen sizable ones where the rolls have doubled in the last two years. In another 205 counties, they have risen by at least two-thirds. These places with soaring rolls include populous Riverside County, Calif., most of greater Phoenix and Las Vegas, a ring of affluent Atlanta suburbs, and a 150-mile stretch of southwest Florida from Bradenton to the Everglades.
Although the program is growing at a record rate, the federal official who oversees it would like it to grow even faster.

“I think the response of the program has been tremendous,” said Kevin Concannon, an under secretary of agriculture, “but we’re mindful that there are another 15, 16 million who could benefit.”
Nationwide, food stamps reach about two-thirds of those eligible, with rates ranging from an estimated 50 percent in California to 98 percent in Missouri. Mr. Concannon urged lagging states to do more to enroll the needy, citing a recent government report that found a sharp rise in Americans with inconsistent access to adequate food.

“This is the most urgent time for our feeding programs in our lifetime, with the exception of the Depression,” he said. “It’s time for us to face up to the fact that in this country of plenty, there are hungry people.”
The program’s growing reach can be seen in a corner of southwestern Ohio where red state politics reign and blue-collar workers have often called food stamps a sign of laziness. But unemployment has soared, and food stamp use in a six-county area outside Cincinnati has risen more than 50 percent.
With most of his co-workers laid off, Greg Dawson, a third-generation electrician in rural Martinsville, considers himself lucky to still have a job. He works the night shift for a contracting firm, installing freezer lights in a chain of grocery stores. But when his overtime income vanished and his expenses went up, Mr. Dawson started skimping on meals to feed his wife and five children.
He tried to fill up on cereal and eggs. He ate a lot of Spam. Then he went to work with a grumbling stomach to shine lights on food he could not afford. When an outreach worker appeared at his son’s Head Start program, Mr. Dawson gave in.

“It’s embarrassing,” said Mr. Dawson, 29, a taciturn man with a wispy goatee who is so uneasy about the monthly benefit of $300 that he has not told his parents. “I always thought it was people trying to milk the system. But we just felt like we really needed the help right now.”
The outreach worker is a telltale sign. Like many states, Ohio has campaigned hard to raise the share of eligible people collecting benefits, which are financed entirely by the federal government and brought the state about $2.2 billion last year.

By contrast, in the federal cash welfare program, states until recently bore the entire cost of caseload growth, and nationally the rolls have stayed virtually flat. Unemployment insurance, despite rapid growth, reaches about only half the jobless (and replaces about half their income), making food stamps the only aid many people can get — the safety net’s safety net.

Support for the food stamp program reached a nadir in the mid-1990s when critics, likening the benefit to cash welfare, won significant restrictions and sought even more. But after use plunged for several years, President Bill Clinton began promoting the program, in part as a way to help the working poor. President George W. Bush expanded that effort, a strategy Mr. Obama has embraced.

The revival was crowned last year with an upbeat change of name. What most people still call food stamps is technically the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.
By the time the recession began, in December 2007, “the whole message around this program had changed,” said Stacy Dean of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington group that has supported food stamp expansions. “The general pitch was, ‘This program is here to help you.’ ”

Now nearly 12 percent of Americans receive aid — 28 percent of blacks, 15 percent of Latinos and 8 percent of whites. Benefits average about $130 a month for each person in the household, but vary with shelter and child care costs.

In the promotion of the program, critics see a sleight of hand.
“Some people like to camouflage this by calling it a nutrition program, but it’s really not different from cash welfare,” said Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, whose views have a following among conservatives on Capitol Hill. “Food stamps is quasi money.”
Arguing that aid discourages work and marriage, Mr. Rector said food stamps should contain work requirements as strict as those placed on cash assistance. “The food stamp program is a fossil that repeats all the errors of the war on poverty,” he said.

Suburbs Are Hit Hard

Across the country, the food stamp rolls can be read like a scan of a sick economy. The counties of northwest Ohio, where car parts are made, take sick when Detroit falls ill. Food stamp use is up by about 60 percent in Erie County (vibration controls), 77 percent in Wood County (floor mats) and 84 percent in hard-hit Van Wert (shifting components and cooling fans).

Just west, in Indiana, Elkhart County makes the majority of the nation’s recreational vehicles. Sales have fallen more than half during the recession, and nearly 30 percent of the county’s children are receiving food stamps.
The pox in southwest Florida is the housing bust, with foreclosure rates in Fort Myers often leading the nation in the last two years. Across six contiguous counties from Manatee to Monroe, the food stamp rolls have more than doubled.

In sheer numbers, growth has come about equally from places where food stamp use was common and places where it was rare. Since 2007, the 600 counties with the highest percentage of people on the rolls added 1.3 million new recipients. So did the 600 counties where use was lowest.
The richest counties are often where aid is growing fastest, although from a small base. In 2007, Forsyth County, outside Atlanta, had the highest household income in the South. (One author dubbed it “Whitopia.”) Food stamp use there has more than doubled.

This is the first recession in which a majority of the poor in metropolitan areas live in the suburbs, giving food stamps new prominence there. Use has grown by half or more in dozens of suburban counties from Boston to Seattle, including such bulwarks of modern conservatism as California’s Orange County, where the rolls are up more than 50 percent.

While food stamp use is still the exception in places like Orange County (where 4 percent of the population get food aid), the program reaches deep in places of chronic poverty. It feeds half the people in stretches of white Appalachia, in a Yupik-speaking region of Alaska and on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.
Across the 10 core counties of the Mississippi Delta, 45 percent of black residents receive aid. In a city as big as St. Louis, the share is 60 percent.
 
Use among children is especially high. A third of the children in Louisiana, Missouri and Tennessee receive food aid. In the Bronx, the rate is 46 percent. In East Carroll Parish, La., three-quarters of the children receive food stamps.

A recent study by Mark R. Rank, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, startled some policy makers in finding that half of Americans receive food stamps, at least briefly, by the time they turn 20. Among black children, the figure was 90 percent.
 
Need Overcomes Scorn

Across the small towns and rolling farmland outside Cincinnati, old disdain for the program has collided with new needs. Warren County, the second-richest in Ohio, is so averse to government aid that it turned down a federal stimulus grant. But the market for its high-end suburban homes has sagged, people who build them are idle and food stamp use has doubled.

Next door, in Clinton County, the blow has been worse. DHL, the international package carrier, has closed most of its giant airfield, costing the county its biggest employer and about 7,500 jobs. The county unemployment rate nearly tripled, to more than 14 percent.

“We’re seeing people getting food stamps who never thought they’d get them,” said Tina Osso, the director of the Shared Harvest Food Bank in Fairfield, which runs an outreach program in five area counties.
While Mr. Dawson, the electrician, has kept his job, the drive to distant work sites has doubled his gas bill, food prices rose sharply last year and his health insurance premiums have soared. His monthly expenses have risen by about $400, and the elimination of overtime has cost him $200 a month. Food stamps help fill the gap.

Like many new beneficiaries here, Mr. Dawson argues that people often abuse the program and is quick to say he is different. While some people “choose not to get married, just so they can apply for benefits,” he is a married, churchgoing man who works and owns his home. While “some people put piles of steaks in their carts,” he will not use the government’s money for luxuries like coffee or soda. “To me, that’s just morally wrong,” he said.
He has noticed crowds of midnight shoppers once a month when benefits get renewed. While policy analysts, spotting similar crowds nationwide, have called them a sign of increased hunger, he sees idleness. “Generally, if you’re up at that hour and not working, what are you into?” he said.
 
Still, the program has filled the Dawsons’ home with fresh fruit, vegetables, bread and meat, and something they had not fully expected — an enormous sense of relief. “I know if I run out of milk, I could run down to the gas station,” said Mr. Dawson’s wife, Sheila.

As others here tell it, that is a benefit not to be overlooked.
Sarah and Tyrone Mangold started the year on track to make $70,000 — she was selling health insurance, and he was working on a heating and air conditioning crew. She got laid off in the spring, and he a few months later. Together they had one unemployment check and a blended family of three children, including one with a neurological disorder aggravated by poor nutrition.

They ate at his mother’s house twice a week. They pawned jewelry. She scoured the food pantry. He scrounged for side jobs. Their frustration peaked one night over a can of pinto beans. Each blamed the other when that was all they had to eat.
“We were being really snippy, having anxiety attacks,” Ms. Mangold said. “People get irritable when they’re hungry.”
Food stamps now fortify the family income by $623 a month, and Mr. Mangold, who is still patching together odd jobs, no longer objects.
“I always thought people on public assistance were lazy,” he said, “but it helps me know I can feed my kids.”

Shifting Views

So far, few elected officials have objected to the program’s growth. Almost 90 percent of beneficiaries nationwide live below the poverty line (about $22,000 a year for a family of four). But a minor tempest hit Ohio’s Warren County after a woman drove to the food stamp office in a Mercedes-Benz and word spread that she owned a $300,000 home loan-free. Since Ohio ignores the value of houses and cars, she qualified.
“I’m a hard-core conservative Republican guy — I found that appalling,” said Dave Young, a member of the county board of commissioners, which briefly threatened to withdraw from the federal program.
“As soon as people figure out they can vote representatives in to give them benefits, that’s the end of democracy,” Mr. Young said. “More and more people will be taking, and fewer will be producing.”
At the same time, the recession left Sandi Bernstein more sympathetic to the needy. After years of success in the insurance business, Ms. Bernstein, 66, had just settled into what she had expected to be a comfortable retirement when the financial crisis last year sent her brokerage accounts plummeting. Feeling newly vulnerable herself, she volunteered with an outreach program run by AARP and the Ohio Association of Second Harvest Food Banks.
Having assumed that poor people clamored for aid, she was surprised to find that some needed convincing to apply.“I come here and I see people who are knowledgeable, normal, well-spoken, well-dressed,” she said. “These are people I could be having lunch with.”

That could describe Franny and Shawn Wardlow, whose house in nearby Oregonia conjures middle-American stability rather than the struggle to meet basic needs. Their three daughters have heads of neat blond hair, pink bedroom curtains and a turtle bought in better times on vacation in Daytona Beach, Fla. One wrote a fourth-grade story about her parents that concluded “They lived happily ever after.”
Ms. Wardlow, who worked at a nursing home, lost her job first. Soon after, Mr. Wardlow was laid off from the construction job he had held for nearly nine years. As Ms. Wardlow tells the story of the subsequent fall — cutoff threats from the power company, the dinners of egg noodles, the soap from the Salvation Army — she dwells on one unlikely symbol of the security she lost.

Pot roast

“I was raised on eating pot roast,” she said. “Just a nice decent meal.”
Mr. Wardlow, 32, is a strapping man with a friendly air. He talked his way into a job at an envelope factory although his boss said he was overqualified. But it pays less than what he made muscling a jackhammer, and with Ms. Wardlow still jobless, they are two months behind on the rent. A monthly food stamp benefit of $429 fills the shelves and puts an occasional roast on the Sunday table.
It reminds Ms. Wardlow of what she has lost, and what she hopes to regain.
“I would consider us middle class at one time,” she said. “I like to have a nice decent meal for dinner.”

Source: NYT

Look for a very strong backlash coming from the Canadian people, but also from the American and Mexican people, once they clearly understand what the Bush-Calderon-Harper trio has been concocting in near complete secrecy and with nearly no public debate whatsoever, over the last few years.

Indeed, the three relatively unpopular governments presently in charge in Washington, Ottawa and Mexico, have aligned themselves with very large corporations, most of them American owned, to lay the foundations for a new North American Union, (NAU) also called the "Deep Integration" project. This would be a new permanent alliance that would be de facto placed under American control. Canada and Mexico would have to harmonize many of their laws and regulations to suit the interests of big business and the undemocratic and imperial ambitions of the U.S. government around the world.

Reviews

Part 1.    North American Union - Connecting the Dots

Part 2.    The Plan to Disappear Canada 'Deep integration' comes out of shadows

 The establishment of the so-called Canadian Jewish Political Affairs Committee (CJPAC) in late 2005, just in time for the federal election of January 2006, has elicited heated debate within Canada's Israel lobby. B'nai Brith Canada's Jewish Tribune, for instance, first reported the development under the headline "Mystery surrounds Jewish political committee CJPAC," and has since been harshly critical of the initiative. CJPAC claims to success following the election did little to change this. In a March 2006 story titled "CJPAC's wall of silence not in spirit of lobbyist's code of conduct," Tribune correspondent Julie Lesser blasted the organization for "continu[ing] to maintain a wall of silence surrounding the availability of basic information to the public." In early May (p.3), Lesser upheld the point, stressing that "CJPAC remains an organization that conducts business under a veil of secrecy."

Amidst a mix of inattention and controversy, CJPAC is moving forward with its "multi-partisan" lobbying work. Exactly what this involves remains unclear. What is tolerably clear is that CJPAC constitutes yet another Canadian foothold for the U.S.-Israeli alliance. In fact, it appears to have emerged under the direct guidance of this alliance's North American powerhouse, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

The creation of CJPAC is part and parcel of the dramatic restructuring which the Canadian Jewish establishment has undergone in recent years. This restructuring, which began in earnest in 2002, has weakened B'nai Brith's position in the community, hence the criticism from the Tribune. But the changes have been far from progressive. For decades, elements of corporate Canada represented by a fundraising federation structure closely tied with the United States and Israel have been increasing their control over mainstream Canadian Jewish organization. Newly organized as the Canadian Council for Israel and Jewish Advocacy (CIJA), they have now entrenched their position.

Through the strength of the federation system, and under the direct supervision of CIJA, mainstream Canadian Jewish organization has been further centralized and, in significant part, converted into a streamlined "Israel advocacy" apparatus. This apparatus has been steered into close alignment with the U.S.-Israeli alliance. Its principal focus is an effort to weaken solidarity with the Palestinian people and solidify official Canadian rejection of basic Palestinian rights. However, it is active on a number of related fronts, and has been involved in supporting the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, helping to lay the political groundwork for possible aggression against Iran, and opposing progressive social movements at the grassroots level (particularly on campuses).

Canada's new Israel advocacy apparatus has too strong a base in the Canadian establishment, and is too thoroughly supported from the United States and Israel, for its work to be stopped entirely. But its own polls reveal that Canadian public opinion is opposed to its agenda. Organized solidarity with the Palestinian people continues to persevere and grow. Predictably, the Israel advocacy apparatus is meeting this challenge with political attacks and institutional bullying. Those who take a principled stand in support of the struggle for democracy in Israel-Palestine - CUPE Ontario has, to its great credit, become notable in this respect - are faced with tremendous pressure to back down.

This article seeks to broaden discussion of why mainstream Canadian Jewish organizations are helping to apply this pressure. More generally, it provides some basic context regarding the politics, strategies and institutions which define Canadian Israel advocacy.

Link to full text

Are the US and Iran really going to sit down together and talk? If they do, how likely is it that those talks would yield compromises satisfactory to both sides and that would defuse the current tensions before they flare up into a regional war?

The Jerusalem Post tells us that Iran asked Greece to use its good graces to reduce tensions between Tehran and Washington. The Post's report was worded in such a way as to suggest that Iran is desperately seeking dialogue. But then the Iranian foreign minister, speaking from Iraq, announced that his government had changed its mind about entering into direct talks with Washington over Iraq. Explaining this decision, he charged Washington with playing games; that it was manoeuvering to limit the agenda of dialogue to subjects it wants to discuss, rather than demonstrating willingness to discuss all pending issues between the two countries. Meanwhile, The Washington Post, The New York Times and other major US newspapers teemed with commentaries urging the Bush administration to engage direct talks. But what most struck me in the flood of coverage was a report by Gareth Porter published by the Inter Press Service (IPS) agency on 24 May.

Porter, a noted historian and US national security policy analyst, reveals that three years ago, in late April or early May 2003, Iran conveyed a two-page proposal to the US via the Swiss Embassy in Washington for a broad Iran- US agreement covering all the issues separating the two countries. Porter's report contains a number of details that lend credibility to the alleged existence of this document. Above all, he notes that IPS had obtained a copy via Trita Parsi, a specialist on Iranian foreign policy at the School of Advanced International Studies at The Johns Hopkins University. Parsi, in turn, said that he obtained his copy from an Iranian official earlier this year, though he was not at liberty to reveal the source. He added that the document is a summary of an even more detailed Iranian negotiating proposal that he learned about from the US intermediary who carried it to the State Department on behalf of the Swiss Embassy in 2003.

What did Iran hope to achieve by striking a bargain with the US? IPS did not publish the text of the document, however Porter states that what the Iranians wanted was an end to US hostility, the recognition of Iran as a legitimate power in the region, and the freedom to acquire nuclear technology for peaceful purposes. In exchange, Iran was prepared, first, to accept full International Atomic Energy Agency supervision of its nuclear programme -- including surprise inspections -- and to sign all protocols and guarantees for ensuring the efficacy of this supervision. Second, to recognise and normalise relations with Egypt; specifically, to align its policies with the Arab countries ready to conclude a peace with Israel on the basis of the Saudi initiative adopted in the Arab summit held in Beirut in 2002. Third, to stop all material support to Palestinian Islamist opposition groups, including Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, and to pressure them by all means to halt attacks within Israel's pre-1967 borders. Fourth, to prevail upon Hizbullah to disarm itself and become an ordinary political party in Lebanon, removing all obstacles to the control of the border area with Israel by the Lebanese army.

Presuming the authenticity of the document in question, Porter's report raises a number of questions. One cannot help but to note, firstly, that the proposal was conveyed to Washington within days of the fall of the regime of Saddam Hussein. That was a tense time for the Iranian regime, which feared that it would be the next target, if not the actual target of the US invasion of Iraq. It was also a time when the balance of power inside Iran had not yet shifted so solidly towards the conservatives; the document reflected the reformists' positions. Although Porter stresses that Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was "directly involved", that involvement has to be understood in light of the Iranian conservatives' fears that the US invasion of Iraq would strengthen the hand of Iranian reformists. Today, the domestic situation in Iran is very different.

It is also important to consider the US administration's response. The US, we recall, was still at the pinnacle of exultation over its lightening victory over Saddam. It had nothing but haughty contempt for the Iranian proposal. Not only did Bush refuse to respond to the Iranian offer to negotiate, he barely paused to consider it. In addition, according to Flynt Leverett, the then senior specialist on the Middle East on the National Security Council, the Bush administration delivered a verbal slap to the Swiss ambassador for having the audacity to forward the proposal to Washington. Undoubtedly, such arrogance and contempt played at least an indirect part in weakening the reformists in Iran and, consequently, paving the way for Ahmadinejad's rise to power.

Although Porter maintains that Iran is still interested in reaching the type of bargain described in his report, I would suggest that this desire is tempered by the fact that Iran is in a much more favourable strategic position than it was three years ago. Certainly, it holds a stronger negotiating hand in the event talks with Washington do take place. The regime is more secure, more confident, and less intent upon reaching an agreement with the current US administration. It has some useful international allies in Moscow and Beijing and regionally in Syria, Lebanon and Palestine. True, none can stand up to American might, but they all have influence and their current interests overlap considerably with those of Iran.

The US, by contrast, is in a much weaker negotiating position than it was in 2003. It is in a military quagmire, in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and its international moral stature is at its lowest ever ebb and getting worse. Not, of course, that the US has no other option but to negotiate with Iran. The Bush administration still has enormous resources to draw on and, despite all setbacks, still believes that military force is the only way to handle certain international problems, one of which is Iran. In all events, the ideological gap between the Iranian and US regimes is so vast as to make a comprehensive deal between the two almost impossible to imagine. Thus: why was the existence of a two-page Iranian proposal to Washington revealed only now? And why are major US newspapers keener than ever on dialogue with Iran?

One strong possibility is Bush's deteriorating credibility at home. The record of disasters his administration has wrought may have driven some to the realisation that it has become a national duty to restrain Bush's hand. One way to do this is to expose him and his administration for their incessant attempts to deceive the American public. The disclosure of the Iranian document fits well into this scenario as the document clearly gives lie to a major propaganda theme of the Bush administration, which is that the Iranian regime has but one aim, which is to destroy Israel. In fact, the proposal makes it very explicit that Iran is willing to make peace with Israel, just like the so-called moderate Arab states. On the other hand, we could posit that the White House engineered the appearance of the document. In this case, the aim of disclosure would have been to discredit Iran among its allies, in order to strip it of some of its strongest assets, before delivering a decisive blow.

Although I personally cannot see the US and Iran coming to terms at present, this does not mean that the circumstances conducive to productive talks cannot arise in the near future. But for these circumstances to arise, the US must come to the conclusion that the Iranian crisis cannot be solved militarily. At that point, the US will have to be ready to accept Iran as a regional power, which to Iran means becoming a nuclear power.

How do the Arabs stand with respect to all this? Not a single Arab regime is capable of thinking strategically about the long-term impact of these developments on the region and the Arab world. Even if we presume that some Arab regimes are intellectually capable of assessing the situation, they are ill equipped to handle it. How can they when their sole preoccupation is self-perpetuation and they believe the US is the only power in the universe capable of keeping them in power?

Hassan Nafaa is a professor of political science at Cairo University.
Courtesy of Al Ahram Weekly

Politicians and pundits in the United States love to talk about our “national character,” typically in rapturous tones of triumphalism.

Often that character is asserted as a noble force but not defined: Earlier this year, for example, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said our national character -- presumed to be benevolent -- requires us to be welcoming to legal immigrants.

Other times it must be defended against foreigners who just don’t understand us: Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland last month explained that too many Middle Easterners fall prey to “depictions of Americans routinely raping, killing, firebombing mosques and torturing innocents as a function of national character.”

And sometimes character is political destiny: In New Delhi last month, President Bush proclaimed that “democracy is more than a form of government, it is the central promise of our national character.” Luckily for India, its national character shares the same feature, according to Bush.

Can a nation have a coherent character? If we take the question seriously -- investigating reality rather than merely asserting nobility -- we see in the U.S. national character signs of pathology and decay as well as health and vigor. What if, for purposes of analysis, we treated the nation as a person? Scan the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (the bible of mental-health professionals, now in its fourth edition) and one category jumps out: Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

DSM-IV describes the disorder as “a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy” that can be diagnosed when any five of these nine criteria are met:

1. a grandiose sense of self-importance.

2. preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love.

3. believes he or she is special and unique.

4. requires excessive admiration.

5. sense of entitlement.

6. interpersonally exploitative, taking advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends.

7. lacks empathy.

8. often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her.

9. shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes.

Narcissistic tendencies to self-aggrandize are not unique to the United States, of course. But given the predominance of U.S. power in the world, we should worry most about the consequences of such narcissism here.

This disorder is bipartisan, and is virtually required of all mainstream politicians. When the House of Representatives held hearings about the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002, California Democrat Nancy Pelosi declared that America is “the greatest country that ever existed on the face of the earth.” Texas Republican Dick Armey described the United States as “the greatest, most free nation the world has ever known.” With a “grandiose sense of self-importance,” politicians routinely ratchet up the rhetorical flourishes when asserting that the country is “special and unique.”

As for arrogance and haughtiness: When asked at his pre-war news conference in March 2003 whether the United States would be defying the United Nations if it were to invade Iraq without legal authorization, Bush said, “if we need to act, we will act, and we really don’t need United Nations approval to do so.” Bush prefaced that promise to defy international and U.S. law with the phrase “when it comes to our security,” but since the invasion of Iraq had little or nothing to do with the security of the United States we can ignore that qualifier. Here the younger Bush was merely mimicking his father, who remarked in February 1991 as the United States was destroying Iraq a first time: “The U.S. has a new credibility. What we say goes.”

On the Gulf War and “lacks empathy”: On Feb. 13, 1991, U.S. planes hit a bunker in Baghdad. Whether military planners knew it was an air-raid shelter or thought it was a “command-and-control site,” an estimated 300-400 civilians died. Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, referred to this as “one downside of airpower,” and said the incident led him to discuss with Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf the need “to look at the target list a little more closely.” Was the goal of that review to discuss civilian casualties? No, it was to question the efficiency of bombing an already bombed-out Baghdad. In Powell’s words: “I asked questions like, ‘Why are we bombing the Baath Party headquarters for the eighth time? … Why are we bouncing rubble with million-dollar missiles?’”

Powell, who went on to serve as secretary of state in George W. Bush’s first term, was often referred to as the “dove” of that administration. Perhaps we could call this level of empathy the mark of a “tough dove.”

The unpleasant subject of the current Iraq war brings up “fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance.” Though Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently acknowledged mistakes in the current Iraq war -- “We’ve made tactical errors, thousands of them, I’m sure” -- she made it clear that history will vindicate U.S. officials for making “the right strategic decision” to invade. But that small concession to reality was too much for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who responded, “I don’t know what she was talking about, to be perfectly honest.”

While it’s easy to point at the narcissism of soulless and self-indulgent leaders, this diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder applies to the country as a whole. The belief that the United States is unique -- a shining “city upon a hill” -- is deeply rooted, and for many has divine origins; 48 percent of Americans believe the United States has “special protection from God,” according to a 2002 survey.

The narcissism of the whole society also is evident in the widespread “sense of entitlement,” defined as “unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations.” This is difficult to confront, precisely because it takes root to some degree in all of us and can’t be so easily displaced onto only the most overtly pathological. The vast majority of the U.S. public -- by comparison to the rest of the world -- lives an extravagant lifestyle that we show few signs of being willing to give up.

We are 5 percent of the world’s population and consume about a quarter of the world’s energy. This state of affairs is clearly unjust, made possible by coercion and violence, not some natural superiority of Americans. Yet the vast majority of the U.S. public, and even much of the left/progressive political community, acts as if they expect this state of affairs to continue. That’s real narcissism, and it’s at the heart of the political problem of the United States. Even if we swept the halls of Congress and the White House clean of every corrupt and cruel politician, the deeper self-indulgence of an affluent culture would be untouched.

Political activism to derail the pathological policies of those politicians must go forward. Critique of the concentrated power of the corporate elites who support those policies is essential. But the critical self-reflection necessary at the collective level also must come home to each of us.

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center http://thirdcoastactivist.org/. He is the author of The Heart of Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege and Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (both from City Lights Books). He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.

Within the very exclusive and puritan Yale University, every year 15 children of very wealthy families are co-opted. They are members of a secret association of ghoulish rites: Skulls and Bones. Throughout their lives, they support and assist each other in view of the democratic flightiness of the masses they detest. The last two candidates for president of the United States, George W. Bush and John Kerry, were, as opposite to enemies, among the 800 initiated and have secretly known each other for thirty years. Alexandra Robbins has investigated the Boners in a book that’s now authority on the subject. On the occasion of its publication in French language in the Voltaire library, we republish this article on the subject.

[Note to  readers: The following essay was much influenced by Mark Danner's comments on the "preponderance" of American power in an interview I did with him for this site. His latest book, a tiny but important paperback, The Secret Way to War: The Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War's Buried History (introduction by Frank Rich), has just come out. It includes three pieces that appeared at Tomdispatch thanks to the kindness of the editors of the New York Review of Books. It is, in my opinion, a must-buy. Tom]

"This Is Our Destiny"

"We must perhaps reluctantly accept that we have to help this region become a normal region, the way we helped Europe and Asia in another era. Now it's this area from Pakistan to Morocco that we should focus on… The world has gotten smaller and is getting smaller and smaller all the time... Isolationism, fortress America isn't going to deal with these problems of the kind that we're facing. Willy-nilly, this is our destiny, given our preponderance in the world, our role in the world and because of our successes." Zalmay Khalilzad, U.S. ambassador to Iraq in an April 24th interview with Borzou Daragahi of the Los Angeles Times

"In short, an attack on Iran would be an act of political folly, setting in motion a progressive upheaval in world affairs. With the U.S. increasingly the object of widespread hostility, the era of American preponderance could even come to a premature end." Former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, "Been There, Done That," op-ed, Los Angeles Times, April 23, 2006.

Hmmm… American preponderance. We know that this preponderance dazzled the men who became known as neoconservatives (though only the "neo" part of it seems even faintly accurate as a label) -- and Zalmay Khalilzad, our ambassador to and putative viceroy in Baghdad, was one of them. They wanted to wield that "preponderance" of power preponderantly. They wanted to lower America's terrible, swift sword decisively.

Link to full text

Two of America’s savants have uttered pronouncements about the final days of the presidency of George Walker Bush. In his magisterial statement succinctly titled, “Bush’s Thousand Days,” Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. pointed out that we have just crossed a significant date, for now less than one thousand days remain of the beleaguered Bush presidency. Schlesinger raises grave issues facing the deeply unpopular president. In his analysis of “The Passion of George W. Bush,” Sidney Blumenthal dubbed this darkening period the “endgame.” Taken together, these two essays present a disturbing image of a presidency in the throes of decline and desperation. These two essays urge us to consider the likelihood of a political collapse that could lead to disastrous consequences for America and Britain.

Blumenthal dissected the faded and now tattered dreams of the president and his wunderkind, Karl Rove. Gone with the wind is their vision of an Imperial America modelled on the pompous presidency of William McKinley, whose dream of the transcendence of American corporate monopolies and global military hegemony was thrown into the incinerator by FDR when he re-wrote the American social contract in the first one hundred days of the New Deal.

Yet, that aching nostalgia for an Imperial Presidency boldly governing a global American Empire did not die: it merely smouldered and rolled over in its grave, nosferatu, undead, unforgotten and lurking its next opportunity to sink its fangs into the jugular vein of destiny.

Under the darkness of the Vietnam nightmare, the Imperial Presidency revived and possessed the mind of Richard Nixon and his leading lieutenants, only to face the cruel dawn during Watergate, whereupon it crept back into its mouldy crypt, mounted its creaking catafalque and hid itself once again inside its dusty casket. This second un-death of the baroque vision of an American Empire in the Nixon era seared the minds and sealed the fates of its youngest and most ambitious protagonists: Dick Cheney, White House Chief of Staff under Ford, and Donald Rumsfeld, Ford’s unruly Secretary of Defense. Like bereft twins of Frankenstein, these two true believers in the myth of the Imperial Presidency presided over the reinvigoration of its corpse yet again under the neoconservative ascendancy of Bush 43 in 2001.

Blumenthal recalled the now thrice-repeated rise and decline of American Imperialism. Along the way, he pointed out that the centrepiece of Bush and Rove’s vision, the privatisation of social security, lies in ruins. The transfer of Social Security to the jaws of corporate capital would have sealed the fates of history and dissolved a New Deal triumph, rolling back the clock to the Gilded Age of unbridled laissez faire corporate capitalism along with the overt imperialism of the McKinley Era. Blumenthal made a number of other penetrating observations before concluding that Bush remains an impassioned believer in the truth of his own version of destiny – a conviction elevated to the level of religious frenzy in a faith empowered by his certainty that the abject failure of his presidency is divine confirmation of both his political martyrdom and his own personal sanctity.

While Schlesinger’s and Blumenthal’s pronouncements about Bush are directly on target, let us now turn to the two courtiers who have recently entered stage right at the White House. The former Director of the Office of Management & Budget (OMB), Joshua Bolten, has been named Chief of Staff. Bolten has brought his top deputy, Joel Kaplan, with him in the newly created post of Director of Policy.

In this White House reshuffle, Andrew Card and Scott McLellan have been sacked, and Karl Rove has been demoted. Rove had been the eminence grise presiding over political operations and policy development for the Bush White House, but he had become vulnerable to indictment in the CIA leak case. Even though it is unlikely that Rove will ever serve any sentence – since Bush will surely pardon him and Scooter Libby as well as any others who face trial and indictment – Rove was stripped of his policy portfolio as a matter of political necessity. However, the first news reports explained that Rove was opposed to the next phase of the war on terror, Iran. This factor would not be surprising: Rove regularly reads the polls, and the majority of voters would not encourage any further expansions of what has become a deeply unpopular war on terror.

Rove’s demotion opened up space for Bolten’s protege. Bolten is now the key player in the Bush White House, who will be backed up by his trusty sidekick and top gun, Joel Kaplan. An appraisal of these two new players will provide a deeper context for Bush’s final one thousand days, the endgame that will soon be unfolding in the some of the darkest days ever in American history.

When the little that is now known about the background of Josh Bolten and Joel Kaplan is examined, it turns out that they are slightly more than mere proteges of Karl Rove, as they were initially described. Josh Bolten’s father is Seymour Bolten, who was a top ranking deputy to George Herbert Walker Bush during his brief, eleven-month tenure as Director (DCI) of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1976.

The two men worked closely together. Documents released through the FOIA revealed Bolten Sr’s role in assisting Bush Sr. to probe a troubling problem for a previous DCI, Richard Helms. When embarrassing documents were published that proved Helms had deliberately misinformed the Warren Commission, Bolten Sr. advised Bush Sr. that Helms had lied to the Warren Commission when he told them that the CIA had never “contemplated” contacting Lee Harvey Oswald. Later documents proved that Helms was lying, and this scandal threatened to open one of the most malignant enigmas ever doomed to stalk the shadows of American history: the assassination of JFK, Lee Harvey Oswald and the CIA. This was a problem that Bush Sr. did not want to see return from the dead to haunt the CIA on his watch as DCI.

Bush Sr. instructed Bolten Sr. to analyze Helms’s exposure to further legal problems and criminal charges that might arise from his false testimony to the Warren Commission. In doing so, Bolten Sr. concluded that the former DCI’s predicament might cause him some public discomfort but no additional legal problems, i.e. no criminal charges. Helms had other legal problems involving lying under oath to a Senate Committee investigating the CIA. For these crimes, Helms would eventually receive the censure of Congress.

In this episode of CIA history, Bolten Sr. spelled out the Helms-Oswald case for Bush Sr., advising him that this deliberate misinformation might cause the disgraced DCI some grief but no criminal indictment. Had Helms been subject to the intensity of criminal probes into the JFK assassination and the CIA’s plans vis a vis Oswald, it would have upset Bush, Sr.

In 1976, America staggered in the wake of Watergate and the loss of faith in its government. Much of this lack of faith centred on the US intelligence community and its major failure, the assassination of JFK. The House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) was being proposed to investigate the unresolved cases of JFK and Martin Luther King. Bush Sr. certainly had no interest in reopening that particular can of political dynamite. Bush Sr.’s involvement as a CIA asset in the Bay of Pigs and its aftermath, including the assassination of JFK, is the subject of hundreds of pages on the internet as well as a central theme in the bestselling book of 1991 when Mark Lane published Plausible Denial - and it shot to the top of the bestseller lists. Lane was the leading scholar of the JFK assassination, and his return to the bestseller lists during Bush Sr.’s run for re-election played no small part in the loss of public confidence that doomed his ill-fated presidency.

In 1976, the Helms problem had surfaced for Bush Sr. and Bolten Sr., when David Martin, a reporter with the Associated Press (AP), wrote a story based on CIA memos from 1960 documenting the fact that “the agency ‘showed intelligence interest’ in Oswald and ‘discussed the laying on of interviews’ with him.” In a memo to Bush, Seymour Bolten stated, “This is another example where material provided to the press and public in response to an FOIA request is exploited mischievously and in distorted form to make the headlines."

Therefore, it is clear from the public record that, in addition to his personal allegiance to Karl Rove, Josh Bolten has a lengthy CIA pedigree through his deep family connection to the Bush dynasty that links him directly to the brief reign of Bush Sr. as DCI. That the relationship between Bolten’s father and Bush Sr. involves the lies of Richard Helms about the CIA’s “intelligence interest” in Lee Harvey Oswald has been documented for many years. Ultimately, Bush Sr.’s ‘intelligence interest’ in Oswald is another riddle wrapped in a mystery inside the enigma of JFK’s assassination.

In recent publications about Josh Bolten, some fascinating facts have emerged. Bolten was Executive Director of Legal & Government Affairs for Goldman Sachs in London, where, according to Pravda, he, “supervised Likud legal affairs.”

In his spare time, Bolten who is a confirmed aficionado of Harley Davidson, founded “Bikers for Bush.” Jeff Birnbaum writing for the Stanford Lawyer reported, “Bolten rode a newly purchased bike to the Iowa Straw Poll in Ames. In honor of that trip, Rove only half in jest gave Bolten, who is Jewish, the biker handle “Bad Mitzvah.” In the same article, we read, “For the last fifteen years, the man whom George W. Bush has nicknamed “Yosh” has spent most of his waking hours working for presidents named Bush.” Birnbaum contributed another fascinating detail to the Bolten story that has inspired a considerable wave of Washington and Hollywood gossip:

“Bolten, who is unmarried, has made the gossip columns partly thanks to his bikes. News photographers caught him giving a ride on one of his bikes to actress Bo Derek, of 10 fame, during a Bikers for Bush rally in Flint, Michigan, in November 2000. Bolten and Derek had actually met earlier in the year at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia. Derek, a die-hard Republican, was scheduled to give a speech during the proceedings, and she wanted to be briefed on Bush's policy ideas. "There were a lot of volunteers to handle this," recalled Bolten. "I took that task for myself." (The Stanford Lawyer, Number 69, Summer, 2004).

While he was Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Bolten became the world’s leading crusader for Bush’s privatization plans for Social Security. While explaining Bolten’s importance for the Bush White House in 2003, Rove succinctly stated, ‘’He’s the explainer of all things Jewish to the White House.’’ It is no secret that Bolten is a devout practitioner of his faith. Bush invited Bolten to open his first cabinet meeting with a prayer. Bolten complied with a prayer in Hebrew.

With a CIA pedigree and direct personal links to Likud, as well as Bush’s sainted plan for the privatization of Social Security, there is little wonder why Bolten was chosen to replace Andrew Card. In their analysis of the recent changes at the White House, Time magazine has pointed to another interesting facet of Bolten’s multifaceted agenda: the reinvigoration of the Republicans’ waning credibility for national security. It seems that Bolten has developed a comprehensive plan to spin the currently dire political situation to reverse the fortunes of the president and to restore public confidence in his waning presidency. It is, thus, unsurprising that Iran plays a crucial role in Bolten’s plan for an endgame. What is Bolten’s plan for Iran? According to Time,

“This is the riskiest, and potentially most consequential, element of the plan, keyed to the vow by Iran to continue its nuclear program despite the opposition of several major world powers. Presidential advisers believe that by putting pressure on Iran, Bush may be able to rehabilitate himself on national security, a core strength that has been compromised by a discouraging outlook in Iraq. ‘In the face of the Iranian menace, the Democrats will lose,’ said a Republican frequently consulted by the White House.”  (Time Magazine, 1 May 2006).

The Time analysis basically parallels the reports of a nefarious “confidential document” said to be in circulation amongst senior Republicans suggesting that a new attack on the US by terrorists could return the party to popularity and “restore (Bush’s) image as leader of the American people.” The sequence of events hoped for by the Republican hierarchy could involve a US bombardment of Iran swiftly followed by a pre-election terrorist atrocity. According to one report on the Republican memo, such a catastrophe could “keep the party from losing control of Congress in the 2006 midterm elections.”

This insidious memo may have been the source of remarks made by Bob Woodward during a lecture to an academic audience in Texas earlier this year. Reflecting on information gleaned from recent interviews with intelligence officials, Woodward warned his audience with a sobering thought: a forthcoming terrorist attack could relegate 9/11 to the status of a footnote in American history. Apparently, members of the Republican Party have been talking with intelligence officials about the consequences of terrorism on US soil, and they are already planning to make political gains out of future tragedies.

The political stakes are high. If the Republicans lose control of the House, John Conyers would become the Chairman of the powerful Judiciary Committee where he would wield the power to launch investigations into any of several potentially impeachable offenses. If the Republicans lose control of the Senate, Senator Ted Kennedy would become Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and he could launch public hearings into the scandals now swirling around of the Bush White House. Imagine: Ted Kennedy presiding over an official investigation into Bush’s clandestine eavesdropping, wiretapping and mail-openings aimed at US citizens or the torture cases of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. There are plenty of potentially explosive scandals, and the Republicans realize that they could face the political Apocalypse if they lose the midterm elections this November. Their fears are driving them to draft plans for a political Gotterdammerung of their own, replete with nuclear weapons and a president who has recently refused to remove the “nuclear option” from the negotiating table.

Josh Bolten’s principal mission is to reconstruct political support for the Bush presidency by ramming through a program for a tough military onslaught against Iran based on its recalcitrance to abandon their nascent – and thus far perfectly legal - nuclear program. Frustratingly for Bolten, Bush, Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld, Iran has not violated any treaties or international laws and - to make matters worse – a majority of the American people do not trust Bush to make the right decision “about whether we should go to war with Iran.”

Be that as it may, Bolten has four months left to prepare the ground for an Autumn Surprise bombing of Iran to revive the fears of Americans and to herd them into a battle formation to support a renewal of “the war on terror”. This role should suit him admirably, for Bolten was one of Washington’s most vocal proponents of war against Iraq when he was in his old position at the OMB.

Now, let us turn to that other new arrival in the Bush White House, Joel Kaplan, who served as Bolten’s deputy at the OMB. Kaplan went to Princeton and Yale. In 1988, he was involved in right-wing Democratic Party politics, but by 2000 he had morphed into a battle-hardened Republican apparatchik who accompanied John Bolton on the belligerent raid of Dade County election officials that brought the Florida recount to a screeching halt. This episode stopped the counting of ballots in the stillborn ‘election’, ultimately resulting in Supreme Court selection of and the assumption of power by the Bush-Cheney administration.

During the 1990s, Kaplan served four years in the Marines as a gunnery and artillery officer. As a Marine, he patrolled the US-Mexican border in a counter-narcotics operation. At Camp Pendleton, Kaplan trained Marines in the arts of artillery, logistics and the battlefield implementation of howitzer systems. At this date, history does not record whether Kaplan’s military experience had anything to do with his political conversion from Democrat to Republican, but it would not be surprising if it had transformed his political identity.

Another credential that reveals his innate neo-conservativism: Kaplan did a stint as law clerk for the right-wing Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia.

At Kaplan’s recent wedding in Texas, the pious Bolten read English translations of seven Jewish blessings, a courteous gesture for those in the party who were not fluent in Hebrew.

The tactical situation of the endgame is perfectly clear. Bolten and Kaplan are pedigreed right-wing intelligence and military operatives who will now enter the field to call and run the plays in the endgame of the Bush-Cheney administration. They will respond to input and orders from Bush, Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld, but they will have a huge amount of independence, latitude and responsibility for the policies and operations that they set in motion.

While the forthcoming bombing campaign against Iran is frequently described as potentially damaging to the security of the US, Iraq and America’s allies in Europe, it is still generally seen to be in the security interests of Israel. I wonder about this, and I frankly doubt it, because a bombing campaign against Iran might trigger a retaliatory attack against Tel Aviv or Dimona or other targets in Israel. In fact, it seems much more likely that any bombing campaign against Iran will not succeed in strengthening the national security of Israel, but in weakening it. In Israel, there seems to be some popular unease with American policy in the region, particularly the war in Iraq and the threat of broadening the war into Iran.

The erstwhile British Foreign Minister, Jack Straw, represented the growing sentiment for peace in Israel. He made embarrassing public comments about the Bush administration’s Iran plans, calling them “inconceivable” and “nuts.” Reports that have appeared since his sacking confirm that he was removed from his office on the direct orders of George Bush who demanded that Tony Blair appoint a more pliable Foreign Minister. Blair complied with the appointment of Margaret Beckett, a person seen as incapable of challenging the authority of Washington.

Wouldn’t it be ironic if the endgame scenario of Bolten and Kaplan involved the bombing of Iran and the concomitant terrorism of Israel? Yes, it would be ironic, but it would also be tragic. Even so, it is all too clear that the Bush presidency is swiftly moving toward a tragic denouement of Shakespearean proportions, and Bolten and Kaplan are destined to play out their pivotal roles in the tragedy against the backdrop of collapsing national security schemes for America, Iran, Iraq, Israel and the rest of the planet.

The vast majority of the global population does not support the Pentagon’s plans for the bombardment of Iran. According to knowledgeable sources in Israel, Turkey has refused overtures from the US military that requested the use of the Incirlik airbase for the bombing of Iran. Meanwhile, further preparations are afoot in Iran itself. Maryam Rajavi, a leader of the People’s Mujaheddin of Iran, is preparing for her role as the American favorite to succeed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president after the US-led attack precipitates what planners in Washington predict will become a massive revolt against the mullahs leading to a self-imposed regime change in Tehran.

Given the uncertainties taking hold of the international community in the runup to the US bombing campaign, the oil market is getting especially jittery. Formal speculations are now appearing in print that the price of Brent crude will soon soar to $100 per barrel in advance of the bombing campaign itself. This will be yet another windfall for the major oil companies, many of which are based in Bush’s home state of Texas.

In Washington, neoconservatives are looking forward to the next targets for American hegemony as set out in the documents of their most influential think tank, The Project for a New American Century. In Washington’s neoconservative circles, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are seen as crucial targets for regime change. The strategic importance of these two ostensibly friendly Islamic nations stems from two factors: Wahabism, the fountainhead of the most militant forms of Islamic extremism, and their energy resources. While Pakistan does not have major energy resources, it is seen as a breeding ground for terror with nuclear bombs giving it dominance over the crucial central Asian oil deposits of Kazakhstan, the third largest untapped reserves in the world after Saudi Arabia and Iraq. A growing number of neoconservatives in Washington long for regime change in Saudi Arabia to ensure American domination of the region for at least another century.

In a recent interview with Robert Fisk of The Independent (London), Seymour Hersh insisted that there are growing numbers of American generals who are strongly opposed to the Iran plans, but they are staying in the shadows where they can avoid the glare of publicity because they are afraid of becoming the victims of high profile character assassinations by Fox News, the Washington Post and the New York Times.

In his highly publicized lecture at Columbia University’s school of journalism, Hersh lamented the, “collapse of Congress (and) the military.” In his remarks to Fisk, Hersh criticized, “a Congress that can’t articulate opposition.” Hersh and his sources in the Pentagon believe that the showdown between Bush’s America and Iran may soon be played out as an explosion of tragedy as Bush moves the pieces into position for his endgame strategy.

With every tick of the clock, more people are awakening to the fact that tragedy and horror are stalking America and Iran because this president wants to go out with a bang not a whimper.

Michael Carmichael became a professional public affairs consultant, author and broadcaster in 1968. He worked in five American presidential campaigns for progressive candidates from RFK to Carter. In 2003, he founded The Planetary Movement, a nonprofit public affairs organization based in the United Kingdom. He has appeared as a public affairs expert on the BBC's Today, Hardtalk, and PM, as well as numerous appearances on ITN, NPR and many European broadcasts examining politics and culture. He can be reached through his website: www.planetarymovement.org

Email mc@planetarymovement.org
Source: GlobalResearch.ca

Peace in the Middle East is more in jeopardy at this time than it has been for a long time. This is due in part to political dynamics within the Israeli and Palestinian societies, but also because of the sustained efforts to enhance Israel's objectives and to undermine those of the Arabs, especially in the United States.  No doubt the victory of Hamas has complicated the situation, but it may also force both the Israelis and the Palestinians to face reality and act more rationally to achieve peace. However, external forces tend to slow down any such progress toward realism.  Among such forces are the virtually blind support of Israel and the equally strong undermining of the Arab cause, particularly in the United States (US).  The blind support has recently been well documented in THE ISRAEL LOBBY, an essay by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Watt, [London Review of Books, vol. 28, no.6, March 2006]. Two articles respectively by Lawrence Rosen and Bernard Lewis in The American Scholar may illustrate the undermining of the Arab cause.

THE ISRAEL LOBBY:

In THE ISRAEL LOBBY, more accurately the Zionist lobby, Mearsheimer and Watt present a penetrating and realistic picture of the power of the Zionist lobby to advance the Israeli [Zionist] agenda, often at the expense of the Arabs, and the US interests. This mostly factual study has met with a flare up of criticism, in two main forms: those that are legitimate, and those that are biased and prejudicial. Some were challenges of fact and interpretation, which is legitimate, but most were charges of anti-Semitism against the authors. A few denied any harm to US interests by identifying the interests of the US with those of Israel, in the sense that what is good for Israel is good for the US, but not the other way around.  Actually the Israel [Zionist] Lobby should be admired for its efficiency and effectiveness.  It is up to the Arabs to create a countervailing lobby, and up to the Americans to ensure that US national interests should come first, and to recognize that even-handedness in international affairs enhances those interests.

UNDERMINING THE ARAB CAUSE:

In his article, titled "The Arab Personality", on the cover and "What We Got Wrong" on the inside of the AMERICAN SCHOLAR, [Winter 2005], Professor Lawrence Rosen questions Bernard Lewis' asking "What Went Wrong" to account for " Arab failure to keep pace with the economic, political, and scientific innovations of the west," suggesting that the problem lies in the Arab personality. As a better alternative Professor Rosen suggests three concepts to explain Arab resistance to western style reform: One, "in the Arab world the self is never seen as divided" presumably between belief and reason as it is in the west; two, "doubt about fundamental beliefs has always been equated with unbelief" and that is risky; and, third, "political institutions have never been separated from the individuals connected with them."  Thus the Arab personality must be the obstacle to change.

While trying to correct a faulty approach to Arab society and culture, Professor Rosen has presented a faulty approach of his own, first by speaking of an Arab Personality and culture, and then by making generalizations that are neither obvious nor testable.  Is it accurate or helpful to speak of an Arab Personality to represent the 22 Arab countries, stretching from Morocco to Iraq, and from Sudan to Syria and Lebanon?  And is it accurate to speak of the Arabs as if they were of one religion, ethnic group, or cultural orientation? Not only are there major cultural differences and diverse patterns of behavior, as Professor Rosen himself notes in passing, but individuals and groups do express doubt about certain fundamentals.  They sometimes rebel, seek wisdom from the learned, or they do their own interpretation of the fundamentals.  Similarly, while political institutions may not be separated from the individuals in power, these individuals may be separated from institutions, either by replacing them or by changing the institutions.

The Arab world resists western style reform because its history   with the west has been one of humiliation, oppression, and perceived betrayal.  Even today, western suggestions for economic and political reform come as demands to be enforced by international institutions if not adopted voluntarily.

Professor Rosen seems to misinterpret some of the dynamics of Arab society.  It is true that the word fitna has one meaning relating to beauty and charm, but in this context it means sedition, insurrection, or riot, which may lead to chaos.  On the other hand, chaos does not mean temptation or seduction.  The Arabic words for chaos are tashawush or fawda, meaning confusion or disorder.
By some standards women in the Arab world are not free, but there are major differences between one country and another. Women in Tunisia and Lebanon enjoy much more freedom than women in Saudi Arabia, with a wide variation in-between.

Finally, Professor Rosen seems to object to asking What Went Wrong, or to imply that something has gone wrong to prevent the Arabs from advancing scientifically and technologically. To deny that something has gone wrong does not help in explaining the depressed status of knowledge in the Arab world. Something did go wrong.  First it was corruption, which led to the decline of the Arab empire.  Then came the stagnating rule of the Ottoman Empire, which lasted a few centuries.  Then it was domination by the western powers, who came as liberators, but acted as dominators. Even more important, the Arabs hurt themselves by learning to memorize the Qur'an as a duty, instead of learning to read it and analyze its contents. This has resulted in conformity instead of promoting literacy and critical thinking. The western liberators did little to influence or reverse that detrimental system of education.  Yes, something did go wrong. The Arab countries are yet to free themselves from the shackles of the past, learn from the advanced countries, or find their own way to knowledge, freedom, and modernization in thought and action.

Coming from another direction, Professor Lewis deals with ANTI-SEMITISM, American Scholar [Winter '06), especially what he considers Arab anti-Semitism. He begins by inventing new definitions to fit his changing perceptions of anti-Semitism: Is anti-Semitism an attitude against all Semites, or against those of a certain religion, language, or ethnic origin?  Professor Lewis skims through selected historical anecdotes to arrive at the conclusion that the Arabs have adopted the new western concept of anti-Semitism just as the west was feeling embarrassed about it. This new anti-Semitism is expressed by judging Jews on a different standard from others, and by accusing "Jews of cosmic evil." Though his selective illustrations suffer from sins of omission and commission, limited space precludes a detailed critique of his illustrations and conclusions. One conclusion, however, deserves special attention, namely that "the new anti-Semitism has little or no bearing on the rights and wrongs of the Palestine conflict, but it must surely have some effect on perceptions of the problem," but the rights and wrongs are a matter of perception. By his account this new anti-Semitism by the Arabs, who themselves are Semites by language, religion, and ethnic origin, developed during World War II and more so after 1948. This is incorrect on at least three counts: First, the Arab attitude toward the Jews does not reflect any accusation of Jews of cosmic evil. Second, the Arabs do not think of all Jews in a negative way. They have a negative attitude against Zionists and Zionist colonization of Arab Land. Finally, the Arab negative attitude developed around the end of the 19th century (birth of Zionism), and the beginning of the twentieth century (western colonial penetration).  Objections to Zionism and colonization evolved concurrently with Arab objections to British and French colonialism, which also was the root of Zionist colonization of Palestine. Zionism and colonization were legitimized and reinforced by the Balfour Declaration of 1917. The Zionist insatiable appetite for Arab land and the harsh Israeli treatment of Arabs under occupation have  since then continually reinforced the negative Arab attitude toward Zionism and Israel's policies. The bond between British-French colonialism and Zionism was reaffirmed by the Israeli-British-French invasion of Egypt in 1956.

Finally, Professor Lewis criticizes the United Nations (UN) for the "special care" it accords the Palestinian refugees. He apparently forgets that the UN resolution to partition Palestine in 1947, which led to the creation of the State of Israel, was also responsible for the refugee problem. It is unfortunate, as Professor Lewis correctly states, that the UN did not have the power to enforce its resolutions, thanks to the United States' abuse of its veto power.  Had the UN had such power, the Palestinians would still be in their homes, Israel would be settled within the boundaries specified by the UN Partition Plan, the Arab Israeli conflict would be resolved, and the new fictional anti-Semitism of the Arabs against the Jews would be inconceivable. **

** The American Scholar did not publish my comments on the Rosen and Lewis articles claiming lack of space.

Elias H. Tuma is a professor emeritus of economics, University of California, Davis, CA.

Source: Arab Media Internet Network

I DON'T usually tell these stories, because they might give rise to the suspicion that I am paranoid.

For example: 27 years ago, I was invited to give a lecture-tour in 30 American universities, including all the most prestigious ones - Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Berkeley and so on. My host was the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a respected non-Jewish organization, but the lectures themselves were to be held under the auspices of the Jewish Bet-Hillel chaplains.

On arrival at the airport in New York I was met by one of the organizers. "There is a slight hitch," he told me, "29 of the Rabbis have cancelled your lecture."

In the end, all the lectures did take place, under the auspices of Christian chaplains. When we came to the lone Rabbi who had not cancelled my lecture, he told me the secret: the lectures had been forbidden in a confidential letter from the Anti-Defamation League, the thought-police of the Jewish establishment. The salient phrase has stuck to my memory: "While it cannot be said that Member of the Knesset Avnery is a traitor, yet…"

In the last 25 years, many Palestinians and other Arabs, in the United States and in the Arab world, have been so awed by the power of the US pro-Israel lobby that any study, book, or journalistic article that exposes the inner workings, the substantial influence, and the financial and political power of this lobby have been greeted with ecstatic sighs of relief that Americans finally can see the "truth" and the "error" of their ways.

The underlying argument has been simple and has been told time and again by Washington's regime allies in the Arab world, pro-US liberal and Arab intellectuals, conservative and liberal US intellectuals and former politicians, and even leftist Arab and American activists who support Palestinian rights, namely, that absent the pro- Israel lobby, America would at worst no longer contribute to the oppression of Arabs and Palestinians and at best it would be the Arabs' and the Palestinians' best ally and friend. What makes this argument persuasive and effective to Arabs? Indeed, why are its claims constantly brandished by Washington's Arab friends to Arab and American audiences as a persuasive argument? I contend that the attraction of this argument is that it exonerates the United States' government from all the responsibility and guilt that it deserves for its policies in the Arab world and gives false hope to many Arabs and Palestinians who wish America would be on their side instead of on the side of their enemies.

Let me start with the premise of the argument, namely its effect of shifting the blame for US policies from the United States onto Israel and its US lobby. According to this logic, it is not the United States that should be held directly responsible for all its imperial policies in the Arab world and the Middle East at large since World War II, rather it is Israel and its lobby who have pushed it to launch policies that are detrimental to its own national interest and are only beneficial to Israel. Establishing and supporting Arab and other Middle East dictatorships, arming and training their militaries, setting up their secret police apparatuses and training them in effective torture methods and counter-insurgency to be used against their own citizens should be blamed, according to the logic of these studies, on Israel and its US lobby. Blocking all international and UN support for Palestinian rights, arming and financing Israel in its war against a civilian population, protecting Israel from the wrath of the international community should also be blamed not on the United States, the studies insist, but on Israel and its lobby. Additionally, and in line with this logic, controlling Arab economies and finances, dominating key investments in the Middle East, and imposing structural adjustment policies by the IMF and the World Bank which impoverish the Arab peoples should also be blamed on Israel, and not the United States. Finally, starving and then invading Iraq, threatening to invade Syria, raiding and then sanctioning Libya and Iran, besieging the Palestinians and their leaders must also be blamed on the Israeli lobby and not the US government. Indeed, over the years, many pro-US Arab dictators let it leak officially and unofficially that their US diplomat friends have told them time and again how much they and "America" support the Arab world and the Palestinians were it not for the influence of the pro- Israel lobby (sometimes identified by the American diplomats in more explicit "ethnic" terms).

While many of the studies of the pro-Israel lobby are sound and full of awe-inspiring well- documented details about the formidable power commanded by groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its allies, the problem with most of them is what remains unarticulated. For example, when and in what context has the United States government ever supported national liberation in the Third World? The record of the United States is one of being the implacable enemy of all Third World national liberation groups, including European ones, from Greece to Latin America to Africa and Asia, except in the celebrated cases of the Afghan fundamentalists' war against the USSR and supporting apartheid South Africa's main terrorist allies in Angola and Mozambique (UNITA and RENAMO) against their respective anti-colonial national governments. Why then would the US support national liberation in the Arab world absent the pro-Israel lobby is something these studies never explain.

The United States has had a consistent policy since World War II of fighting all regimes across the Third World who insist on controlling their national resources, whether it be land, oil, or other valuable minerals. This extends from Iran in 1953 to Guatemala in 1954 to the rest of Latin America all the way to present-day Venezuela. Africa has fared much worse in the last four decades, as have many countries in Asia. Why would the United States support nationalist regimes in the Arab world who would nationalise natural resources and stop their pillage by American capital absent the pro-Israel lobby also remains a mystery unexplained by these studies. Finally, the United States government has opposed and overthrown or tried to overthrow any regime that seeks real and tangible independence in the Third World and is especially galled by those regimes that pursue such policies through democratic elections. The overthrow of regimes from Arbenz to Goulart to Mossadegh and Allende and the ongoing attempts to overthrow Chavez are prominent examples, as is the overthrow of nationalist regimes like Sukarno's and Nkrumah's. The terror unleashed on populations who challenged the US-installed friendly regimes from El Salvador and Nicaragua to Zaire to Chile and Indonesia resulted in the killing of hundreds of thousands, if not millions by repressive police and militaries trained for these important tasks by the US. This is aside from direct US invasions of South East Asian and Central American countries that killed untold millions for decades. Why would the US and its repressive agencies stop invading Arab countries, or stop supporting the repressive police forces of dictatorial Arab regimes and why would the US stop setting up shadow governments inside its embassies in Arab capitals to run these countries' affairs (in some cases the US shadow government runs the Arab country in question down to the smallest detail with the Arab government in question reduced to executing orders) if the pro-Israel lobby did not exist is never broached by these studies let alone explained.

The arguments put forth by these studies would have been more convincing if the Israel lobby was forcing the United States government to pursue policies in the Middle East that are inconsistent with its global policies elsewhere. This, however, is far from what happens. While US policies in the Middle East may often be an exaggerated form of its repressive and anti- democratic policies elsewhere in the world, they are not inconsistent with them. One could easily make the case that the strength of the pro-Israel lobby is what accounts for this exaggeration, but even this contention is not entirely persuasive. One could argue (and I have argued elsewhere) that it is in fact the very centrality of Israel to US strategy in the Middle East that accounts, in part, for the strength of the pro-Israel lobby and not the other way around. Indeed, many of the recent studies highlight the role of pro-Likud members of the Bush administration (or even of the Clinton administration) as evidence of the lobby's awesome power, when, i t could be easily argued that it is these American politicians who had pushed Likud and Labour into more intransigence in the 1990s and are pushing them towards more conquest now that they are at the helm of the US government. This is not to say, however, that the leaders of the pro-Israel lobby do not regularly brag about their crucial influence on US policy in Congress and in the White House. That they have done regularly since the late 1970s. But the lobby is powerful in the United States because its major claims are about advancing US interests and its support for Israel is contextualised in its support for the overall US strategy in the Middle East. The pro- Israel lobby plays the same role that the China lobby played in the 1950s and the Cuba lobby still plays to this day. The fact that it is more powerful than any other foreign lobby on Capitol Hill testifies to the importance of Israel in US strategy and not to some fantastical power that the lobby commands independent of and extraneous to the US "national interest." The pro-Israel lobby could not sell its message and would not have any influence if Israel was a communist or anti-imperialist country or if Israel opposed US policy elsewhere in the world.

Some would argue that even though Israel attempts to overlap its interests with those of the US, that its lobby is misleading American policy- makers and shifting their position from one of objective assessment of what is truly in America's best interest and that of Israel's. The argument runs as follows: US support for Israel causes groups who oppose Israel to hate the US and target it for attacks. It also costs the US friendly media coverage in the Arab world, affects its investment potential in Arab countries, and loses its important allies in the region, or at least weakens these allies. But none of this is true. The United States has been able to be Israel's biggest backer and financier, its staunchest defender and weapon-supplier while maintaining strategic alliances with most if not all Arab dictatorships, including the Palestinian Authority under both Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas. Moreover, US companies and American investments have the largest presence across the Arab world, most prominently but not exclusively in the oil sector. Also, even without the pathetic and ineffective efforts at US propaganda in the guise of the television station Al-Hurra, or Radio Sawa and the now-defunct Hi magazine, not to mention US-paid journalists and newspapers in Iraq and elsewhere, a whole army of Arabic newspapers and state-television stations, not to mention myriad satellite television stations celebrate the US and its culture, broadcast American programmes, and attempt to sell the US point of view as effectively as possible encumbered only by the limitations that actual US policies in the region place on common sense. Even the offending Al-Jazeera has bent over backwards to accommodate the US point of view but is constantly undercut by actual US policies in the region. Al-Jazeera, under tremendous pressure and threats of bombing from the United States, has for example stopped referring to the US occupation forces in Iraq as "occupation forces" and now refers to them as "coalition forces". Moreover, since when has the US sought to win a popularity contest among the peoples of the world? Arabs no more hate or love the United States than do Latin Americans, Africans, Asians, or even and especially Europeans.

Finally we come to the financial argument, namely that the US gives an inordinate amount of money to Israel -- too exorbitant a cost that is out of proportion to what the US gets in return. In fact, the United States spends much more on its military bases in the Arab world, not to mention on those in Europe or Asia, than it does on Israel. Israel has indeed been very effective in rendering services to its US master for a good price, whether in channelling illegal arms to central American dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s, helping pariah regimes like Taiwan and apartheid South Africa in the same period, supporting pro-US, including Fascist, groups inside the Arab world to undermine nationalist Arab regimes, from Lebanon to Iraq to Sudan, coming to the aid of conservative pro- US Arab regimes when threatened as it did in Jordan in 1970, and attacking Arab nationalist regimes outright as it did in 1967 with Egypt and Syria and in 1981 with Iraq when it destroyed that country's nuclear reactor. While the US had been able to overthrow Sukarno and Nkrumah in bloody coups, Nasser remained entrenched until Israel effectively neutralised him in the 1967 War. It is thanks to this major service that the United States increased its support to Israel exponentially. Moreover, Israel neutralised the PLO in 1982, no small service to many Arab regimes and their US patron who could not fully control the organisation until then. None of the American military bases on which many more billions are spent can claim such a stellar record. Critics argue that when the US had to intervene in the Gulf, it could not rely on Israel to do the job because of the sensitivity of including it in such a coalition which would embarrass Arab allies, hence the need for direct US intervention and the uselessness of Israel as a strategic ally. While this may be true, the US also could not rely on any of its military bases to launch the invasions on their own and had to ship in its army. American bases in the Gulf did provide important and needed support but so did Israel.

AIPAC is indeed powerful insofar as it pushes for policies that accord with US interests and that are resonant with the reigning US imperial ideology. The power of the pro-Israel lobby, whether in Congress or on campuses among university administrators, or policy-makers is not based solely on their organisational skills or ideological uniformity. In no small measure, anti- Semitic attitudes in Congress (and among university administrators) play a role in believing the lobby's (and its enemies') exaggerated claims about its actual power, resulting in their towing the line. But even if this were true, one could argue, it would not matter whether the lobby has real or imagined power. For as long as Congress and policy-makers (and university administrators) believe it does, it will remain effective and powerful. I of course concede this point.

What then would have been different in US policy in the Middle East absent Israel and its powerful lobby? The answer in short is: the details and intensity but not the direction, content, or impact of such policies. Is the pro- Israel lobby extremely powerful in the United States? As someone who has been facing the full brunt of their power for the last three years through their formidable influence on my own university and their attempts to get me fired, I answer with a resounding yes. Are they primarily responsible for US policies towards the Palestinians and the Arab world? Absolutely not. The United States is opposed in the Arab world as elsewhere because it has pursued and continues to pursue policies that are inimical to the interests of most people in these countries and are only beneficial to its own interests and to the minority regimes in the region that serve those interests, including Israel. Absent these policies, and not the pro-Israel lobby which supports them, the United States should expect a change in its standing among Arabs. Short of that, the United States will have to continue its policies in the region that have wreaked, and continue to wreak, havoc on the majority of Arabs and not expect that the Arab people will like it in return.

© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly.  Courtesy of Al-Ahram Weekly 

(Left to right : Paris 1968, Paris 1998, Paris 2000, Paris 2005)

The mainstream press has been telling Europeans that "riots" have broken out in the Parisian suburbs (Banlieu) of Paris this week. In calling them "riots", the popular imagination likens them to fires and other sorts of largely uncontrollable disasters. It's as if the French are merely being faced with an outbreak of civil unrest, and that someone from the ranks of the government will most assuredly figure out how to weather the storm within the coming days.

These aren't "riots". This is social rebellion, directed at decades of French imperial rule, and ultra-capitalist and racist policymaking at home. After the "decolonization" process finished in Africa (oddly leaving the former colonies entirely dependent on the Banque de France for their monetary policymaking and at the whim of French military decision-making), the colonized were supposed to be offered life in France as a sort of reparation for the destruction that went along with the imperial era. This, predictably, has turned out to be nothing more than a bone that the French have thrown at their dependents to try to keep them quiet. The idea is this: give them cheap, shitty housing away from the beautiful Metropole of Paris, give them minimum wage paying work, and hope that they shut up.

Obviously, "they" haven't shut up. The largely immigrant population of the northern Banlieu has grown tired of being shut out. What's more, this is nothing new. Over the last decade or so, urban revolt has been a regular, if not common occurrence. Fires, car bombings, random acts of violence, and vandalism are all part of life in Paris' most neglected district.

Referred to as the "93 (neuf-trois)", after the first two numbers of the postal code, the northern suburbs have always been the destination of those too poor to handle the inner city or the more posh southern and western suburbs. Like similar districts in every major city of the world, it has also been the target of government attempts at wiping it off the map. Being from Chicago, I am quite familiar with the technique, employed by the totalitarian mayor Richard Daley, to clear out public housing structures, replace them with a monotonous string of overpriced yuppy condominiums, build public amusements to attract the yuppy inhabitants, and then advertise to the world that you have helped rebuild the city. In the north of Paris, this script has been followed almost exactly. The build up of superstores such as Ikea and The Gap between the "93" and Charles de Gaulle Airport began the process of encroaching on these poor communities. Then came the construction of the Stade de France in time for the 1998 World Cup in Saint-Denis (just on the border of the hot region). The last step was meant to score the 2012 Summer Olympics for the same venue, which would have paved the road for the completion of the great "urban renewal" project of the problem district.

Unfortunately for Chirac and Co., things have not gone according to plan. Perhaps the unexpected loss to London in the Olympic bid race can be seen as a fitting metaphor for the administration's failure to kill the poor communities. However, France's frustration in losing the bid to host the games can't be anything compared to the frustration of those who have descended from three generations of French residents, only to still be entirely excluded from the main fabric of society and government.

Much of the frustration among the revolters has been aimed at Finance Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, often called "Sarko" by disaffected youth. It is he who has provided the tough rhetoric that has easily fueled the fires of rage behind the current rebellion. Among other things, Sarko has been known to regularly refer to the 93's residents as racaille, or scum. He has threatened to clear out the streets of the neighborhood with power hoses, and blames the locals with instituting a depraved culture of petty crime and heavy drug use. This is the #2 man in the government behind Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, and so his rhetoric carries immense weight. While some within both major ruling parties in Parliament have begun to question Sarko's tough talk, it's all pretty moot at this point. By allowing Sarko to have his way for so long, the perception is that all of government and the elite populations that support it feel this way about the residents and citizens of the northern Banlieu.

The mainstream press, be it "left" or "Right", has done their best to falsely turn this story into another "Clash of Civilizations" bit. Without saying as much, they tend to interview people with obviously Arabic names on the scene, and then babble on about the history of Algerian and Tunisian immigration to the area. All one needs to do is read what the interviewees are saying to realize that this has nothing to do with any overarching West-East dilemma. They aren't talking about the death of the West, and their revulsion at the Judeo-Christian liberal democratic norms. They are talking about their revulsion at socioeconomic exclusion. This doesn't have anything to do with civilization: this has to do with Capitalism running buck wild over the human rights of thousands of members of French society.

Just listen to the voices of the revolt. Zaid, 20, quoted in the November 4th Independent of London, says: "It's hard to just sit here and watch the rich people driving past in their swanky vehicles. They have everything and we have absolutely nothing."

In the November 5th version of the Independent, Kamel, 16, says: "Ever since Sarko came into the government, life has been merde. He treats us like dogs -- well, we'll show him how dogs can react!"

I could draw up a list of dozens of such quotes, none of them using religious or cultural imagery to indicate a civilization clash.

While there is a heavy population of North African Arabs in the area, they aren't the whole story. The other half of the north Banlieu population is made up of Blacks, immigrants from other parts of the world, and the occasional poor white French families. This is a widespread spectrum of the population that is feeling excluded. One needn't pull out the Samuel Huntington boogeyman to understand why the feeling of desperation is so high in these areas. One need only use common sense: the largely poor and immigrant population here is made to live in dangerously, dilapidated conditions, are not permitted to practice cultural traditions from home thanks to the overarching cultural chauvinism of French society, and are not even give the rare representative in Congress the way American and British minorities are. Simply enough, you treat a significant portion of your population in this disturbing way for long enough, and they will rebel.

What began as a seemingly contained bout of social disorder in response to the electrocution of two youths being pursued by police last week has manifested itself into nationwide revolt. The problem areas have spread to Toulouse, Marseille, Strasbourg, Nantes, and other areas of the country that fit the ultra-excluded demographic of the Northern Banlieu. The most frequent form of revolt has been car torchings, with the biggest job being an entire Renault dealership in Aulnay-Sous-Bois. Schools, department stores, large chains and government buildings have also been targeted. The mainstream press has been dutifully overemphasizing the youth aspect to the rebels, so as to delegitimize the events. Any new violence is being referred to as "copy cat" riots, as if those responsible are not thinking about anything but imitating those who have come before. This is a completely irrelevant point insofar as the "copy cat" aspect doesn't significantly change the overarching picture: angry, disaffected, and largely young segments of the population with nothing better to do than declare war on France.

The war is built upon the marked contrasts in French society. The Paris city center is one of the richest in the world, with the West side being lined with gold from the Champs Elysées down through the Eiffel Tower district to the ultra posh 16th Arrondissement (district).  As Paris rests comfortably in wealth, built on family dynasty and tourism, the suburbs toil for every last meal. If they are lucky enough to find work (sometimes unemployment runs as high as 50% in the suburbs), then they often work twelve hours a day, seven days a week, just to maintain a decent living. They keep France open by managing corner shops and laborious industrial night shifts, and receive nothing but hate in return. Their parents and grandparents managed to survive the often bloody onslaught of French imperialism in Africa, and now they are made to survive the immoral onslaught of rugged Capitalism.

France has always captured the imagination of the rebellious. Many credit the French Revolution with being the first example of a popular social revolution. It was followed in Paris with social rebellion in 1848, worker upheaval in 1871, and student revolt in 1968. In 2005, Paris is burning at the hands of the modern day proletarian population. Just don't call them riots! These aren't forest fires. This is a rebellion in real time.

Matt Reichel is an American expatriate currently working and studying in Paris. He can be reached at: reichel_matt@yahoo.fr.

Canada’s Fraser Institute continues to chart the progress of Americanism into Canada

Lecture in Berlin
Conference on "Raising Children without Violence"

Some years ago I talked with a young Israeli writer. I was struck by the fact that in spite of being very successful and acclaimed by the critics, and that at a relatively early age, she somehow exuded an air of insecurity.

When I asked her about it, she broke down. "I never told this to anybody. My whole childhood was hell. I did not know that both my parents had been in Auschwitz. They never talked about it. I only knew that there was a terrible secret hanging over my family, a secret so awful that I was forbidden even to ask about it. I lived in constant fear, under a constant threat. I never had a feeling of security."

This is violence - not physical violence, but violence nonetheless. Many Israeli children have experienced it, even when the State of Israel became more and more powerful, and Security - with a capital S - became its fetish.

We, Israelis and Palestinians, are living in a permanent war. It has lasted now for more than 120 years. A fifth generation of Israelis and Palestinians has been born into the war, like their parents and teachers. Their whole mental outlook has been shaped by the war from earliest childhood. Every day of their lives, violence has dominated the daily news.

In many ways, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is unique. Putting a complex historical process in its simplest terms, it goes like this:

120 years ago, many Jews in Europe realized that the growing nationalism of the various peoples, almost always accompanied by a virulent anti-Semitism, was leading towards a catastrophe. They decided to become a nation themselves and set up a state for the Jews. They chose Palestine, the ancient homeland of their people, as the place to realize their dream. Their slogan was: "A country without people for a people without a country."

But Palestine was not empty. The people living there objected, of course, to another people coming from nowhere and claiming their country.

The historian Isaac Deutscher has described the conflict in this way: A person lives on an upper floor of a building that has caught fire. To save himself, he jumps from the window and lands on a passerby below, injuring him grievously. Between the two, a mortal enmity ensues. Who is in the right?

Every war creates fear, hatred, distrust, prejudices, demonization. All the more so a war lasting for generations. Each of the two peoples has created a narrative of their own. Between the two narratives - the Israeli and the Palestinian - there is not the slightest resemblance. What an Israeli child and a Palestinian child learn about the conflict from their earliest years - at home, in kindergarten, in school, from the media - is totally different.

Let's take an Israeli child. Even if his parents or grandparents were not Holocaust survivors, he learns that Jews have been persecuted throughout history - indeed, he learns that history is nothing but an endless story of persecution, inquisition and pogroms, leading to the terrible Shoah.

I once read the reports of a class of Israeli schoolchildren, who had been asked to write down their conclusions after visiting Auschwitz. About a quarter of them said: My conclusion is that after what the Germans have done to us, we must treat minorities and foreigners better than anyone else. But three quarters said: After what the Germans have done to us, our highest duty is to safeguard the existence of the Jewish people, by every possible means, without any limitations.

This feeling of being the eternal victim still persists, even after we have become a powerful nation in the State of Israel. It is deeply imbedded in our consciousness.

Already in kindergarten, and then every year in school, a Jewish child in Israel experiences an annual series of national and religious holidays (there is no real difference between the two) commemorating events in which Jews were victims and had to fight for their lives:

- Hannuka, commemorating the fight of the Maccabees against the Greek oppressors

- Purim, the victory over the Persians who tried to exterminate all the Jews

- Passover, the flight of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt

- Remembrance day, devoted to the Israeli soldiers killed in our many wars against the Arabs

- Independence Day, our desperate fight for survival in the 1948 war in which our state was founded;

- Holocaust Day

- The 9th of the month Av, when the Jewish temple was twice destroyed, once by the Babylonians and five centuries later by the Romans

- Jerusalem Day, when we conquered the Eastern part of the city, and much more, in the Six-day war.

- Only Yom Kippur is a purely religious holiday, but in our mind it irrevocably connected with the terrible war of 1973.

On each of these occasions, year after year, there are special classes explaining its meaning, imprinting its significance. The climax is the Seder on the eve of Passover, commemorating the exodus from Egypt, when in every Jewish home around the world an identical ceremony takes place. Every member of the family, from the oldest to the youngest, has a role and every sense - seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling and touching - is engaged. No Jew, however secular he may be, is ever free from the memory of this hypnotizing event in his childhood, experienced in the warmth of the assembled family.

In the mind of the child, all these events become intermingled. My wife Rachel, who for many years has been a teacher of the first and second elementary school classes, says that the children do not really understand who came before whom - the Romans or the British, the Babylonians or the Arabs.

The cumulative effect of this is a world-view in which Jews at every period in every country had been threatened with annihilation and had to fight for their lives. The whole world is, always was and always will be, "against us". God - whether he exists or not - has promised us our country, and no one else has any right to it. This includes the Palestinian Arabs, who have lived there for at least 13 centuries.

With such an attitude, it is hard to make peace.

Now let's take a Palestinian child. What does he learn?

- That they belong to the Arab people, who had a glorious empire and a flourishing civilization in the Middle Ages, when Europeans were still barbarians, and who taught Europe science and brought it enlightenment.

- That the barbarian Crusaders perpetrated a horrendous bloodbath in Jerusalem and ravished Palestine, until they were driven out by the great Muslim hero, Salah-al-Din (Saladin).

- That the Palestinians were humiliated and oppressed for many centuries by rapacious foreigners, first the Turks and then the European colonialists, who brought the Zionists to Palestine in order to suppress all hope of the Arabs achieving freedom in their own countries.

- That in the great Nakba (calamity) of 1948, half the Palestinian people were driven out of their homes and country by the Zionists, and that since 1967 all the Palestinians have been vegetating either as refugees or as victims of an endless, cruel occupation. 

Every Palestinian child grows up with a deep feeling of resentment and humiliation, the feeling of being the victim of a terrible injustice, able to redeem his people only by violent struggle, heroism and self-sacrifice.

How to make peace between two peoples in the grip of two contradictory, seemingly irreconcilable, narratives?

Certainly not by diplomatic maneuvers. These can ease the situation temporarily, but cannot in themselves put an end to the conflict. The history of the Oslo agreement shows that without dealing with the root causes of the conflict imbedded in the minds of the peoples, an agreement is nothing but a short-lived cease-fire.

Peace is a state of mind. The main task of peace-making is mental: to get the two peoples, and each individual, to see their own narrative in a new light, and - even more important - to understand the narrative of the other side. To internalize the fact that the two narratives are two sides of the same coin.

This is mainly an educational undertaking. As such, it is incredibly difficult, because it first has to be absorbed by the teachers, who themselves are imbued with one or the other of these world-views.

Let me tell you a little story. Rachel was teaching her class the Biblical story of how Abraham bought a plot in Hebron from Ephron, its owner, in order to bury his wife, Sarah. First Ephron offered the plot for free, and only after many entreaties named a price, 400 silver shekels, saying "What is that betwixt me and thee?" (Genesis 23.)  

Rachel explained to her children that that is the way business is conducted between the Bedouin in the desert even now. It is crass to come straight out with the price, one has to offer it first as a gift. Thus the transaction becomes polite and life more civilized.

In the intermission, Rachel asked the teacher of the parallel class how she had explained the chapter to her pupils. "Simple," she answered, "I told them that this is a typical example of Arab hypocrisy. You can't believe a word they say. They offer you a gift and than demand a high price!"

For peace to become possible, you need to change a whole mentality. That is what my friends and I, in the Israeli Peace Bloc Gush Shalom, are trying to do.

Is this possible at all?

Speaking here, in the center of what used to be the capital of Prussia, I am reminded of my childhood, when I was a pupil in what was then Prussia, which was then still governed by the Social Democrats.

Once, when I was 9 years old, in pre-Hitlerite Hanover, the teacher was speaking about the statue of Hermann the Cherusker in the Teutoburger forest. "Hermann stands with his face to the arch-enemy (Erzfeind)," she said. "Children, who is the arch-enemy?" All the children answered in unison: "France! France!"

Today, after centuries of war, Germany and France are not only allies, but partners in the glorious enterprise of a united Europe.

If this could happen here, peace is possible anywhere.

Uri Avnery is a founding member of Gush Shalom (Israeli Peace Bloc). In his teenage years he was an independence fighter in the Irgun (1938-1942), and later a soldier in the Israeli Army. A three-time Knesset member (1965-1973, and 1979-1983), Avnery was the first Israeli to establish contact with the Palestinian Liberation Organization leadership, in 1974. During the war on Lebanon in 1982 he crossed "enemy lines" to be the first Israeli to meet with Yasser Arafat. He has been a journalist since 1947, including 40 years as Editor-in-Chief of the newsmagazine Ha'olam Haze, and is the author of numerous books on the conflict. 

I heard then read President George Bush's speech on the war on terror last Thursday while my wife and I enjoyed a wonderful two-day, two-night train journey across most of the United States, from Chicago to San Francisco. But I only fully grasped the meaning of Bush's "global war on terror" when I arrived here and had a useful discussion with one of my sons on the fantasy football league that he and my other son in Beirut are deeply engaged in.

For readers who may not follow these things closely, fantasy football is a virtual world over the Internet in which individuals create their own teams by choosing real players from the existing rosters of the National Football League. Every week the performances of the real players are tallied to give the fantasy team a score, and the fantasy team with the highest score at the end of the season wins. The exciting week-to-week interaction between the actual and imagined worlds makes it hard to separate fantasy from realityŠ which brings me back to George Bush's speech and policy on terrorism.

My conclusion after this rich week of travel and conversation is that sensible middle class Americans get on with the hard work of making a living in challenging times, while their federal government in Washington conducts a fantasy foreign policy based more on make-believe perceptions and imagined realities. The latest public opinion poll figures here bear this out, showing that about one-third of Americans approve of Bush's handling of the Iraq war, while nearly two-thirds disapprove -- a sharp reversal of the situation two years ago.

The long train ride through the American heartland was an opportunity to visually see the varied beauty of this land and the socio-economic variety of its inhabitants, and to engage a small sample of ordinary Americans about the problem of terrorism and how they relate to it in their everyday lives. The Americans I spoke to -- a computer engineer from Denver, a train service employee from Chicago, a retired professor from Omaha, a seminary student from South Carolina, a young university engineering graduate from Alabama, among others -- expressed lingering anger about 9/11 and concern about a future attack. They also seemed perplexed about two important points: why this terror threat remains so vivid, and why so many people around the world criticize the United States.

I sensed a great disconnect in America today between the sentiments and perceptions of ordinary citizens and the rhetoric and foreign policies of their federal government, articulated again last week by Bush's cosmic speech about fighting the new global threat of Islamist jihadi terrorism. Bush and his ideological warhorses in Washington want to take this fight to the enemy in Iraq and elsewhere and keep fighting until freedom prevails everywhere. Ordinary Americans would settle for a more effective, productive policy that makes them feel safer at home and less opposed around the world. Bush's speech at the National Endowment for Democracy last week reaffirmed to me that Washington's policy to fight terrorism is a mishmash of faulty analysis, historical confusions, emotional anger, foreign policy frustrations, worldly ignorance, and political deception, all rolled into one. The fundamental flaw is that Bush confuses and conflates a range of separate issues that have very different causes and consequences. As a result, he formulates an ineffective or even counter-productive strategy on the basis of distorted analysis and a wrong reading of the symptoms and causes or terror.

He sees the Islamist jihadi movement of Osama Bin Laden, Ayman Al-Zawahiri and Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi as a global totalitarian threat in the same tradition as Communism and fascism, and sees all acts of terror, against American, Arab, European or Asian targets, as emanating from a single, common inspiration. This is nonsense taken to peculiarly Texan heights of intellectual contortion and confusion.

He completely ignores the impact of American, Israeli and other foreign policies on the mindsets of hundreds of millions of people in the Arab-Asian region, whose degraded political and economic environment eventually spawns the desperate and futile criminality of terrorism. This is willful political blindness that makes the analytical basis of American foreign policy a laughing stock around the world.

He correctly notes that more democratic, prosperous and free societies in the Arab-Asian region would spawn fewer terrorists, but he refuses to acknowledge that America's war-making, military-based approach to promoting democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq is more feared than admired in our troubled region, and creates more resistance to, than embrace of, America's rhetoric and policies.

He wildly exaggerates the capacity of Bin Laden-style jihadi terrorists to achieve their goals, which he correctly identifies as ejecting the U.S. and other foreign armies from the region, toppling Western-supported Arab regimes, and imposing their vision of Islamic rule. He also grossly misdiagnoses the relationship between the jihadi terrorists and regimes such as Syria and Iran, both of which have established records of political enmity and warfare against such Islamist movements.

Bush keeps making the same speech about fighting terror and promoting freedom around the world month after month, but with progressively less credibility with his own citizenry on every occasion. The cautious, sensible wisdom of ordinary Americans is challenging the emotional zealotry and reckless global militarism of the Bush foreign policy team. This is because Bush's policies have proved less effective than the rousing rhetoric of his speeches, and after a while Americans prefer genuine security to perpetual warfare, and reality to fantasy.

Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.

Source: TomPain.com

Two men shot Muhammad Al-Durra five years ago this week, on Sept 30, 2000, two days after the outbreak of Intifada II: The occupation soldier who shot the fatal bullet that killed him, and the photo journalist who shot the iconic picture that immortalized him.

Muhammad, of course, was the 12-year old boy killed in the arms of his father, who had vainly tried to shield him from harm as both crouched, compressed and trapped, between a low wall and a large metal barrel at the Netzarin Junction.

The harrowing image, filmed by Palestinian cameraman Talal Abu Rahma for France 2 television, carries the emblematic power of a battle flag. Its heart-rending intensity, its fevered veracity, puts it beyond all rational understanding. It is a lasting image of the war against the Palestinian people and how Israel has conducted it.

Hundreds of poems have been written about the boy. Several countries, including Egypt, Tunisia and Belgium, have issued stamps commemorating the event. Parks and streets (including one in Cairo, where, tellingly, the Israeli Embassy is located) have been named in his honor.

Yes, that image has encoded its dark derangement in our consciousness, attesting to how a picture, clichés aside, is worth a thousand words, how we live in a world today where a verbal matrix is not the only one in which the articulation and conduct of the mind’s eye are conceivable.

For in its gruesome starkness, its distinctive dread, that video (and choose here whatever frame you want) jettisons all of the Palestinian conflict’s subplots — checkpoints, collective punishment, targeted assassinations, land grabs, home demolitions — and leaves it bare for us all to see.

Blow up one of these frames, or put it under a magnifying glass, as I have done, and what strikes you most of all is the blood pooling under the boy’s legs, an image more chilling than the depiction of any war scene.

The death of Muhammad was the picture seen around the world because photographs transcend language barriers and are relentlessly direct in the message they strive to convey.

“Ever since cameras were invented in 1839,” wrote the late literary critic Susan Sontag in “Regarding the Pain of Others,” a follow-up to “On Photography,” her earlier book on the subject, “photography has kept company with death.”

You stop in your tracks here, till you read on: “Once the camera was emancipated from the tripod, truly portable, and equipped with a range finder and a variety of lenses that permitted unprecedented feats of close observation from a distant vantage point, picture-taking acquired an immediacy and authority greater than any verbal account in conveying the horror of mass-produced death.”

Not satisfied with the dictum that a picture is worth a thousand words, Israeli officials and their apologists in the US and elsewhere have turned it upside down to read that a picture is worth a thousand arguments — namely that the boy died in the crossfire at the hands of Palestinian militants, not Israeli soldiers. Humbug!

Since the Intifada started, and since that provocative walkabout by Ariel Sharon on the grounds of the Al-Aqsa Mosque that triggered it, five years ago today, the Palestinians — left unable to choose how they lived, only how they died — turned from stone-throwing to suicide-bombing, and the Israelis turned from machine guns to tanks and Apache helicopters.

According to the latest figures put out by the United Nations Children’s agency, UNICEF, 542 Palestinian children have been killed over the last five years. Children under occupation continue to live mutilated lives, many of them, according to the UN agency, “suffering emotional problems,” like speech impediments, bedwetting, crying, panic attacks and temper tantrums, symptoms that manifest themselves in adult life as aggressive behavior.

That picture of 12-year old Muhammad Al-Durra embodies that human devastation. It joins that pantheon of iconic pictures from around the world — the horrific image of the execution of a Vietcong prisoner in a Saigon street by a Vietnamese police officer in 1968; John Filo’s shot of a girl wailing over the body of a slain Kent State student in 1970; that shot from Vietnam in 1972 of a little girl running — naked and screaming — from a napalm bombing toward the lens of Nick Ut’s camera; and most recently, a hooded Iraqi prisoner standing on a box with wires connected to his hands.

All these pictures, like that depicting the death of Muhammad, are not just iconic, but impactful as well, in the way they both represent a radical transformation of how news is delivered and how, through them, we define our objective reality.

I will conclude with a quote from an unlikely source — Donald Rumsfeld. Yes, none other than the American secretary of defense.

At an angry Senate subcommittee hearing in May, 2004, following the release of those photos of grinning American soldiers humiliating their Iraqi prisoners — photos that inspired moral outrage all over the world — Rumsfeld testified, unwittingly attesting to the power of the craft of photography: “It is the photographs that give one the vivid realization of what actually took place. Words don’t do it. ....You see the photographs and you get a sense of it, and you cannot help but be outraged.”

At that Netzarine Junction, almost exactly five years ago, the camera did not blink. It did not lie. It recorded reality in a visual way that will be etched in our consciousness for generations to come.

Source: Arab News (www.arabnews.com) . Courtesy of: PalestineChronicle.com

We had better start preparing for a decline in global oil supply

Are global oil supplies about to peak? Are they, in other words, about to reach their maximum and then go into decline? There is a simple answer to this question: no one has the faintest idea.

Consider these two statements: 1. “Last year Saudi Aramco made credible claims that as much as 500 billion-700 billion barrels remain to be discovered in the kingdom.” 2. “Saudi Arabia clearly seems to be nearing or at its peak output and cannot materially grow its oil production.”

The first comes from a report by Energy Intelligence, a consultancy used by the major oil companies(1). The second comes from a book by Matthew Simmons, an energy investor who advises the Bush administration(2). Whom should we believe? I have now read 4000 pages of reports on global oil supply, and I know less about it than I did before I started. The only firm conclusion I have reached is that the people sitting on the world’s reserves are liars.

In 1985, Kuwait announced that it possessed 50% more oil than it had previously declared. Had it just discovered a new field? Had it developed a new technology, which could extract more oil from the old fields? No. OPEC, the price-fixing cartel to which it belongs, had decided to allocate production quotas to its members based on the size of their reserves. The bigger your stated reserve, the more you were allowed to produce(3). The other states soon followed Kuwait, adding a total of 300 billion barrels to their reserves(4): enough, if it existed, to supply the world for 10 years. And their magic oil never runs out. Though extraction has long outstripped discovery, Kuwait posts the same reserves today as it claimed in 1985(5).

So we turn to the US Geological Survey for an answer, and find that its estimates of global oil supply are as reliable as the Pentagon’s assessments of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. In 1981 it said we possessed 1719 billion barrels of oil(6). In 2000, 2659(7). Yet the discovery of major oil fields peaked in 1964(8). Where has it come from?

It is true to say that oil reserves are not fixed. As technology improves or the price increases, oil that was formerly too expensive to extract becomes available. But the oil geologist Jean Laherrere points out that the survey’s estimate “implies a five-fold increase in discovery rate and reserve addition, for which no evidence is presented. Such an improvement in performance is in fact utterly implausible, given the great technological achievements of the industry over the past twenty years, the worldwide search, and the deliberate effort to find the largest remaining prospects.”(9)

The current high oil prices are the result of a shortage of refineries – exacerbated by the hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico – rather than a global shortage of crude. But behind that problem lurks another. Last week Chris Vernon of the organisation PowerSwitch published figures showing that while total global oil production has risen since 2000, the production of light sweet crude – the kind that is easiest to refine into motor fuels – has fallen, by two million barrels a day(10). This grade, he claims, has already peaked. The refinery crisis results partly from this constraint: there aren’t enough plants capable of processing the heavier grades.

And next in the queue? Who knows? All I can say is that Bush himself does not appear to share the Geological Survey’s optimism. “In terms of world supply,” he said in March, “I think if you look at all the statistics, demand is outracing supply, and supplies are getting tight.”(11) What has he seen that we haven’t?

If the figures have been fudged, we’re stuffed. That might sound extreme, but it is not my conclusion. It is that of the consultants hired by the US Department of Energy. In February this year, the department released a report called “Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, & Risk Management”.(12) I say “released”, for it was never properly published. For several months the only publicly available copy was lodged on the website of the Hilltop High School in Chula Vista, California.(13)

The department’s consultants, led by the energy analyst Robert L Hirsch, concluded that “without timely mitigation, the economic, social, and political costs will be unprecedented.” It is possible to reduce demand and to start developing alternatives, but this would take “10-20 years” and “trillions of dollars”. “Waiting until world oil production peaks before taking crash program action leaves the world with a significant liquid fuel deficit for more than two decades”, which would cause problems “unlike any yet faced by modern industrial society.”(14)

Of course, we have been here before. Oil analysts and environmentalists have warned of disappearing reserves ever since drilling began, and they have always been proved wrong. According to people like the Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg, this is because the industry is self-regulating. “High real prices deter consumption and encourage the development of other sources of oil and non-oil energy supplies”, he says. “Since searching costs money, new searches will not be initiated too far in advance of production. Consequently, new oil fields will be continuously added as demand rises. ... we will stop using oil when other energy technologies provide superior benefits.”(15)

It is beginning to look as if he is wrong on all counts. As the Economist magazine pointed out on September 10th, “demand for petrol is pretty inelastic in the short term”(16), because people still have to go to work, however much it costs. According to the analyst it cites, “it would take a doubling of petrol prices to reduce American petrol consumption by just 5%.”(17) Lomborg’s idea that companies can just go out and find new oil when demand rises suggests that he believes geology is as malleable as statistics. One day – or so we should hope – a superior technology will certainly emerge, but cheap alternatives to liquid fuels are currently decades away. Yes, the pessimists have been crying wolf for almost a century. But better that, perhaps, than crying “sheep” when the wolves appear.

The Hirsch report has no truck with those who believe in the magic of the markets. “High prices do not a priori lead to greater production. Geology is ultimately the limiting factor”.(18) There are plenty of oil shales, tar sands and coal seams available for turning into liquid fuels, but it would take years and a massive investment before enough came online. Hirsch compares the projections of the oil optimists to those of the gas optimists in the late 1990s, who promised “growing supply at reasonable prices for the foreseeable future” in the US and Canada. Today the same people are bemoaning the deficit. “The North American natural gas market is set for the longest period of sustained high prices in its history, even adjusting for inflation … Gas production in the United States (excluding Alaska) now appears to be in permanent decline”.(19)

“The bottom line,” Hirsch says, “is that no one knows with certainty when world oil production will reach a peak, but geologists have no doubt that it will happen.” Our hopes of a soft landing rest on just two propositions: that the oil producers’ figures are correct, and that governments act before they have to. I hope that reassures you.

Courtesy of http://www.monbiot.com Published in the Guardian 27th September 2005

References:

1. Energy Intelligence, 2005. High Oil Prices: causes and consequences.
http://www.energyintel.com/datahomepage.asp?publication_id=65
2. From Matthew Simmons, 2005. Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy. Wiley. Quoted by Peter Maass, 21st August 2005. The Breaking Point. New York Times.
3. Adam Porter, 15th July 2005. How much oil do we really have? http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4681935.stm
4. Jean Laherrere, 2nd May 2000. Is USGS 2000 Assessment Reliable? http://energyresource2000.com
5. Adam Porter, ibid.
6. J.W. Schmoker and T.S. Dyman, 2000. Chapter RV, U.S. Geological Survey, World Petroleum Assessment 2000. http://energy.cr.usgs.gov/WEcont/chaps/RV.pdf
7. U.S. Geological Survey, 2000. World Petroleum Assessment 2000. Executive Summary. http://pubs.usgs.gov/dds/dds-060/
8. Cited in Aaron Naparstek, 2nd-8th June 2004. The Coming Energy Crunch. New York Press Volume 17, Issue 22.
9. Jean Laherrere, ibid.
10. Chris Vernon, 26th August 2005. OPEC reveal global light sweet crude peaked. http://www.vitaltrivia.co.uk/2005/08/26
11. George W Bush, 16th March 2005. Press conference. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/03/20050316-3.html
12. Robert L. Hirsch, Roger Bezdek and Robert Wendling, February 2005. Peaking Of World Oil Production:Impacts, Mitigation, & Risk Management. US Department of Energy. This is now available at http://www.hubbertpeak.com/us/NETL/OilPeaking.pdf
13. Richard Heinberg, 30th July 2005. Where is the Hirsch Report?www.counterpunch.com
14. Robert L. Hirsch, Roger Bezdek and Robert Wendling, ibid.
15. Bjorn Lomborg, 2001. The Skeptical Environmentalist. Cambridge University Press.
16. No author, 10th September 2005. No Safety Net. The Economist.
17. Philip Verleger, the Institute for International Economics.
18. Robert L. Hirsch, Roger Bezdek and Robert Wendling, ibid.
19. Hirsch et al are citing Cambridge Energy Research Associates, Spring 2004. The Worst is Yet to Come: Diverging Fundamentals Challenge the North American Gas Market. In 2001 they said “The rebound in North American gas supply has begun and is expected to be maintained at least through 2005. In total, we expect a combination of US lower-48 activity, growth in Canadian supply, and growth in LNG imports to add 8.95 Bcf per day of production by 2005.” (R.Esser et al. Natural Gas Productive Capacity Outlook in North America – How Fast Can It Grow? Cambridge Energy Research Associates, Inc. 2001.)

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As the costs begin to escalate in the Gulf States with Congress authorizing $60 billion for rescue and cleanup operations and as fingers point in the Capital, the costs of another quagmire mount—that of the Iraq War. The death and destruction strewn by hurricane Katrina may equal or even exceed the death toll of U.S. soldiers in the Iraq War. But while 6,000 miles separates the two, the links between war overseas and the fate of those in Katrina’s wake are closely interwoven.

Just as policymakers evaluate our nation’s response to Hurricane Katrina so too should they reevaluate our policies in the Persian Gulf.

Cindy Sheehan’s vigil outside President Bush’s ranch and now the Gold Star Families for Peace bus tour bring the human cost of the war into all our living rooms. Most Americans are somewhat aware of the body count for the United States, now amounting to 1,895 dead and 14,362 wounded as of September 8, 2005. Yet most are not aware that the number of Iraqi civilians killed is more than 10 times the number of Americans who have lost their lives.

Most don’t know how many children could have obtained health insurance or how many elementary school teachers could have been hired with the $204.4 billion of U.S. tax dollars spent on the war so far. Most don’t know the enormous financial burden shouldered by the majority of U.S. military families. Most are barely aware of the legion of other costs—economic, human, environmental, legal, social, and more—born by millions of people in Iraq, in the United States, and around the world.

The costs keep mounting. An examination of three of them illustrate why we can no longer “stay the course”:

An Expensive Quagmire: Monthly operations costs in Iraq are estimated at $5.6 billion in 2005. By comparison, the average cost of U.S. operations in Vietnam over that war’s peak eight years was $5.1 billion per month, adjusting for inflation. The Iraq War coupled with Afghanistan could cost more than $700 billion and at its current rate will cause the national deficit to double within 10 years.

The Resistance Continues to Rise: Iraq’s resistance forces remain at 16,000-40,000 even with the U.S. coalition killing or capturing 1,600 resistance forces per month. Suicide attack rates rose to 10 per month in 2005, doubling the rate before the January elections.

The U.S. Military is Beginning to Crumble: Members of the Army National Guard have been hit particularly hard in recent months, with an average of 13.3 deaths per month since the elections, the highest of any period since the 2003 invasion. Over 1 million soldiers have served in Iraq or Afghanistan and nearly 1/3 of active-duty troops have served two or more tours.

These costs illustrate why Iraq policy can no longer be a partisan issue. Today both Democrats and Republicans are recognizing the costs and are beginning to look for common ground alternatives beyond Bush’s call to “stay the course.” Discussions are underway in the halls of Congress, in homes, schools, and workplaces across the United States about stopping this war—how to bring home the troops, and end the quagmire.

Six months ago in official circles the words “withdraw,” “quagmire,” and “exit strategy” were avoided altogether, or spoken only in whispers. Today 60 percent of Americans believe the President’s handling of the war is wrong. Sixty percent of Americans want to bring the troops home and 33 percent want them all brought home immediately. Better yet, Iraqis want that too; close to half of Iraq’s elected parliamentarians have called for the “departure” of foreign troops.

But simply calling to bring the troops home now isn’t enough. The United States owes more than that to the people of Iraq. New exit strategies are appearing rapidly from think tanks, academics, citizens, and members of Congress. This is an important and healthy development. Particularly heartening is a briefing called by Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey for September 15, to bring together experts offering a variety of exit plans. The newfound debate over exit strategies is a useful one, whether in Congress, in the classroom, around the dinner table, or anywhere else.

But whatever the plan, it is time to open the debate and to work toward the common ground that will be required to bring the troops home and internationalize the peace. We need to do this, for the sake of Iraqis but also to help make our own country safe and secure. 

Erik Leaver is a research fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and the policy outreach director for the Foreign Policy In Focus Project. He is the co-author of a new report, “The Iraq Quagmire: The Mounting Costs of War and the Case for Bringing Home the Troops,” available online at: http://www.ips-dc.org/iraq/quagmire/.  Courtesy of FPIF

Hurricane Katrina and its disastrous aftermath have stripped away the Mardi Gras veneer and casino gloss of the Gulf Coast region, and disclosed the stark disparities of class and race that persist in 21st century America.

The growing gap between the rich and the poor in this country is old but underreported news--perhaps in part because so many of the poor also are black. Accordingly, many Americans were surprised that most of the victims of the New Orleans flood were black: Their image of the Crescent City had been one of jazz, tasty cuisine and the good-natured excesses of its lively festivals. 

Where did all those black people come from, they wondered; and where were the white victims?

African Americans make up about 67 percent of the population of New Orleans, but clearly they were disproportionately victimized by the hurricane and its aftermath. And while blacks make up just about 20 percent of those living along the Gulf coast of Mississippi,

Among other things, the monster storm blew away the pretense that race has ceased to matter in the United States. Media coverage of this major disaster has made it clear that poverty and race are highly correlated.

their images dominated media representations of the victims there as well. In addition to race, the common denominator between blacks in both states is poverty. The "Big Easy," has a poverty rate of 30 percent, one of the highest of any large city. The state of Mississippi has the highest percentage of people living in poverty of any state and the second-lowest median income. The state's Gulf Coast experienced an economic boom when casinos were legalized in the early '90s, but that new affluence did little to ameliorate the race/class divide that has deep roots in the region.

Among other things, the monster storm blew away the pretense that race has ceased to matter in the United States. Media coverage of this major disaster has made it clear that poverty and race are highly correlated.

Katrina also unearthed other uneasy truths; including the glaring ineptitude of the federal government, the domestic consequences of the illegal Iraqi invasion and the media's proclivity to employ racial stereotypes.

Critics complain that the overwhelming blackness of the victims may have been a factor in the government's apparent slowness to respond. In a reflection of popular black opinion, hip-hop artist Kanye West went off-script during an NBC benefit concert for Katrina victims and declared, "George Bush doesn't care about black people."

Others have been a bit more circumspect. "If the hurricane had struck a white, middle-class neighborhood in the northeast or southwest, [Bush's] response would have been a lot stronger," the Rev. Calvin Butts, president of the Council of Churches of New York City, said in an interview with London's Observer. "We have an amazing tolerance for black pain," said the Rev. Jesse Jackson, adding that conditions among the evacuees reminded him of "Africans in the hull of a slave ship."

Whatever the motive, federal misfeasance is getting the blame in many media anatomies of the catastrophe. "Three years ago," wrote Tim Rutten in a September 2 Los Angeles Times column, "New Orleans' leading local newspaper, the Times-Picayune, National Public Radio's signature nightly news program, 'All Things Considered,' and the New York Times each methodically and compellingly reported that the very existence of south Louisiana's leading city was at risk and hundreds of thousands of lives imperiled by exactly the sequence of events that occurred this week."

The Times-Picayune, in fact, published a five-part series on the potential for catastrophe and specifically noted the danger to the city's poorest residents. The series, written by John McQuaid and Mark Schleifstein was uncanny in its prescience. "It's only a matter of time," they predicted, outlining a scenario that has gone according to script. "Evacuation is the most certain route to safety but it may be a nightmare," they wrote. "People left behind in an evacuation will be struggling to survive. Some will be housed at the Superdome, the designated shelter in New Orleans for people too sick or infirm to leave the city. … Thousands will drown while trapped in homes or cars by rising waters." The city's black communities were located in the lowest lying areas of the city.

The Times-Picayune series was only one of several insistent warnings. But in the face of these repeated warnings, the federal government failed to step up to the plate. As Joel Bleifuss and Brian Cook noted in a recent piece politics and restructuring of FEMA prevented any meaningful response to the disaster. 

Disaster officials told Knight Ridder news service that "the government wasn't prepared, scrimped on storm spending and shifted its attention from dealing with natural disasters to fighting the global war on terrorism."

The storm's racially disparate impact and the media's inordinate focus on lawlessness and looting has mobilized dozens of African-Americans organizations to mount their own efforts. The Rev. Jesse Jackson has visited the area and joined in an effort to relocate flood victims to clean shelter. Every major civil rights group has announced a program to address the crisis. The Congressional Black Caucus has issued a number of unusually strong statements condemning the Bush administration for its inaction.

This has been a major blow to the GOP's campaign to get more black votes. African Americans are angry at the Bush administration's lackadaisical response to Katrina and its ineptitude is likely to taint other Republicans. What's more, the administration's incompetence has shaken the confidence many Americans once had in our war-time president and has considerably weakened his political hand.

If only this new political understanding hadn't come at the cost of mass displacement and thousands dead.

Salim Muwakkil is a senior editor of In These Times, where he has worked since 1983, and an op-ed columnist for the Chicago Tribune. He is currently a Crime and Communities Media Fellow of the Open Society Institute, examining the impact of ex-inmates and gang leaders in leadership positions in the black community.

In These Times

George W. Bush was in New Orleans to deliver a clear and unmistakable message: Drop Dead. And then, according to various reports, he went off to play golf.

Little in our history can match his administration's astounding non-response to this excruciating human catastrophe.

Before Katrina, even Bush's harshest critics might have found non-credible his leaving tens of thousands of American citizens to suffer and die in utterly gratuitous squalor, disease, hunger and thirst.

Taxpaying American citizens are dying in the heart of a great city because their government can't be bothered to get them clean water. Or a bed. Or to a hospital.

The weather has been clear since Katrina passed. Bush commands the world's most advanced armada of land, sea and airborne vehicles. The resources to save our brothers and sisters are readily available.

But we see our elders, black and white, sitting confused and in pain, dying of heat and thirst and utter neglect in clear, sunny weather while the President of the United States babbles aimlessly and the Secretary of State shops for shoes.

We see babies by the dozen dying of dehydration and hunger where there is no war and no storm, only incompetence and contempt.

Global warming caused this storm. And there are no secrets about the corruption and stupidity that weakened New Orleans's earthen defenses and opened the floodgates.

The Bush junta slashed funds for levees, let the wetlands be drained, let the developers rape and pillage. It assaulted those who warned the city would be laid bare to the storms everyone knew would come.

But even from this unelected gang of thugs and thieves, the horrifying abandonment of New Orleans has taken things to a new level.

Amidst a dire crisis, American citizens put their trust in the government. They walked into the Superdome. And they were utterly, cynically abandoned. No food. No water. No emergency electricity. No organized evacuation. No cleaning of the bathrooms. No disinfectants for the hot, damp, stinking stadium. No provisions for fresh clothing. No medical care for the elderly. No formula for the babies. No sanitary facilities for pregnant women. No insulin for diabetics. No injections for the sick. No policing. No leadership. No airlift of doctors, nurses, EMTs, psychologists, medicines….nothing!

Only a big, empty vacuum, the ultimate symbol of an administration with absolutely nothing in its head or heart.

That the federal government has utterly failed in these lethal days is universally obvious.

Is it because so many of these people are black and poor? Is it because Bush has successfully stolen a second term and just doesn't care? Is it because this gouged and battered organization that was once our government has been so thoroughly exhausted by war and corruption that it cannot or will not manage so basic a task as bringing the necessities of life to its needlessly dying citizens?

Fox News and macho fools like Haley Barbour, the corrupt and inept Republican governor of Mississippi, will rant endlessly about a few looters and the shot that may or may not have been fired at rescue helicopters. We will see endless footage of the African-American family arrested for "stealing" a car so they could escape and live.

But to hear of dead bodies being stacked outside a professional football stadium to avoid further stench where ten thousand Americans can't get water, food or sanitary facilities….To see dazed elders who've just lost their homes or hospital rooms being laid on sidewalks to die…To watch crying children stretched out on the ground, separated from their parents, dehydrated, overheated, starving….this is too much to bear.

How utterly can our nation have failed? How totally bankrupt can we be?

As we mourn our most colorful city, the home of our truest American music, and of so much gorgeous history and culture….we are heartsick and disgraced.

These global-warmed hurricanes will be coming again and again.

And with this ghastly Bush crew, soul-killing scenes like these will define our nation.

Harvey Wasserman's HISTORY OF THE US is available via http://www.harveywasserman.com/ , along with A GLIMPSE OF THE BIG LIGHT: LOSING PARENTS, FINDING SPIRIT, and the upcoming SOLARTOPIA. He is co-editor, with Bob Fitrakis, of DID GEORGE W. BUSH STEAL AMERICA'S 2004 ELECTION? www.freepress.org

Before the Pat Robertson affair is completely swept under the rug by the American media and political establishment, the incident is worth more careful consideration for what it reveals about the state of political life in the United States. It is, after all, not every day that a prominent American and one-time presidential candidate openly advocates the assassination of a foreign head of state.

Robertson issued his call for the murder of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez on his “700 Club” television program Monday. On the same program Wednesday he tried to pull back from the statement, claiming that in urging the US government to “take out” Chavez he was advocating kidnapping rather than killing. After videotape footage was widely distributed on the Internet of his explicit use of the word assassination, Robertson issued a grudging retraction, claiming that he had been speaking “in frustration” over the policies of a foreign leader who had “found common cause with terrorists.”

The American media has largely dismissed Robertson’s comment as though it was a slip of the tongue that, however embarrassing to the individual involved, has no deeper meaning. The multi-millionaire television host and founder of the Christian Coalition has been derided as a buffoon, a crackpot, a political loose cannon—anything to obscure the fact that his remarks reflect the views of wide layers in the US political establishment.

Robertson’s statement followed weeks of intensifying verbal warfare between the nationalist and populist Venezuelan leader and the US government. There were tit-for-tat diplomatic gestures. The Bush administration claimed that Venezuela was not assisting in anti-drug efforts aimed at stopping the flow of cocaine from Colombia. Chavez in turn accused Drug Enforcement Administration agents of spying on his country and suspended cooperation. The State Department then threatened to remove Venezuela’s certification as an ally in the “war on drugs,” which would lead to sanctions against loans from international agencies and other foreign aid, and it denied entry visas to three Venezuelan military officers.

From August 15 to 17, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld visited the South American countries of Paraguay and Peru, holding talks on the deteriorating political situation in neighboring Bolivia, where successive US-backed presidents have been brought down by a peasant-based opposition movement, and condemning alleged outside interference by Chavez and Fidel Castro. “There certainly is evidence that both Cuba and Venezuela have been involved in the situation in Bolivia in unhelpful ways,” Rumsfeld told the press.

Chavez responded to this heavy-handed intimidation with more bravado, making his fourth visit to Cuba in the last nine months and appearing side-by-side with Cuban President Castro on his weekly television show. “The grand destroyer of the world, and the greatest threat,” the Venezuelan leader told his audience, “is represented by US imperialism.”

The New York Times summed up the situation in an article August 19, with the headline: “Like Old Times: US Warns Latin Americans Against Leftists.” It observed that Rumsfeld’s visit had the “throwback feel of a mission during the cold war, when American officials saw their main job as bolstering the hemisphere’s governments against leftist insurgencies and Communist infiltration.” The Times quoted “a senior Defense Department official traveling with Mr. Rumsfeld” who said of Chavez, “A guy who seemed like a comic figure a year ago is turning into a real strategic menace...”

The Times did not spell out the obvious corollary of such a characterization: throughout the cold war, American policy in Latin America was to foment military coups to overthrow hostile regimes, kill their leaders and suppress popular opposition. This policy was implemented in Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Guatemala and other countries.

Such methods are not a historical relic. In 2002, a similar effort was carried out in Venezuela, with open US support. From the perspective of Washington, it failed as a result of poor organization and insufficient ruthlessness: Chavez was detained at a military base rather than murdered, and the threat of a popular uprising produced a panicky retreat by the coup organizers, who released Chavez and fled, allowing him to return to power.

Since then, Chavez has prevailed over a “general strike” organized by the Venezuelan Chamber of Commerce and Venezuelan union leaders in league with the AFL-CIO and State Department, and then won a convincing majority in last year’s referendum on whether he should be allowed to serve out his term in office, which ends in 2006. The huge run-up in oil prices—Venezuela is the fourth largest supplier of the US market—has given Chavez the resources to spend on social measures popular with the vast majority of his country’s impoverished workers and peasants.

This is the context in which Robertson vented his spleen at the Venezuelan president, whose position, in control of a pool of oil of immense economic and strategic significance to the United States, is seen as a serious obstacle to US foreign policy. The TV preacher declared that assassinating Chavez made more sense than another $200 billion war like that which overthrew Saddam Hussein. There was an inadvertent truth embedded in this comparison. Robertson was effectively confirming that the war in Iraq, too, was about oil.

The media commentary on Robertson has been largely aimed at covering up the seriousness of the affair. The right-wing Cincinnati Post observed, “Privately, most people might admit, Robertson’s plan to cap Chavez has a certain forbidden appeal...” But most newspaper editorials have either ridiculed or bemoaned his remarks, while claiming that his sentiments did not reflect those of the US government.

The Washington Post set the tone in an editorial Thursday which expressed vexation that Chavez would be able to use the death threat to validate his claims that the US government seeks to destroy his government. “Mr. Chavez, who, like Mr. Robertson, is infatuated with the absurd, fancies that the United States is out to kill him,” the newspaper said. The Venezuelan president “seems to enjoy portraying himself as a target of US assassins—a charge that he makes without evidence and that has been strongly denied by the Bush administration.”

In its invocation of the “absurd,” the Post conveniently ignores the well-established fact that US administrations, including that of John F. Kennedy, developed and approved of schemes to assassinate Castro. Revelations of US assassination plots became a sufficient political embarrassment in the 1970s to oblige President Gerald Ford to issue an executive order banning such practices.

The fact, moreover, that Chavez has faced a series of CIA-financed destabilization campaigns—and only narrowly survived a US-backed coup three years ago—apparently does not constitute “evidence” in the eyes of the Post, a newspaper which served as one of the principal mouthpieces for the Bush administration’s fabrications about alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

An even more cynical note was sounded by the Los Angeles Times, in an August 24 editorial that began, “A paranoid is never happier than when he discovers that he really does have enemies. So Pat Robertson’s call for the assassination of Hugo Chavez may be just the moment of vindication the Venezuelan president has been waiting for.”

People in the United States know Robertson is a crackpot of “questionable sense or even sanity,” the newspaper added. “But South Americans may see things differently, causing considerable damage to the United States’ already poor reputation in the region.”

Those poor deluded South Americans! They apparently are prone to believe, after a century of US-backed coups and military interventions, that Yankee imperialism is the biggest menace to their national independence and democratic rights.

The Los Angeles newspaper does not seriously examine the implications of its own characterization of Robertson. This is, after all, a man who has played a major role for a quarter century in the Christian fundamentalist right, which exercises immense sway in official Washington. As recently as the 2000 campaign, Robertson played a critical role in the selection of the Republican presidential nominee, throwing his support to Bush against Senator John McCain in the crucial South Carolina primary.

If Robertson is semi-deranged, the same can be said about fundamentalist spokesmen like James Dobson of Focus on the Family and Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, or Republican politicians like Tom DeLay or, for that matter, Bush himself. It is a reality of American political life that ideologies which would once have been considered part of the fascistic lunatic fringe are now treated with respect and deference in the media and official Washington.

Support for political assassination does not put Robertson out of this far-right “mainstream.” We should recall that after the murders this spring of two judges and a judge’s family, at least one Republican senator, John Cornyn of Texas, expressed understanding of the political frustrations directed against the judiciary, while DeLay declared (echoing Robertson) that federal judges were a greater danger than terrorists, and had to be “held accountable.”

It was during the media furor over Robertson’s comments that Christian fundamentalist Eric Rudolph was sentenced to life in prison for the 1996 bombing of Olympic Park in Atlanta, in which one woman was killed and a hundred people wounded, as well as bombings of a gay night club and an abortion clinic. Rudolph, like Robertson, is a representative of the “culture of life” so praised by Bush.

American imperialism is in a blind alley, facing an insoluble social crisis. It has embarked on a course of military aggression, using its residual military superiority in an attempt to offset a weakened economic position. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are only the prelude to even bloodier adventures. In that context, the ravings of a Pat Robertson give a more realistic view of the actual state of mind in Washington than all of the official bloviating from the White House and State Department about “democracy” and “freedom.”

WSWS.org

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The Religious Right: An Anti-American Terrorist Movement

When I was in college, I wrote a research paper that changed my life forever. I had grown up in a fundamentalist Christian family living in the buckle of the Bible Belt where I was fed a steady diet of racism and Cold War anti-communism. My grandfather had been a member of the Klan in the 1920s, and as a high school student, I was saving money to join the John Birch Society. Most personally detrimental to me, however, was the denigration by my high-school-educated parents of higher education. "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing," they exhorted from the Book of Proverbs in the Old Testament. And, when I insisted on attending college, they reminded me incessantly that the wisdom of man is foolishness in the eyes of God. However, getting an education from a fundamentalist, Bob Jones University-like institution would be acceptable. I did not attend Bob Jones, but almost miraculously, given the fact that I was attending a similar institution, I started to think critically, and therefore, from their perspective, my parents' caveat that "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" was validated.

In the second semester of my freshman year, I chose to write a research paper on race. It was 1964, and that summer, the Congress would pass the Civil Rights Act. Throughout my high school years, Martin Luther King was becoming a household word, and few people in my world held anything but contempt for the "colored communist sympathizer."

As I reflect on my innocence at that age, but more importantly, my thirst for knowledge, I recall the hours of reading and research invested in the topic. Specifically, I set out to discover if African Americans were genuinely equal with whites. Pathetically, I was actually seeking evidence for the humanity of blacks. On the one hand, that I needed to research the topic in order to grasp that African Americans were my brothers and sisters was tragic, but on the other hand, that particular research project at that particular time in my life opened one door and closed another permanently, forever, and there was no turning back. I didn't get an A on the paper, but it launched for me a journey of social justice that I have been on ever since.

Today, as I witness the possibility of losing the last shreds of liberty to a fundamentalist theocracy, I am reminded once again of my college research paper and how "dangerous" research, critical thinking, and asking the right questions can be. All those years ago, I extricated myself from the fundamentalist Christian programming of my family and subculture, and now I am watching it threaten to engulf my entire country.

To even attempt to understand the religious right, which many are now naming "Dominionism", one must grasp the mental duress it holds on its followers. I should know; I was one of them. Axiomatic in the worldview of the fundamentalist, born-again Christian is: "I have the truth, I'm right; you don't have the truth, you're wrong." As a result, critical thinking, research, or intellectual freedom of exploration are not only unnecessary, they are dangerous and potentially heretical. Paul Krugman noted in a recent article that while the religious right bashes academia for its "liberal bias", studies of the political persuasions of college and university professors indicate that persons who prefer academia as a lifelong career tend to be more liberal, just as those who prefer the military as a lifelong career tend to be more conservative.( http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/printer_040505H.shtml)
The halls of academia do not spawn the likes of Tim LaHaye or Pat Robertson. Remember, "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing."

But simply shunning critical thinking does not make one a terrorist. What does, however, is the notion that because one "has the truth" and everyone else who believes differently is "wrong", those individuals will be condemned to spend eternity in hell and must be incessantly reminded of their fate and their "inferior" status in the eyes of God. Moreover, because of one's "superior" spiritual status, one has the so-called "divine authority" to subvert, by whatever means necessary, the very machinery of government in order to establish a theocracy in which one's worldview is predominant.

When sufficiently pressed, Christian fundamentalists intractably argue that people are poor because they have not been born again. Like the Puritans of seventeenth-century America, wealth is a sign that one is following the will of God, and poverty indicates that one is not. People are poor because they are doing something to cause themselves to be poor, and whatever that may be, the underlying cause is that they do not have a "personal relationship with Jesus Christ." Increasingly, one sees many faces of color in fundamentalist congregations, but those individuals are almost without exception, born-again Christians who tow the dominionist line with other people of color.
Dominionism deplores the mental health system. Like those who are poor, the mentally ill would not be so if they were born again Christians. After all, mental illness is a label given by the Dr. Phil's of the world to people whose minds have been devoured by Satan. What they really need is Christian conversion and of course, a great deal of medication from the pharmaceutical lobby. The only valid therapist is Jesus; down with Oprah, God bless Joyce Meyer. Obviously, according to Dominionism, government should not be financing mental health programs.

And what about addictions? In case you haven't caught on to the drill yet, Jesus is the answer to that one as well. Who needs a Twelve-Step program? There's only one step: Accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior as soon as possible, and your addictions will be erased faster than those eighteen minutes on the Richard Nixon tapes. (Remind me to write another article on the religious right AS an addiction.)

Christian fundamentalism in "cafeteria style" has chosen which parts of Jesus' teachings it chooses to honor and which not. Preference is always given to the "I am" passages such as those in the Gospel of John in which Jesus says, " I am the door; the bread of life; the way, the truth, and the life; the light of the world; the living water," and so on, supposedly claiming to be God and commanding his listeners to accept him as the only way to live forever with God in heaven and escape eternity in hell. Little attention is given to the Sermon on the Mount and the many passages where Jesus condemns the wealthy and the religious leaders of his time for their callous, hypocritical, mean-spirited absence of compassion. In fact, theologians who pay much attention to Jesus' teachings on compassion are viewed as bleeding hearts, unorthodox, and not really Christian. For this reason, Pat Robertson stated on his 700 Club Program, January 14, 1991: "You say you're supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing. Nonsense. I don' have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist."

Let us not overlook the obvious: Dominionism is about dominion-over women, children, the poor, people of color, alternative sexual orientations, and the earth. It fits so nicely with fascist tyranny.

Christian fundamentalism is fundamentally UN-American. Dominonists clearly desire a revised United States Constitution that will institute a fundamentalist Christian theocracy. As Katherine Yurica has so assiduously reported, the Domionist agenda would shred the Constitution and end the democratic republic our Deist founding fathers hammered out for five grueling months in 1787 in Philadelphia. ( http://www.yuricareport.com/Dominionism/ConstitutionRestorationAct.htm)
In fact, Pat Robertson believes that only Christian people should interpret and benefit from the Constitution. Again, on his 700 Club, December 30, 1981, he stated that "The Constitution of the United States, is a marvelous document for self-government by Christian people. But the minute you turn the document into the hands of non-Christian people and atheistic people they can use it to destroy the very foundation of our society." Never mind that most of the founding fathers did not consider themselves Christian and clearly, adamantly, and unequivocally defended the right of everyone in America to believe-or not believe, as he/she chooses.

Replacing this republic would be the Dominionist theocracy which pronounces itself above the rule of law and claims to be directed by the "higher law" of the Bible. In that society, abortion would be illegal, even in cases of rape or incest; capital punishment would be mandatory in every state, and for some Dominionists, it should be extended to anyone with a sexual orientation other than heterosexual; the nation's entire infrastructure and economy would be privatized; public schools would be turned into essentially Dominionist parochial schools, and no social services would exist except those of faith-based charities. The fastest-growing industry in the nation, the prison system, would undoubtedly find itself at the top of the financial markets as hordes of "unbelievers" were incarcerated. However, given the multitudes of fundamentalist Christian organizations now proselytizing in the nation's prisons, the heathen masses would be given "one more chance" to be born again, hence sending them to prison would be doing God's work and society a favor.

Most egregious, and certainly paralleling terrorism's culture of death is the fundamentalist Christian contempt for life-I repeat: contempt for life. As Benedictine Sister, Joan Chittister notes, being "pro-birth" is not the same as being pro-life. ( http://www.pbs.org/now/society/chittister.html)
Forcing females to have children without providing what they need financially, emotionally, and educationally is a pro-birth agenda that murders countless bodies and souls. Because they don't think the Sermon on the Mount is really very important, these individuals have an appalling disconnect, fawning over the decaying body of a woman in a permanent vegetative state while praising the demise of over 100,000 innocent Iraqi citizens and touting the patriotism of some 1,600 dead U.S. troops.

The religious right of twenty-first century America is anti-American, inherently violent, and a cruel, tyrannical, punitive, force of death and destruction. In its mindset, adult human lives do not matter because the human condition itself is inherently evil resulting in eternal and everlasting punishment in hell unless its members are redeemed in a prescribed manner by the fundamentalist God/man/savior, Jesus Christ. Moreover, with an embarrassingly adolescent flamboyance, Dominionists shamelessly rape, pillage, and desecrate the earth because in the first place, their Bible has given them authority over all things human and in the second place, their "imminent" apocalyptic rapture, transporting them from the human "veil of tears" to live happily ever after in heaven, entitles them to do so. Meanwhile, we the unredeemed, the unbelievers, the poor, the feminists, the gay and lesbian, the disabled, the homeless, the mentally ill, the addicted, and those who are conscientiously following divergent spiritual paths of their choice, are suffering in the wake of Christian fundamentalism's devastation of the economy, the earth, and the human race. But this is what we deserve for not becoming born-again devotees of their Jesus. And we deserve even worse-to burn in hell for all of eternity. Hence, we are expendable, inconsequential, and a force to be conquered, broken, imprisoned, or killed.

In his article, "Feeling The Hate," in the May, 2005 issue of Harpers Magazine, Chris Hedges conjectures that we may well see a civil war in America between the religious right and everyone else who does not identify as such. I do not know if this will happen, but I do know that the demented logic and circular reasoning of "the Bible says" fundamentalists must be challenged and exposed at every turn for what it is: Intellectual, emotional, and spiritual terrorism-un-American, un-democratic, inhuman. Furthermore, I wouldn't be surprised if some of their children, somewhere, sometime, write research papers that prove to the world that "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing."