LA Dodgers a Microcosm of American Society

The LA Dodgers are bankrupt. They do not have the cash to pay their employees’ wages. We are talking about a community here. The Dodgers are a baseball team much loved by its many patrons, as sports teams usually are, whether big or small. And the Dodgers are bankrupt despite recent success—they made the play offs as recently as 2008 and 2009. Why then has this catastrophe engulfed the team? Andrew Gumbel of the UK Observer has explained it.

The fact is that the owner of the team has sucked them dry for his own aggrandisement. It should be a lesson for Americans, especially those who persistently defend the mega rich, people whom they do not know and never will, and people who are richer than they can ever imagine—America’s plutocrats, the corrupt and greedy rich.

Frank McCourt, not the deceased Irish novelist but a car lot magnate, bought the team and bled it dry to support a life of luxury for himself and his family. McCourt bought the Dodgers from News Corp, who had used it to build up a regional sports network. To do it, McCourt borrowed $150m from Bank of America, $75m from Major League Baseball and $196m from Fox, so he had not spent a penny of his own money.

McCourt then sliced off what was most profitable, the stadium car park and the ticket office as his own operations, which charged the Dodgers rent, and, in turn, giving McCourt security to borrow more dollars. He paid himself $5m a year, his wife, Jamie, $2m pa as chief executive, and their two children $600,000 each—one was a student at Stanford University and Goldman Sachs employed the other. McCourt also enjoyed a private jet and four luxurious houses in Hollywood and Malibu. In typical robbing financier style, the money and debt were spread among, and constantly moved between McCourt’s shell companies and subsidiaries to hide what was going on.

And what was going on was that the assets of the team were being stripped and moved into the personal accounts of a single family and a few hangers on.

Yes, it ought to be a lesson for the average American, whether poor and unemployed or middle class and imagining that they are well off. You just do not have a clue, especially you Tea Partiers taken in by rich men’s stunts to keep you on side. The invisible über rich of the USA are taking you all for the same sort of ride as McCourt took the community that supported the LA Dodgers. They are robbing you silly, and too many of you are defending them!

You cheer because they are sending your boys to distant lands to get maimed and killed, and they make money out of armaments and the vast support industry of the military-industrial complex that supports it. Often you don’t even get a badly paid job out of it. They manufacture more and more abroad in low cost countries. You lose your jobs, or the threat is used to keep wages down or to get concessions from the city and the state treasury, and all of it goes into pockets just as McCourt’s did. You don’t know what is going on because they are like McCourt experts in hiding it, and have a gigantic publicity service called the media to feed you anything to keep you confused and divided.

Get real! You Yankees are like the Dodgers fans—being conned!

Are Americans Sick Of War?

A poll by “Pulse Opinion Research” shows that 72 percent of likely voters in the US think that the country is fighting too many wars abroad. Operations continue incessantly overseas and new ones always arrive when old ones seem to be getting settled, like Libya after Iraq. The US people increasingly want to know when the military will finally listen to the people and step back.

Americans see the country deep in hock, and millions unemployed and underemployed, while millions more, even middle class people, worry about the possibility of getting the bullet—fired! Or their compensation slashed in some economy drive. Yet administrations always have plenty of money to fight foreign wars. Something Americans can do without in these allegedly hard times is their tax dollars wasted on useless wars.

With Americans wanting out, this administration is doing little. Yet Obama campaigned under the banner of “Change”, of which ending war was one prominent constituent part, but like Clinton he has broken every promise and spinelessly has bent over to the militarists and the armamaments manufacturers, introducing the US into more wars on his watch. Even a Republican presidential candidate, Ron Paul, thinks these wars “endless” and “unwinnable”.

Is Paul doing the same as Obama? Codding the voter? Elections in the USA are an utter fraud. It does not matter who wins, the same policies—aimed at keeping the military and industrial barons and their financiers in banking and insurance swimming in profits—are retained, and the professional lobbyists in Washington with their bucketloads of bribery dollars can always get their own way with grasping representatives. They all have their price, and it isn’t high for the filthy rich minority with enough megabucks to control the USA.

Yankees threw off the yoke of the English, but now they'll have to throw off the yoke of their home grown oppressors. The Brits had to do the same. They threw out the king in the seventeenth century, but kings returned. In the nineteenth century, they had to strike and riot to get the two reform acts passed that pulled the greedy rich into some order for a couple of centuries. Now the British will have to do it again, too!

US Middle Class ready to Revolt against Wall Street Parasites and Financial Terrorists

The Max Keiser Report 65

Why the US has a Perpetual War Economy

During WWII, government decisions stopped all market fluctuations. A major power in the middle of a serious war, cannot allow markets to boom and bust. Economic effort was singularly aimed at victory. Besides victory, people just worried about what things would be like once the war was over. The Americans were not themselves suffering from bombing. They never have done. So, an extra year of war was not nearly as great a worry as the question of how the war economy could be switched to peacetime conditions.

Most economic experts thought the transition would involve a violent crisis. Americans were pessimistic. Post-war unemployment, counting women engaged in war work, of up to 20 million were commonly predicted, based on the heavy readjustment crisis after WWI. Things would be no different after WWII, they predicted.

Then there occurred the American economic miracle—the demobilization of ten million people without any upheavals. Transition to a peacetime economy was smooth. Unemployment rose to less than four million—half as much as before the war. The US had mild recessions in 1946, 1949, and 1954 but nothing like a real crisis. America's faith in heaven on earth revived, and the specter of 1929 faded.

Economic optimists quickly became confident, for three reasons:

1. the American economy was less speculative, as post war stock exchange transactions show, and speculation was strictly controlled compared with 1929, when reckless gamblers used unlimited credit to drive stock to precipitous heights—something that is again familiar
2. Keynesian principles were applied—a downward trend in the economy was helped by a dose of inflation, and conversely an unhealthy boom invited deflationary measures such as a gentle credit squeeze.
3. the main one, now obviously swept under the carpet, was rearmament—the perpetuation of the war economy. After WWII, the US continued to spend twenty times as much money on its armed forces and military aid abroad as before the war. In the early post war years, between 12% and 15% of the national income was directly or indirectly spent on war and war preparations, employing 10-12 million people on the Federal budget, near enough the same number as were unemployed pre war.

Post war, financial speculation gradually returned, and Keynesianism was abandoned under pressure from the right wing fad of monetarism, and eventually, Reagan and Thatcher abolished all the regulations that had kept banks and markets under control and stable.

As for the third, and most important factor, it never changed! Rather it has become increasingly important. In fiscal year 2010, total US defense spending accounted for 38–44% of estimated tax revenues. Over sixty years after the war, Americans still spend a large fortune on warfare and armaments supporting, with their tax dollars, the death of their own boys, 6000 miles away murdering mainly innocent Moslems, people simply trying to assert their own freedom in their own country. All of this mayhem to avoid giving benefits to those Americans they call idle—people who cannot find work—and profits to billionaires who could do with a lot less.

The US since the last war has maintained a war economy, supporting utterly wasteful and cynical military adventures all over the world. And the American people seem to be happy it should remain the case when the federal government could be creating useful jobs through civilian projects. Alternatively, why not just give the unemployed sufficient benefits to live on, so that by spending them they thereby employ others! Every tax dollar spent by the government at the grass roots of society is multiplied five times over, as it is successively spent.

A fabulously wealthy country spends over a third of its tax revenue supporting the military industrial complex, when it could transform derelict cities like Detroit, and the decaying suburbs of many other famous cities, taking millions of US citizens off drugs and tranquilizers by letting them live decently. Yet the childishly unselfcritical Yankees profess bafflement that the wicked world does not love them! Will enough Americans ever realize that they are being treated with contempt by the political caste in Washington, the gentlemen soldiers of the ruling megarich elite? They are too ready to believe the bullshit they are constantly fed.

Protests Make Political Parties More Responsive

Latin American protests have caused deaths and national crises since the 1970s, but democratic reforms too. Moises Arce, an associate professor of political science in the Missouri-Columbia College of Arts and Science, has found that political protests, although they can be violent, can bring about stronger political parties and more responsive policies (published in Party Politics):

Many of these protests in Latin America have led to changes in policies and the direction of the government. In some cases, protests may ultimately be helpful for democracy. The established parties may be taking things for granted. Political protests become forms of street accountability. The change that we have seen after many of these protests is the creation of new parties that better represent the popular interests of society, and, therefore, serve as more effective communication channels for political discourse.

By studying political activity and parties in 17 Latin American countries since 1978, Arce found that most protests were because economic policies favored the business sector. Most recent policies have given Latin America large scale economic stability but little improvement from the general public's perspective. There is still a high level of unemployment, and the public has become more knowledgeable of political corruption:

People have died, so it's unfortunate that government reforms happened that way. Currently, almost all Latin American countries have left or left leaning presidents who tend to be more responsive to popular demands and will create a new political equilibrium between those popular demands and the business sector.

Politicians often argue that protests are disruptive and should be suppressed, and that protests are unnecessary in a democracy, but they are happening and have not damaged democratic stability. Of course, generally the political right are ultimately not interested in democracy, only their own power, and many so called Liberals, and even New Labour “socialists” in the UK, are dupes of the rich anyway, so the trend towards unrestrained global capitalism means that “the existing power structure will be forced more and more to directly violate its own formal democratic rules”, as Slavoj Zizek puts it. The Patriot Act in the US and similar repressive legislation laid on incredibly thckly by the Blair and Brown governments are far more dangerous to democracy than a few protests, or even the terrorism attacks they pretend to be to prevent.

People in Latin America are becoming tolerant of protests. In Europe and the US, politicians are getting more and more scared of it. Democracy needs both parties and protests. We have the duff parties. All we need now, according to Arce, are more and more determined protests.

Impeach the War Criminals

When American POWs were shown on TV by the Iraqis, Donald (von) Rumsfeld suddenly became a spouter of international law, the Geneva Convention. Why then was he, and the US leadership not interested in international law when they ignored the rule of the UN and started the war? Are we supposed to admire or believe this hypocrisy? Saddam was not the only criminal. These men were too, and they know it. That is why the US still refuses to ratify the International Court of Justice.

Mr Blair boasted that the removal of Saddam was a good deed in itself, so it did not matter that he lied to Parliament and the country over WMDs. Saddam, he told us killed 300,000 of his own people and they were buried in mass graves, but the invasion led to more deaths, and that is justified in Blair”s perverted mind. In the Vietnam war, Blair’s ally in mutual sycophancy, the USA, had already killed 60,000 of its own soldiers fighting an unjust war, and killed two million Vietnamese, as well as destroying the country with defoliants and poisons, and damaging the genetic make up of the Vietnamese forever with horrific results. What does the selective Christian conscience say about all this?

Bush was not elected but twice defrauded the US electorate to get into power. Yet, the people of the US seem unabashed that this man should have led their sons into a mad adventure on the basis of hatred of Moslems, or greed for oil. The call among peace loving and democratic people now is to punish the crypto-Nazis and strengthen the democratic process so that the same disaster cannot happen again.

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Impeach the war criminals Bush and Blair.

Great Angel or Dangerous Psychopath—the US Today

US Popular Opinion

America has a great analyst of their political situation in Noam Chomsky, yet Americans are so indoctrinated by their Brahmin class of plutocrats that they take no notice of what he has to say, which is a lot, it is blunt, easy to comprehend and it is true. US politicians harp on about their uniquely brilliant democracy, but while most Americans will parrot what is said out of misguided patriotism, they just do not believe it. They do not believe they create their own institutions or run their own country. Pollsters find 80% of them think the government is controlled by a few big interests looking out for themselves and not for the people. Popular opinion is that less than 20% think much of Congress, yet voters re-elect most Senators and Representatives, though they have no real choice and play no real part in running the country.

In a true democracy, people would feel they are shaping their own lives, and would therefore, Chomsky says, be celebrating 15 April, the day when taxes are paid. It was the day when the financial flesh was put on the democratically chosen skeleton, when people publicly put their money where their democratic mouth is, to implement policies they had chosen. It is nothing like that. It is a day people resent because they are obliged to pay their hard earned tax dollars to maintain policies and programs they mostly find useless at best and objectionable at worst. They do not feel they have any stake in government, and none in leading corporations banked up by government. Voters have little regard for most institutions, little say in what they decide, and little enthusiasm for having to finance it.

Political issues hardly bear on electoral campaigns, and many electors, maybe most, are not even sure what the issues are. How then is democracy possible? US Elections are run by the PR industry and so are effectively bought by the parties and candidates with the deepest pockets. The Obama campaign was no different, as the annual award by the advertising industry for the “best marketing of the year” shows. It went to Obama’s campaign which beat Apple! Advertisers work on mood not meaning, and it works! Obama had little definite to say about the issues, but concentrated on the warm feeling words “hope” and “change”. When people vote for such objectively meaningless slogans, it shows that hope and change are what they do not have. It should tell the politicians that people felt hopeless, and did not like what they had, and that ought to be a warning. It shows that society is crumbling at its foundations.

The Reality of Capitalism

No feeling of hope exists in these depressed days, but the Great Depression was different. In the depths of despair people did not lose hope, they always felt there was a way through, things would come good. Admittedly, it took a world war and many deaths before brighter days came after the Second World War when the Brahmin business classes of the US built an incredible, yet unremarked propaganda campaign to eliminate all ideas of proper democracy, and social feeling while promoting social Darwinism, the false belief that survival of the fittest should be the norm of civilized communities, that selfishness was the essence of humanity as it was supposed to be in Nature. Capitalism was driven by greed and selfishness, and those who could not stand it went to the wall, or rather had a pauper’s funeral… and that was supposed, under the “Darwinian” capitalist ideology, to have been what society was all about.

Yet what did this capitalism actually do? It was a production and marketing strategy, not a creative one, except perhaps in PR and labor productivity. Where did technological innovations like computers and the internet come from? Overwhelmingly from research institutions like universities, mainly funded by the Pentagon. In other words, the principle fount of new products was a dynamic and creative public sector of the economy. Capitalism was not where technological novelties came from. It simply manufactured and distributed them for personal profit after communal endeavors had invented them. Inventions like computers and the internet were in use for decades before private enterprise made use of them for profit. Most of the economy is the same still. So, where is the capitalism that is so much vaunted and praised by the propaganda machine? It does not exist. What exists is this:

1. the public pays the costs
2. the public takes the risks
3. the plutocrats in the private sector take the profits.

The reality of capitalism can no longer be hidden after the collapse and bale out of the banks in the last two years. Saving inept and greedy banks is justified by the “too big to fail” slogan of our cringingly servile governments, who now are exposed as the paid monkeys of the profiteers, none more obviously than Tony Blair. Every attempt since Adam Smith to live purely by supposedly self regulating, free market principles has led to disaster.

If the banks have to be baled out because they are “too big to fail”, they are being treated as public utilities, except that the profit goes to the Brahmin caste, the bankers’ own class. In the UK, the government has had to take a dominant share in some banks, yet has been timid in acting, as a dominant shareholder should, to protect its investment from being siphoned off into private coffers, like some tinpot dictatorship supported by the US, contrary to the will of the local people. That is the democracy exported by America. Whatever is essential in a state must be publicly owned so that the state can make sure it does not fail, but the public get any profits and all of the benefits they produce. That is what a public utility is for.

Change?

As long as important peaks of the economy are protected by the public, our capitalist system is not capitalist, is it? Contrary to Margaret Thatcher’s slogan TINA, or “There is no Alternative”, and as Obama’s slogan of “Change” emphasized, change is possible, but it is undeniably difficult, and needs open public support to counter the well funded vested interests of the plutocrats. Indeed, swifter changes were needed during World War II, and the government made them. Wartime command economy enabled us to win the war, and mixed economies have proven to be more successful in economic history than doctrinaire capitalism. Why then is economic change not happening now? Why is there no firm move to regulate capitalist enterprises, and even to nationalize those that cannot be allowed to fail. Because Wall Street would not get enough out of it.

Better still than nationalization would be to let stakeholders—the workforce and the local community—take over these industries and make them produce what’s needed by the society with the profits going back to the workforce and community, and kept out of the already bulging purses of the mega rich. The trouble is that Americans have been brainwashed to think of such solutions as evil, as socialist or, heaven forbid, as communist. Yet no society, except the cooperatives of Spanish anarchism, has implemented genuine social production. The reason has nothing to do with these alternative systems not being feasible, or even being evil—cooperatives work!—it is because the Washington caste of lobbyists and the capitalist PR industry will not allow it to enter the consciousness of the US public.

Adam Smith, discussing England, pointed out that the principal architects of policy in England—merchants and manufacturers—made sure that their own interests were attended to, however grievous the effect on others, especially the common people of England. The US has remained stuck in this eighteenth century time warp in its economic philosophy. A lot has changed since Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, and, though much of what he wrote remains true, after over 200 years, it is as doctrinaire to stick to an old economics tome for political economy as it is, after 2000 years, to stick unreservedly to the bible for our moral guidance. The function of US “intellectuals” is to suppress any proper consideration of reform of received thinking. Feigning objective advice, in lofty, obscure and profound rhetoric, they emphasize the objections, difficulties and risks of doing things in a better way, intending all along to discredit any progress. They are servants of the rich. The only real difficulty to economic progress is one of public will, and that exists largely because of the PR success of the ruling class.

Trying a Little Self Reflexion

Chomsky says Americans must adopt an often recommended but rarely applied principle—look in the mirror. Before they advocate murderous incursions into foreign countries, they must look at themselves to see whether they practise at home what they preach. Maybe the trouble is the fossilization of ancient practices. From the outset, the American nation was based on “extermination”, as the founding fathers put it, and its image as “an infant empire”, as George Washington put it. These ideas seem to be instilled into the American psyche when no one gains from them except the arms manufacturers and the military industrial complex. They were a poor moral basis to build upon, but were profitable for some, and that makes it all right in America.

So too was slavery immoral. The Civil War should have ended slavery, but, after about twenty years, in the South it started to be introduced again, and with the acceptance of the North. The former slaves were criminalized through spurious acts yielding racist laws against “vagrancy” or “talking too loud”. Much of the black male population were thrown into prison by these petty but seriously immoral laws. The victims found themselves permanently incarcerated, various machinations being used to suspend parole and extend the sentence indefinitely. This body of reintroduced slave labor built the accumulated capital at the base of modern industrial society—that of the mining, steel, cotton and other industries. Black men were worse off than they had been under slavery. Slave owners valued the slave to some degree because they had paid good money for him, and so mostly they took care of him. Now black men were like galley slaves, tormented by jailers, and with no appeal for mercy.

Only World War II ended it. The need to recruit, and the absence of soldiers abroad meant black labor had to be freed for more than the prison jobs they had been doing. The new liberation lasted for several decades after the war in the years of the “Golden Age” of capitalism. Then, from 1980, the incarceration of black men again went up sharply to new heights, higher than anywhere else. It was slavery again, prison slavery. So, today, slavery continues in the US where black men are disproportionately held in penitentiaries, and locked up for absurdly cruel terms. To take the moral high ground over what it perceives as injustice abroad, so as to justify sending punitive armies to correct it, the US should first correct its own faults.

What too of the 80% of the US population that sees their own government as run by big interests looking after themselves? Do they really think the US should export a system that they themselves find so grossly unpopular? When 85% of the US population think their government should cut medical costs from their exorbitant level, and leading Congressmen and Senators use dirty tricks to try to stop it, what right do they have to tell distant countries they should not be corrupt, but copy the US. The US can hardly teach anyone lessons. It needs to learn lessons of its own.

Americans brag about their model of US democracy and the American way of life, but seem unable to compare the image and the reality they experience directly, as revealed by opinion polls. People think the US can take freedom to others, but they do not live up to it themselves. Time after time the principles of freedom and democracy are violated. The self perception of the US is entirely distorted.

Iraq and 9/11

When the US first wanted to go to war in Iraq, Bush and Blair gave their war aims as to make Saddam give up WMD. The great intellectual, Condoleezza Rice, thought he was capable of nuking New York. Opinion polls showed US citizens went to war because they feared danger. Many people in the world hated Saddam, but America was the only country in the world scared of him. Saddam had no WMD, then, suddenly, the reason was that the love of democracy was so strongly in our hearts, it justified killing tens of thousands of innocent Arabs to rid ourselves of one dictator. As if in a totalitarian state, the media and intelligentsia enthusiastically fell for it.

The 9/11 attacks were an attack on US policy in the Middle East in particular, and an attack on the West in general because mostly it supports US policy. None of the intelligence agencies or senior policy advisers doubted it, but it could not be admitted to the public. As far as Al Qaida was concerned, the US was picking on Islam, and they were going to defend themselves, but the propaganda is that the US is too Christian to pick on people.

Though 9/11 was a horrible atrocity, what if Al Qaida had been more ambitious and had more resources, and had bombed the White House, killed the President, established a military dictatorship, tortured hundreds of thousands of people, set up an international terrorist center to overthrow governments and kill people all over the world, and introduced economic reforms that ruined the economy. It would have been terrible. Well, it actually happened on 9/11! On 9/11, 1973, when a rogue state, the US, organized the overthrow of the legitimate president—Allende—and government of Chile. It is never counted as terrible, especially in the US, because it was US terror, US violence. US terror is never terror.

America is psychopathic. its citizens are incapable of self reflexion, and self criticism. Whatever they do, however disgustingly immoral and murderous, is always right. Chomsky says Americans have to learn to look at themselves before they start moralizing and punishing the rest of the world. They should start fearing God, instead of thinking they are His Great Angel.

US Morality? Ignoring Israeli Atrocities

The UN Resolution on the Goldstone Report

US ambassador Douglas Griffiths, opposing the human rights resolution at the UN, said the Goldstone report written by South African Judge, Richard Goldstone, was unfair towards Israel. But Goldstone investigated both sides of the conflict, Israel and Hamas. The 575 page document concluded that, during its incursion into the Gaza Strip, on 27 December 2008, to root out Palestinian rocket squads, Israel:

• used disproportionate force
• deliberately targeted civilians
• used Palestinians as human shields
• destroyed civilian infrastructure.

It also pointed out that Palestinian armed groups, including Hamas, deliberately targeted civilians and tried to spread terror through years of rocket attacks on southern Israel. In fact, the report required both Israel and Hamas to look publicly and fairly into their respective human rights failings in the conflict, and, if they failed to conduct credible investigations within six months, recommended a reference of the offending party to the International Criminal Court prosecutor in The Hague.

So, the report itself is balanced, but the UN resolution emphasized the Israeli part because far more innocents were killed by Israeli professional soldiers than by Hamas fighters. The three week conflict in Gaza left 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis dead. It was the continuation over decades of such one sided “defense” of the territory that until 1948 had been the Palestinians’ for twelve centuries that has caused the hatred of Moslems worldwide. Consequently, the resolution agreed in Geneva called for the UN General Assembly to consider the Goldstone report, and then for UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to report, on Israel’s adherence to the resolution, to the Human Rights Council.

For Washington, justice is a “distraction from the peace process”, according to the US ambassador. Naturally, Israeli foreign ministry spokesman, Yigal Palmor, claimed the resolution “provides encouragement for terrorist organizations worldwide and undermines global peace”. Israel is not the terrorist organization he meant. Meanwhile Ambassador Griffiths continued with the usual pro-Israeli stance of all US administrations:

We had worked for a resolution that recognized the right of a state to take legitimate action to protect its citizens in the face of threats to their security while also condemning violations of international law regardless of the actor.

Read this carefully. “A state has the right to take legitimate action to protect its citizens.” It is true, and is enshrined in the Human Rights Act, but the US ambassador means Israel has the right, not the Palestinians who are actually fighting for the life and land of its people, yet always suffer completely disproportionally in the one sided war going on between Israel and Palestine. Numerous UN resolutions have been directed against Israel, but they lead nowhere because of US intransigence and veto.

In 40 years, Israel has featured in 65 Security Council UN resolutions, passed by two thirds majorities or better in the 15 nation Security Council—often 14 to one, the US! These resolutions have censured and deplored Israel’s actions and policies in respect of massacres of Palestinians, land grabbing since the 1948 partition, destroying Palestinian buildings including homes, making them refugees in their own land, restricting their access to water and electricity, illegal imprisonments, deliberate harassment and settling Israelis in illegal settlements. These are all violations of human rights, yet The US and Israel justify them by the fact that Palestinians protest against them! If someone did it to you, what would you do? Tip your cap in gratitude? Something is seriously wrong with the world when people wronged for half a century are treated as if they are criminals for trying to assert some sort of justice themselves.

For international justice for them is a joke, through US protection of Israel. It is impossible for them to find justice wherever they turn. Insurmountable obstacles are constantly placed in their way, legal channels are blocked, and their human rights are mangled in the interest of US oil imperialism. They have lost their own land, and are promised a share of it, as a Palestinian state but the never get even to share what was theirs sixty years ago. In the end, they only have one course open to them— to fight for their rights—then they are called terrorists.

Is it any wonder that Arab and African countries can only see US double standards in this, and try to use the UN for its proper purpose. The Israelis do all the damage, and the Palestinians get all the blame. Those who believed President Obama would act differently have already been disappointed. Change? He talks the talk but no longer walks the walk, in this key issue of foreign affairs. Typically and especially typical of his predecessor, he insists on a nuclear free Middle East, except for Israel, whose 60 nuclear bombs, though held contrary to the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty never meet any US disapproval while Iran gets threatened with nuclear attack just for enriching uranium for legitimate reasons.

How can the leaders, and indeed the general population, of this immensely powerful superpower, the US, claim to be a moral nation, or even understand what morality is, when they have such an immoral attitude to some of the most ill treated people in the world. The Palestinians are treated as less than dogs. So much for the respect the meretriciously Christian Americans have for God and His creation, and Christ’s famous saying that to mistreat anyone is to mistreat himself in the same way!

At the root of the US hypocrisy is the unqualified protection America gives its Middle Eastern colony, Israel. The US can veto anything brought before the UN Security Council blocking any call to bring Israel to justice before the International Criminal Court. Israel therefore knows it stands above international law. It can therefore act just as it likes to its Arab neighbours, launching attacks wherever it fancies. The illegal segregationist wall stretches through the West Bank to protect the illegal Israeli settlements being expanded there—Arab land—and Gaza is still being illegally blockaded.

As the US ambassador said, countries have the right to self defense, and that is what the Palestinians have been doing, but the US has its own agenda behind its immoral attitude to foreign policy. It is the agenda of the magnates and militarists who make megabucks out of other people’s distress, and so have a permanent policy of causing it, not just in Palestine. It is time for American liberals and the genuinely Christian American, if any exist, to speak out against the criminality of their own leaders serving those who sacrifice human beings to the insatiable Moloch of greed and war bucks, America’s caste of robber barons.

Gaza: Israeli Criminals let off the Hook Again

In a special session, 25 members of the 47 nation UN body voted in favor of the resolution that chastised Israel for failing to cooperate with the UN mission led by South African jurist Richard Goldstone. Another 6 voted against—the US and Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Slovakia and Ukraine—while 16 others abstained or did not vote. Britain, France and three other members declined to vote. Russia and China, two permanent members of the UN Security Council, were among those voting yes.

Britain, which used to pride itself on its respect for law and for human rights did not vote, according to David Milliband, the UK's Jewish Foreign Secretary, because it had not finished discussing the issue, effectively colluding with Israel to keep its generals and officials from prosecution. The British Foreign Office prevaricated last month, over a private visit to London of Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak and his wife until they had immunity from prosecution.

Moreover, the United Nations itself ignores Israel's flouting of Security Council Resolutions and has shelved the report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, its own careful investigations into Israel's crimes.

Israel says focusing on its actions in Gaza could derail the start of talks toward a peace deal and the establishment of a Palestinian state, objectives Israel has consistently opposed in every way practical. “Any action against Israel in this area is incompatible with negotiations and concessions”, said Eytan Gilboa of Bar Ilan University.

Goldstone, a noted judge, who is a Jew and has been under strong pressure from Zionist Jews and Israelis, concluded that both Israel and Hamas, the militant ruling party of Gaza, elected by the Palestinian people, committed war crimes and possible crimes against humanity during the conflict.

So the responsibility was evenly divided between Israelis and Palestinians. The Palestinian people, having been consistently failed by international bodies and the international legal system, it can scarcely surprise anyone that they have tried to take matters into their own hands. Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto did the same—they fought back even though against the odds. why is it right for Jews to fight fascist oppression but it is not right for Arabs to do it against Israelis, Jewish colonists in the US colony of Palestine.

Israel is portrayed as the minnow even though it has nuclear weapons and every modern WMD it wants from their protectors the USA. The Palestinians have almost nothing, though Israel launched its vicious attack in response to some rockets fired from Gaza in late December 2008. These rockets were not professionally made military hardware, but are ingenious home made contraptions, little more than self propelled mortar bombs, and quite untargetable. They have caused some casualties and damage to property, but no fair judge can compare it with the full scale professionally equipped onslaught of the Israeli army last January.

And who can doubt the injustice looking at the figures of casualties from the three week long invasion of Gaza by the Israeli troops and their tanks. Almost 1,400 Palestinians—400 children—were killed during conflict, and just 13 Israelis, half by friendly fire! What is moral or defensible about professional soldiers killing defenseless women and children in their homes?

How can the US justify such immoral behavior? How can Obama especially justify it? It is not moral in the least to beat up and murder helpless people, and it is the Palestinians who are helpless not the Israelis. Obama in less than a year has been corralled by the military clique in Washington, yet has won a Peace prize. So too did Kissinger, but he at least gave his back. Why doesn't Obama change? Change was his slogan. Why not try it in foreign affairs as well as in health care? And even there he is struggling. We have to conclude that the Christian-Zionist military axis ruling the US is too strong for anyone. The US people themselves need to respond.

Afghanistan, yet another US Imperialist War

Geoff Simons, author of many books on geopolitics, describes George Bush as a semi dictator who ignored the constitution and pretended that he was a war leader so as to rule by diktat. But before Bush there were plenty of lies, torture and invasions. This legacy has left Barack Obama trapped in a culture that regards military aggression and subversive operations as normal tactics. This is the deep seated, enduring and global militaristic culture with which Obama has to contend.

Before Barack Obama became president, US military strategists briefed him on the war in Afghanistan. He asked them what was their exit strategy from Kabul. Silence! Whatever Obama thought about this, the US are still deeply involved in killing Afghans approaching the anniversary of his election. Obama is surrounded by people in the US intelligence and military who don’t want themselves or their policies subjected to too much scrutiny.

After eight years of fighting in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden remains free, despite the technology of the mightiest power on earth, and the liberal intervention to democratize the country is stuck in the mire of corruption. Al Karzai, the supposed leader of the country, is a US puppet, who was for long a CIA agent. So it is hardly surprising that any aid sent to Afghanistan simply disappears long before it gets to its targets. The UN suggest that barely 10% of outside aid gets through. It still proves US benevolence, or so the average Yankee seems to think, scared as shit that if they do not keep the front line 6 to 12 thousand miles away, they will have to defend their own back yard. The trouble is their own back yard has continued to expand since the Monroe Doctrine, and for a long time now has covered the whole world.

The Afghan war is what the Vietnam war was, and dozens of other US wars have been in the last 100 years since the Spanish American war, aggression against a foreign state started with whatever excuse and for whatever real reason the US deemed appropriate in its role of world bully. The initial excuse here was the handing over of Osama bin Laden and the al Qaida perpetrators of 9/11. Then it became the noble neocon desire to bring democracy to a backward country—whether they wanted it or not—a banner eagerly waved by Blair, then Brown, as philanthropic imperialism.

On 2 December 1823, president James Monroe outlined the points that defined the Monroe Doctrine—the “American continents” were not subjects for European colonisation and any such attempt would be seen as “dangerous to our peace and safety”. This doctrine yielded the idea of “manifest destiny”, supposedly giving divine sanction to any expansionist policy. The New York journalist, John L O’Sullivan, wrote in 1845 that it was “the fulfilment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly expanding millions”. This meant that the racist genocide of indigenous people would rightly contribute to the enlargement of a Christian nation. In 1822-5, US forces repeatedly invaded Cuba and Puerto Rico.

Since then, the US has been an imperial junkie, unable to break the habit of killing foreigners in their own lands as a route to expansionism and resource exploitation. They had begun by breaking treaties with the native Americans and slaughtering them.

The Spanish-American war began in 1898, bringing further opportunities for US expansion across the world. The Cuban war of liberation was converted into a US war of conquest. Cuba had a liberation movement heroically fighting against Spanish colonialism and the US would have to intervene. On December 24 1897, US undersecretary of war, JC Breckenridge, commented that the inhabitants of Cuba…

…are generally indolent and apathetic. Its people are indifferent to religion and the majority are therefore immoral. They only possess a vague notion of what is right and wrong. As a logical consequence of this lack of morality, there is a great disregard for life.

It would of course be “sheer madness” to annex such a dissolute and depraved people into the virtuous US. Cuba was invaded and occupied in what US secretary of state John Hay dubbed “a splendid little war”, which crippled the Cuban economy and reduced the people to destitution. Havana stank, and sick and starving people roamed the city or lay in the gutters. Streets were lined with the corpses of horses, dogs and human beings. All efforts to bury the dead had been abandoned. Breckenridge observed:

We must clean up the country, even if this means using the methods Divine Providence used on the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. We must destroy everything within our cannons’ range of fire. We must impose a harsh blockade so that hunger and disease undermine the peaceful population and decimate the Cuban army.

The academic Brian Linn graphically described the response of the US army to the Filipino liberation struggle. Suspects were hung by their thumbs to make them talk. Water was forced down the victim’s throat—“the water cure”—Americans seem fond of water torturing, and euphemisms for it! Villages were burned. US Colonel Benjamin F Cheatham urged his troops to “burn freely and kill every man who runs”. Villagers were forced into concentration camps with food shortages and appalling sanitation. A report said that “malnutrition, poor sanitary conditions, disease and demoralisation”, had cost 11,000 Filipino lives.

The twentieth century gave many more opportunities for US imperial expansion. In the first decade of the century, troops were active in Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Syria, Panama, Abyssinia, Korea, Cuba, Honduras and Nicaragua. Just before World War I, the US found reasons to send troops to Cuba, Haiti, China and Turkey. In 1915, president Woodrow Wilson ordered General John J Pershing to invade Mexico with 10,000 troops to crush the insurrection led by Francisco Villa—Pancho Villa. China was again invaded in 1916, while in the same year US troops began an eight-year occupation of the Dominican Republic to combat a popular uprising.

The US invasions continued in China, Guatemala and Russia (all in 1920), China and Turkey (1922), China and Honduras (both invaded in 1924 and 1925), China again (1926 and 1927). In the prelude to World War II, US forces again invaded Cuba and China. In 1940, the US acquired from Britain the lend-lease bases of Newfoundland, Bermuda, St Lucia, Jamaica, Antigua, Trinidad and British Guiana, and in April 1941, Greenland and Iceland were taken under US protection. In October 1945, 50,000 US marines were sent to north China to aid the nationalist battle against the communists. World War II and the Korean war resulted in permanent US occupations of parts of Germany, Japan, South Korea and Britain and of many island bases taken over from the Japanese.

On 7 August 1964, the US Congress, responding to president Lyndon B Johnson’s deliberate lie that US ships had been attacked by North Vietnamese vessels in international waters, approved the Gulf of Tonkin resolution affirming “all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States… to prevent further aggression”. The blatant lie had produced a presidential authorization that led to almost 60,000 US fatalities. Vietnamese dead, like the earlier Korean dead, numbered in the millions. The Vietnamese war included the Phoenix programme, which involved the systematic torture of tens of thousands of Vietnamese peasants.

William Blum, in his book Rogue State, has profiled US interventions since the end of the Vietnam war. Washington launched military or subversive actions in the Dominican Republic, Zaire, Laos, Cambodia, Lebanon, Iran, Libya, Grenada, Honduras, Chad, Bolivia, Iraq, Panama, Colombia, Peru, the Philippines, Liberia, Turkey, Kuwait, Somalia, Yugoslavia, the Central African Republic, Congo, Gabon, Sierra Leone, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Tanzania, Sudan, Afghanistan, East Timor, Serbia, Yemen, Ivory Coast, Haiti, Pakistan, South Ossetia, Brazil, Ecuador, Indonesia, Uruguay, Ghana, Chile, El Salvador, South Africa, Portugal, Angola, Jamaica, Seychelles, Diego Garcia, Marshall Islands, Albania, Costa Rica, Georgia and other countries.

In Afghanistan, back in the present, bombing by pilotless airplanes continues, and is extended into Pakistan. Neither Obama nor General David Petraeus seem able to stop rogue officers from doing just as they like. They are undisciplined and irresponsible, but determined to have fun soldiering, just as the captain of the USS Vincennes had fun in 1988 shooting down an aeroplane with 290 passengers and crew on board, in a similar utterly undisciplined act. Many say the Lockerbie bombing, later the same year, was a reprisal for that US atrocity—an eye for an eye, so to speak—but the US did not want any such conclusion to be drawn, so the CIA set up Abdulbaset al-Megrahi, a Libyan, whom most of the British relatives of the dead now consider to be innocent. Yet the US, with the same evidence before them refuse to accept that the conviction of al-Megrahi is, to say the least, unsafe, and the rage is fomented by Obama, Hillary Clinton, and one of the men responsible, CIA chief Robert Mueller.

So the Yankees continue their policy of invasion, utterly unable to accept that it is a long time failure. Or is it a failure? The US military industrial complex have their own economic reasons. It gets huge government appropriations, and these make for vast profits in the military linked armaments and supply industries. For Cheney and the like of his puppy, Bush, these overseas adventures are ways of siphoning tax dollars into personal profit. And who allegedly pays most tax dollars? Cheney’s own Republican voters! They do not seem to notice they are the ones being conned the most.