Turn the World Upside Down

Be a Good Republican and Support Occupy Wall Street

2011-12-06T15:46:00.012-05:00

Are you one of the many good, decent hardworking Americans who are registered members of the Republican Party and who view the Occupy Wall Street folks very negatively? If so, I'm guessing you believe that the OWS protesters are freeloaders who expect others to pay for their own foolish decisions, and who begrudge the higher standard of living enjoyed by people who work harder and smarter than others. The reason you joined the Republican Party is no doubt because it opposes such freeloader thinking and champions the contrary view that people should take responsibility for their own lives and work to earn what they desire to possess.

I don't intend to argue with you about your values. In fact, I agree that freeloading is wrong and that people should take responsibility for their own lives and work to earn what they desire to possess. I merely want to say why someone with those values would want to support the OWS movement, and why Republican leaders who condemn OWS only pretend to share your values.

The OWS movement says that the growing economic inequality in America, and the huge power and wealth concentrated in the 1% of the very wealthy, especially bankers like Goldman Sachs, is wrong. Are they right or wrong? Well, if they are taking the side of freeloaders, then they are wrong. But if they are complaining about freeloaders getting away with it, then they are right. Which is it?

Are the real freeloaders in America the people in OWS, or people like the Goldman Sachs bankers? Financial analyst, Clive Maund, aptly captures the essence of the immediate cause of the recent financial crisis as, "near criminal insanity of investment bankers writing themselves massive bonus checks for effectively standing in a circle and making promises to each other that none of them have ever had the capital to back up." This is what the bankers' trading in derivatives and credit default swaps (CDS) and all of the other arcane shenanigans was all about.

Financial analyst, Daniel R. Amerman, CFA, describes what the bankers did this way:

"[T]he hopeless economic mess that we find ourselves in today is the direct result of the ballooning of debt and derivatives over many years by opportunistic and irresponsible banks and other companies in the financial sector, with the support and collusion of cronies in government and throughout the business community, with the result that the debt and derivative mountains have grown to such monstrous proportions that they are bringing the world economy to a dead stop, verging on collapse. The banks and financial sector companies are on the hook for massive losses and after years of garnering huge profits from deals associated with this debt pyramiding, are now scrambling to push all of their snowballing bad debts onto the ordinary citizen. They have already succeeded in doing this in 2008 - 2009 in the US with their 'too big to fail' mantra and to put it crudely, the average US citizen has been well and truly shafted..."

By getting the government to bail them out of their bad debts, the bankers did what the OWS folks are accused of: "expect others to pay for their own foolish decisions." And boy did they! The combined Bush and Obama bailouts were estimated in July 2009 by Neil Barofsky, Special Inspector General of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, at $23.7 trillion dollars. The audacity of this mother of all freeloading is made even more evident by the fact that there was never any justification for it except the bankers' greed. As Dave Stratman writes,

"But weren’t these bailouts and the consequent austerity programs necessary? The answer is no. The gigantic bailouts were only necessary, explains John Hussman, President of Hussman Investment Trust, because Bernanke and Geithner and their backers in Congress chose to protect the bondholders of the “too big to fail” institutions rather than the public. The usual—and legally required—way of dealing with failed banks is to fire and replace their management, use their shareholders’ and bondholders’ capital to correct their balance sheet, and sell the bank's good debts to a solvent institution. This is the method used recently in the case of Washington Mutual, the largest bank failure in U.S. history, and hundreds of other cases. Neither depositors nor taxpayers lose a penny in this process. Hussman points out that the bonds backing the “TBTF” banks in question represent more than enough capital to restructure the bank balance sheets and discharge the toxic debt."

Republicans, of course, respect people who work harder and smarter and they do not begrudge such people the fruits of their honest labor, even if those fruits are very substantial indeed. But the bankers taking home their multimillion dollar bonuses were not doing honest work. I don't think good Republicans like yourself have in mind con artists and swindlers when they speak of working harder and smarter, do they? There is no justification for these bankers living in extreme luxury enjoying a life style ordinary working people can only dream of. They did not deserve to receive the bonuses and bailouts. This is why they are rightly called freeloaders.

But what about the OWS folks who are complaining about having mortgages greater than the value of their home, or about having their home repossessed by the bank? What about the OWS youngsters complaining about having crippling debts of sixty thousand dollars or more as the price of a college education in a society that does not offer them a decent-paying job? Does their wanting some relief from these debts make them freeloaders too? Well, as in the case of the bankers, the answer to this question depends on whether they deserve to have what they are asking for.

Do working class people who work 40 hours a week and often more to produce the wealth of our society deserve to have decent homes to live in? Do students who study at a college and earn good grades and graduate with a degree in order to be better educated and better able to contribute to our society deserve to receive such an education without having to go deep into debt? Do people who contribute their fair share towards producing the wealth that, as a complex society, we produce together, deserve to enjoy the benefits of what they help produce?

Republicans support the military, so let's answer the above questions by considering how they are addressed inside our military forces. Soldiers are expected to do various things, including learn new skills. But when they do what is expected, they are not required to go deep into debt to pay for their housing and education. Why should this same principle not apply to civilians? The principle is, "From each according to ability, to each according to need." This idea comes from the Bible. "Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold, And laid them down at the apostle's feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need" (Acts, 4:43-35). It is an anti-freeloading principle because it requires "from each according to ability." This is a very reasonable and just principle. The OWS folks are simply asking that it be applied to everybody.

What about the idea that people should take responsibility for their own lives? We've seen how the bankers, on the contrary, have demanded that the public take responsibility for their lives by paying for their undeserved lives of extreme luxury, but what about the OWS folks? There is nothing about the concept, "taking responsibility for one's own life," that excludes cooperating with others to do it, is there? When people join together to right the wrongs of society, isn't that a valid way of "taking responsibility for one's own life"? When people form an army to take responsibility for making their own lives secure against an enemy threat, aren't they "taking responsibility for their own lives?" The OWS folks have joined together to right some terrible wrongs in our society. They have succeeded in placing the wrongfulness of growing economic inequality and concentrated power in the hands of bankers and the very rich on the public agenda, something that nobody before them came even close to accomplishing. If this isn't an example of "taking responsibility for one's own life" then what, pray tell, is?

In all of the above I have been addressing the concerns of good Republicans, by which I mean Republicans who take seriously the values that the Republican Party claims to champion. But there are bad Republicans too. These are Republicans who only pretend to champion the Party's stated values. Bad Republicans are in the leadership of the GOP. The reason they condemn the OWS movement is not because it goes against the values of good Republicans, but because it exemplifies them. Bad Republicans actually support freeloading when it is done by the very rich. I urge you, because you are a good Republican, to support the Occupy Wall Street movement. I also urge you to read "Thinking about Revolution" and ask yourself if the values it espouses are not really much closer to your values than those of the richest 1% whom your GOP leaders support.

Egyptians Beware: Elections Are a Trap

2011-11-27T12:49:00.008-05:00

President Obama wants elections and a civilian government in Egypt. Egyptians! Please don't fall for this trap.

Elections are a trap that ruling elites use to prevent people from making the world more equal and democratic. This is why agents of the American plutocracy, from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush to Barack Obama, always insist that wherever overtly undemocratic regimes (like monarchies or military rulers or Presidents-for-life) are unable to control their populations, then there should be elections of a national government. From the United States itself to Iraq and Haiti and now Egypt, this is the plutocracy's game plan for social control, to make class inequality secure against popular movements.

The trap works like this. The elections produce a national government that, based on the electoral victory of its politicians, claims to be the representative of the people with, therefore, legitimate authority to rule over the people. The government then makes and enforces laws that reflect the values and interests not of ordinary people but of the very wealthy. The people are trapped, because they feel that the elected government is exercising legitimate power that they have no right to challenge.

The leaders of the upper class do not allow elections to take place until they are confident that they can control the outcome sufficiently to ensure that the trap functions properly. They gain this control by their ownership or control of the important institutions in society: the large businesses that control people with the threat of firing them, the mass media, and often the labor organizations and religious organizations.

It is a mistake to believe that the important distinction is between a government of military generals versus an elected civilian government. Both are equally capable of being used by a privileged, wealthy elite as an instrument of class domination. The important distinction is between a government that is an instrument of ordinary people for abolishing class inequality and creating a non-capitalist economy based on "from each according to ability and to each according to need," versus a government that is an instrument of an upper class for making socially-produced wealth the exclusive property of a few and suppressing popular efforts to make society more equal.

Governments that are instruments of a wealthy elite, that have objectives that most people oppose, need to exert power over people; they therefore need to be centralized national governments that claim the right to command the people to obey its laws. When they hold elections in order to be able to get away with this, they are fake democracies.

In contrast, when ordinary people are shaping society by widely shared values of equality and mutual aid, they need no such authoritarian top-down government. What they need, instead, is a way to democratically cooperate with each other on a large scale in order to achieve social order. The kind of government that does this, and which is truly democratic, is one based on voluntary federation of local community and workplace assemblies that have the exclusive power to make and enforce laws--laws passed by local meetings in which every adult who opposes class inequality and who will be bound by such laws is free to participate as an equal with all others. (See further discussion of this in Thinking about Revolution.)

Democracy is a crucial goal today. But elections do not a democracy make. Elections in societies based on class domination are a trap. When Jimmy Carter or some UN committee arrives to inspect the elections and give them a "Seal of Approval," beware! It's a trap.

Real democracy requires the disbanding of all the institutions that the upper class uses to control and dominate people, especially the military and the police forces. Merely having a constitution that says the military has limited power and is subservient to the civilian government is not enough. If an instrument capable of dominating the people exists, the privileged elite will use it or threaten to use it to maintain their privileged status, no matter what a constitution may say. The revolutionary movement must persuade the rank and file soldiers to come over to the side of the revolution and refuse to obey orders from the military top command, which means the military as an institution must be destroyed. To accomplish this, the revolution must make its goal of abolishing class inequality crystal clear, because this is the goal that will inspire working class soldiers to support it, even at great risk to themselves.

From Occupation to Revolution II

2011-10-31T22:07:00.031-05:00

If OWS decides explicitly that its goal is revolution, it would transform the OWS movement. It would be a qualitative leap and set the agenda for the coming years: a national and international conversation about how to make a revolution and what a post-revolutionary society can be like. If OWS does this, then folding the tents in the heart of winter (or losing them to a police raid) won't matter because the revolutionary strategy can be carried out even without them. What OWS will gain is what does matter: a whole new level of consciousness, determination, and ties to the community and each other internationally.

But what exactly does it mean to make revolution our goal? How is that different from what OWS is already doing? Does it mean picking up a gun or smashing more windows or attacking the police? No it does not. It means doing what is discussed below.

One of the most popular chants of the Occupy Wall Street occupations is, "The banks got bailed out; we got sold out." People want a more equal and democratic society and they know that the 1% with the real power in our country want the opposite. How can the OWS occupiers make society more equal and democratic?

On this, opinions vary widely. While everybody wants more people to join and support the occupation, there is presently little agreement about what "joining and supporting the occupation" should mean in practice. What, exactly, do occupiers need to do in order to achieve a more equal and democratic society?

Some believe that if occupiers keep their tents at the various parks around the country long enough, then the desired changes will happen. Others believe that if enough people get themselves arrested in civil disobedience actions to demonstrate the sincerity of our convictions, that will exert "moral suasion" (as Gandhi called it) on the rulers and make them change their ways. Some think that if everybody can agree on a few realistic demands and communicate them clearly, that will do it. And some believe that electing different politicians to office will solve our problems.

None of the above actions, however, will achieve the desired goal, because these actions don't remove from power the plutocracy that holds the real power in America and that wants America to be undemocratic and unequal, and these actions don't abolish the capitalist system from which the plutocracy derives its power based on concentrated wealth.

Tents in parks won't stop a ruling class that commands the greatest military force on the planet.

The plutocracy already knows we are sincere, and they don't care if we offer ourselves to be arrested to make the point.

Any "realistic" demands we make will have to avoid challenging the power of the plutocracy or the capitalist system from which it derives its power, or the demands will be dismissed as "unrealistic." Defining our goal as a set of "realistic" demands means declaring that we will stop bothering the plutocracy when it makes the demanded changes. Our movement will then be over; the plutocracy will remain in power, able to take back whatever it gave; and before long we'll be back where we are today.

The plutocracy was never elected, and cannot be un-elected. Politicians in our society only have the power that the plutocracy delegates to them; they most certainly do not have the power to remove the plutocracy from power.

It will take a revolution to remove the plutocracy from power, and to begin creating a new kind of society based on equality and mutual aid and genuine democracy. The strategy and tactics of the OWS movement should be directed towards building a huge, popular revolutionary movement, one that explicitly aims to remove the plutocracy from power, that has a vision of a new and better kind of society that can inspire hundreds of millions of Americans to fight for it. This kind of movement can win the support of soldiers and sailors so that, when the ruling class orders the military to attack the revolution, they will disobey and instead join and help defend the revolution with their weapons. This is how a revolutionary movement, when it reaches critical mass, will be able to prevail even in a contest of violent force with the ruling class.

The world does not have to be a capitalist one, based on class inequality and the glorification of self-interest. Most people want a very different kind of society. We can create a society that is the way most people want it to be, in which products and services are created to satisfy real needs and reasonable desires consistent with sustainability and environmental wisdom, not to make a profit for the few at the expense of every other consideration; in which the economy is based on sharing, from each according to ability and to each according to need, where products and services are provided according to need, not according to who has enough money to buy them; where there are no rich and poor because everybody has an equal right to enjoy the benefits of the wealth that society produces.

We can create a genuine democracy in which all law-making power resides in local community and workplace assemblies that all adults who support the principles of equality and mutual aid can attend. Instead of social order on a large scale being imposed by a centralized government democratic in name only, it can be achieved in a truly democratic manner by voluntary federation of local assemblies. (This is discussed in some detail in "Thinking about Revolution.")

The key to building this revolutionary movement is to first explicitly declare that building a revolutionary movement is the strategic goal. Then tactics can be evaluated with respect to how well they serve that goal. The chief element of the strategy is spreading the revolutionary ideas--that the ruling class has no legitimate right to rule over us, that revolution is necessary, that it is possible, and that it is the way to create a far better society based on equality and mutual aid and democracy. Tactics would emphasize communicating these ideas to the wider public: chants during demonstrations, leaflets passed out wherever the public is, talks by us where people live and work, teach-ins, interviews given to whatever media will do them. And tactics would include various creative ways to involve the public in actively discussing and developing revolutionary ideas, and recruiting others to help spread the message.

What about confrontational actions? These tactics also should be evaluated the same way. Do they spread the revolutionary message? Sometimes a confrontation with authority can indeed bring wider attention to our revolutionary message. But this depends on how we engage in the confrontation. A confrontation that exposes the illegitimacy and immorality of the rulers, for example when people pack a courtroom to protest eviction proceedings against a family, is good. A confrontation that gives the rulers what the public will perceive as a legitimate reason for using police force against our movement is bad. Confronting the police, in and of itself, does not help, and can backfire if it enables the rulers to paint a false picture of us in the public eye.

What about violence? Violence in self-defense may not be tactically wise in a given situation, but it is not immoral. The philosophy of nonviolence is wrong to say it is. Violence against property, when it is not clearly in self-defense, serves no good purpose and makes it easy for the rulers to turn the public against us. Violence against unarmed civilians has nothing to do with self-defense, and it is immoral.

If we focus on spreading the revolutionary message, then there will come a time when the revolutionary movement is large enough and has the support of sufficient numbers of soldiers and sailors to successfully defend itself against violence by the forces remaining loyal to the ruling class. At this time we should use whatever force, including violence, that is necessary to defend ourselves and the goals of the revolution.

But we are not yet at the point when we can actually prevail in a contest of violent force with the ruling class. Therefore it makes no sense to pretend that we are and to deliberately get into violent fights with the police that we have no way of winning. When the police attack us violently, we should do our best to make an orderly tactical retreat. Our strategic offense is what is most important: to spread a message about what we believe and what we want. The message isn't that we can defeat the well-armed police today; it is that the movement we are building is for values and objectives that most people share, and it can grow large enough one day to win a contest of force with the ruling class.

We need to keep our eye on the revolutionary strategy. Let us not get deflected from it by wishful thinking of the sort that says that "moral suasion" or "enough tents" or "better politicians" or "reasonable demands" will make the rulers change their ways.

Let us neither be deflected from the revolutionary strategy by those who propose tactics that have nothing to do with spreading revolutionary ideas. There is a totally false Hollywood image of what it means to be a revolutionary, made up of images of Che Guevara and black-shirted bomb-throwing (or window-breaking) "anarchists" who strike a revolutionary pose and talk tough with bravado. Police provocateurs, agents of the ruling class, try to get us to act this way, or themselves act this way in our name, because they know that as long as we equate our movement with such actions we will not be thinking about how to spread revolutionary ideas and mobilizing the public around those ideas, and the public will be turned against us.

The rulers have many agents with many different disguises, all pretending to be our friends, trying to persuade us what to do. They can be very persistent--that is their job! They appeal to our wishful thinking, or our desire to view ourselves as courageous, or anything else that will work, as long as it prevents us from understanding what a real revolutionary strategy is, and carrying it out. Now, more than ever, we need to think carefully about strategy and tactics. Just doing what seems to be "in the air" or whatever the most persistent individuals advocate is not good enough to win. It will take a huge revolutionary movement to win, which can develop if, and only if, we aim to make it happen.

We should make every Occupation a base camp for spreading the idea of revolution. Occupations should actively reach out to the larger community, as Occupy Boston did recently when it cooperated with Occupy the Hood and local people to stage a large rally in Dudley Square in Roxbury, the heart of the black community. The rally focused on local concerns, especially police brutality, but put them in the larger picture of savage inequality in American society.

Occupiers: Let this be our Message to the American People

2011-10-19T09:47:00.003-05:00

The 1% with all the money, and their Republican and Democratic politicians controlled by money, do not represent the 99%, do not serve the 99%, and do not have any legitimate right to govern the 99%.

To soldiers, sailors and members of police forces, we say: Do not obey orders from the 1%, to attack the movement of the 99%. Our movement aims to create a fundamentally more equal and democratic society. If you obey such orders you will be taking the side of the dictatorship of the rich and attacking your own people. Refuse such orders. Come over to the side of the people--your neighbors and friends and relatives.

To the American people, we say: Once again it is time for revolution in America. Instead of a British king we have a ruling class of bankers and billionaires who control the government and all the important institutions of society. The powerful men and women who run our world were not elected and cannot be unelected. They can only be removed from power by revolution.

Our goal is democratic revolution, to break the power of the ruling elite and create a society run by and for the people: a true democracy, with a non-capitalist economy in which all who contribute to it share equally in its benefits.

Join us. Show your support with signs saying "Equality" in your windows and in any other way you can think of. Help to spread these ideas far and wide. We are the 99%. We can make a new world.

Please read "Thinking about Revolution" at www.NewDemocracyWorld.org

Occupiers: When the Cops Say Clear Out, What Should We Do?

2011-10-11T19:25:00.005-05:00

What should Occupiers do when the police order us to clear out?

This is a tactical question that can only be answered by first identifying the strategy we want to advance with our tactics. So let me start by talking about strategy.

Somebody in the Boston Occupation made a great sign: "The beginning is near!" Yes, the Occupation is a terrific beginning. But the beginning of what?

I hope it is the beginning of carrying out a strategy that can win. The strategy is to build a revolutionary movement that grows to include the great majority of Americans, including most soldiers and sailors who will refuse orders to attack it. Such a movement will inspire the 99% with a vision of a non-capitalist society based on equality and concern for one another and genuine democracy instead of the opposite values held by the 1%. Such a mass, popular revolutionary movement, if we build it, will be able to defend itself against all of the violence that the ruling class will try to use to stop it from making a new and better world.

Most occupiers know, however, that we are not there yet. We may be speaking for the values and the interests of the 99% but not all of the 99% fully understand that yet, and they are not all on board yet.

The nature of the verbal and written attacks on the Occupation indicate how far we've come and how far we still need to go to get the majority of Americans on board. When the Occupation first stared out small, the attack on us by the talking heads and mainstream news media consisted of ignoring us. It is a sign of our growth and increasing respect by the public that the media now feel the need to acknowledge our existence. The two main attack themes that I've noticed are the following:

"If they're against Wall Street then they're against capitalism!"

"They're just a bunch of spoiled college kids."

These themes are directed at our current weaknesses, and they should alert us to the need to strengthen ourselves where we are weakest.

Regarding the first one, we are indeed against Wall Street because we are against class inequality, which is what capitalism produces and depends upon. So yes, we are against capitalism. We want a society based on equality, not a capitalist one based on class inequality. We want a society based on democracy, not a capitalist one in which money is power and most don't have any. And we want a society based on people helping each other, not a capitalist one based on pitting people against each other in a competitive race to the bottom.

But the public has virtually never heard capitalism denounced in the name of the values that the public already embraces: equality and mutual aid and democracy. They have only heard it denounced by Communists who are notoriously anti-democratic and famous for creating societies in which "some are more equal than others." And the public is always told that without capitalism we would not have smart phones or anything else ever created during the last several hundred years of capitalism, as if human creativity only exists when there is class inequality. When it comes to engaging the public in this vital discussion, the beginning is near, but only the beginning.

Regarding the second attack, the "spoiled college kids" theme, this will remain our weakness until we have recruited many many Americans who are not college students. We can do this. But we are only beginning.

One way we'll know that we've got enough Americans--a critical mass--on board with us to really start thinking about making a revolution is this. We'll know we're nearly there when the kind of people who today accuse us of being against capitalism start saying something like, "Hey, I'm against capitalism too. Who isn't? But those crazy extremists are going about it the wrong way. They should work within the legal system to make changes, bla bla bla." We're not there yet. We're only at the beginning.

So what will we do when the police, as is very likely at some point in the near future, order everybody to leave the parks that the occupiers are occupying?

It would be a big mistake if, when this happens, we forget what our long term task is--to spread our ideas to more and more of the public and recruit more and more people to joining in that effort. If we mistakenly think that our most important task is to maintain control of the parks where we've been camping, then our movement will suffer greatly.

The police at this time have the ability to win a contest of force--violent force--with us. We should not make it our purpose today to try to win a fight with the police. At the present time, the beginning of our movement, that would be futile. When we have grown the revolutionary movement to critical mass it will not be futile, but very possible. If we delude ourselves into thinking that we can overpower the police today, then the result will be a huge defeat and a terrible demoralization of the movement. The rulers will succeed in sending their most important message to the American public: "Resistance is futile. The numbers who want a different kind of world are and always will be too small to succeed. We have the power. You don't."

If, on the other hand, we make an orderly TACTICAL retreat when it becomes necessary, and continue to take the STRATEGIC offensive by reaching out to the public with our revolutionary ideas, using all the ways we can invent, then we will continue to grow stronger.

Please read "Thinking about Revolution" at www.NewDemocracyWorld.org for in depth discussion of these ideas.

What is the Occupation the Beginning of?

2011-10-10T22:22:00.005-05:00

Somebody in the Boston Occupation made a great sign: "The beginning is near!" Yes, the Occupation is a terrific beginning. But the beginning of what?

I hope it is the beginning of a concerted effort to build a revolutionary movement that grows to include the great majority of Americans, including most soldiers and sailors who will refuse orders to attack it. I hope it inspires the 99% with a vision of a non-capitalist society based on equality and concern for one another and genuine democracy instead of the opposite values held by the 1%. And I know that such a mass, popular revolutionary movement, if we build it, will be able to defend itself against all of the violence that the ruling class will try to use to stop it from making a new and better world.

I also know, and I think most occupiers know, that we are not there yet. We may be speaking for the values and the interests of the 99% but not all of the 99% fully understand that yet, and they are not all on board yet.

The nature of the verbal and written attacks on the Occupation indicate how far we've come and how far we still need to go to get the majority of Americans on board. When the Occupation first stared out small, the attack on us by the talking heads and mainstream news media consisted of ignoring us. It is a sign of our growth and increasing respect by the public that the media now feel the need to acknowledge our existence. The two main attack themes that I've noticed are the following:

"If they're against Wall Street then they're against capitalism!"

"They're just a bunch of spoiled college kids."

Race and the Occupation

2011-10-05T19:15:00.005-05:00

The Occupation movement spreading across America is inviting the 99% to join together to defeat the power of the 1% and to make a better world. They envision a world without inequality, which would mean (as many are coming to see) without the capitalist system that is based upon, and promotes, inequality.

In the General Assemblies there are discussions of race, and how that relates to the movement for a better world. In this discussion I believe it is important to keep two facts in mind.

#1. In American society life is harder, on average, for working class blacks and Hispanics than for working class whites.

#2. In American society life is hard and getting harder for all working class people, regardless of race.

Some people focus on fact #1 and say that whites are privileged. Some on the Left, for example, talk about "White skin privilege." But "privilege" is the wrong word. The reason is this. The ruling class uses racial discrimination not to improve the lives of whites, which is what "privilege" implies, but to weaken the working class with divide-and-rule in order to more effectively oppress and exploit all working people, including whites--fact #2.

It doesn't make sense to refer to this racial discrimination as a "privilege" for the whites when it is being used to oppress and exploit whites as well as non-whites. Using the word "privilege" obscures the role of racial discrimination as an instrument for oppressing all races.

Furthermore, using the word "privilege" and the phrase "white skin privilege" tends, naturally, to promote among whites the wrong emotional response. We want all working class people, including whites, to feel righteous anger, not guilt: anger at the ruling class, not guilt from seeing themselves as unfairly "privileged." Angry people overthrow their oppressors. People who think they are guilty of enjoying privileges given to them by the ruling class don't.

In fact, we want whites to feel anger at the ruling class for using racial discrimination to divide-and-rule working class people. This is how racial unity against racial discrimination and ruling class oppression is built.

Please, let's drop the "white privilege" vocabulary. Let's talk about racial discrimination as a ruling class weapon that hurts us all. Let's reach out to people of all races on the basis of fighting our common enemy for shared goals, for equality. We will be a lot stronger if we do this.

The ruling class's purpose in using racial discrimination is to foment distrust between people of different races. Decades of slavery followed by Jim Crow followed by much higher than average unemployment and exclusion from higher-status jobs and positions in society and disproportionately greater imprisonment of black people was intended to make white people view blacks as intellectually and morally inferior to whites. It was also intended to make black people view whites, whether rich or poor, as the oppressor of blacks. It is an unfortunate fact that the ruling class has had some success with its divide and rule strategy: what people of different races think about each other, unconsciously if not consciously, has been negatively affected by decades of living in a society shaped by a ruling class determined to foment distrust between different races. Given this effort by the ruling class to divide and rule, what is significant about race in the U.S. today is not that there exists some distrust between the races, but that so many people nonetheless try so hard to build trusting relations of solidarity between the races.

The existing negative ideas and attitudes about race, however, do need to be identified and refuted, especially when they affect how we behave towards each other. To succeed in building a movement that can defeat the ruling class and create a better world, we need to keep in mind that good people can have bad ideas, that criticizing a person's bad idea or attitude about race is different from denouncing the person as a bad person as if they were trying, like the ruling class, to oppress people. We need to practice friendly criticism among ourselves, to root out the ideas and practices that the ruling class encourages among us to weaken us all.

Why We Have No Demands

2011-10-05T11:04:00.006-05:00

Some people commenting on the Occupation movement sweeping America are saying that the movement needs to come up with specific demands. But this would be a big mistake.

It is a strength, not a weakness, that we are not making demands. We need a revolution. We all surely know that, don’t we? We need to remove the ruling class--the 1%, the plutocracy, the corporate elite, whatever one calls them—from power. We do not want this ruling class to do anything except to stop ruling. By making a demand on the ruling class, we would be saying to them that we want you to continue ruling, but to just make this or that reform in how you rule. Wrong!

Demands are messages to the rulers. We need, on the contrary, to direct our message to the ruled.

Our message is: Revolt against the rulers, remove them from power, abolish the capitalist system that is the basis of their power, and create a genuine democracy based on equality and mutual aid.

Please read "Thinking about Revolution" for more discussion of this.

Leaders

2011-10-03T10:02:00.004-05:00

The Occupy Wall Street (and Boston etc.) protestors say, "We have no leaders." This is true in one sense, but false in others. To see why, we need to consider the very different roles that people can play, all of which get lumped together, confusingly, under the term, "leader."

Sometimes a person who has a cult following is called a "leader" and in this sense the Occupy folks apparently do not have a leader. Good! Sometimes when people elect a president, prime minister, chairman or some similarly titled person, that person is called a "leader." The occupiers don't have one of those either.

But the occupiers do have people who provide leadership of different sorts. One important kind of leadership is helping people to develop clarity in their thinking about the situation. Such a leader would help people gain clarity in seeing that the conflict is between the positive values--equality, solidarity, democracy--shared by the rank-and-file versus opposite values--inequality, competition, top-down control--held by the elite enemy. This kind of leadership aims at giving the rank-and-file greater confidence in themselves as the source of what is good in the world and the source of what can make a better world. Such leadership can come from different people at different times; whenever anybody speaks at a meeting and contributes to this clarity, they are--at that moment at least--a leader.

Another kind of leader is a person whose role is that of a commander. "Commander" is not a derogatory word. There are times when it is very important to have a commander, or even a military-style hierarchy of commanders. Commanders are necessary when the rank-and-file need to make tactical decisions, as a group, too quickly for consensus methods to work, or in a situation when it is impractical to use a consensus method of decision-making. For example, when the "occupy" protestors are assembled in a marching column and marching through the streets, it is not possible to use consensus methods to make decisions about whether, when confronted with an unexpected fork in the road, to take the left or the right road.

Apparently this situation arose when the Wall Street Occupation march was crossing the Brooklyn Bridge and the cops in front of the march directed it to turn off the pedestrian walk and onto the main road for vehicles, as part of a trap to provide a pretext for arresting more than 700 protestors. The protestors who happened (by chance alone?) to be at the front of the march were confronted with a decision: follow the direction of the cops, or refuse to leave the pedestrian walkway. The people at the head of the march may not even have been aware of the fact, but at that moment they were commanders. Their choice determined where everybody behind them would march.

No doubt due to innocent lack of experience, these chance commanders made a poor decision, allowing the police trap to succeed. The moral of the story is that, in advance of situations like this when it is appropriate, the movement needs to democratically choose individuals with sound judgement to be its commanders. These commanders should be obeyed in the specific context for which they are selected; but otherwise they should be treated as just equal rank-and-file members of the movement.

Another role that is sometimes referred to as leadership is the role of facilitator of a large meeting using consensus methods. This is an important role. When individuals take the initiative to play this role well, that is a good thing, even if they do not happen to be selected by a formal democratic procedure. If the individuals acting as a facilitator do a poor job, then the rank-and-file need to step in and replace them with better facilitators.

The experience of movements from earlier decades is sometimes expressed this way: "When people say, 'We have no leaders,' it really means that there are leaders, but they operate in the shadows without transparency and accountability." There is much wisdom in these words. Instead of saying, "We have no leaders," it would be better to say, "We have many different kinds of leaders. Whoever provides clarity is a leader when they do that. We democratically select our commanders if and when we need them. We have good facilitators. Those are our leaders."

The People As Enemy: The Leaders' Hidden Agenda in World War II

2011-08-16T14:15:00.003-05:00

The People as Enemy: The Leaders' Hidden Agenda in World War Two exposes how Allied leaders in WWII were not trying to liberate people from Fascism but rather to strengthen the corporate elite's control over their own increasingly revolutionary domestic working classes.

The book is available at Amazon.com or directly from myself at the reduced price of $3.00 plus $7.20 shipping in the U.S. To purchase directly, email me at spritzler@comcast.net and use Pay Pal:

The British ruling class foments and then uses the "riots"

2011-08-12T14:22:00.006-05:00

It is clear from a host of reports online that the key cause of the recent rioting in England is that the rioters—some of the poorest people in England--are furious at how the police have been tormenting them prior to the rioting, and how the rulers of England have deprived them of jobs and the chance to enjoy the wealth that society produces. This is not a race thing, it is a class thing. (“Members of the Jewish community have joined the fray, with members of Tottenham’s Hassidic community reportedly gathered in the street on Saturday to heckle police.”)

British police harass non-whites worse than whites, just as the American police do. By saying that “this is not a race thing, it is a class thing” I mean that the fundamental conflict is class and not race, that the upper ruling class—not the “white race”—is the problem, and that racial discrimination is, itself, a divide-and-rule instrument used by the upper class to try to create racial resentments and turn working class people against each other along race or ethnic lines. This is how one insightful person explains the violence:

“Violence is rarely mindless. The politics of a burning building, a smashed-in shop or a young man shot by police may be obscured even to those who lit the rags or fired the gun, but the politics are there. Unquestionably there is far, far more to these riots than the death of Mark Duggan, whose shooting sparked off the unrest on Saturday, when two police cars were set alight after a five-hour vigil at Tottenham police station. A peaceful protest over the death of a man at police hands, in a community where locals have been given every reason to mistrust the forces of law and order, is one sort of political statement. Raiding shops for technology and trainers that cost ten times as much as the benefits you’re no longer entitled to is another. A co-ordinated, viral wave of civil unrest across the poorest boroughs of Britain, with young people coming from across the capital and the country to battle the police, is another.

“Months of conjecture will follow these riots. Already, the internet is teeming with racist vitriol and wild speculation. The truth is that very few people know why this is happening. They don’t know, because they were not watching these communities. Nobody has been watching Tottenham since the television cameras drifted away after the Broadwater Farm riots of 1985. Most of the people who will be writing, speaking and pontificating about the disorder this weekend have absolutely no idea what it is like to grow up in a community where there are no jobs, no space to live or move, and the police are on the streets stopping-and-searching you as you come home from school. The people who do will be waking up this week in the sure and certain knowledge that after decades of being ignored and marginalised and harassed by the police, after months of seeing any conceivable hope of a better future confiscated, they are finally on the news. In one NBC report, a young man in Tottenham was asked if rioting really achieved anything:

“’Yes,’ said the young man. ‘You wouldn't be talking to me now if we didn't riot, would you?’; "’Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you.’"

The British ruling class surely knew that inflicting police stop-and-search abusively on people whom they also deprived of jobs and hope for a decent life would eventually cause the victims to strike back in anger. Now we can see why the ruling class did this. They want to use the riots to frighten the rest of the British public into accepting the transformation of the U.K. into even more of a police state than it already is with surveillance cameras presently everywhere. The idea is to make most of the public feel that they need the ruling class to protect them from the poorest people. Here’s how Prime Minister Cameron is doing it:

“Mr Cameron said: ‘To the law abiding people who play by the rules, and who are the overwhelming majority in our country, I say: the fightback has begun, we will protect you. If you've had your livelihood and property damaged, we will compensate you. And to the lawless minority, the criminals who have taken what they can get, I say this: we will track you down... we will punish you. You will pay for what you have done.’”
Also reported: “Ministers and the security services are planning draconian powers to shut down or disrupt mobile phone messaging services and social networks in times of civil disorder.”

What the British ruling class is doing here is the same as what the Israeli ruling class of billionaires and generals is doing to control Israeli Jews—attacking non-Jews to foment anger and their striking back in order to make Jews so fearful of non-Jews that they will feel they need the Israeli ruling class to protect them. And it is the same as what the American ruling class is doing to control Americans—attacking foreign people so viciously, most recently murdering Afghani and Pakistani civilians, that they strike back in anger, thus making Americans so afraid of “terrorists” that we will look for protection from the likes of our Nobel Peace Prize-winning War-mongerer in Chief and his Wall Street cronies enriching themselves to the tune of multiple trillions of dollars at the expense of all the rest of us.

Reform Congress?

2011-08-01T14:21:00.011-05:00

Americans neither like nor trust Congress. A survey by ABC NewsWashington Post, May 19-23, 1989 found that 79% of Americans agreed that "most members of Congress will tell lies if they feel the truth will hurt them politically," 75% agreed that they "care more about special interests than they care about people like [themselves]", 71% that they "make campaign promises they have no intention of fulfilling," 66% that they "care more about keeping power than they do about the best interests of the nation" and 57% that they "make a lot of money using public office improperly." Does anybody think the reputation of Congress has risen since then?

This is why every now and then some people get enthusiastic about a proposal to reform Congress in some manner, such as denying members of Congress their special perks (like their superb health insurance) and their large salaries, or imposing term limits, or limiting the size of campaign donations, or providing public funds for election campaigns. (I have copied the latest such proposal below.) These reforms are all proposed as a way to make the politicians truly represent ordinary people whom they theoretically represent, rather than serve wealthy special interests or their own greedy selves.

But the problem is bigger than any of these reforms can solve. All of these reforms can be enacted (some already have been) but the problem will remain. The root of the problem is theextreme inequality that puts the real power in society in the hands of billionaires. National politicians cannot win elections without the support of the mass media, which are owned by the upper class plutocracy. This--not salary and benefit perks or any of the other things that the proposed reforms address--is why Congressional politicians serve the upper class instead of ordinary Americans. Their salary and perks are merely a symptom of the problem but not the cause. In fact, plenty of the politicians in Congress are independently wealthy and don’t need their salary or the health coverage perks. Forty-four percent of members of Congress are millionaires.

Very big problems require very big solutions. How do we solve the problem that our society is based on class inequality, one-dollar-one vote? How do we solve the problem that the mass media and all of the other key institutions in our society, including not only the corporations but the schools, labor unions, churches and foundations as well, are owned and controlled by the very wealthy. How do we solve the problem that politicians can only get elected by doing what the very wealthy want them to do?

The big solution that is required is a fundamental social revolution to remove power from the ruling plutocracy and create a society based on equality.

Small solutions like the recent proposed one, copied below, will not solve the big problem:

Congressional Reform Act of 2011 (Amendment 28 of the U.S. Constitution)

1. No Tenure and No Pension. A Congressman collects a salary while in officeand receives no pay when they are out of office.

2. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security. All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates the same as all other American people. The Social Security fund may not be used for any other purpose.

3. Congress must purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.

4. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.

5. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.

6. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.

7. All contracts with past and present Congressmen are void effective 1/1/12. The American people did not make this contract with Congressmen. Congressmen made all these contracts with and for themselves. Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so congressmen should serve their terms (no more than 2), then go home and find a job. Former congressmen cannot be lobbiest.

Do These Facts Fit Your Paradigm?

2011-07-20T18:39:00.003-05:00

Do these facts fit your paradigm?

Fact #1. “Prince Walid bin Talal bin Abdelaziz Al-Saud, the second biggest shareholder in News Corporation after Murdoch, recently gave an interview, on his yacht, to the BBC flagship programme Newsnight. The Saudi prince declared himself "a good friend" of Rupert Murdoch and his son James Murdoch (probably the next executive to be charged by the police in the scandal). He defended both men briskly, but in doing so drew attention to the fact that he is the second biggest shareholder in the Murdoch empire, and that the Murdochs were major shareholders in his own Rotana media empire in the Middle East. An unholy alliance, surely? Mr Murdoch is the co-owner, with Prince Walid, of Fox News - one of the most virulently anti-Muslim television stations in the world. The station gives a megaphone to the likes of Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly and Sarah Palin. In the US, Fox's role was to throw gallons of petrol on the flames Islamophobia which were leading to the burning of the Holy Quran by vigilantes.” [http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/07/20117181848649939.html]

This fact does not fit into a popular (but wrong) paradigm that says the pro-Israel policy of the United States harms the U.S. ‘national interest’ by angering the oil-rich Arab rulers and making it hard for Big Oil to do business with them. Therefore, according to this “logic,” the only reason the U.S. has a pro-Israel foreign policy is because the Israel Lobby forces Big Oil and the rest of the American plutocracy to be pro-Israel, even though it is against their interest.

But here we see that a Saudi prince is great pals with the most pro-Israel media mogul in the world, and a co-owner with him of Fox News, the #1 pro-Israel network in the U.S.

The paradigm that this fact DOES fit into is the one that I describe in The Israel Lobby's Power Comes From the American Ruling Class .

Fact #2. ““Americans are learning what Europeans have known for years: Islam-bashing wins votes,” wrote journalist Michael Scott Moore in the wake of the 2010 election. His assumption was shared by many then and is still widely accepted today. But as the 2012 campaign ramps up along with the anti-Muslim rhetoric machine, a look back at 2010 turns out to offer quite an unexpected story about the American electorate. In fact, with rare exceptions, “Islam-bashing” proved a strikingly poor campaign tactic. In state after state, candidates who focused on illusory Muslim “threats,” tied ordinary American Muslims to terrorists and radicals, or characterized mosques as halls of triumph (and prayer in them as indoctrination) went down to defeat. Far from winning votes, it could be argued that “Muslim-bashing” alienated large swaths of the electorate -- even as it hardened an already hard core on the right. The fact is that many of the loudest anti-Muslim candidates lost, and for a number of those who won, victory came by the smallest of margins, often driven by forces that went well beyond anti-Muslim rhetoric. A careful look at 2010 election results indicates that Islamophobic talking points can gain attention for a candidate, but the constituency that can be swayed by them remains limited, although not insignificant.” [http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175418/tomgram%3A_stephan_salisbury%2C_how_muslim-bashing_loses_elections/#more]

This fact flies in the face of the paradigm that says most Americans are Islamophobic racists. Fox News, etc., of course, want Americans to believe that all of their fellow Americans are 100% on the War on Terror, anti-Muslim bandwagon. This belief makes those many who are not on the bandwagon afraid to say so publicly. It allows the naked emperor to act as if he were clothed and get away with it. But judging by how people act when alone in a voting booth, it seems Islamophobia is not the majority view.

The paradigm that this fact DOES fit into is the one that says ordinary Americans are an implicitly revolutionary force because their values—equality, solidarity and democracy—are the opposite of the plutocracy’s values of inequality, top-down control and dog-eat-dog competition (for us, not for them).

Fact #3.

The top marginal income tax rate: 100 years at a glance

Presented without comment.

(Originally from the Washington Monthly)

[In case you cannot see this graphic below, it shows that under President Obama’s plan, the wealthiest Americans still pay far less in taxes than under Reagan or Nixon. ]

Does anybody still believe in the paradigm that says President Obama or the Democratic Party is on the side of the middle or lower class, and standing up against the plutocracy?

Revolution: it is both necessary AND POSSIBLE!

--John

Norman Finkelstein's claim that right of return is "complicated"

2011-03-19T19:40:00.003-05:00

Is it true, as Norman Finkelstein claims, that the right of return for Palestinians is a ‘complicated problem’ – so complex that it justifies him (and the Zionists) saying, “Now, I am not arguing now for a right of return”? [This is what Finkelstein does indeed say on his web at http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/democracy-now-debate-with-finkelstein-shlomo-ben-ami/ and you can see a video of him saying he doesn't call for right of return at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4OXP6Jy49I ]

No, it is not true. I have debunked this ‘it’s complicated’ (or ‘not practical’) notion in two articles: here (pdf) and here. The only thing that makes people say that right of return for the Palestinian refugees is ‘complicated’ is the fact that if lots of the refugees returned then there might not be a majority of Jews inside the green line and this would essentially make it impossible for the Zionists to continue referring to the territory inside the green line as a Jewish state, unless they were to openly admit that their Jewish state is a state of only a minority of the population and risk disapproval of everybody in the world who supports the idea of democracy. In other words, what makes right of return ‘complicated’ is that it is incompatible with the existence of a Jewish state in Palestine—a state that is officially a state of the Jewish people and not a state of all its inhabitants (or even of all its citizens) equally.

For anybody who says, ‘There should not be a Jewish state in Palestine,’ it is very easy and uncomplicated to call for the unconditional right of return of every single Palestinian refugee. As my second linked article above discusses in some detail, there is no economic or political reason why all the refugees should not be allowed to return and be fully compensated for all the property that Zionists stole from them.

If Norman Finkelstein would agree that there should not be a Jewish state in Palestine, then he would be calling for the right of return, and he would be an anti-Zionist. Instead, however, he joins the Zionists in his refusal to say there should not be a Jewish state in Palestine, and he follows the logic of that refusal by saying that he doesn’t call for the right of return because it is ‘complicated.’

In the debate between Finkelstein and the former Israeli foreign minister (see the link above to Finkelstein’s webpage for this debate) the overtly Zionist foreign minister and Finkelstein agreed on the fact that the Palestinians, under international law, had a right of return. Asserting this fact does not make one an anti-Zionist. Calling for the right of return does make one an anti-Zionist. The very essence of Zionism is denying the right of return, no matter what the particular Zionist’s excuse is for denying that right, be it ‘God gave the land to the Jews’ or ‘Jews can only be safe in a state that ethnically cleanses most of the non-Jews because non-Jews are innately anti-semitic’ or ‘The UN gave the land to the Jews’ or ‘Might makes right’ or even ‘It’s complicated.’ I wish Norman Finkelstein were an anti-Zionist.

Which Side Are They On?

2011-02-25T23:42:00.002-05:00

I’m sure we all hope that Muammar Gaddafi’s days as a ruthless dictator will end very soon, before he murders any more of “his” people, whom he accuses of being doped up rats and cockroaches under the control of al Qaida. But some world leaders stand with Gaddafi. See the details below, which underscore that no matter how much they use “anti-imperialist” or “Left” rhetoric, or liberal democratic rhetoric, leaders need to be judged by whether they help ordinary people make society more equal and democratic, or not. This is the only way to really determine, Which side are they on?

Courtesy of Iman

Libyan protesters seized this artillery vehicle from security forces at the airport.

The revolutionary uprising in the Middle East and North Africa is making many important things more clear. One is that the philosophy of non-violence is wrong—dangerously wrong. Guns matter, a whole lot. Of course who those guns are aimed at matters even more, and this is determined by the ideas that lead people with guns to take one side or the other when the oppressed fight their oppressor. But the philosophy of nonviolence not only says it is immoral to use a gun, it also claims that ideas alone, in the heads of people who go limp when confronted with force, can defeat people with guns. Anybody paying attention to events in Libya can see how foolish and dangerous this nonviolence philosophy is, and can see why Obama praises the oppressed for being “nonviolent” all the time.

http://kavkazcenter.com/eng/content/2011/02/23/13631.shtml

Fidel Castro

Castro urges Gaddafi 'stay in power till the end' and predicts U.S. invasion of Libya

Publication time: 23 February 2011, 12:07

"The riots in Libya were inspired by the United States. Every hour an invasion by U.S. troops could be expected. US will send them to "protect the Libyan people". But in reality, they need only the Libyan oil", said the leader of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro.

He called on Muammar Gaddafi "to stay in power till the end."

http://www.indianexpress.com/news/castro-firmly-backs-israels-right-to-exist/686535/

Castro firmly backs Israel's right to exist

Posted: Thu Sep 23 2010, 09:54 hrs New York:

Fidel Castro said: 'I don't think anyone has been slandered more than the Jews.'

Fidel Castro, the long-time president and leftist icon who stepped aside during a health crisis but still leads the Cuban Communist Party, has told a reporter that Israel definitely has the right to exist.

"Yes it does, without a doubt," Castro, 84, told visiting US journalist Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic magazine, according to a new article published yesterday.

[Note: Israel’s “right to exist” means its right to exist as a Jewish state, which requires not allowing the 4 million (or more) non-Jewish Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and villages inside of what is now called Israel because this would end the Jewish majority status of Israel’s population, i.e. it requires ethnic cleansing. The “two state solution,” which Castro supports, is based on “normalizing” this ethnic cleansing by telling the Palestinian refugees they must forfeit their right of return and be satisfied with having a “bantustan” state “of their own” that will be completely controlled by Israel the same way that Israel controls Gaza, from which Israel “withdrew.”]

http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/02/25/chavez_breaks_silence_on_twitter_viva_qaddafi

Hugo Chavez

Chavez breaks silence on Twitter: Viva Qaddafi!

Posted By Joshua Keating Friday, February 25, 2011 - 1:40 PM Share

A number of commentators have wondered in recent days whether Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez would weigh in on the difficulties facing his old friend Muammar al-Qaddafi. Unlike his counterpart Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, Chavez has been uncharacteristiaclly reserved as the man he once called the Simon Bolivar of Libya slowly loses control of his country.

This morning, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro weighed in, echoing a recent column by Fidel Castro suggesting that the turmoil is just a pretext for a Western invasion of Libya.

Today on Twitter, Chavez broke his silence to back up the foreign minister (roughly translated):

Go Chancellor Nicholas: Give another lesson to the pitiyanqui far right! Viva Libya and its independence! Qaddafi is facing a civil war!!

(Pitiyanqui is one of Chavez's insults of choice for political opponents.)

http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2011/02/22/nicaragua-president-daniel-ortega-cubas-ex-leader-fidel-castro-weigh-qaddafi/

Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega and Cuba's Fidel Castro Stand-By Qaddafi

Published February 22, 2011

| Fox News Latino

In this handout photo released by Presidential House of Nicaragua, Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, left, shakes hands with Nicaragua's President Daniel Ortega during a meeting in Tripoli, Libya, Tuesday, June 5, 2007.(AP Photo/Presidential House of Nicaragua/Jairo Cajina) ** NO SALES **

Despite almost global condemnation of the violence against demonstrators in Libya, some prominent Latin Americans are standing-by Libya's Muammar al-Qaddafi, even as he declares that he'll keep fighting and will die as a 'martyr.'

Nicaragua's leftist President Daniel Ortega says he has telephoned Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi on Monday to express his solidarity. Cuba's former leader Fidel Castro also weighed in on developments in the middle eastern nation on Tuesday. Castro said that unrest in Libya may be a pretext for a NATO invasion.

“Populist” Moktada al-Sadr and Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/24/world/middleeast/24iraq.html?_r=1

Iraq’s Top Shiite Leaders Urge Delay of Protests

By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT and YASIR GHAZI

Published: February 23, 2011

BAGHDAD — Iraq’s top Shiite religious leaders, the populist cleric Moktada al-Sadr and Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, called Wednesday for Iraqis to defer their protests, leading many members of the country’s Shiite majority to say they would not join in nationwide demonstrations scheduled for Friday.

Many Sunnis said they still planned to go ahead with the demonstrations, which are being billed as a “day of rage.” But the Shiite withdrawal dealt a significant blow to protest organizers, who had hoped to fill Iraq’s streets with millions of people to call for improved government services.

[Note: The goals of the nationwide demonstration that Moktada al-Sadr told people not to join are the same as these earlier local demonstrations, described as follows: “Throughout February, there have almost been daily demonstrations in many Iraqi cities, mostly nonviolent, except for the demonstrations in the last few days in the city of Suleimaniya in the province of Kurdistan in which two have died and 124 have been injured. All the as-yet-local demonstrations were against the widespread corruption at all levels of government and the security forces; high unemployment; rising prices of food supplies; and poor public services, particularly the severe shortage of electricity and inadequate supply of potable water.

“Corruption in Iraq has become legendary. A week ago, the Integrity Commission announced that it was suing hundreds of government employees for embezzlement of $30 billion. Shortly thereafter, the Iraqi Parliament appointed two special committees to investigate the "disappearance" of $41 billion from the Iraqi Development Fund.[1] It is possible that elements of the two figures overlap, but the order of magnitude of the corruption is stirring the Iraqi street, which is clamoring for change.” http://www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/5040.htm ]

http://archive2.tt-total.com/s0/F/4/i/xI4iDU1C_www.today.az=2Fnews=2Fregions=2F81333.html

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Gaddafi must meet public demand

23 February 2011 [17:07] - Today.Az

Amid a fresh wave of violent crackdown on revolution in Libya, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has urged Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi to meet public demand.

President Ahmadinejad addressed leaders of countries who replied the popular revolutions “with a bullet” and said, “I highly recommend leaders of these countries to let their people express their words and that they should follow public views,” IRNA reported Wednesday.

[Note that by “public” Ahmadinejad apparently does not include Iranian workers. Thus: “But today, Iranian workers are still unable to form independent trade unions, a right denied both within Iran’s labor code and de facto repressed by the government in action. The government routinely arrests and prosecutes workers demanding their most basic rights, such as demands for wages unpaid, sometimes for periods as long as 36 months. Security forces often attack peaceful gatherings by workers, harass their families, and even kill them, as happened during a gathering by copper miners in Shahr Babak, near the city of Kerman, in 2004.

“Two leading trade unionists, Mansour Osanloo and Mahmoud Salehi, are currently in prison. Another one, Majid Hamidi, recently the target of an assassination attempt, is hospitalized. In addition to being imprisoned and fined, eleven other workers were flogged in February 2008 for the crime of participating in a peaceful gathering to commemorate International Labor Day, May 1^st.

“Although Iran’s constitution (Articles 26 and 27) recognizes freedom of association and assembly and Iran’s civil law requires ratified international treaties to be recognized equivalent to domestic laws, Iran’s Labor Law explicitly contradicts these legal obligations. Section 6 of the law addresses workers organizations in such vague terms that for nearly twenty years since its adoption, Iranian workers have not been able to freely associate with independent organizations.

“According to the Labor Law, workers may only participate in three types of organizations: Islamic Labor Councils, Trade Associations, and Workers Representative for workplaces with less than 35 workers). The law explicitly encourages workers to associate with Islamic Councils, which are effectively controlled by management in workplaces. It also stipulates that only one of the above organizations may exist in a given workplace. These legal restrictions on membership and pre-definition of the allowable types of workers organizations are in direct breach of international standards and the Iranian constitution.

“In addition, Islamic Labor Councils, the most common type of labor organization, are explicitly defined in Iran’s Labor Law as ideologically-centered entities. They are not focused on promoting workers rights and are incompatible with the concept of independent unions. Furthermore, workers’ membership in these Councils is subject to a vetting process, controlled by the Labor Ministry. According to Article 138, the Supreme Leader is entitled to appoint a representative in each type of workers organization. The law even forbids formation of these organizations in large industries, such as the petrochemical industry, unless the cabinet issues a special directive. Article 191 empowers the Supreme Labor Council to propose labor-related legislation to the cabinet, bypassing the parliament. Using this loophole, rug-weaving workshops and workplaces with under five employees are exempt from provisions of the Labor Law.

“Over the past three decades, the track record of Islamic Labor Councils and their central body, the Supreme Labor Council, has been in favor of management and its policies. These councils are controlled under the umbrella of the Workers House.” [http://www.iranhumanrights.org/2006/01/workersrights/ ]

Barack Obama

http://www.singlepayeraction.org/blog/?p=2064

Dr. Flowers went to the White House yesterday to deliver a letter to Obama asking him to consider a single payer, Medicare for all health care system.

She was turned away at the gate and told that for security reasons, the White House doesn’t accept hand delivered letters.

During his State of the Union speech on Wednesday, Obama said he wanted to hear from people on a better approach to health care reform that will “bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare for seniors and stop insurance company abuses.”

“Let me know, let me know, let me know. I’m eager to see it,” Obama said.

Flowers, Paris and the majority of doctors and nurses in America believe that approach is a single payer national health insurance system.

Obama himself, when he was a state Senator in Illinois in 2003, said single payer was the way to go.

But last year, he cut deals with the pharmaceutical and health insurance industries in a now failed attempt to get through tinkering reforms.

[Note that public opinion polls show that a robust majority of Americans want single payer health care, and have for decades. See the poll results here: http://www.wpasinglepayer.org/PollResults.html ]

http://www.truthistreason.net/former-cia-analyst-ray-mcgovern-arrested-and-beaten-at-hillary-clintons-lecture-about-free-speech

Hilary Clinton

As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lectured about freedom to the rest of the world at George Washington University and condemed governments that arrest protestors and do not allow free expression, 71-year-old Ray McGovern was seized from the audience right in front of her by police and an unknown official in plain clothes. He was brutalized and left bleeding in jail. And yet Hillary never even paused; didn’t skip a beat in her speech.

When Secretary Clinton began her lecture to the world, Ray McGovern was standing silently in the audience and turned his back to her. Mr. McGovern, a veteran Army Officer who also worked for the CIA for 27 years, was wearing a “Veterans for Peace” t-shirt.

McGovern discussed his protest and subsequent arrest at Secretary Clinton’s “Freedom Speech” in an interview with blogger Rob Kall.

“I turned my back to her and stood [silently]. When she came in, I not only remained standing but I turned my back to her… I didn’t think that would get me roughed up and arrested for disorderly conduct.”

He was suddenly grabbed by security officers and police. As he was being hauled out the door, Mr. McGovern remarked, “So this is America?” Mr. McGovern received bruises, lacerations and contusions from officers.

“It is the ultimate definition of lip service that Secretary of State Clinton would be trumpeting the US government’s supposed concerns for free speech rights and this man would be simultaneously brutalized and arrested for engaging in a peaceful act of dissent at her speech,” stated attorney Mara Verheyden-Hilliard of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF).

Egypt: One Down, Two to Go

2011-02-12T11:38:00.000-05:00

One down: the people of Egypt have overthrown the hated dictator Mubarak. Wild cheers for this!

Two to go:

1. Overthrow the dictatorship of Suleiman and his fellow generals.
2. Overthrow the power and privileges of the entire parasitic class of the very wealthy, the class on behalf of which Mubarak and Suleiman rule, a class that is responsible for imposing extreme inequality on Egyptian society, a class that sees nothing wrong with millions of Egyptians living in poverty while Mubarak accumulates a $50 Billion fortune. Create a new kind of society, based on equality and mutual aid, not inequality and people being pitted against each other.

Obama lies.

Obama announced yesterday that, “It was the moral force of nonviolence, not terrorism and mindless killing, that bent the arc of history toward justice once more.” Wrong! What made Mubarak step down was the fact that he and the generals advising him saw that the people in Tahrir Square and elsewhere fought back against the police goons Mubarak sent to attack them. They fought back with all the violence they could muster, using the only weapons they had, such as stones. The people did not follow the philosophy of nonviolence. Had they followed this wrong philosophy, they would have gone limp and invited arrest in order to “demonstrate the sincerity of their convictions” in the erroneous expectation that “moral suasion” can make oppressors stop oppressing. The people did not, fortunately, buy into a philosophy that says people who use violent force in self-defense are morally inferior to those who don’t.

The generals advised Mubarak to step down because they knew that if he did not, push would come to shove. The rank and file soldiers would have to be ordered to fire on the Egyptian people. The generals feared that when so ordered, the soldiers would refuse. The risk was enormous. If this happened, then the people, with help from friendly soldiers and weapons they could acquire, would have more force—violent force—at their disposal than the upper class.

Obama refers to the “moral force of nonviolence,” but it was the moral force of violence that “bent history.” It was Mubarak’s fear of the possibility that his rank and file soldiers, armed and trained to kill, would share the decency and morality of the Egyptian people and aim their weapons at the rulers instead of the people. The oppressors do not fear nonviolence; they fear being on the losing side in a contest of violent force.

Obama contrasts nonviolence, which he—the commander in chief of the most violent mass-murdering military force ever to exist on the planet—claims to love, to “terrorism and mindless violence.” His point? That violence against oppression is morally wrong. Obama would be revealed as a defender of oppression if he came right out and said what he means, so he “violence baits” people who seriously threaten to overthrow oppressors, hoping to strengthen the forces among them who try to persuade the people to “go limp.”

Obama said, “Egyptians have made it clear that nothing less than genuine democracy will carry the day.” What does he mean by “genuine democracy?” He means “genuine democracy like what we have in the United States.” But we have fake democracy in the United States. A plutocracy controls all the key decisions: our government wages unjust wars that the public opposes, it refuses to even consider single-payer health care even though the public wants it, and it makes sure the rich get richer and the poor poorer. This is what Obama actually wants for Egypt when he praises “genuine democracy.” For the wealthy elites of the world and the politicians and dictators who rule on their behalf, “democracy” means using elections (that they control) as a fig leaf to cover the truth that Big Money rules, not the people.

The revolution has only begun. Two to go.

How Progressive Ideas Protect Inequality

2010-10-17T09:49:00.090-05:00

“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” [NYT, Nov. 26, 2006]

There is indeed a class war whose outcome will determine whether our society will remain one based on inequality with real control over society in the hands of a privileged few, or become one based on equality and genuine democracy; and right now billionaires like Buffet are winning. But the billionaires are few in number and we, the people they are defeating, vastly outnumber them.

The question, then, is, "Why are we losing the class war?" The answer is that we are not trying to win it. Instead, we are fighting for what are generally known as progressive goals, but progressive goals don't actually make society more equal and democratic. Why not? Let's look at some of the most popular progressive goals to see what the problem is with them. They all have an appeal that makes us want to fight for them, but winning them has consequences very different from the appeal.

Our National Interest

The appeal. This phrase is often used as an indisputable reason to do something, as in opposing U.S. aid to Israel on the grounds that it is not in "our national interest" to support Israel.

What happens if we win it? The concept "national interest" falsely asserts that all Americans have a common "national" interest, blinding people to the crucial fact that our nation is not a place where we all share common interests but is instead a place in which class conflict rages. It prevents people understanding that in order to have our government adopt just domestic and foreign policies it is necessary to win this internal class war. A few Americans reaping huge profits from the military industrial complex love wars (that they assert are in the "national interest") because these wars allow them to take trillions of dollars to pay for their privileged life style instead of for things that would make life better for ordinary Americans. People who think they are fighting for some mythical "national interest" that everybody in the nation shares--rich and poor alike--are fighting for something that simply does not exist.

Further, when we fight for "our national interest" we are prevented not only from fighting our own nation's plutocracy but also from allying with ordinary people of other nations in international working class solidarity against all national ruling elites. The concept of national interest tells us that our American national interest is different from an Iranian national interest or a Chinese national interest etc. This way of thinking allows ruling elites to divide-and-conquer us. The concept of "our national interest" is a bogus concept that prevents us from winning a more equal and democratic society.

National Self-Determination (aka National Liberation)

The appeal. National Self-determination (aka National Liberation) seems to be about ending the master-slave relationship between people in places like Palestine and countries like Israel that dominate them. If only the people in Palestine had the "right to self-determination" then the master-slave relationship would be ended, and hence the world would be more equal.

What happens if we win it? National self-determination has nothing to do with making the world more equal. If Palestine's government consisted entirely of non-Jewish natives of Palestine then Palestinians would enjoy national self-determination, but their society could still be extremely undemocratic and unequal. The undemocratic and wealthy elite who presently control the Palestine Authority would remain just as undemocratic, wealthy and indifferent to the poverty of the many as they so notoriously are known to be today. Black South Africans discovered that winning self-determination (i.e. a government whose top leaders are black South Africans) does not equate to making their society more equal; in fact the economic gap between the many and the few has grown even wider since their success in winning "self-determination."

National interest, national liberation, national self-determination, "black power," Zionism, and all of the other variations on this theme are examples of the ideology of nationalism, which says that the important thing about people is their nationality or ethnic group, not whether they try to make society more equal and democratic. Nationalist ideas always undermine the efforts of people to win the class war.

Equal Opportunity

The appeal. The phrase features the word "Equal." And "opportunity" sounds like a positive thing.

What happens if we win it? Equal opportunity and social equality are two very different things. Social equality means people are all in the same class when it comes to wealth and power. Equal opportunity, in today's society based on competition and enormous class inequality, means that everybody has the same opportunity to engage in the competition that sorts people into a few winners and many losers. Equal opportunity would result in the gender and ethnic and racial composition of the winners being exactly the same as the composition for the overall population. Whatever category of people one considered--blacks, males, etc.--their proportion among the winners, and among the losers, would be exactly the same as in the whole population. The upper class could still be as wealthy and as privileged as it is today, but women and blacks and hispanics would be perfectly (i.e. proportional to their numbers in the population) represented in the upper class. Millions of people could still be homeless or destitute but their gender and racial composition would be perfect--exactly the same as that of the upper class. In this sense, equal opportunity is about making our extremely unequal society "perfectly unequal." But we don't want perfect inequality; we want equality.

Making inequality perfect only serves to give it more legitimacy. This is the ruling elite's goal; it should not be ours.

Level Playing Field

The appeal: When things are unequal some are higher than others, so making things "level" must therefore make the world more equal. In 17th century England the "levelers" were people fighting to make society more equal. In a game like soccer, if the playing field is not level then the team driving the ball downhill has an unfair advantage, so a level field makes the competition fair.

What happens if we win it? As with "equal opportunity," what is "level" about the playing field actually has nothing to do with making the world more equal and democratic. It means the same thing as "equal opportunity": perfectly fair competition resulting in perfect inequality.

Affirmative Action

The appeal: Discrimination against racial minorities and women is a form of inequality, so it would seem that discrimination in favor of racial minorities and women makes the world more equal.

What happens if we win it? Racial and gender discrimination are indeed forms of inequality. That's why the goal should be to end such discrimination, not just to change its target. The original goal of the Civil Rights Movement under the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr., was to abolish Jim Crow laws, making it illegal to discriminate based on race. This goal for greater equality had enormous support from blacks and working class whites. Only in response to pressure from Richard Nixon and other upper class forces did the leaders of Civil Rights organizations change the goal to affirmative action after the assassination of MLK, Jr.

Affirmative action has not made the United States more equal and democratic. Warren Buffet knows this is true and so should we. Ordinary blacks suffer imprisonment and joblessness more now than before affirmative action laws were implemented. Affirmative action made the upper middle class and corporate board rooms include more blacks and women, but for ordinary black people and women, having a lousy job without health insurance, or losing one's home to foreclosure, or spending one's life in prison are not made any better by having a black person or a woman managing the machinery of inequality. Affirmative action, like equal opportunity and a level playing field, is about making inequality perfect, not making our society more equal.

The "action" in affirmative action refers to acts taken by the upper class--by the corporations and the government they control--and not actions taken by we the people. These actions--in particular, telling countless whites for decades that they didn't get a job or a school admission because it had to be given to a less qualified black person--have unfortunately succeeded in doing precisely what the upper class intended they do: foment racial resentment and undermine solidarity between white and black working people. The action that we the people need to take must first be to get back on the road that the old Civil Rights Movement was on--attacking racial/gender discrimination no matter whom it discriminates against. Then we need to continue on that road to build mutual support wherever working people are under attack, uniting men and women, immigrant and non-immigrant, black and brown and white in a struggle against inequality and for a new world.

Marriage Equality

The appeal: "Equality" is in this phrase, so it must be about making a more equal world.

What happens if we win it? Same-sex marriage, which is what this phrase refers to, is about making same-sex couples identical to opposite-sex couples with respect to laws regarding what couples can marry. The premise here is that society is less equal when some kinds of couples cannot marry and more equal when any couple can get a marriage license no matter what. If it were true then our society would become more equal if we abolished the laws against siblings marrying each other. But nobody believes this.

Same-sex marriage would do nothing to reduce the gap between the wealthy few and the remaining many. Some of the rich and powerful as well as the poor and powerless might include such couples. The billionaire Buffets and Soroses, however, could not care less.

What the billionaires do care about, however, is giving legitimacy to the undemocratic nature of our society in which a political/corporate elite make the important decisions. One way to do this is to persuade a large minority of the population, progressives who are disproportionate college-educated with higher salaries than most, that the majority is not fit to make important social decisions--that the very idea of democracy, in other words, is wrong. The billionaires have succeeded in this by using their mass media to conduct a public debate about same-sex marriage in which those who oppose it because of a genuine concern for children, and who don't fit the stereotype of a religious fanatic bigot, are excluded.

I have written elsewhere (here and here and here) about why same-sex marriage is a bad idea because it is harmful to children, and why that--not bigotry--is the reason many people vote against it, like African-Americans in California, seventy percent of whom voted for Proposition 8 to ban same-sex marriage. The billionaires use this phony debate to persuade progressives that the majority, who voted "No" to same-sex marriage in 31 out of 31 state referenda, are "homophobic bigots" and therefore certainly not fit to determine social policies. The progressive Green Party, for example, with its slogan "It is wrong to vote on rights," asserts that the majority should not even be allowed to vote on marriage policy. This illustrates how a progressive idea can cause its followers to actually oppose democracy, i.e. to oppose equality in the political arena.

A Greener, Self-Sustaining, Low Carbon Footprint World

The appeal: The environment, we are told, will no longer support human life unless this goal is achieved, so this goal is a necessary condition to have any kind of human society, never mind a more equal and democratic one. Additionally, if one works for this goal then one is going against the bad guys--the Big Oil industry.

What happens if we win it? A greener, self-sustaining, low carbon footprint world can be every bit as unequal and undemocratic as the present one, and our plutocracy intends to make it so. The plutocracy is as concerned about protecting the survival of the human race as anybody. They want the human race to survive with them as the privileged ruling elite, and they will do what it takes to ensure this. Class war is not about whether the human race should do what is necessary to survive; it is about whether human society in the future will be more equal and democratic or not. By focusing on human survival instead of equality and democracy, we abandon the goal that actually distinguishes us from people like the owners of Big Oil, and hand the future over to them.

The carbon-cap etc. goal doesn't challenge the Big Oil agenda at all. As an article in the online Asia times reports:

"Big Oil - from Exxon Mobil to Shell and BP - along with a Fortune 500 cast of global corporations, many directly linked with Big Oil, will also make a killing. They want a direct global carbon tax - as ExxonMobil has called for, on the record. This carbon trading system will link national "cap-and-trade" markets; the "caps" will be in line with the targets for emission reduction. This explains the "paradox" of Big Oil actually being in favor of fighting global warming."

Nothing in the above assumes that Al Gore's warnings about human-caused global warming threatening human survival are false. But there is good reason to suspect that they are indeed false. Go here and here to read why.

What Else Do These Progressive Ideas Have in Common?

Not coincidentally, one can find influential institutions--that receive financial backing from the billionaire class--promoting all of these progressive ideas. The Ford Foundation in 1996 "contributed $1.4 million to activities aimed at defending affirmative action against political attack." In academia, people like Judith Stacey, Ph.D., Professor of Sociology and Professor of Gender and Sexuality at New York University and a prominent proponent of same-sex marriage, are funded by elite foundations. "Professor Stacey's research has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Russell Sage Foundation." A well-funded "progressive" establishment keeps these ideas in the forefront, like the proverbial carrot dangled on a stick in front of a horse to make the horse go where the master wants it to go, a place that has nothing to do with the horse getting the carrot to eat--what it actually wants.

Movements Often Win What They Aim For, For Better or Worse

When it comes to goals--like social equality--that are opposed by the ruling elite, mass movements never win them unless they explicitly aim for them. That is why the ruling elite work so hard to make sure that what we explicitly aim for is never the actual abolition of class inequality and upper class rule over society. They fear the day that masses of people stop fighting for plutocracy-approved goals like "self-determination," "equal opportunity," "affirmative action" and "marriage equality," and instead focus on overthrowing the power of our plutocracy and making society more equal and democratic for real.

Good Leadership Versus Bad

Billions of people want social equality and yet far too often we are organized around goals that have nothing to do with this aim. Our leaders, either for self-serving reasons or ineptitude, define our goals with ideas that protect inequality. Why do we let them get away with this?

The reason is that far too often we, ourselves, do not see clearly what is wrong with the ideas espoused by our leaders. We seldom subject the goals of our leaders to collective critical examination with everybody encouraged to speak their mind freely, and without feeling that our goals have already been determined by the leaders and the only thing left to discuss is how to win them.

We need to turn things around. We need to determine our own goals. Good leaders are the people who help us do that. They help us develop confidence in our own values and the ability to articulate and fight for goals that reflect those values. These are the kinds of things that we need to consider when evaluating our leaders. Just because the newspapers and politicians say so-and-so is our leader, and just because so-and-so claims to be our leader, does not mean it's true. Good leaders do not tell us what our goals are and stifle discussion about the matter. Good leaders remind us that choosing our goals carefully is the most important thing of all! They warn us: "Be careful what you wish for. You may get it."

We, the large number of non-leaders, cannot blame our failure to win the class war on external problems over which we have no control, such as the billionaires being too rich and powerful, or our leaders being bad. Our problems are internal--therefore things that we can change. We can change the goals we fight for, and we can change the way we evaluate our leaders. If we do this we can win the class war.

Nationalism and Palestinian Leaders

2010-09-25T19:41:00.002-05:00

Below is an impassioned post to a list decrying the betrayal of the Palestinian people by their leaders, and wondering why they let it happen. It is an extremely important post. (I deleted the author’s name in case he/she did not want it used outside the list.)

Following the post is what I sent in reply.

--John

-------------------------------------------------------------

From: ______
Sent: Sep 18, 2010 9:10 AM
To: USQuagmire@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [USQuagmire] What is wrong with the Palestinians? A
whole lot.

What is wrong with the Palestinians? A whole lot.
23 07 2009

There is something very wrong with people who claim to be smart, intelligent, educated, hard working, honest, nationalists, and decent to accept such a stupid, corrupt, incompetent, reckless, useless leadership and organization for the last 45 year that failed at everything it set out to do turning the PLO to a manager and contractor of the Jewish Occupation with leadership that at best can be described as self serving, racketeering mafia that made financial fortunes for its self and members of their families fleecing national treasury ,while claiming to represent and lead the Palestinian people toward liberation and independence. The Palestinians remain under Occupation till now.

There is something very wrong with people who never held the leadership accountable for its failing, for lack of accountability and transparency, for the numerous disasters that befell the Palestinians in exile and under Occupation, where tens of billions wasted, tens of billions remains unaccounted for, where tens of thousands perished and died in the cause of liberation and where hundreds of thousands were exiled ( Kuwait) and lost every thing because of the reckless and irresponsible behavior of the leadership.

There is something wrong with people where â€œintellectualsâ€ who supposed to be the conscious of the nation and guardians of the peopleâ€™s interests and rights colluded with Arafat, the PLO and Fatah leadership and remained silent while witnessing firsthand the abuse of power and authority by Arafat, lack of collective leadership, lack of financial accountability, lack of holding the leadership and officers responsible for the many repeated failures. There is something wrong with intellectuals who became self serving of a system that corrupted their body and soul. Rather than standing up for the peopleâ€™s rights these intellectuals became a tool and apologists for a failed leadership. They simply sat on their face all these years while knowing the PLO and its leadership are nothing more than a lie, a fraud, bunch of crooks and thieves, unfit to lead let alone liberate. The failures and the mess we see today did not take place over night. It was there years ago, when Arafat became the sole dictator, dispensing financial favors for loyalty, making sure that all those around him are â€œeunuchsâ€ with no voice bought and sold with money and privilege and subordinated powers accepting personal insults and humiliations by the â€œOld Manâ€ including members of the present leadership.

There is something wrong with a business community and leadership that failed to dedicate a share of its money and wealth and access to power to building a viable economy with professional and skilled jobs for the people. Rather it chose collusion with a corrupt and failed leadership, benefiting from the corrupt leadership of Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority with rewards of monopolies and scares business opportunities that added billions to their wealth while the rest of the people could hardly have a decent job to live on with more than 70% living below the poverty lines. A business leadership that â€œcorneredâ wealth rather than â€œspreadingâ€ wealth, robbing average small entrepreneurs from business opportunities, becoming part of the mafia that is the Palestinian Authority.

There is something with leaders of so called â€œcivil societiesâ€, a leadership rather than serving the general interest of the people and public became self serving of their on pockets accumulating substantial wealth from donations they get from foreign donors anxious to do some good for the miserable people of Palestine. So many leading names became corrupted by access to Arafat, Abbas and the Palestinian Authority with business opportunities created through such relation that they became silent and blind, failing to speak out on corruption, incompetence, ineptness, abuse of power and authority, civil right abuse, never speaking out for accountability and transparency in government and public service, muzzled by the dollars they get. To the leaders of civil societies the Occupation became and is a business, a big business, they simply forget it is there.

There is something wrong with people and their so called representative ( PNC) who never demanded any sort of accountability and who never held the leadership responsible for it failures and mistakes in Jordan, in Lebanon, in Tunis, in Kuwait. There is something wrong with people who failed to demand accountability and public inquiry into the many massacres committed against the Palestinian people in Tal-Zaater, in Sabra and Shatilla, in Jennin, in Hebron. Who would believe that Israelâ€™s of Begin form a public and independent commission to hold hearing into the massacres at Sabra and Shatilla but says nothing about Palestinian leadershipâ€™s failures to hold a similar hearing? Something very wrong with such people and such leadership.

Who would believe that the PLO/Fatah and PNC leadership never made public accounting of the billions at its disposal, peopleâ€™s money, with no ccounting of SAMED Industries, no accounting of tens of billions of investments in Africa, in Europe, North America and the Middle East with no one knowing what happened to these tens of billions? And more troublesome is the deafening silence as they see and witness continued financial
corruption and thefts of public funds on a daily basis.

Who would believe that Israel charges its hero and prime minister, Rabin, with failing to adhere to its laws limiting bank accounts of officials outside Israel to few thousand dollars and forcing him to resign yet accept Yasser Arafat private and personal decision to transfer millions of dollars of the â€œpeopleâ€™s moneyâ to the private accounts of his wife so she can enjoy the high standard of living in Paris. Israelâ€™s dismiss its prime minister over few thousand dollars while the Palestinians worship a man who robbed them blind and failed them at every turn.

Who would believe the Palestinian people accept a leader who agrees to and accept hundreds of millions transferred into his personal and private account, money collected by Israel from taxes it collects on Palestinian imports, rather than having all the funds going to the peopleâ€™s treasury? Who would accept but Palestinians their leaders to have public money deposited into private accounts of their leaderâ€™s entrusted to retired Mossad agents and crooked bankers in France and in Switzerland? Why Israel punishes its leaders for keeping several thousands of dollars in foreign accounts, yet the Palestinians do not demand to know where are the billions hidden and lost in the private accounts of Arafat. Who would believe that the Palestinian people remain silent while key members of the PLO leadership accumulate wealth and assets in the hundreds of millions and do not ask the question where and how? The Israeli brought Olmert to trial because he accepted tens of thousands of dollars in stuffed envelops yet the PLO and Fatah leadership rob the treasury blind to buy cars, houses, scholarship for their kids, pay for expensive weddings and other wise fleece the national treasury.

Who would believe that there are so many traitors, informers and collaborators working for and on behalf of the occupying enemy making it very possible for Israel to target and assassinate key leadership such as Sheik Ahmed Yassin, Abdul-Aziz Rantisi, Engineer Abuy-Ayash and many many more resistance fighters gunned downed in cold blood based on information and intelligence provided by members within Hamas and Fatah? Who would believe there are tens of thousands of such collaborators and informers from the highest levels of government of Hamas, Fatah, and Palestinian Authority to the drivers of the donkey carts in the streets of Gaza , Ramallah or Nablus?

Who would believe that Palestinians accept , say nothing and do nothing about having to wait for hours and days, by the hundreds of thousands if not millions at more than 650 security checkpoints while more than 3,000 VIPs of Fatah, PLO and Palestinian Authority speed through these Israeli security point? One has to wonder what kind of people the Palestinians are made of and what kind of a leadership that negotiate for itself such privilege while the people it is suppose to represent languish for hours and days at these humiliating and degrading security checkpoints with so many women, sick and very young dying while waiting to go through. I am sure the leadership is very proud of its selfish achievements. It never cared for a gave a damn about the people when in Beirut, Tunis and now Ramallah.

One has to wonder what kind of people that accept a leadership that promised liberation for 45 years, only to come back as manager and partner with the occupation? A leadership that continues to meet and negotiate while Israel continues to expropriate and steal more and more land for its settlements, continue to negotiate while settlers are terrorizing villages and destroying farms, continue to negotiate while with some 70,000 Palestinians under virtual 25 hours curfew in Hebron and does nothing to chase this leadership out of Ramallah?. Abbasâ€™s partner Israeli negotiating partners Olmert & Company succeeded to build 2,500 housing units in settlements, 400 Km of the Apartheid Wall, while Abbas, Saeb, Quari and Abed-Rabou were having regular visits and drinks with Olmert, Levni and Barack. They even met with these killers and murderers after the war on Gaza. Who would believe that leaders from around the world make the efforts to visit Gaza to see the devastation caused by the Palestinian Authority negotiating partners yet not Abbas, not one single leader of the Ramallah authority bothers to make the efforts to visit Gaza?

Who would believe that Palestinians accept the lies of both Hamas and Fatah as they talk of liberation when the only thing they are interested in is â€œwho gets what of the financial pieâ€ that is the Jewish Occupation? Who would believe the lies of Hamas that it is Israel that detonated a truck load of explosive during a â€œResistance Ceremonyâ€ killing some 40 innocent people and lies about its reckless and irresponsible behavior and total disregards of the peopleâ€™s safety and security as it parked the loaded truck next to the people?

Who would believe that a leadership like Hamas turns the absolute and honorable right to resist and fight the occupation including armed means, into an act of â€˜terrorâ€ through the reckless, irresponsible and immoral use of â€œ suicide bombingsâ€ that kills innocent people, yes innocent people in cafes, buses and restaurant and turned resistance into a self serving business, with families celebrating the death of a son in a suicide mission rather than celebrating his or her life and graduation from college. Who but Hamas and Islamic Jihad that encourage and prompt families to accept â€œblood moneyâ€ for their dead sons and daughters from such killers and murderous like Saddam? It is one thing to carry a gun, shoot and kill Israeli soldiers or an armed settlers in the Occupied Territories, it is another thing to murder people on a bus in Tel-Aviv. Hamas leadership blurred the lines between what is right and what is wrong, and what is honorable and legitimate resistance and acts of terror. Hamas reckless behavior and leadership deprived the Palestinians from the noble and honorable right to fight and resist the Occupation. Hamas like Fatah not only failed to liberate, it managed to pull the rugs and legitimacy from underneath legitimate armed resistance.

Who would believe that smart and intelligent people like the Palestinians believe that the useless worthless Qasasm rockets will liberate Gaza? That Hamas fighters will defend the people of Gaza when in fact such irresponsible and incompetent resistance managed to kill not more than a dozen Israel soldiers while Israel managed to destroy some 30,000 homes made more than 500,000 homeless and killed some 1,800? Where is the smart competent intelligent resistance that Mishaâ€™al and Haniyah talk about? Certainly it is not in Gaza. Why does Hamas leadership put the fait and lives of millions of people in the hands of reckless, irresponsible resistance fighters and fails to take charge and responsibility for its failed strategy?

One has to wonder what kind of people the Palestinians are for accepting the daily abuse and misuse of power and authority by the Palestinian Authority Security Forces with a mission to protect the soldiers and settlers of the Occupation, retreating to its barracks when the Israeli army decided to carry out a military operation or an assassination, leaving the Palestinians without security or safety as Israeli soldiers and settlers kill, assassinate and destroy.

Who would believe that people who suffered for so long under occupation with more than 700,000 spending time in Israel jails since 67, tens of thousand dead at the hands of the Jewish Occupation accept the abuse and criminal behavior of Arafatâ€™s Preventive Security Forces in Gaza and the West Bank where more Palestinians died in Palestinian jails than those who died in Israelâ€™s jails? Who would believe that Palestinians accept and remain silent while Arafat, Abbas and their cronies turned the Preventive Security Forces into a mafia, racketeering and protection organizations for its leadership and officers accumulating millions in the process? Who would believe that the leadership and commanders of the Preventive Security Forces, during the shameful and criminal commands of Dahlan and Rajoub, of course with the blessings of Arafat and Abbas subjecting citizens and dissident Palestinians to torture, physical and verbal abuse, rewarded with promotions as they ran away scared, abandoning their posts before the advancing Israeli forces leaving behind their staff and political prisoners locked behind bars? Fulfilling the old saying â€œassadon alaya wa fel hurubinaâ€™amatunâ€. Loins when it comes to me but ostrich when it comes to war and enemy.

It is difficult to believe how the PLO leadership of the last 45 years turned and transformed the proud Palestinian people from a nation and people dedicated to education, hard work with ambitions to become doctors, engineers, lawyers, industrialist, and teachers and turned them into unskilled laborers for Israeli market killing their hopes and ambition to have a university degree. Young people now can look forward to joining gangs, joining theâ€œSultaâ€ and join the Palestinian Authority and becomes a security officer or a functionary, dedicated to protecting the Authority, the leadership and the Jewish Occupation and joining Hamas gangs in Gaza.

It is even more difficult to accept the utter silence, bordering on cowardliness where people fails to rise up against such an Authority where more than 80% of the people are below poverty line while the elites; the â€œBeirut and Tunisâ€ leadership enjoys million dollar homes, luxurious cars with guards and drivers for themselves, their wives and mistresses, spending thousand of thousands of dollars on dinner and drinks enough to feed several starving families for a month.

Never understood how brave individuals who faced Israeli tanks and guns with stones and rocks, could become a nations of cowards failing to take up the challenge of popular sustainable and persistent uprising against the Palestinian Authority, Hamas and Fatah and against the Israeli Jewish Occupation that lasted some 42 years? Why are the people so brave before Israeli guns and tanks yet do not take the challenge and march on Ramallah and Gaza and chase the leadership out of office and out of country?

It is also not so surprising that the Palestinian people accepted the role of refugees, living in miserable camps, with open sewers, waiting for the end of the month to collect their rations of dry milk, flour, and cooking oil from UNRWA rather than take the challenge by taking over such services themselves. No wonder the Palestinian people and leadership became a nation of beggars, â€œshahadeenâ€ with no self respect and dignity and with a leadership of thieves. Too bad for the Palestinian people after being the model of well educated hard working intelligent people they became the laughing stock of the Arab, and the world. Thanks to such a self serving corrupt incompetent inept leadership of thugs, thieves and collaborators. Never seen a case where a leadership not only failed to liberate but succeed in destroying a people and a dream. Thank you Yasser Arafat, thank you Mahmoud Abbas, thank you Ahmed Qurai, thank you Farouk Qadoumi, thank you Saeb Eurikat, thank you Yasser Abed-Rabou, thank you Mohamed Dahlan, thank you Jibril Rajoub, thank you Tayeb Abdul-Raheem, thank you Khalid Mishaal, thank you Hakam Balawi and thank you Azzam Al-Ahmed, thank you Hanan Ashrawi, thank you all for destroying our people and our dreams, succeeding where Israel failed. For and on behalf of more than 7 million people for your successful dedicated leadership. We deserve you, as you deserve us.

-------------------------------------------------------------

John Spritzler here: My reply follows:

Dear _____,

I am an American who has never been to Palestine, but I care very much about what is happening there, have tried to learn about the conflict, organize against Zionism in the United States, and agree with your excellent and appropriately sharp denunciation of Palestinian leaders. I also agree with the extremely important point you make about resistance, and salute your wonderfully clear and principled statement of it in the paragraph where you write:

“Who would believe that a leadership like Hamas turns the absolute and honorable right to resist and fight the occupation including armed means, into an act of terror through the reckless, irresponsible and immoral use of suicide bombings that kills innocent people, yes innocent people in cafes, buses and restaurant and turned resistance into a self serving business, with families celebrating the death of a son in a suicide mission rather than celebrating his or her life and graduation from college. Who but Hamas and Islamic Jihad that encourage and prompt families to accept blood money for their dead sons and daughters from such killers and murderous like Saddam? It is one thing to carry a gun, shoot and kill Israeli soldiers or an armed settlers in the Occupied Territories, it is another thing to murder people on a bus in Tel-Aviv. Hamas leadership blurred the lines between what is right and what is wrong, and what is honorable and legitimate resistance and acts of terror. Hamas reckless behavior and leadership deprived the Palestinians from the noble and honorable right to fight and resist the Occupation. Hamas like Fatah not only failed to liberate, it managed to pull the rugs and legitimacy from underneath legitimate armed resistance.”

The question that you have raised—the crucial question indeed—is why have the Palestinian people permitted their leaders to betray the people in whose interests they claim to act? (And it is not just a Palestinian problem—the same thing afflicts oppressed people everywhere.) I believe nationalism is the key to understanding why. This is why I reacted differently than you may have intended when I read this sentence of yours that includes the word “nationalists”:

“There is something very wrong with people who claim to be smart, intelligent, educated, hard working, honest, nationalists, and decent to accept such a stupid, corrupt, incompetent, reckless, useless leadership…”

While I agree with you that there is something wrong (in the sense of unexpected) in smart, intelligent, educated, hard working, honest people accepting terrible leaders, I don’t think it is unexpected for people who claim to be nationalists to accept such leaders. Here’s why.

Nationalism is an ideology based on a hierarchical model of society that legitimizes all of the things you rightly condemn:

· class privilege (“…having to wait for hours and days, by the hundreds of thousands if not millions at more than 650 security checkpoints while more than 3,000 VIPs of Fatah, PLO and Palestinian Authority speed through these Israeli security point?”, “…tens of billions remains unaccounted for” “that added billions to their wealth while the rest of the people could hardly have a decent job to live on with more than 70% living below the poverty lines”);

· elite domination and control (“dispensing financial favors for loyalty, making sure that all those around him are eunuchs”) and

· demobilization of the populace (instead of promoting mass action like the intifadas the leaders “like Hamas turns the absolute and honorable right to resist and fight the occupation including armed means, into an act of terror through the reckless, irresponsible and immoral use of suicide bombings that kills innocent people” by the actions of a select few.)

The poisonous effects of hierarchical and competitive models are also much in evidence here in the U.S., for example in the labor unions, where union leaders draw vast salaries as their members lose their jobs, their pensions, their health care, their rights while being directed to compete with other workers "for the good of the company." Union leaders demobilize their members as they negotiate and act on their behalf. The leaders function as an unacknowledged arm of management, undermining worker solidarity and strength wherever they can, while promoting competition and division among workers.

The core nationalist idea is that the most important aspect of a person is not their class but what nation (or, equivalently, ethnicity, race or religion) they belong to. Nationalism demands that people be loyal to the nation, and respect the nation’s flag and symbols. But in the nationalist concept, leaders can be seen as bringing honor and glory to the nation by achieving wealth and power and respect for themselves, as representatives of the nation. Loyalty to the nation, national honor and glory have nothing to do with making the nation more equal and democratic.

Yet in every nation working class people want to live in a more equal and democratic society; they want better lives for themselves and their children. This makes the nation’s working class a threat to the nation’s elite and privileged rulers. The rulers know this, which is why they demobilize the people, tell them not to engage in mass action like intifadas—the kind of actions that can actually defeat oppression—and instead tell them to rely on their leaders’ skill in negotiating with the oppressor the way Palestinian leaders collaborate with Israeli leaders. They don’t want the masses taking matters into their own hands, like in the intifadas. They want people to be dependent on them for their daily subsistence, unemployed except as police or soldiers, without independent sources of income and reliant on government handouts.

Nationalism divides ordinary people of different nations, who share the same positive values of equality and democracy, into two supposedly antagonistic camps: “our nation” versus “other nations.” Leaders who rely on nationalism to deflect criticism of their actions know that nothing strengthens nationalist thinking more than a war between “our nation” and an “enemy nation.” This is why nationalist leaders can make a mockery of armed resistance by making terrorist attacks on innocent noncombatant civilians of the “enemy” nation. And nationalism, in turn, is why people feel obliged to accept this as legitimate.

Even if ordinary Palestinians don’t like what their leaders do, it is exceedingly difficult to stand up to these leaders and challenge them if the ideology of nationalism is not, at the same time, repudiated in a massive way. For as long as the Palestinian public accepts, even if only passively, the nationalism that currently prevails, then any individual who opposes what the leaders do in the name of nationalism cannot help but feel isolated and incapable of mounting a serious opposition. Without a full repudiation of the ideology of nationalism, there cannot be a coherent challenge to the misdeeds of nationalist leaders.

But it is difficult to launch a massive repudiation of nationalism if one is an individual without an organization that is explicitly anti-nationalist and based on internationalism. (By internationalism I mean the outlook that judges people not by what nation they are loyal to but rather by whether they try to make the world more equal and democratic, as most working class people of all nations do.) This is why one of the most important things to do in the fight against Zionism and all forms of oppression is to identify nationalism as a poisonous ideology and to create new organizations based on internationalism.

Despite their occasional use of internationalist phrases like “workers of the world unite,” communist parties, due to the inherent elitism of Marxism (see articles on this by David Stratman and myself at http://newdemocracyworld.org/world_revolution.html) cannot and will not build a genuinely internationalist movement.

While it is certainly a difficult task to build an internationalist movement with the revolutionary goal of overthrowing privileged undemocratic elites and creating a more equal and democratic world, there is evidence all around us that this is in fact what most ordinary people actually want. That being the case, we can be on firm ground in being hopeful that success is possible if we are on the right path. Nationalist movements can never lead to the world we want. Only an internationalist movement can.

What would an internationalist movement do in Palestine? I think it would speak out, as you have done, against all of the wrong things that nationalist leaders do. It would do so, however, with the enormous added power that comes from a coherent internationalist perspective that rejects nationalism explicitly and calls for solidarity among all working people in Palestine--be they Muslim or Christian or Jewish, be their language Arabic or Hebrew, be their skin dark or light. It would denounce all forms of class inequality and divide-and-rule policies--like Zionism--that the upper class uses to strengthen their domination. It would build this solidarity by attacking oppressive elites no matter what their nationality; it would not, for example, give Palestinian elites a free pass with the nationalistic excuse that "Palestinians need to be all united against the Zionists." Nor would it have Israeli Jews give Zionist leaders a free pass with the analogous nationalist excuse. It would denounce acts of terror against Jewish noncombatants, while defending the right of armed resistance (like the intifadas) against the IDF and violent Zionist civilians. It would call for the revolutionary transformation of society--the abolition of class inequality and the shaping of society on the basis of democracy and solidarity--in Palestine and the entire world.

Such a movement would resonate with the billions of good people around the world. It would expose all who attacked it as morally wrong. In particular it would expose the lie that Zionist leaders are defending ordinary Jews from anti-Semitic Arabs, a lie without which Zionism would have virtually no support among ordinary people anywhere in the world.

--John Spritzler

Don't Ban Smoking in One's Own Home

2010-08-27T19:19:00.003-05:00

Massachusetts politicians are considering making it illegal for people to smoke in their own home if it is public housing. My friend, Stephen Helfer, wrote this excellent letter to the Boston Globe, which was printed last week (without the references.)

To the Editor:

The Globe justifies prohibiting public housing residents from smoking in their apartments by implying that secondhand smoke can cause or aggravate asthma (“Boston should ban smoking in all public-housing units,” editorial, August 9). While secondhand smoke, like dust, pollen, or even exercise, can trigger an asthma attack, there is no evidence that tobacco smoke causes the illness.(1)

Between 1980 and 1996, in fact, although smoking and secondhand smoke exposure sharply declined in the United States, the prevalence of asthma increased 77 percent.(2) Specialists who had assumed there was a relationship between smoking and asthma were dumbfounded.(3) At present, according to the National Heart Blood and Lung Institute, the cause of asthma is unknown.(4)

Proponents of ever-more-restrictive health regulations ignore that people want and need to make their own personal decisions. Sir Michael Marmot, chair of the World Health Organization Commission on the Social Determinants of Health, has found that people with little control over their lives, suffer from ill health, as much or more, than as those who smoke or are obese.(5)

Denying public-housing residents the right to determine the smoking policy in their own homes deprives many of them the one area of their lives over which they have any control. It is not only, as the Globe concedes, intrusive, it is a danger to their health.

References:

(1) National Heart Blood and Lung Institute, “What causes asthma symptoms to occur.”
http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/dci/Diseases/Asthma/Asthma_Causes.html
(2) “Breathing Easier In Boston,” editorial, The Boston Globe, 10/16/06
(3) Ibid. Also see Ellen Ruppel Shell, “Does Civilization Cause Asthma,” Atlantic Monthly, May 2000, where Dr. Fernando Martinez of the University of Arizona is quoted: “...I assumed tobacco smoke and pollution were the problem.....But these factors turned out not to play a major role.”
(4) National Heart Blood and Lung Institute, “What causes asthma?” http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/dci/Diseases/Asthma/Asthma_Causes.html
(5) The following is condensed: “Smoking is an important cause of premature death. But it was not the main explanation of the social gradient.A combination of smoking, overweight, sedentary lifestyle, explained no more than about a quarter of the social gradient in mortality. So it wasn’t medical care and it was not primarily lifestyle.
“Unnatural Causes,” page 3, interview with Sir Michael Marmot, airing on PBS television.
http://www.unnaturalcauses.org/assets/uploads/file/MichaelMarmot.pdf

The Refugees, by Lorraine Grzyb

2010-06-25T19:32:00.005-05:00

The author told me she was inspired by the Mass. Residents for International Human Rights presentation June 23 at the Watertown public library of the film "My Land" followed by a speech about Israel's denial of the right of return to Palestinian refugees.

The Refugees

The refugees stood at the gate
with nobody letting them through.

The flowers peeked through the fence,
and the air carried their scent.

The birds flew over the wires
in the sky of unmarked blue.

The clouds blew across the border
and the rain came down on both sides.

"Are we less than the flowers, the clouds and weeds?"
asked those waiting long at the barrier.

The refugees couldn't get through,
and earth and sky gasped in horror.

The Root of the Mid-East Conflict and the Reason Our Government Supports Israel’s Government

2010-06-24T06:51:00.014-05:00

Here are the notes I used for my talk June 23, 2010 at the Watertown, Massachusetts, public library, hosted by Massachusetts Residents for International Human Rights, which is extending the work (see SDP Press Statement (pdf)) of the Somerville Divestment Project to towns throughout Massachusetts.

The Root of the Mid-East Conflict and the Reason Our Government Supports Israel’s Government

A. Virtually every American politician, Jewish or not, supports the Israeli government virtually unconditionally. On his recent trip to Israel, Vice President Biden referred to Israel as “his home.” Secretary of State Clinton in her March 22 speech to AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) said, “We are committed to Israel and its security.” Whenever there is a UN resolution critical of Israel, our government vetoes it. When Judge Richard Goldstone, a pro-Israel South African Jewish judge who headed a UN fact-finding commission concluded from a thorough investigation of the Israeli attack on Gaza 18 months ago that Israel and Hamas had both committed “war crimes and breaches of humanitarian law, which may amount to crimes against humanity” the U.S. House of Representatives condemned the report as “irredeemably biased and unworthy of further consideration or legitimacy” and President Obama dismissed it as ‘one-sided and flawed.” But no American politician has ever identified a false statement in the report.

B. According to a Congressional Research Report for Congress, “Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II. Since 1985, the United States has provided nearly $3 billion in grants annually to Israel. Almost all U.S. bilateral aid to Israel is in the form of military assistance. In the past, Israel also had received significant economic assistance. Strong congressional support for Israel has resulted in Israel’s receiving benefits not available to other countries. For example, Israel can use some U.S. military assistance both for research and development in the United States and for military purchases from Israeli manufacturers. In addition, all U.S. foreign assistance earmarked for Israel is delivered in the first 30 days of the fiscal year. Most other recipients normally receive aid in installments. Congress also appropriates funds for joint U.S.-Israeli missile defense programs.”

C. Why are all U.S. politicians and mainstream media so pro-Israel?

i. The pro-establishment explanation goes like this: Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, it is the only haven for the survivors of the Holocaust, it is surrounded by anti-Semitic enemies who want to drive the Jews into the sea, and the reason all American politicians support Israel even though they may disagree about everything else is because only a nasty anti-Semitic bigot would not support Israel.

ii. You may not have ever heard the anti-establishment explanation. It goes like this: The Israeli government has the virtual unconditional support of all American politicians because they are all beholden to the American billionaire upper class. The upper class uses Israel to strengthen their control over ordinary Americans. It works like this. Israel unjustly attacks Palestinians in ways I will discuss shortly. This makes the Palestinians angry, some of them even violent. The American media then tell Americans that we must defend Israel and that Arabs and Muslims all hate Israel and America because they are hate-filled anti-Semitic terrorists. An Orwellian “war on terror” mentality is created. Then our leaders tell us, “You need to obey us because no matter how much we enrich the upper class at your expense, we are, after all, the only ones protecting you from the real enemy—Muslim terrorists. Now please take off your shoes at the airport and, by the way, we’re tapping your phone—national security, you understand.”

iii. Which explanation is right? You be the judge. But to make an informed decision one needs to understand what is the root of the conflict in the Middle East.

D. The root of the conflict is the establishment, by Jews calling themselves Zionists, of a Jewish state—Israel--in 78% of Palestine in 1948. To establish this state, Zionist leaders ethnically cleansed it of non-Jews, by which I mean they forcibly removed at least 750,000 of the approximately 900,000 non-Jews—Palestinians—from their villages inside the new Jewish state between 1947 and 1949. They removed them simply because they were not Jewish. Zionist leaders confiscated the land and all movable property of these Palestinians. The Israeli government continues to this day to deny these refugees their right to return to their country (i.e. inside Israel) and their right to receive compensation for the land and other property that the state of Israel stole from them—the same rights that the German government and the entire world does not dare deny to Jews who suffered at the hands of the Nazis. The Palestinian refugees and their descendants, many who are living in refugee camps in places like Lebanon and Gaza, now number at least 4 million. 75% of the people in Gaza are refugees, many of whom still have the keys to their former houses inside Israel.

Zionists claim that no refugees were violently forced to flee, that they all did so voluntarily, and that they thereby forfeited their right of return. The “voluntariness” of the flight of the refugees is factually untrue, as even Israeli (including pro-Zionist) historians (such as Ilan Pappe and the notoriously pro-Zionist Benny Morris) have documented. But Zionists who use this argument to justify denying the Palestinian refugees’ right of return would never dare suggest that, by exactly the same reasoning, an American Jew who voluntarily travels to Europe for vacation, or who emigrates to Israel, thereby forfeits his right to return to the United States. This selective application of their “logic” reveals the utter racism of anybody using this argument to justify denying Palestinians’ right of return. The argument is inherently racist regardless of whether the Palestinians left voluntarily or were, as was the case, driven out with violence.

The Palestine/Israel conflict is framed in our mass media as a conflict between peace-desiring Jews and hate-filled anti-Semitic Arabs, but that is wrong; it is a conflict between those who support inequality—specifically Israeli governmental discrimination against people simply because they are not Jewish—and those who support equality.

The notion that the current conflict is just a continuation of centuries of hatred between Arabs and Jews is just plain historically untrue. Before Zionist Jews began immigrating to and colonizing Palestine at the end of the 19th century with the aim of turning it into an exclusively Jewish state, relations between Muslims and Jews in that part of the world were, in comparison with Europe, very peaceful and harmonious. Jews expelled from Spain in 1492, for example, fled to the Muslim Ottoman Empire where they were welcomed and prospered.

Yes, the Palestinian so-called leader—Amin el Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, was a reactionary nationalist who allied with Hitler against Britain, but this hardly proves that the conflict is between anti-Semitic Arabs and Jews, as two facts alone demonstrate:

Fact #1. One of the Zionist militias itself—the National Military Organization (“Stern Gang”)—sought an alliance with Hitler in 1941, sending a document to the Nazis that said:
“The NMO [the [Zionist] National Military Organization], which is well-acquainted with the goodwill of the German Reich government and its authorities towards Zionist activity inside Germany and towards Zionist emigration plans, is of the opinion that:

1. Common interests could exist between the establishment of a New Order in Europe in conformity with the German concept, and the true national aspirations of the Jewish people as they are embodied by the NMO.
2. Cooperation between the new Germany and a renewed volkish-national Hebrium would be possible and
3. The establishment of the historical Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis, and bound by a treaty with the German Reich, would be in the interest of a maintained and strengthened future German position of power in the Near East.”

Fact #2. The British Foreign Office, not Palestinians, installed Amin el Husseini as the Mufti of Jerusalem in 1921 precisely because he was so reactionary. The majority of Palestine Arabs never took part in this decision, nor were they even allowed to vote in elections at this time.

The Palestinian’s unelected so-called leader was pro-Nazi, but the Germans’ unelected leader was Adolph Hitler, himself. We don’t say that the German people are therefore all anti-Semites who should be evicted from most of Germany to make it a Jewish State, so why should we demand it of the Palestinian people, whom nobody accuses of being responsible for the Holocaust?

Many Jews who oppose inequality everywhere else, who opposed South Africa’s apartheid and the Jim Crow laws that existed in the American South for example, and who would never support a White State or a Black State or a Christian State or a Muslim State or an Aryan State, nonetheless make an exception for a Jewish State. If there is time later, I will discuss their reasons for making this exception, and why these reasons are based on false beliefs.

But let’s start by looking at what a Jewish State actually means.

E. A Jewish state is:

i. A state of the “Jewish people” and not a state of all its citizens

a. A state in which the sovereign authority is the Jewish people [Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel], and not all of its citizens (as is the case with normal states.).

b. A state in which (according to section 7A(1) of the Basic law of Israel: "A candidates' list shall not participate in elections to the Knesset if among its goals or deeds, either expressly or impliedly, are one of the following: (1) The negation of the existence of the State of Israel as the State of the Jewish People.…"

c. A state based on both de jure and de facto discrimination against non-Jews:

o Israel’s Law of Return allows any Jew to automatically immigrate to Israel, but Palestinian refugees who were driven out of Israel are not allowed to return.

o Israel’s State Education Law says the purpose of elementary education for all citizens, including non-Jewish citizens, is to teach “the values of Jewish culture” and “loyalty to the State and the Jewish people”. The law does not recognize any other religion or culture.

o Every resident over 16 years old must carry an identification card that indicates whether Jewish or not (only Jews have their birth date as a Hebrew calendar date.)

o Only Jews (and a tiny Druze minority) are drafted into the military, but many important state welfare and housing benefits are only for those who served in the military or orthodox Jews who are exempted from such service.

o Palestinian Israelis have been ghettoized in small sections of Israel. Israel controls the land and permits for building on it. While Jewish neighborhoods grow unchecked, segregated Palestinian communities have not been allowed to expand. No new Arab areas have been created while hundreds of Jewish areas have been.

o Arab families living in houses built without permits (which are seldom granted to Arabs) are deprived of basic services by the state such as water and electricity, and face eviction and demolition.

o The Absentee Property Law of 1950 categorizes any Arab who never left what is now Israel but who, at any time between November 29, 1947 and 1950, left their own village (typically to seek safety in a neighboring village during the fighting) and who went to “a place in Palestine held at the time by forces which fought to prevent the establishment of the State of Israel” as a “present absentee.” Present absentees remain such forever, and their homes and property remain in the possession of the Custodian of Absentee Property, who puts the property at the disposal of Jews. There are about 250,000 present absentees.

o Laws in Israel discriminate against non-Jews in ways designed to make the discrimination less obvious than South African apartheid laws. For example, the Specified Goods Tax and Luxury Tax Law authorizes the Minister of Finance to designate classes of persons for favorable treatment when they bring goods into Israel after residence abroad. Under this authorization, the minister issued the Purchase Tax Order (Exemption), which called for a lower import duty to be collected from a returning national than from a returning resident. The order defined ‘returning national’ to include only a person who, ‘if the person were not an Israeli national the Law of Return would apply to him.’ Thus, only a Jewish citizen of Israel is a returning national. An Arab citizen of Israel is a returning resident and pays a higher customs duty. By making eligibility under the Law of Return the criterion, the minister used an explicitly ethnic basis of distinction without using the word “Jew” at all. This is typical of many Israeli laws and regulations.

ii. A Jewish state is a state whose population must always be at least 80% Jewish.

a. As early as the end of the 19th century, Zionist leaders knew that Palestine was not “a land without a people for a people without a land” as Zionist propaganda for ordinary Jews claimed. A 19th century Zionist conference in Vienna sent a couple of rabbis to Palestine and instructed them to, “Let us know if this is a suitable place for a Jewish state.” The rabbis went, they had a look, and they sent back this message to Vienna: they said, “The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.”

b. Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe's, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, page 48 of the hardcover edition, provides the following quotation from a speech by David Ben-Gurion (later Israel's first prime minister) given on December 3, 1947 in front of senior members of his Mapai party (the Eretz Israel Workers Party), in which he said (referring to the UN partition resolution): "There are 40% non-Jews in the areas allocated to the Jewish state. This composition is not a solid basis for a Jewish state. And we have to face this new reality with all of its severity and distinctness. Such a demographic balance questions our ability to maintain Jewish sovereignty...Only a state with at least 80% Jews is a viable and stable state."

c. Before Israel declared itself an independent state in 1948 only 38% of its population was Jewish.

d. Zionist militias in 1947-9 violently expelled 75% of the non-Jews (Palestinians) from the 78% of Palestine that is now called Israel.

e. Benny Morris, in a famous interview with Ha’aretz newspaper, discusses how David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, deliberately "transferred" the Arab population out of Israel's new borders:

BM: "Of course. Ben-Gurion was a transferist. He understood that there could be
no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in its midst. There would
be no such state. It would not be able to exist."
Ha'aretz: "I don't hear you condemning him."
BM: "Ben-Gurion was right. If he had not done what he did, a state would not have come into being. That has to be clear. It is impossible to evade it. Without the uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here."

o This uprooting of the Palestinians is a crime against humanity under international law.

o Forcible expulsion of people from their country because they are the wrong ethnicity is ethnic cleansing.

f. All the land and other property of the expelled Palestinians was confiscated by the Zionists and never returned or paid for.

o The UN Conciliation Commission estimated that about 80% of the land in what is now Israel is property formerly owned by Palestinians that was confiscated by Jewish organizations like the Jewish Agency. Palestinians are forbidden by Israeli law from owning it. The (Jewish) Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs describes the Jewish Agency as “a quasi-public, voluntary institution sharing many, often overlapping functional jurisdictions with government.” Of all the land in Israel that may be legally sold, 67% of it may not legally be sold to non-Jews, but can be sold to Jews.

iii. The Jewish state considers a fifth of its population who are not Jewish to be a problem.

a. Israel’s Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, advocates redrawing Israel’s vaguely defined border to include Jews living outside the current border and to exclude most of its non-Jewish citizens who live inside the current border.

iv. The Jewish state was conceived as a state of the conquerors of the native peoples:

a. Theodor Herzl, the founder of the modern Zionist movement, in his 1897 book, The Jewish State, wrote: “Will people say, again, that our enterprise is hopeless, because even if we obtained the land with supremacy over it, [only] the [economically] poor [Jews] would go with us? It is precisely the poorest whom we need at first. Only the desperate make good conquerors” [pg. 155].

v. Is Israel a democracy? True, Israeli politicians are elected. True, non-Jewish citizens of Israel can vote and even hold office, like the Palestinian, Azmi Bishara, who was a member of the Knesset but then was charged with treason and is now a fugitive, because he advocated that Israel be a state of all its citizens, not a state of the Jewish people. But here’s the elephant in the living room: more than 4 million people who, were it not for Zionist ethnic cleansing, would live inside Israel and vote in Israeli elections, cannot vote in those elections or even live in Israel. In a democracy the people choose the government. But in Israel, the government chooses the people—the Jewish people. Holding an election, after you’ve driven almost all of the “wrong” people out of the country, does not a democracy make!

F. Why do lots of ordinary Jews support Zionist inequality?

i. They believe (because they have been taught so for centuries by Jewish leaders) a racist stereotype about all non-Jews (i.e. Gentiles): that Gentiles are all, for some mysterious irrational and timeless reason, innately anti-Semitic, even if only covertly. Note that this is a racist (against Gentiles) stereotype, one of the last such racial stereotypes that some supposedly sophisticated people still believe. For Jews to be safe in an anti-Semitic world, many Jews believe, there must be an exclusively Jewish state armed to the teeth and willing to do whatever it takes to exist, be it ethnic cleansing and all of the barbarity that requires, or even making credible threats to wage thermonuclear war. Instead of seeking to end the specific injustices that sometimes lead to anti-Semitism, and thereby abolish anti-Semitism, Zionists have no intention of ending anti-Semitism; they only use its existence to justify their exclusively Jewish State. Thus:

a. Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism in 1897 wrote in his book, The Jewish State:

“Anti-Semitism increases day by day and hour by hour among the nations; indeed it is bound to increase, because the causes of its growth continue to exist and cannot be removed.”
“The nations in whose midst Jews live are all either covertly or openly Anti-Semitic.”
“…the longer Anti-Semitism lies in abeyance the more fiercely will it break out.”

b. In fact there is nothing mysterious, innate or permanent about anti-Semitism.

The anti-Semitism of European peasants in past centuries arose because of their anger at being oppressed as virtual slaves by a small upper class of aristocrats who employed rich Jews to do the dirty work of exploiting the peasants. Even the poorest Jews (none of whom were peasants) were far better off than the peasants; they lived in towns and they were employed by rich Jews as tailors etc. Their contact with peasants was minimal and often adversarial economically. Jews lived as self-governing communities, apart from the peasants. There is nothing mysterious about why anti-Jewish feelings developed among peasants and when violence broke out in the worst pogrom prior to the Holocaust—the Chmielnicki pogroms of 1648, in what was then Poland and now the Ukraine, peasants attacked the Christian upper class and clergy even more ferociously than they attacked Jews. The way to end this source of anti-Semitism is to end class inequality.

Kings and Queens used Jews in pre-modern times as merchants and money-lenders, but when it was convenient (e.g. Spain and England) they ordered the Jews to leave and confiscated their wealth. Nothing mysterious there either. Ending class inequality would eliminate this source of anti-Jewish violence as well.

Zionist leaders portray Palestinian anger at Zionism as irrational, mysterious, timeless anti-Semitism, rather than rational and justifiable anger at ethnic cleansing and inequality. It is just a false explanation.

ii. Wealthy Jews for a long time have taught ordinary Jews to fear gentiles because this makes it easier for them to control ordinary Jews. The Jewish upper class of billionaires in Israel wants ordinary Jews to fear Palestinians for the same reason. It is only by keeping ordinary Jews more frightened of Palestinians than of the Israeli upper class that the Israeli upper class can get away with enriching themselves at the expense of the Jewish population of Israel. The Jewish upper class attack on Israeli Jews was described by The Jewish Forward.

a. In 2006 it wrote: "Israel’s growing population of retirees has been reduced to a state of profound economic insecurity in recent years, as self-styled economic reformers have hollowed out the Jewish state’s time-honored system of care for the elderly. Pensions have been frozen. Social security payments, known in Israel as national insurance, have been relentlessly whittled away — cut by 35% in a single decade. Health care and prescription drug coverage have been slashed, along with funds for senior housing and assisted living. It’s part of a deliberate move by Jerusalem policy-makers to modernize Israel’s economy, by which they mean to remodel it along American lines. Determined to bury the socialist ethos of Israel’s founders, successive governments since the mid-1980s have slashed income supports and welfare payments even as they’ve privatized and deregulated industries, opened capital markets to international competition and reduced workers’ job security (they call it “liberalizing labor laws”). Over the past three years, under the economic leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, the reforms have been ramped up to a revolution."

iii. What about the suicide bombers and the rockets that Hamas aims at Jewish civilians? The fact that some Palestinians wrongly target violence against Israeli Jewish non-combatants is no excuse for the immoral ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. It is no more an excuse than was the Nat Turner slave rebellion in 1831 in our country that wrongly killed 40 innocent white children an excuse that justified slavery. No injustice is excused by the wrong things its victims may do in their effort to stop it.

iv. Furthermore, if Israel granted Palestinians their right of return and compensation, the conflict would end, and any remaining Palestinian individuals who still committed violence against Israeli non-combatant civilians would be considered—by Palestinians—to be a criminal who should be arrested and tried for a crime. It is only the ethnic cleansing that creates any substantial Palestinian support for violence against Jewish non-combatants.

G. What does the OTHER SIDE want—the side that wants equality, not inequality?

i. We want the right of Palestinian refugees (more than 4 million) to return to their homes and villages inside of Israel and be compensated for property that Zionists stole from them.

a. Just as Jews are allowed to return to Germany and have been compensated for property that the Nazis stole from them. Not only the Jews who fled from the Nazis but also their children born outside of Germany are allowed by Germany to return to Germany and receive compensation for what was stolen by the Nazis from their parents. Refugees have a right of return under international law, and the children of refugees born elsewhere are legally refugees as well, as acknowledged by the United Nations specifically for the Palestinian case.

b. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights says (Article 13(2)): “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.”

c. The right of the refugees to return is the #1 issue for most Palestinians. An opinion poll of Palestinians reports: “Right of Return Not Negotiable, Say Palestinians July 01, 2008 (Angus Reid Global Monitor) - The vast majority of people in the West Bank and Gaza would reject giving up the so-called right of return, according to a poll by the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion. 89.8 per cent of respondents are not willing to compromise the right to re-occupy their land in Israel in exchange for the creation of a Palestinian state and a peace agreement.” [full article is at http://www.angus-reid.com/polls/view/31128/right_of_return_not_negotiable_say_palestinians ].

d. The “two state solution” is no solution at all because it is based on the premise that the Palestinian refugees will continue to be denied their individual human right to return to their country and be compensated for what was stolen from them, and this is the central grievance in the conflict.

Some say it would be a just solution if Israel paid reparations to the Palestinians and THEN denied them their right of return. It would not. Jews have the right to return to Germany and would rightfully declare it a travesty of justice if they were denied that right—reparations or no reparations. Who in this room would agree that if red-headed fanatics declared Massachusetts a “Red State” and drove all the rest out, it would make it ok if they paid reparations?

The premise of the “two state solution” is the racist principle that Palestinians are so anti-Semitic that Jews shouldn’t have to live with them as equals. Nothing good can come from this racist premise.

e. Is the right of return and compensation for stolen property practical? Economically speaking, yes. In 4.5 years a fund receiving most (not all!) of the income of the 18 wealthiest Israeli families could offer every Jewish Israeli who lives on stolen land a million U.S. dollars that they would be required to use either to buy their home from the rightful Palestinian owner (if the rightful owner agrees to sell) or buy another home so they could return the stolen one but not end up homeless.

f. What about politically speaking? Still yes. Most of those buying a new home would have to buy a newly constructed one, creating construction jobs and an economic boon that would benefit both Jews and Palestinians. Who would object? A few fanatical Zionists and the 18 wealthiest Israeli families is all. Most Israeli Jews would probably support such a solution, just as most (69%!) of South Africa’s whites, who were notoriously pro-apartheid until then, voted to abolish apartheid in 1992 when their leader, de Klerk, realizing that South African apartheid was condemned by the whole world, gave whites a green light to end it. When Israeli leaders are convinced that the world will ostracize Zionist Israel even more than it ostracized Apartheid South Africa, there will be an Israeli “de Klerk” and Israeli Jews, with a sigh of relief, will welcome the end of Zionism. This is why Americans must force our government to stop supporting Israel’s Zionist government.

ii. We want equality under the law for Jews and non-Jews.

iii. We want the abolition of states that are based on inequality such as ethnic cleansing.

a. Israel is such a state, just as was the slave-based Confederacy, the Master Race Aryan Third Reich, and the apartheid-based White South African state. Such states have no right to exist.

b. Abolishing a state based on inequality means abolishing inequality under the law; it does not mean denying anybody the right to live in the state: whites, for example, still live in South Africa after the apartheid state was abolished.

II. What does the U.S. mass media say is the root of the conflict? They never mention the ethnic cleansing. The blame the conflict exclusively on:

A. Arab/Muslim anti-Semitism

B. Irrational hatred of “our freedoms”

C. Disagreement over where to draw the border between Israel and a “Palestinian state” (“A fight between two peoples over one land”)

III. Why does the mass media cover up the truth?

A. The mass media studiously avoid explaining to the American public that ethnic cleansing is the root of the Palestine/Israel conflict.

B. By covering up the truth, they make the lie--that the cause of the conflict is irrational hateful anti-Semitism—more credible because it is the only explanation for the conflict allowed in the public discourse.

C. The American billionaire upper class controls Americans with Orwellian wars of social control. They are dramatically increasing economic inequality in the U.S. and reducing our liberties. To get away with that, what do they need? They need Americans to be more frightened of a foreign boogieman than of their real enemy—the American upper class. The American and Israeli upper class both use the “Arab boogieman” to control their own people.

D. When the Communist enemy vanished, Americans looked forward finally to a ‘peace dividend.’ America’s upper class needed a new enemy to justify the huge military industrial complex and the postponement of the peace dividend, and they decided to make the new enemy Arab/Muslim terrorism.

E. Palestinian anger at Israel, without the true reason for that anger being known, makes for a perfect boogieman to persuade Americans that they are surrounded by hate filled terrorists and that we must therefore obey our leaders who are waging a war on terror to protect us from that diabolical enemy.

F. Israel’s ethnic cleansing is necessary to produce the Palestinian anger. This is why the American billionaire ruling class, and all of the politicians beholden to it, supports Israel’s government virtually unconditionally. They support it as a means of controlling us.

IV. How should decent people respond to the Middle-East conflict? We should support equality, not Zionist ethnic cleansing. Equality is the way to make a better world for ordinary people from Watertown to Ramallah to Tel Aviv, and it is the only way to end racist ideologies such as anti-Semitism and Zionism. Let your fellow citizens of Watertown know that you oppose Zionism by voting Yes on the ballot question that calls for our government to support the right of all people, including non-Jewish Palestinian citizens of Israel, to live free from laws that give more rights to people of one religion than another.

THANK YOU.

The Real Reason the Gaza Blockade Banned Toys

2010-06-10T12:41:00.013-05:00

Israel says its blockade of Gaza is for security, that its purpose is to protect the safety and well-being of ordinary Jewish Israelis by preventing weapons from being imported to Gaza. But the fact that the blockade, until recently at least (it is changing as I write as Israel tries to deflect the world's outrage), banned items like foodstuffs and toys demonstrates that it had (and has) a very different purpose.

The real purpose of the blockade, the real purpose of banning toys and other such non-weapon items, is to make life as miserable as possible for Palestinians in order to make them leave all of Palestine (Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Israel itself) and never even dream of returning to their homes and villages where they were born inside of Israel. Banning toys for children in Gaza really does make something more secure, namely Zionist ethnic cleansing and the Jewish state based upon it. What the blockade makes more secure ought not even to exist!

The real purpose of everything that the Israeli government does--not just the Gaza blockade, but also the "separation wall," the Occupation, the "settlements," and military attacks on people in Gaza and Lebanon--is indeed "security." But what does "security" really mean to Israeli leaders? It does not mean the safety and well-being of ordinary Israeli Jews, even though Israeli leaders want people to think that is its meaning. No! By "security," Israel's leaders mean security of the Zionist project of ethnic cleansing: the removal of most of the non-Jews from what is now Israel in 1948, and the denial of their right of return forever. "Security" means making the Palestinians give up their effort to abolish the ethnic cleansing and to abolish the Jewish state that defines itself as a state sufficiently cleansed of non-Jews that it has at least an 80% Jewish population. For Israel's Zionist leaders, "security" means the security of Zionism, i.e. ethnic cleansing.

In fact, the security of Zionism, the blockade's real purpose, causes terrible insecurity for ordinary Israeli Jews. It causes Jews to be the object of hatred by all of the people in the world who hate ethnic cleansing and who believe the Israeli government's claim that it acts in the name of "the Jewish people." It causes Israeli Jews to be the victims of increasingly brutal economic inequality inside Israel, driven by the Israeli ruling class of billionaires and generals and politicians who are only able to get away with this attack on Israeli Jews by ensuring that they fear Arabs and Muslims more than their Jewish ruling class. Creating this fear is precisely the purpose of Israeli leaders in carrying out the ethnic cleansing that makes Jews an object of hatred in the first place.

Even If True, Netanyahu's Lies Wouldn't Excuse Israeli Piracy

2010-06-01T17:42:00.009-05:00

The world is rightly horrified at Israel's latest atrocity--piracy in international water including killing civilians. Details can be read here.

What caught my attention is Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's attempt to justify murdering people on the Turkish boat carrying food and concrete and toys and so forth to Palestinians in Gaza who are starving because of Israel's illegal blockade--a form of collective punishment of civilians that is a war crime under the 1949 Geneva Conventions. Netanyahu, claiming that Israeli soldiers were attacked on the ship that they boarded, said:

"They were mobbed, they were clubbed, they were beaten, stabbed, there was even a report of gunfire. And our soldiers had to defend themselves."

Only anger at the crime prevents one from laughing at the absurdity of its excuse. Criminals the world over now have a new defense--the "Netanyahu defense": "Your honor, I plead 'Not Guilty' because when I broke into Mr. Jones's house to rob him he fought me so hard that I had no choice but to kill him in self defense."

The fact of the matter, of course, is that the people on the ship, not the Israeli soldier pirates, were the ones acting in self-defense. In particular, the people on the ship had every right to, as Netanyahu put it, mob, club, beat, stab and shoot the soldiers. Every right.

In fact, all the soldiers in the Israeli military who follow their orders are engaged in a decades-long violent ethnic cleansing (i.e. removal) of non-Jews from what is now Israel. Most of the people living in Gaza, for example, are refugees or the descendants of refugees who were driven at gun-point out of their homes and villages inside Israel. The entire Israeli military deserves to be mobbed, clubbed, beaten, stabbed and shot, until it stops committing the crime of ethnic cleansing.

I don't know if Mr. Netanyahu's claim is correct or not, but if it is, then the people on the ship deserve, in addition to three cheers for their solidarity with Palestinians, three more cheers for mobbing, clubbing, beating, stabbing and shooting those Israeli soldiers. It's just too bad that they were outgunned.

But with world outrage growing against Israel's ethnic cleansing, and its barbarity in carrying it out, it may not be too long before the Israeli soldiers find themselves outgunned. That will be the day!

In the meantime, beware of those who pretend to be outraged at Israel's latest atrocity but who, like the Boston Globe, support the ethnic cleansing that the atrocities enforce. These people say that the way to end such atrocities is to have a peace based on a "two state solution." Such a "solution" means that Israel will remain a "Jewish state" based on ethnic cleansing, specifically the refusal to let the Palestinian refugees return to their homes and villages inside Israel. The refugees will be told that their reservation or Bantustan in the small remaining part of Palestine that is not called "Israel" is a "state," and somehow calling it a "state" is supposed to make the ethnic cleansing OK.

This "reasoning" gives the criminals of the world yet another defense--the "Peace is the solution" defense: "Your honor, I plead 'Not Guilty' because after I broke into Mr. Jones's house and claimed it as my own and threw Mr. Jones onto the street, I told him that all I want is for us to live peaceably now. But Mr. Jones is an extremist who doesn't want peace; he even denies my right to own his house. Such people only understand force, your honor, which is why I had to use the violence that I am accused of using."

As horrible as the recent Israeli piracy was, let us not forget that the worst atrocity is the ethnic cleansing, not the crimes Israel does to enforce it.

AP Reporter Explains What "Israel's Right to Exist" Really Means

2010-05-16T10:13:00.018-05:00

AP reporter Rizek Abdel Jawad broke a taboo by providing truthful background in his report today on Palestinians in Gaza marching to commemorate the Nakba, which means "catastrophe" in Arabic and refers to the Zionist removal of Palestinians from what is now Israel in 1948. Jawad may have sacrificed his career by letting the cat out of the bag: he broke an American mass media taboo by explaining why the very existence of Israel as a Jewish state is a catastrophe for Palestinians. This is what he wrote:

"The plight of the refugees--who fled or were driven from their homes during the 1948 Israeli-Arab war--is one of the most emotionally charged issues for Palestinians and Israel to resolve...Some 4.7 million Palestinian refugees and their descendants are scattered across the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria, according to UN figures. About one-third still live in UN-supported refugee camps...

"Palestinian negotiators have demanded at least partial repatriation. Israel has refused, saying an influx of refugees would dilute Israel's Jewish majority and threaten the existence of the state. "

The Boston Globe ran this report below the fold on page A17, where relatively few people will read it. Nonetheless, it may be the first time that a Globe article informed its readers about what "Israel's right to exist" really means. Because Israel officially defines itself as a Jewish state, a state of "The Jewish People" and not a state of all its citizens, a state that, in order to be a "Jewish state," must use ethnic cleansing (i.e. removal) of non-Jewish Palestinians to ensure that Jews are at least 80% of the population allowed to live inside it, a state that considers non-Jewish citizens to be a "dilution" of its very essence, because of this the phrase "Israel's right to exist" really means the right of Zionists to enforce the ethnic cleansing of non-Jews from their homes and villages by refusing to allow them to return. For perhaps the first time a Globe reader who puts two and two together could figure out that denying Israel's right to exist (as Albert Einstein did) is not anti-Semitism but rather is what decent people who oppose ethnic cleansing must do.

I doubt we will see this cat being let out of the bag too often in the future. The Globe and the rest of America's mass media don't want the American public to understand why Palestinians are so angry at the Israeli government; they want us to think it is just that Arabs and Muslims are and always have been anti-Semitic. They don't want us to know that before the Zionist project to make most of Palestine an exclusively Jewish state Arab Muslims and Jews got along fine in Palestine.

America's wealthy ruling elite want us to believe the lie that Arabs and Muslims are hate-driven anti-Semitic fanatics who "hate Israeli and American freedom." Why? Because that lie is how our rulers get us to obey them.

"Do what we order you to do," our leaders say, "because we are protecting you from terrorists."

"Send your sons and daughters to fight and die in wars to overthrow foreign governments and install regimes we like because this is necessary to defeat the terrorists," they say.

"Give up your jobs and pensions and affordable health care," they say, "and give up teachers for your children and public services like libraries and a social safety net so that we can transfer trillions of dollars to the bankers, because this is required to make America strong so we and our great ally--Israel--can win the war on terror."

America's ruling plutocracy needs a boogieman to control us, and with the Communist boogieman now vanished "anti-Semitic" Palestinians and their Arab/Muslim sympathizers must fill the bill. Do not, therefore, be surprised if honest reports like the career-ending one from Rizek Abdel Jawad remain scarce as hens' teeth.

Why Do They Single Out Israel?

2010-04-11T20:39:00.028-05:00

"How come you single out Israel for its faults, but never criticize other governments for doing things just as bad?" This is what apologists for the Israeli government say to those, like myself, who criticize it. Their not-so-subtle implication is that critics of the Israeli government are really just motivated by antisemitism and therefore their views should not be given credence.

Since I do indeed focus more on Israel's faults than the faults of other countries, it is only fitting and proper that I should explain why. Here is why.

To start with, I admit that the Israeli government is certainly not the only government that does terrible things to innocent people, using lies to justify the unjustifiable. Nor do I claim that Israel's government is worse than others in this respect. Virtually all governments oppress their own people so that inordinate power and privileges are enjoyed by a ruling elite. The Chinese government is no exception. Neither is the Iranian government. Additionally the Russian government oppresses the Chechen people; the Saudi government is particularly oppressive of Saudi women; and the U.S. government kills innocent civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Iraq, not to mention millions whom it killed earlier in Vietnam and elsewhere. Lots of governments commit terrible crimes. Who can quantify the wrongness of these crimes and say "this one is the worst" and "this one is not as bad"?

Before I explain why I focus on it so much, let us at least agree about what the Israeli government is doing, whether or not it is the worst crime being committed by any government in the world today. The Israeli government is carrying out brutal and violent ethnic cleansing against Palestinians, which is a terrible thing. Millions of Palestinians are refugees--living in refugee camps in places like the Gaza Strip section of Palestine, and in other countries such as Lebanon. They lost all of the property they once owned and are refugees from their own country of Palestine--the place where they were born, or would have been born had not the Zionist military forces (that became the Israeli military in 1948) violently driven their parents, or grandparents in some cases now, out of their villages throughout the 78% of Palestine that is now called "Israel" in 1947 and 1948 and again later in1967. Israel continues this ethnic cleansing today by denying the refugees their right of return and by making life as unpleasant as possible for Palestinians (for example massacring civilians in Gaza last December/January) in an effort to make them depart from all of Palestine "voluntarily." Israel does not let these refugees return to their country for only one reason--they are not Jewish.

But why focus on Israel? Why focus on this crime above all others?

I do it for three reasons.

#1. As an American I have a duty to focus on my own government's mis-deeds more than on other government's mis-deeds ("the log in my own eye, as opposed to the mote in my neighbor's eye," as a wise man once put it), and my focus on Israel is actually a focus on the wrongness of my own government's over-the-top and virtually unconditional support for the Israeli government's ethnic cleansing. It is my government, not I, who has singled out Israel from all other countries to receive military, diplomatic (all those UN vetos!) and economic (no-strings-attached loans!) aid far surpassing that given to any other nation.

#2. Also as an American, I want to expose the Big Lie that the American ruling class uses to control ordinary Americans. The Big Lie is a) that there are lots of evil people who commit terrorist violence against us and against Israelis simply out of an irrational hatred of freedom and an antisemitic hatred of Jews and of anybody who defends Jews from such hateful violence, b) that our government is waging a War on Terror to defend good people against these evil people, and c) that we must obey our leaders during this war and surrender basic freedoms we once held dear in order to win it.

Exposing this Big Lie requires focusing on Israel because one of the main reasons Americans believe the Big Lie is that they see so many news reports about Palestinians violently attacking Israel and they do not understand the true reason why Palestinians do this. Our corporate-controlled mass media never explain that Israel, as a Jewish state that uses ethnic cleansing to ensure it has at least an 80% Jewish population, oppresses Palestinians because they are not Jewish. Nor does the media explain that Israel defines itself as a state of the Jewish people and not a state of all its citizens, that it enacts laws that discriminate against non-Jews, and that Palestinian anger at this is not hateful antisemitism but simply anger at being ethnically cleansed from their own country. By portraying the justified anger of Palestinians (and of all the Arabs and Muslims who share it) as unjustified irrational antisemitic and "anti-freedom" hatred, our rulers try to persuade us that the War on Terror is a real war against a real enemy when in fact it is an Orwellian war of social control. To expose this lie one must "focus on Israel" to explain the truth about Palestinian (and Arab and Muslim) anger at the U.S. and Israeli governments.

(One must also focus on Israel in order to have a serious discussion of the wrongness of terrorism (violence targeted against non-combatants) whether it is carried out in the name of Zionism or in the name of "resistance to Zionism." I discuss this topic here and here and here and here and here.)

#3. Even were I not an American, however, and even if the Israeli government's ethnic cleansing were not being used by the American ruling class to force Palestinians into a conflict with the Israeli government that enables our mass media to portray them as a "bogeyman" hateful terrorist enemy, there would remain one more reason to focus on Israel, which is this.

The Israeli government's crime of ethnic cleansing is, in one important respect, worse than the crimes that other governments commit. When other governments oppress people they of course lie about their reasons, but they almost never equate opposition to such oppression with bigotry and in the rare cases when they do so this assertion is not taken seriously by most people in the world. When Americans opposed our government's invasion and bombing of Vietnam, nobody ever accused them of being bigots for it. When people oppose the Saudi government's oppression of women, nobody ever accuses them of being bigots for it. When people oppose the Chinese government's oppression of workers and peasants, nobody ever accuses them of being bigots for it.

But when people oppose the Israeli government's ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, the entire spectrum of political and corporate and academic leaders in the United States equate that righteous stand against oppression with antisemitism! People are labeled antisemites and thereby have their reputations smeared just for defending the 13th article of the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which says that "Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country." (It doesn't say "except Palestinians.") The Israeli government is the only one that commits its particular crime in the name of righteousness, in the name of fighting racism and bigotry. It carries out ethnic cleansing of non-Jews in the name of fighting antisemitism. And it uses organizations with righteous names like "Anti-Defamation League" to accuse anybody who opposes this crime of being an antisemite.

Think about it. When many crimes are being committed, but only one of those crimes is done under the cover of "fighting bigotry" and only one of the criminals dares to equate opposition to their crime with bigotry, then is it not reasonable to focus on that crime, even if it is in other respects not the worst one? The victims of the other crimes will get support from the many good people of the world who oppose injustice and oppression. But the victims of a crime carried out by a criminal who persuades the world of the lie that the crime is actually a battle against antisemitism will not receive the support they deserve. Good people of the world, to their great credit, detest antisemitism and will support the side they believe is fighting against it. This is precisely why it is so important that those who do understand what is actually happening, who do understand that the crime is a crime and not a righteous defense against antisemitism, focus on exposing the lie. This means focusing on the crimes of the Israeli government.

Revolution and the Uprising inThailand

2010-04-04T13:47:00.008-05:00

Happy Easter. Easter is about the concept of "a rising," and in today's Boston Globe there is a report on the mass uprising in Thailand by "mainly poor, rural" people against the government. In their latest move, the people all wore red shirts and invaded the upscale shopping malls en masse, refusing to leave and saying if anybody was going to be arrested then all of them would be.

What really caught my attention was buried at the end of the article. A protest leader, Jatuporn Prompan, told the crowd, "Today's another day when commoners will declare war to bring democracy to the country." Earlier the previous day, "protesters swarmed around a Porsche, angrily smashing its windows after its driver bulldozed a line of motorcycles the group had parked."

I don't know very much about what's going on in Thailand, but I am quite certain that Jatuporn Prompan is absolutely right: the goal in Thailand (and the world) is to bring democracy to the country, and this means war--a war to defeat the powerful and privileged ruling elites. In other words, a revolution.

But how can an elite armed with a powerful and violent military force be defeated by people with few if any weapons? Again, what the Thai people are doing points the way. Below I have copied an article describing how the Thai people are creating an alliance with rank-and-file soldiers, in order to deprive the ruling elite of confidence that the army will obey when ordered to attack the people.

When a pro-democracy movement is genuinely a movement of the vast majority of people, then it will be a movement of friends, relatives and neighbors of rank-and-file soldiers; it will be a movement that those soldiers will be exceedingly reluctant to attack; and it can be a movement that those soldiers will decide to support by turning their weapons, when necessary, against the ruling elite. This is how a mass movement for democracy can defeat a ruling class, even one with a strong military force.

To succeed, however, the movement must be clear that it is at war with the ruling class. It must be clear that the outcome of that war will ultimately be decided by which side brings more violent force, or the credible threat of such violent force, against the other.

How does this relate to the philosophy of non-violence?

Non-violent tactics have their place. In order to become a truly mass movement, a movement for democracy must persuade the majority of people that it represents the morally right side of the conflict, and the ruling elite the morally wrong side. The movement must indeed use persuasion to win the support of the people; and this requires, of course, non-violent methods. When the movement confronts the ruling elite before it is powerful enough to forcibly defeat the ruling elite, as the Thai people are now doing, it makes perfect tactical sense to use methods that do not rely on violence. The strategic goal in this case is not to use force against the ruling class (not yet, at least) but to build the movement's strength by clarifying for the larger public 1) what the movement is for, 2) the fact that the ruling class opposes it and will even use violence against it, and 3) the fact that the movement consists of many people.

The problem with the philosophy of non-violence is not that non-violent tactics are never appropriate; the problem is that when it comes time to actually defeat the ruling elite, force or its credible threat must be employed, but the philosophy of non-violence asserts the contrary with its core premise that the oppressor can (and must) be morally persuaded--without reliance on violence or its threat--to stop oppressing.

Ruling elites generally do not believe that their oppression of the people is morally wrong; they do not lose sleep over it. The slave-owners of history did not think slavery was morally wrong. Capitalists do not think wage-slavery is morally wrong. Communist rulers do not think their one-party dictatorships are morally wrong. Israel's rulers do not think Zionist ethnic cleansing is morally wrong. The people can demonstrate the sincerity of their convictions, in an effort to morally persuade the elite to stop oppressing them, until they are blue in the face. It won't defeat the ruling elite. Superior force, or its credible threat, is what it takes.

The philosophy of non-violence is wrong in its assertion that the oppressor can be persuaded, without the use of force or its credible threat, to stop oppressing. The oft-cited example of Gandhi's success in making the British leave India is, ironically, illustrative of this very fact. Gandhi's "victory" did nothing to eliminate the power of a wealthy privileged elite to rule over and oppress the Indian masses, which was the situation immediately after this "victory" and is undeniably still the situation today.

Three cheers for the people of Thailand! Three cheers for their war to bring democracy to the country! Three cheers for their understanding that it is, indeed, a war!

Apologies: I haven't been able to make the wonderful photographs in this article by Thomas Barton appear on this blog. But the captions alone are worth reading. --John S.

Military Resistance:
thomasfbarton@earthlink.net
3.28.10
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The Most Terrifying Sight An Evil Government Can See:

Military Resistance

Mar 28: Thai soldiers wave and give thumbs-up sign to citizens marching In Bangkok against the military dictatorship of politicians and Army Generals that controls Thailand. (Photo: AFP/Nicolas Asfouri)

“Women Threw Flowers At The Departing Troops, Who Smiled And Snapped Photos To Cheers From Protesters”

[Thanks to Sandy Kelson, Military Resistance, who sent this in.]

Mar 27 by Thanaporn Promyamyai, AFP [Excerpts]

BANGKOK (AFP) – Thai troops retreated from security posts in the capital Saturday, bowing to demands from 80,000 jubilant red-shirted protesters who mounted a rally to demand fresh elections.

The “Red Shirt” supporters of ousted premier Thaksin Shinawatra targeted seven points where soldiers have been stationed during two weeks of street demonstrations, including the city’s zoo and Buddhist temples.

In the face of the huge crowds of flag-waving protesters, who arrived in cars, on motorbikes and on foot, the military agreed to withdraw from the positions in Bangkok’s old quarter where the Reds have their main rally base.

Women threw flowers at the departing troops, who smiled and snapped photos to cheers from protesters, who turned the streets red with their colourful clothes and heart-shaped clappers.

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Building For The Future:

An Excellent Example Of How To Move Soldiers Towards Armed Revolution Against A Corrupt Government

Demonstrators leave no open space between themselves and the Thai soldiers, who are surrounded as they walk in line past the anti-government protesters March 27, 2010 in Bangkok, Thailand. This is a perfect example of what, in past revolutions, has been described as “the hot breath of the people melts the hearts of the soldiers.” (Photo: AP Photo/Apichart Weerawong)

Protesters and cheer and offer flowers to the soldiers as they retreat from their temporary base, March 27, 2010 in Bangkok, Thailand. Thousands of protesters marched to seven temporary bases comprising schools and temples and asked the soldiers to abandon their bases and return to their barracks. (AP Photo/Apichart Weerawong)

Protesters cheer the soldiers as they leave their temporary base following the pressure from protesters March 27, 2010 in Bangkok, Thailand. Thousands of protesters marched to seven temporary bases comprising schools and temples and ask the soldiers to abandon their bases and return to their barracks. (AP Photo/Apichart Weerawong)

A marcher hugs a Thai soldier in Bangkok March 27, 2010. Photo: REUTERS/Chaiwat Subprasom

A protester kisses and thanks a soldier for retreating from a temporary base in Bangkok, Thailand, March 27, 2010. (AP Photo/Apichart Weerawong)

Warm smiles and waves as Thai soldiers leave the streets to go back to barracks in Bangkok, Thailand, March 27, 2010. Tens of thousands of red-shirted protesters marched across the historic heart of Bangkok on Saturday, clogging traffic in a renewed show of strength aimed at bringing down the government. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit)

DO YOU HAVE A FRIEND OR RELATIVE IN THE MILITARY?

Forward Military Resistance along, or send us the address if you wish and we’ll send it regularly. Whether in Iraq or stuck on a base in the USA, this is extra important for your service friend, too often cut off from access to encouraging news of growing resistance to the wars, inside the armed services and at home. Send email requests to address up top or write to: The Military Resistance, Box 126, 2576 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10025-5657. Phone: 888.711.2550

The Biden vs. Netanyahu Flap

2010-03-21T11:34:00.013-05:00

The recent flap between America's Vice President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu over Israel's building 1600 new Jews-only housing units in East Jerusalem is, at its root, a disagreement about whether or not Israel should take the "new path" advocated by Israel's previous Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, or continue on its old path. I discussed Olmert's "new path" in 2008 in my article, A New Path For Israel? [ http://newdemocracyworld.org/War/New%20Path%20Israel.htm ], which noted that hours after resigning as prime minister of Israel on September 21, 2008, Olmert gave an interview to the Israeli newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth (excerpted in the New York Review of Books), in which he said,

"We must reach an agreement with the Palestinians, meaning a withdrawal from nearly all, if not all, of the [occupied] territories. Some percentage of these territories would remain in our hands, but we must give the Palestinians the same percentage [of territory elsewhere;] without this, there will be no peace." In answer to the interviewer asking, "Including Jerusalem?" Olmert replied, "Including Jerusalem with, I'd imagine, special arrangements made for the Temple Mount and the holy/historical sites."

Indeed, prior to this, as reported in Ha'aretz November 29, 2007, Olmert explained exactly why the "two state solution" was necessary if the state of Israel was to persist as a Jewish state, in these words:

WASHINGTON - "If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights (also for the Palestinians in the territories), then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished," Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told Haaretz Wednesday, the day the Annapolis conference ended in an agreement to try to reach a Mideast peace settlement by the end of 2008. "The Jewish organizations, which were our power base in America, will be the first to come out against us," Olmert said, "because they will say they cannot support a state that does not support democracy and equal voting rights for all its residents."

It appears that Netanyahu disagrees with Olmert and does not believe the two state solution is necessary for Israel's existence as a Jewish state (which Zionist leaders define to be a state with at least an 80% Jewish population, even if it takes ethnic cleansing to make it so.) There seems to be a real disagreement among these equally hard-core mass-murdering racist camps within the Zionist elite. It also seems that, as I suggested in 2008, the U.S. ruling elite thinks Olmert, not Netanyahu, is right about what is best for the Zionist project of ethnic cleansing to remain secure.

Due to this disagreement, we may see the U.S. government apply real (not just the usual phony) pressure on Israel to follow Olmert's path. We may see things like an arms embargo on provisions of U.S. arms to the Israeli government. Let us not confuse such pressure with opposition--even the slightest amount of opposition--to Zionism or the ethnic cleansing that is its defining goal.

The American ruling plutocracy views Zionist ethnic cleansing as strategically useful for controlling both the people in the Middle East and Americans*. If we in the United States are going to have a government that does not support Zionist ethnic cleansing, it will require defeating the power of the plutocracy that, in actual fact, controls our government no matter who we elect. The plutocracy was never elected, and thus cannot be un-elected. Removing them from power will take a revolution--a revolution to win genuine democracy--which is exactly what we don't have and should be working for, for the sake of ordinary Americans as well as all of the people in the world, like the Palestinians, who suffer grievously at the hands of our war-mongering rulers.

* For discussion of this point, see the articles linked to in this sentence, which are at these urls:

http://newdemocracyworld.org/War/Iran.htm

http://newdemocracyworld.org/War/Saudi%20Rulers%20use%20Israel.htm

//www.divestmentproject.org/downloads/Why_Our_Govt2007.pdf

Rebutting Israel's "We don't kill civilians on purpose" argument

2010-02-14T12:05:00.014-05:00

Zionists try to refute the Goldstone Report by arguing, "Unlike Hamas, Israel does not intentionally kill civilians." They emphasize the difference between intentional and accidental ("collateral") killing of civilians. [See, for example, this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8WWx4CGYVI ]

This difference between intentional and accidental killing is, however, only relevant when the aim of the violence is a just one. Accidentally killing civilians in the course of using violence to stop oppression is one thing. Doing it in the course of using violence to oppress people is a very different thing.

In the case of Israeli violence, the question is not whether Israel intentionally kills civilians. The question is: What is the purpose of Israel's violence?

Israel uses violence today to prevent the Palestinian refugees from returning to the homes and territory (inside the part of Palestine now called Israel) from which they were expelled by Zionist violence in the past. They were expelled for only one reason--they were not Jewish. This violence has an unjust purpose: ethnic cleansing. Its purpose is to ensure that the population of Israel will be at least 80% Jewish, which is what Israel's leaders say it must be in order to be a Jewish state. Violence in defense of the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state is violence in defense of ethnic cleansing. When this violence kills somebody, no matter whether on purpose or accidentally, and no matter whether the victim is a civilian or a soldier, it is 100% unjustifiable homicide. It is a criminal act.

What about Hamas's killing of civilians?

There are two separate questions involved here. The first question is this: If Hamas does something morally wrong, does that in any way justify Israel's denial of the right of return to millions of Palestinian refugees? The answer is clearly, No. For example, would anybody claim that nineteenth century slavery in the U.S. was justified by the fact that some slaves (like Nat Turner in 1831) wrongly killed white children during their resistance to slavery?

The second question is: Does Hamas intentionally kill civilians? The latest report (seen by this author) is that Hamas had withdrawn its earlier apology for Israeli civilians killed by its rockets. This suggests that the killing was intentional. If Hamas intentionally kills civilians, then that is wrong. But it is a wrong that in no way justifies Israel's violence for the purpose of denying Palestinian refugees their right of return. (Furthermore, if Israel did grant the right of return and compensation for stolen property--as Germany did for Jews-- then those individual Palestinians, in Hamas or not, who continued to advocate violence against Israeli civilians would no longer have enough support from the Palestinian people to carry it out; instead Palestinians would want them to be arrested as criminals.)

It's not how many are killed on each side, but why they are killed

Some anti-Zionists argue that the most morally relevant question is: Who kills more civilians, Israel or Hamas? This is wrong, and the Zionists easily win the argument when it is framed this way. How come? Zionists argue that accidentally killing a thousand people in the course of fighting a just war is morally defensible, whereas intentionally or accidentally killing only one person in the course of fighting an unjust war is morally indefensible. Would anybody, for example, argue that if the Nazis had killed fewer people than the Allies then the Nazis would have been morally justified in their violence? The Zionists win this argument when anti-Zionists merely contrast the numbers of civilians killed by each side, because the contrasting numbers deflect attention from the fact that it is the purpose of Israel's violence, not its magnitude, that makes it immoral.

Elections and Bill Moyers

2010-02-06T09:24:00.008-05:00

Last night, on Bill Moyers' Journal TV show, there was a debate about the recent Supreme Court decision that gives corporations the same rights as people to spend money in support of politicians during election campaigns. There was also an interview with Margaret Flowers, M.D., who was arrested in the course of trying to present the case for "Medicare for all"--what the majority of Americans want--to the Senate. [see http://pnhp.org/blog/2009/05/08/why-we-risked-arrest-for-single-payer-health-care/ ] Dr Flowers was also arrested trying to deliver this message to President Barak Obama. [see http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x7603887 ] Obama, if you recall, declared in his state of the union speech: "If anyone from either party has a better approach that will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare for seniors, and stop insurance company abuses, let me know. Let me know. Let me know." Yeah, right.

The debate about the Supreme Court decision was wrong-headed on both sides. Opposing the decision was Harvard law professor Larry Lessig, and supporting it was libertarian Reason editor Nick Gillespie. Lessig said he had nothing against corporations or their right of free speech. His only concern was that the Supreme Court's decision would further erode the public's trust that Congress represented the people instead of Big Money, and he noted that already most people think Congress acts for the latter not the former. Lessig advocated an amendment to the Constitution that would permit laws regulating corporate electioneering in the 60 days preceding the election. Gillespie argued that the Supreme Court's decision advanced free speech, and how could that be a bad thing? The evil, he said, is restricting free speech.

As is typical of elite-owned, mass-media-sponsored debates, both sides of this debate implicitly accepted an extremely controversial but elite-friendly premise--that there is nothing wrong per se with the extreme inequality in our nation that is manifested primarily as corporate wealth concentrated in the hands of a small plutocracy. Sophisticated propaganda does not announce itself and thereby alert its intended audience to be on guard against it; rather it delivers its message through the "back door" of our consciousness, by asking us to focus on deciding which side of a debate we support without noticing that with either choice we are accepting the elite-friendly view that is the truly controversial one. Thus the only thing these two debating gentlemen on Bill Moyers' show disagreed on was how, or whether, the plutocratic owners of our huge for-profit corporations should be regulated in regards to their overt efforts to determine the outcome of elections.

Neither gentleman dared so much as to hint that the reason Big Money controls our government is because billionaires will be the dominant power in a society like ours, where most people are much poorer, no matter what laws or regulations purport to make it otherwise. Just as surely as the water in a river will reach the ocean one way or another no matter how many dams are built, big money will influence people one way or another, by hook or by crook, no matter how many laws are written to prevent it.

If we want power to be in the hands of We the People and not Them the Billionaires then we need to get rid of billionaires. It is that simple. If we, as a society, honor the outrageous claims of individuals to personally "own" billions of dollars of what is actually social wealth, produced and made possible by the collective labor and knowledge and skills of thousands if not millions of people, then we will never have anything except what we in fact have today--a plutocracy, not a "representative democracy."

The plutocracy knows that very few Americans still believe that we have a genuine democracy. Most people know that Big Money calls the shots. Most people know that the reason Dr. Flowers isn't listened to by politicians when she advocates Medicare for All is because what most Americans want does not count in the corridors of power in the nation's Capitol. What the big corporations want, the big corporations get. And they obviously want Americans to be forced to pay big premiums to insurance companies for health insurance that may not even cover their health care expenses when they are seriously ill.

The plutocracy hopes that people like Bill Moyers will succeed in directing the anger of Americans into channels that will not threaten the existence of the extreme inequality that is what for-profit corporations are all about. They hope to persuade us that inequality is not the problem, that the problem is merely insufficient regulation of corporations.

But inequality, itself, is the problem. We need to focus on abolishing class inequality, as I discuss in some detail here [ http://spritzlerj.blogspot.com/2008/12/class-inequality-abolish-it-or-win.html ].

Elections in the United States have never been an instrument enabling We the People to shape government policy; they started out in 1776 as a means for male owners of substantial property (including slaves) to shape government policy, and suffrage was only extended to others gradually and to the extent that the wealthy upper class was certain they would be able--because of their wealth--to control the outcome of elections well enough to retain control of the government.

We live in a dictatorship of the very wealthy. It is a dictatorship that seeks legitimacy on the grounds that it permits us to vote. By voting, all we do is confer legitimacy on a dictatorship. That is why it is IMMORAL to vote for politicians today. All voting does is give legitimacy to the politicians who are beholden to the plutocracy and who commit immoral crimes against us (like denying some of us health care) and against people in other nations by waging Orwellian wars based on lies.

The first step towards winning a genuine democracy is to acknowledge that we do not have one today. Only then will it be possible to have the kind of public discussion about what we can do to win a real democracy. Deciding not to vote for politicians, and telling our friends and neighbors why not, is the first step in this direction. Let's take it.

Elections and Howard Zinn

2010-01-31T11:06:00.006-05:00

In the part of his famous People's History of the United States that dealt with the 1830s and 1840s, the late Howard Zinn wrote:

"It was the new politics of ambiguity--speaking for the lower and middle classes to get their support in times of rapid growth and potential turmoil. The two-party system came into its own at this time. To give people a choice between two different parties and allow them, in a period of rebellion, to choose the slightly more democratic one was an ingenious mode of social control." [pg. 212 in the paperback edition]

Let us grasp the truth of this.

The power to determine government policy and actions in the United States does not come from, and never has come from, ordinary people; it comes from the very wealthy. Elections in the United States are not a means by which ordinary people can tell the government what to do (either directly or via "representatives"). Elections are a means by which the wealthy, who have the actual control of the government, persuade ordinary people not to take the kind of direct mass action that is the only way they can challenge the power of the very wealthy. This role of elections is especially important in, as Zinn put it, "a period of rebellion."

Let us not forget that no substantive improvement in the lives of ordinary Americans has resulted from voting. On the contrary, it was mass, direct, collective action that abolished slavery (the slaves left the plantations in droves during the Civil War, which Lincoln never waged to abolish slavery); it was sit-ins and massive demonstrations and bus boycotts that abolished Jim Crow; it was massive labor strikes that won the 8 hour day and, later, even more militant sit-ins (like the famous ones in auto plants in 1936) that won the right to have labor unions. It was the armed resistance of the Vietnamese peasants and the refusal of American GIs to fight them, plus the increasingly revolutionary movement of people inside the United States in the 1960s (see below) that forced the U.S. to "bring the troops home."

"It was the assessment of the Army that [Martin Luther King, Jr.] would lose control of [the Poor People's Campaign in Washington D.C.]. And the more violent and radical amongst the forces would take control and they would have a revolution on their hands in the nation's capital. And they couldn't put down that revolution. They didn't have enough troops. Westmoreland wanted 200,000 for Vietnam. They didn't have those. They simply didn't have enough troops to put down what they thought was going to be the revolution that would result from that encampment." [William Pepper speaking on the release of his new book, An Act of State - The Execution of Martin Luther King (Verso, 2003).]:"

In 2004 David Stratman and I (the co-editors of www.NewDemocracyWorld.org) advocated that people boycott the election, to demonstrate that the U.S. government did not truly represent the American people in its warmongering mass murder in Iraq. Howard Zinn did not agree. He said it was important to elect John Kerry president.

An ingenious mode of social control

With all due respect to the man, I think Zinn was mistaken here. The truth needs to be spoken loudly--elections are, as Zinn stated it himself, "an ingenious mode of social control." They are not a means by which We the People can affect what our government does.

Once again, it is time to boycott the elections **in order** to focus on making this a "period of rebellion."

It is most definitely NOT the time to try to create a "better democratic party" or, as some people would call it, "a real labor party" or a "real party of the working class". What such a party is, by whatever name, is an instrument dedicated to persuading people that the solution to our problems is voting, not rebellion. This is the very last thing we need today!

The Supreme Court, Corporations & Elections

The recent Supreme Court decision to let corporations have the same rights as human beings to propagandize during elections should be a wake-up call to Americans. The Right defends the decision on the grounds that, "Hey, media corporations like the newspapers have always had this right, why shouldn't all corporations?" The Right has a point. The corporate elite has always controlled how public issues are framed in the newspapers and mass-circulation magazines, on the radio and on T.V. GE owns NBC for crying out loud. Chris Hedges put it well:

"The fiction of democracy remains useful, not only for corporations, but for our bankrupt liberal class. If the fiction is seriously challenged, liberals will be forced to consider actual resistance, which will be neither pleasant nor easy. As long as a democratic facade exists, liberals can engage in an empty moral posturing that requires little sacrifice or commitment. They can be the self-appointed scolds of the Democratic Party, acting as if they are part of the debate and feel vindicated by their cries of protest.

"Much of the outrage expressed about the court’s ruling is the outrage of those who prefer this choreographed charade. As long as the charade is played, they do not have to consider how to combat what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls our system of “inverted totalitarianism.”[ http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/democracy_in_america_is_a_useful_fiction_20100124/ ]

Instead of fretting about for whom to vote, let's tell our friends and neighbors--even the whole world!--that we "get it" for once: we understand what elections are really all about. We know we do not live in a democracy and that the government, for all the hype about it being a "representative democracy" does not represent us. We know that what we need to do is launch a "period of rebellion" with the revolutionary aim of creating a genuine democracy that does not commit mass murder for lies in order to make rich people richer, does not deny health care in order to make rich people richer, does not throw people out of their homes to make rich people richer, does not take the side of the wealthy against ordinary people struggling to make a more equal and mutually supportive society instead of one based on inequality and pitting people against each other, and (you might need to read the first next linked article to understand this last point) does not support Israel's ethnic cleansing in order to (pdf) make Americans (pdf) easier to control.

But Do We Really Want Majority Rule?

If you are not a liberal or leftist, you can skip this section. But if you are, I can already hear you responding to this article by saying, "You know what? I'm not so sure I actually want real majority rule democracy, at least not right away. The majority voted Yes for Proposition 8 against same-sex marriage. In every one of the 31 state referenda on that issue the majority voted to deny gays and lesbians equal rights. The majority are bigots, unfortunately."

The Green Party's fear of majority rule democracy is expressed in their slogan, "It's wrong to vote on rights." The Marxist left says that over time, in the course of struggles led by the left, people will learn not to be bigoted and only then will it be ok to let them have the real say in society. Thus Che Guevara said that it was too early for real democracy in Cuba, and the Communist Party needed to rule from the top down, because, first, the Communist Party had to create a "New Socialist Man."

Listen people! The majority voting against same-sex marriage have decent non-bigoted reasons for doing so, as I discuss in painstaking detail here and here and here and here. The elite want the college-educated, professional white collar folks to fear the masses. This is why they tell us that "Hitler was voted into power by the German masses" when in fact the opposite is the case. (Read all about it here.) This is why they hide from us the history of poor whites in the deep South joining with blacks to fight slavery and, later, Jim Crow (as discussed here.) This is why they characterize opposition to same-sex marriage as bigotry.

If, my dear reader, you are so afraid of real democracy, and so willing therefore to tolerate rule by the plutocracy as a "lesser evil," then you should at least look at the above linked articles and possibly, for the first time, listen to what people opposed to same-sex marriage are saying. Do this before you dismiss them as bigots just because all you have ever heard on the subject from the corporate-owned liberal newspapers and magazines and radio stations that you read or listen to tell you that you should fear the majority and fear genuine democracy.

Don't Vote, Organize!

The bumper stickers are true!

If voting could make things better it would be illegal.

Don't vote, it only encourages them.

Scott Brown's Got a Tiger by the Tail

2010-01-20T19:58:00.002-05:00

The new Republican senator from Massachusetts, Scott Brown, has a tiger--a very pissed-off voting public--by the tail. The tiger is furious at Obama for handing trillions of dollars of public wealth to the bankster buddies of the guys he put in charge of the economy--Tim Geithner and Larry Summers--while ordinary people are losing their homes and jobs; disgusted with Obama's health care reform that was drafted by the insurance companies and is just a scam to force us to pay them more money while undermining Medicare; angry as hell at an arrogant Democratic Party that wouldn't let the public vote on whether to make same-sex marriage legal but expected the public to vote Martha Coakley into Ted Kennedy's seat because the Democratic Party "owned" it.

The only way that Scott Brown--a war-monger who wants to kill innocent people in Afghanistan and Pakistan no less than Obama does, a pro-Zionist who wants to support Israel's ethnic cleansing no less than Martha Coakley does--can hold onto this tiger is by it's tail. The tiger's "tail" is its confusion about the War on Terror. Scott Brown used endorsements by warmongers like Rudi Guilliani and John McCain to help him win this election. The Orwellian War on Terror, based on lies, is what Scott Brown uses to tame the tiger and get it to accept, or at least tolerate, the rule of the American warmongering plutocracy. Brown is good at this job, apparently a lot better at it than Martha Coakely.

But how long can Scott Brown and other "populist" politicians keep a firm grip on this tiger's tail? It's a wild and angry tiger, getting angrier each day, and justifiably so. When the tiger sees through the War on Terror Big Lie, watch out! Boy do I look foward to that day.

Stop Iran's Execution of Three Gay Teenagers

2009-11-10T19:36:00.010-05:00

Apparently the Iranian government is preparing to execute three gay teenagers arrested while they were minors for their homosexual conduct (see the UrukNet article copied below for details.) If the Iranian government executes these youths it will be a heinous act that nobody should support even if, as I do, they think same-sex marriage is wrong and homosexuality is nothing to "celebrate."

The problem with same-sex marriage is not what the couple does in the bedroom; it is a) their use of donated egg or sperm to conceive a child in a manner that denies the child its natural bond with one of its biological parents, and b) their claiming they have the right to do this to the child because they have a marriage license, which, unlike a Civil Union certificate or any other social contract, does indeed confer formal social approval to produce a child. (See "Legalizing Same-Sex Marriage: What is at Stake?" , What is a Liberal to Do?, and "Why They Voted For Obama But Against Same-Sex Marriage". )

The Iranian government is wrong for making homosexual behavior a crime. Conceiving babies with donated egg or sperm in a way that denies them the bond with their natural mother or father should be a crime (as it is in some countries), but it should be a crime whether the couple doing it is gay or straight. I disagree with "celebrating homosexuality" in public schools, and I think "Gay Pride" marches send a bad message, but I also say these are questions for people to resolve by democratically adopting policies for our schools and by expressing one's opinions in order to sway public opinion, the way many other issues are settled, not by declaring private sexual behavior a crime, and certainly not executing people for it!

The Iranian government's attack on homosexuals has the very same purpose as the American corporate elite's promotion of homosexuality. (That the American corporate elite is promoting homosexuality is evident from the facts that a) many American TV shows now portray homosexuality as if it were just as good a basis for a family as heterosexuality, b) most of the mass media endorse same-sex marriage, and c) politicians and judges insist on legalizing same-sex marriage despite people consistently voting against it when given the chance.) Corporate America promotes the idea that same-sex marriage is fine, not because they have any concern for people who happen to be gay, but because it is a way of attacking the core idea of democracy--the idea that ordinary people are fit to rule society instead of being ruled over by an elite.

Americans are indeed unfit to rule society, says corporate America, because too many Americans are bigots, the proof being that they oppose same-sex marriage. Liberals and the Left say that ordinary Americans should not even be allowed to vote on this fundamental question because it's "too important," or, as they speciously argue, "It's wrong to vote on rights." Only judges and politicians, they say, should decide the really important questions. Like war. Should we invade this or that country? Only the President, say the elite, should decide, certainly not ordinary Americans who, by their eventual opposition to the Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan wars, have demonstrated they are unfit to call the important shots.

While the American ruling elite attacks democracy by promoting homosexuality, the Iranian ruling theocracy attacks democracy by asserting its right to kill people for homosexual behavior as minors; behavior that, I am willing to bet, the great majority of Iranians do not think is wrong enough to be punished by execution even if they think it is wrong. The theocracy argues that what ordinary Iranians may think does not count, at least not when the question is "too important." Instead of saying, "It's wrong to vote on rights," they say, "It's wrong to vote against what Allah has decreed." By executing gay teenagers, the regime warns everybody else in Iran that if they don't obey the theocracy, they risk being executed too!

It should not come as a surprise that the American and Iranian ruling classes share a common reason for their opposite views on homosexuality. They also share a common reason for their opposite views on Israel, as I discuss in How Israel Helps the Islamic Republic of Iran Control the Iranian Working Class, where I show that Iranian leaders adopt an "anti-Israel" stance to strengthen their control over their own people, and American leaders adopt a "pro-Israel" stance for exactly the same purpose.

We should condemn the Iranian regime for even considering executing these three teenagers, and in the same breath we should condemn the oh-so-gay-friendly American ruling class for attacking democracy here at home and everywhere else in the world.

Three gay teenagers are on death row in Iran: please help to try and save them
Paul Canning

November 9, 2009 - Iran is preparing once again to execute young gay men arrested while they were a minor. Guilty of 'lavat’ (i.e. sexual conduct between two men, regardless of penetration), the three teenagers do not yet have dates set for their state-sponsored murders, but according to Human Rights Watch and Iranian Railroad for Queer Refugees it could happen any day with no warning. They are Mehdi P., from Tabriz; Moshen G., from Shiraz; and Nemat Safavi, from Ardebil and who has been detained for over three years. Under Iranian law lavat is "punishable by death so long as both the active and passive partners are mature, of sound mind, and have acted of free will" — something that not only conflicts with the boys’ age at the time of the alleged 'offenses’, but also a gross violation of international law, which forbids, under any circumstance, the executive of juvenile offenders...

Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=59884

Whither the Unraveling United States of America?

2009-11-08T10:39:00.007-05:00

The United States of America is unraveling. The headlines about the United States make it obvious:

Suicides of Soldiers Reach High of Nearly 3 Decades (reported also here and here)

U.S. Unemployment Rate Soars (reported also here)

In Hard Times, Tent Cities Rise Across the Country (video of one in Los Angeles )

Krugman: U.S. Headed for Jobless Recovery (What's next? A "survivor-less peace?")

Income Inequality is at an All-Time High: STUDY (and this is by DESIGN!)

Inmate Count in U.S. Dwarfs Other Nations (read more here )

The suicides by soldiers and the rising rates of unemployment, homelessness and imprisonment, are symptoms of a deeper problem in the United States: a small plutocracy controls the country. They use their power (via ownership of the mass media, control of the major political parties and the funds candidates need to wage successful election campaigns, and ownership of the corporations that decide who has a job and who doesn't) to cause the symptoms that make these headlines.

They increase an already obscene degree of economic inequality. They automate jobs out of existence or ship them overseas. And they wage unjust Orwellian wars whose main purpose is domestic social control that relies on generating a "war mentality" to get Americans to voluntarily send their youth (especially the poorest for whom military employment seems better than no job at all) to commit mass murder of innocent people in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and to respond to the deaths and suicides of American soldiers by thinking it necessary to "support our troops" and the plutocracy who sent them to kill and be killed.

Does the American plutocracy care what ordinary Americans want? Let's see.

The plutocracy knows that a robust majority of Americans want to end the notorious lack of universal health care (that distinguishes the United States from virtually all other countries) and that they support a single payer system that would accomplish this by using tax dollars to pay for everybody's health care. So how has the plutocracy responded? By ignoring what the majority of Americans want and instead defining "health care reform" to mean a law that will require all Americans to buy health insurance. Only in America!

The American plutocracy knows that a robust majority (74% according to a scientific poll conducted by the University of Maryland reported July 1, 2008) of Americans do not want their government to take the side of Israel in the Israel/Palestine conflict. But the myth--that Israel is "the only democracy in the Middle East" and that Palestinians (and Muslims and Arabs in general) attack Israel not because it commits ethnic cleansing against non-Jews but because they are hate-driven anti-Semitic crazed religious fundamentalist terrorists who also want to kill all Americans--is a crucial pillar of the Orwellian "war on terror" story line. It is so crucial that when the UN Report by Judge Richard Goldstone (a pro-Zionist Jew) concluded, with irrefutable facts and documentation, that Israel had committed war crimes in Gaza against unarmed civilians, the United States House of Representatives and President Obama decided to "shoot the messenger" by denouncing the report without being able to point to a single factually incorrect statement in it. In opposition to 74% of Americans, the plutocracy insists on taking the side of Israel.

The plutocracy can read the headline, Public Opinion in U.S. Turns Against Afghan War, but that doesn't stop them from their warmongering that produces headlines like this one: Obama Approves Afghanistan Troop Increase.

The plutocracy could not care less what the American public wants. In order for the United States to reverse direction and head in the direction most Americans want it to go-- towards being more equal and democratic, not to mention getting out of the business of committing mass murder of foreign peoples-- it will be necessary to remove the plutocracy from power.

How can we do this? How can we remove the plutocracy from power? Good question! In fact, it is the single most important question that the American public needs to start talking about and coming up with an answer to, if we are going to stop the continual unraveling of our society.

The biggest problem in this task is that we have no organizations that want to talk about this question. The political parties, obviously, do not. The big labor unions don't. The churches (of any religion or denomination) apparently don't. So how can we do it?

We need to start from scratch in creating organizations that aim to engage Americans in figuring out how to remove the plutocracy from power.

Who will do this for us?

The right-wingers who blast "big government" on Rush Limbaugh's radio show won't, because they studiously avoid bashing big money.

The liberals won't because they are happy as long as the plutocracy rules with Democrats like Obama with Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense and Goldman Sachs stooges controlling the Treasury and Federal Reserve Bank, instead of Republicans like Bush with Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense and Goldman Sachs stooges controlling the Treasury and Federal Reserve Bank.

The left-wingers won't because they are more afraid of ordinary people being in power than of the plutocracy being in power. Strange but true. The Marxists among them would no doubt like to replace the plutocracy with themselves, so they could carry out their Marxist social engineering and eventually, after many generations, make "racist, homophobic, selfish, pro-imperialistic" ordinary Americans good enough to deserve having a real democratic voice in social decisions. But they know that the realistic choice today is between having our present-day "socially enlightened" corporate elite in power versus having ordinary Americans in power, and they much prefer the former because they worry that ordinary Americans, unlike today's politicians and judges and corporate directors, don't approve of same-sex marriage or the racial quotas of Affirmative Action and so forth. The left doesn't even want the American public to be allowed to vote on a question as important as same-sex marriage, speciously proclaiming, "It's wrong to vote on rights."

Who does that leave? Each of us can see the answer in our mirror each morning. Yes, we are totally unorganized and for that reason feel like there is nothing we can do that will have any real effect. Yes, the political activists from right to left are organized and, indeed, often funded by the plutocracy. Nonetheless, we are the vast majority, not them. We can prevail if we organize with the explicit intention of prevailing. Let's do that. If we do not, then imagine the terrible answer to the question-- "Whither the unraveling United States of America?"-- that lies in store for us and our children.

Why Did Only 53% of Maine Voters Say No to Same-Sex Marriage?

2009-11-04T19:59:00.009-05:00

The recent same-sex marriage referendum in Maine saw only 53% of voters say "No" to same-sex marriage (by voting "Yes" on Proposition #1). Yes, that's a majority; but a small one. Why such a small majority?

The reason is not hard to figure out when one examines the arguments made by both sides during this election campaign over Proposition #1, which outlawed same-sex marriage. The pro-same-sex marriage argument said that if you believe in equality and fairness you should vote "No." The "vote Yes" side's strategy (judging by its leading organization's web page, Stand For Marriage Maine) was not to explain what was wrong with same-sex marriage but rather to warn those who were already opposed to it that they better take the trouble to vote in this off-year election because if Proposition #1 failed then the public schools would start teaching children that same-sex marriage was good.

The "vote Yes" side waged a terribly ineffective campaign because their message was aimed only at Catholics and others whose objection to same-sex marriage was based on a religious conviction that God does not approve of same-sex marriage. Their campaign strategy ignored the many voters who, either because their church (like many Protestant ones) supported same-sex marriage or because they were not particularly religious, did not believe that God condemned same-sex marriage.

The "vote Yes" side didn't tell these people the non-religious reason why same-sex marriage is bad: that giving a couple a marriage license means giving them formal social approval to produce a child, and in the case of a same-sex couple this is wrong because the only way a same-sex couple can produce a child is with donated sperm or egg, which necessarily inflicts on the child the psychological pain that comes from not having a normal bond with its biological mother and father.

The "vote Yes" side didn't explain the secular role of marriage and laws restricting who can marry: We don't have laws about who can be business partners, or roommates, or friends etc. because these relationships do not produce children. The only reason laws about who can marry are legitimate is because society has a legitimate interest in who it approves of producing a child. We don't approve of siblings or people infected with syphilis producing a child, so we have laws against such marriages, and everybody knows these laws have nothing to do with hatred of siblings or denying people equal rights.

The "vote Yes" strategy should have been to explain why opposing same-sex marriage is about defending the psychological welfare of children, just as opposing sibling marriage is about defending the genetic welfare of children and opposing the marriage of syphilis-infected people is about defending the health welfare of children, and that none of these restrictions on who can marry have anything to do with denying anybody equal rights.

Had the "vote Yes" side waged this kind of campaign, I am quite certain that many of the people who voted "No" would have been persuaded to vote "Yes" no matter what their beliefs were about religion and God. People who understood the psychological pain that adopted children feel because of the absence of a bond with their biological parents, and who understood that adopting parents are not the cause of this pain but that couples (same-sex or otherwise) who use donated sperm or egg to conceive ARE the cause of this pain would have voted "Yes." The ones who would still have voted "No" would have been the people who think that the bond between a child and its biological mother and father counts for nothing. Such people are a very small minority.

Whose Side are Richard Goldstone and Bill Moyers on?

2009-10-25T18:36:00.013-05:00

Bill Moyers recently interviewed Judge Richard Goldstone, now famous as the author of the UN Report that says Israel and Hamas both committed war crimes against civilians. (The transcript is at

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/10232009/watch.html )

Both of these men are perceived by many as being "on the side of the angels." A closer look at what they actually say indicates that both of them are on the opposite side. Bill Moyers, for example, came out 100% for the War on Terror with his infamous "Winning the War on Terror" article here, discussed in depth here. (Links are in the original posting, if not visible in the version you are reading.)

But what about Goldstone? Let's see what Goldstone told Moyers about Israel.

BILL MOYERS: Let me put down a few basics first. Personally, do you have any doubt about Israel's right to self-defense?

RICHARD GOLDSTONE: Absolutely not. And our approach to our mission and in our report the right of Israel to defend its citizens is taken as a given.

BILL MOYERS: So the report in no way challenges Israel's right to self-defense-

RICHARD GOLDSTONE: Not at all. What we look at is how that right was used. We don't question the right.

...

BILL MOYERS: You're Jewish, and a Zionist as well. When you say, "I'm a Zionist," in your case, what does that mean?

RICHARD GOLDSTONE: Well, what it means, that I fully support Israel's right to exist. That's for the Jewish people to have their own national homeland, in Israel.

What's wrong with supporting Israel's right "to exist" or "to self-defense" or "to defend its citizens"?

This is what's wrong.

First, what is meant by "Israel's right to exist" is the right of people like Israel's leaders to drive most of the non-Jews who lived in what is now Israel out of their homes and villages and into refugee camps (1947-9 & 1967), and to deny them their right to return to their country (today); in other words it means the right to carry out ethnic cleansing. Israel defines itself as a "Jewish state" and not a state of all of its citizens, a fifth of whom are not Jewish. Israeli leaders insist that non-Jews must never be allowed to become more than 20% of the population inside Israel, and that "Israel's right to exist" justifies whatever violence and ethnic cleansing is required to ensure this. There is no right for a regime like the state of Israel to exist, any more than the apartheid state of South Africa had a "right to exist" or the "Third Reich" based on the racist principle of Aryan supremacy had a "right to exist" or the slave-based Confederacy in America had a "right to exist." Denying these racist regimes a "right to exist" is the way to be "on the side of the angels" and it is in no way the same thing as denying the people living under these regimes the right to live there safely. Defending Israel's "right to exist" means being on the opposite side of the angels.

Second, it is a lie to imply, as Goldstone and Moyers do, that Israel's attacks on Palestinians, such as the recent one in Gaza, have anything to do with "self defense" or "defending civilians." If Israel's leaders truly wanted to protect Israeli civilians then they would end the conflict by allowing the Palestinian refugees (75% of Palestinians in Gaza are refugees from villages inside Israel) to return to their villages inside Israel and live in equality with Jews under the law. This is what the Israeli government would do if it really cared about the safety of Jewish civilians. Israeli leaders don't do this because their actual aim is to foment the conflict between Jews and Palestinians and use it as an Orwellian war to control the Israeli population while amassing great wealth and power for themselves at the expense of ordinary Israelis and Palestinians.

Third, if Israeli leaders ended the conflict by ending the ethnic cleansing policy that is the very definition of Israel as a "Jewish state," then any Palestinian who continued to commit violence against Israeli civilians would be considered by the great majority of Palestinians to be a criminal who should be arrested.

Did Hamas commit war crimes too?

Yes. Hamas fired rockets aimed at Israeli unarmed civilians. That's a war crime. It is certainly true that Israeli war crimes killed far far far more Palestinian civilians than vice versa, but this doesn't take away from the fact that intentionally killing unarmed civilians is a war crime. Palestinians have every right to use violence against armed Israelis who deny them their right of return and their right to live as the equals of Jews. This is justifiable violence in self-defense, and resistance against oppression. But violence against unarmed civilians, such as the rockets fired at Sderot or the earlier suicide bombings at bus stops and restaurants in Tel Aviv, is not self-defense or resistance. It accomplishes no military objective. Such violence, on the contrary, strengthens the Zionist leaders by helping them persuade Israeli Jews that the Zionist leaders are their protectors. Such violence also enables Palestinian leaders to use the conflict the same way as Zionist leaders do, to strengthen their control over "their own" people.

Did the Hamas rockets fired at Jewish civilians justify the Israeli government killing even one Palestinian before ending its ethnic cleansing?

No. In fact the Hamas rockets did not justify the Israeli government in doing anything harmful to Palestinians, armed or civilian, no matter how "proportionate"--not even verbally yelling at them, never mind shooting them. Until the Israeli government ends its ethnic cleansing it has no justification for anything: it hasn't even any right to exist.

The wrongness of the Hamas rockets is irrelevant with respect to Israel's right to do anything. To see why in a context where emotions aren't so strong, consider what happened in the United States South in 1831. Nat Turner led a slave revolt that killed 40 innocent white children. Those killings were as wrong as the Hamas rockets. But did those wrongful killings give the slave-owners the right to do anything at all to enforce slavery? Did the slave-owners even have a right to exist as slave-owners?

Why did Goldstone accuse the Israeli government of war crimes?

It is clearly not because he is on the side of the angels. But people on the "other side" can disagree with each other. It seems that Goldstone is worried that the Israeli government has "crossed a line" with its war crimes, a line that, for the sake of Israel's need to maintain support in the world, it dare not cross:

RICHARD GOLDSTONE:... I think true friends criticize their friends when they do wrong things....I've got no doubt that the laws of war are sufficient to cover the situation of fighting what is now termed asymmetric war. It's not easy; I concede that. But there's a line over which you just don't transgress, without clearly violating the law.

Is Goldstone a sophisticated pro-Zionist propagandist?

Yes. To persuade somebody to adopt a controversial point of view, it is often more effective not to argue directly for that view but rather to argue for something else less controversial, but in a manner that implicitly, even silently, takes the controversial view as a premise. This way the controversial view enters into the audience's mind "through the back door" without announcing itself and thereby inviting the criticism or suspicion that one naturally has for any obvious propaganda message.

The controversial view in this case is that Zionism is a just cause and that Zionist leaders do whatever they do for the just cause of protecting Israeli civilians. The less controversial view is that Israel committed war crimes. (Anybody seriously following the Gaza massacre or even just reading newspaper headlines knows this is true.) Goldstone focuses on persuading people that Israel committed war crimes, but he does so while implicitly agreeing with the key Zionist premise that Israeli leaders acted, even if wrongly, for the just cause of defending Israeli civilians. This is how effective propaganda works. Let us not fall for this Zionist propaganda.

Liberalism's Contempt for the Welfare of Children

2009-10-11T10:13:00.025-05:00

A basic principle followed by most people in the world is that the welfare of children trumps the desires of adults. But the Boston Globe--arguably the most liberal large city daily newspaper in the United States and a supporter of all liberal causes from same-sex marriage to Affirmative Action--asserted today that the desires of adults trump the welfare of children.

In its lead editorial (copied below) the Globe defends the practice of anonymous sperm- or egg-donation, despite the fact that this practice ensures that children so-conceived will suffer the psychological pain caused by not knowing their biological father or mother. The Globe writes:

"ANONYMOUS DONATIONS of sperm and eggs have helped bring happiness to thousands of Massachusetts families with fertility problems...

"Children born under this system will have a natural curiosity about their biological roots. For some, the curiosity could take on the force of an impassioned search for identity. But such quests emerge from many types of families, of all configurations, and often reach frustrating dead ends. While recognizing the desires of children to know all aspects of their backgrounds, the state should nonetheless ensure that the identities of sperm or egg donors remain such a dead end."

Anonymous sperm donation is illegal in Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, Britain, Switzerland and Australia. Sperm donation, anonymous or not, is illegal in Italy. Some people argue that the anonymity is important because without it men stop donating in sufficient numbers to meet the demand. But this misses the point that Italian law apparently grasps: sperm donation is morally wrong because it is based on the principle that the desires of adults trump the welfare of children; it is a practice that is designed and intended to prevent precisely that which society should do everything possible to ensure--that children enjoy the undeniable psychological benefits of knowing and being raised by both their biological mother and biological father.

Infertile couples who want a child should adopt. Adoption, in contrast to conception by sperm or egg donation, is morally admirable because it is a way that adults lessen the harm a child suffers from whatever unfortunate circumstance (having nothing to do with the adoptive parents) caused it to be put up for adoption instead of being raised by its natural parents. The "happiness" that the Globe says anonymously donated sperm or eggs have brought to infertile couples is the happiness of knowing that their child is biologically related to at least one of them. But in order for the adults to enjoy this happiness they must deny the child that very same happiness from having a connection to its biological mother or father.

The Globe dismisses as unimportant the "impassioned search for identity" by children from sperm or egg donation seeking to know their absent biological parent, on the grounds that "such quests emerge from many types of families, of all configurations, and often reach frustrating dead ends." What the Globe disingenuously fails to acknowledge is that the only circumstances (such as the death of a child's parents or their refusal or inability to raise it) that require a child to have to make this kind of "quest" for identity are circumstances that we as a society should try to prevent. Likewise, we should prevent, not promote, sperm/egg donor conception.

The issues of sperm/egg donation and same-sex marriage are directly connected because when society declares two people to be married it formally approves of them producing a child of their own; since a same-sex couple can only do this by means of sperm or egg donation, legalizing same-sex marriage means formally endorsing this practice and rejecting the principle that the welfare of children trumps the desires of adults. This is one reason most people oppose same-sex marriage even if they support civil unions for such couples.

Liberalism's defense of adults placing their personal desires above the needs of children reflects the individualistic value system of liberalism. It is a value system that defines "freedom" as the freedom of an individual to act unrestricted by social obligations to others. This is the value system--euphemistically described as "personal liberty"-- that capitalism uses to justify its increasing domination of the world over the last few centuries: "freedom" means the freedom of an individual to pursue his or her self-interest, in competition with all others, by maximizing profit without regard for the welfare of others (and excusing this selfishness with the convenient myth that an "invisible hand" will nonetheless make it the best of all possible worlds for all.) Freedom for people to create a society based on caring for each other and working together for shared goals democratically arrived at in the spirit of equality, is declared by capitalism's ideology to be tyranny, "mob rule," and a catastrophe to be avoided by all means.

Liberals regard competition as the natural and proper behavior of free individuals, and they view social solidarity and social norms that promote or defend such solidarity as an infringement on freedom. Liberals believe that individuals should only be restricted when it is necessary to protect the freedom of others or to ensure that competition takes place on a "level playing field."

Thus liberals think it is wrong for workers to enforce solidarity by forcibly preventing scabs from crossing their picket line during a labor strike, because this denies the scab personal "freedom." At the same time liberals defend the racial/gender quotas imposed by Affirmative Action on the grounds that they are necessary to make the competition among people of different races and genders take place on a level playing field. Liberals know that the actual effect of these quotas has been to destroy the solidarity between blacks and whites that developed during the 1960s Civil Rights Movement on the basis of opposing racial discrimination (which is the opposite of demanding racial quotas.) They know that Affirmative Action enables employers and schools to foment white resentment of blacks by telling whites they had to give the job to (or admit into the school) a less qualified black person. Liberals don't care, because they value competition, not solidarity.

With respect to supporting individualistic competition and opposing norms of social solidarity, such as the principle that the welfare of children trumps adult desires, there is no disagreement between the politicians and mass media pundits in the U.S. who call themselves "liberals" and those who call themselves "conservatives." Both liberal and conservative leaders defend capitalism and the competition and inequality integral to it. This is why the ultra liberal Senator Ted Kennedy and the champion of conservatism, George W. Bush, co-sponsored the "Leave No Child Behind Act" that makes children more controllable by their future corporate employers by using standardized testing to make them insecure and unsure if they even deserve to have a decent job, all in the name of making our children better able to compete against others like themselves in the "global economy." Usually, however, liberal and conservative leaders pursue the same goal but in different ways.

The conservatives explicitly support capitalism and the right of corporate elites to do as they wish, while at the same time paying respectful lip service to some norms of solidarity that most people embrace. Thus most conservative leaders oppose same-sex marriage while supporting capitalist policies that force many children to live in poverty. Liberal leaders, in contrast, claim they want to protect ordinary people from harmful "unbridled capitalism," but they promote the individualistic ideology of capitalism and attack the ideology of solidarity, which, alone, enables people to successfully resist the ravages of capitalism.

The Republican Party mobilizes its followers to support capitalism, competition and inequality in the name of "family values" and similar notions. The Democratic Party pursues the same end by ideologically de-mobilizing those who want to fight against capitalism and challenge the authority of the corporate elite. Thus Democratic Party leaders (joined by virtually all "Left" organizations and major labor union leaders) tell working class people they are racist for opposing racial quotas and they are bigots for opposing same-sex marriage and therefore they are not fit to make important decisions in society that should be left to the enlightened upper class.

The corporate elite who rule our society are an immoral force that we need to overthrow. They are the cause of the growing inequality in our society, of the warmongering of our government, of the lack of good health care for all regardless of personal wealth, of our government's policy of supporting Israel's ethnic cleansing, of the Federal Reserve handing trillions of dollars to banksters like Goldman Sachs, and countless other policies designed to preserve elite rule and prevent the majority of people from shaping society by positive values of equality, solidarity and democracy.

But if liberal and conservative leaders and Left organizations and even labor unions (as discussed here) are all part of the problem, who are the people that are the solution? They are we: the great majority of people who think of ourselves as working class or middle class, who have no organizations that truly speak for us and our values, who therefore feel powerless to challenge the terrible things that are done in our name in fake democracies like the United States where the people with real power were never elected and cannot, therefore, be unelected. If we ever do succeed in getting organized and defeating the corporate elite and creating a genuine democracy, it will be a revolution. (But most assuredly not the kind of revolution Marxists want, in which a new Marxist elite rules undemocratically with the excuse that regular people need generations of social engineering before they will be ready to run society on their own.)

All of the hundreds of millions of us in the United States (and billions of us in the world) who want this kind of fundamental revolutionary change should call ourselves what we are--revolutionaries. It is we--revolutionaries--who oppose the immoral values and policies of the Liberals and the Conservatives and the Leftists. It is only a movement of people like us--revolutionaries--who will make the kind of world we truly want to live in.

_________________

Boston Globe Editorial:

For sperm-bank era, courts need clearer rules

October 11, 2009

ANONYMOUS DONATIONS of sperm and eggs have helped bring happiness to thousands of Massachusetts families with fertility problems. But behind the many successful outcomes is a tissue of unresolved questions about the legal rights and obligations of the parties involved, from clinics to donors to parents to the children themselves, many of whom are only now reaching an age to assert their legal interests.

Supreme Judicial Court Justice James McHugh, addressing the case of a mother seeking the identity of a sperm donor in order to obtain child support and genetic information, was right to call upon the Legislature to clarify these issues. The Legislature would be deeply remiss to allow a situation with such broad implications to be addressed through a patchwork of legal opinions. The state must act now to avoid uncertainty - and to preserve a fertility system that has worked well for the majority of those involved.

Any legislation must use as its starting point the reasonable terms - including a strong ethos of anonymity - under which all the parties entered into their arrangements, while imposing new common-sense requirements that address complications that may never have been envisioned when sperm and egg donations first became possible. A fair system of laws would impose some restrictions on all parties to the donation process.

Clinics must be empowered to preserve the privacy and anonymity of donors, but also required to build an appropriately extensive record of medical or genetic conditions that might bear on future offspring.

Would-be parents who use donated sperm or eggs must relinquish any claims to financial support or any other form of contact with the donors. The wall of privacy should be breached for only one reason: to protect the life of the child.

Donors, too, must give up any interest in the children produced through the fertility process, except in matters of life and death.

Children born under this system will have a natural curiosity about their biological roots. For some, the curiosity could take on the force of an impassioned search for identity. But such quests emerge from many types of families, of all configurations, and often reach frustrating dead ends. While recognizing the desires of children to know all aspects of their backgrounds, the state should nonetheless ensure that the identities of sperm or egg donors remain such a dead end. A breach in the wall of privacy under any but the most dire circumstances could jeopardize the whole fertility system. The greater good is clearly in encouraging the participation of informed donors and preserving their anonymity.

The only exception should be for life itself. In rare instances, otherwise fatal diseases can be cured by transplants from biological relatives. A child conceived through a sperm or egg donation should be able to seek help from people with biological connections. Cases could, conceivably, work the other way, from a donor’s family to a child born through a donation. In both situations, a court could appoint a master to contact the relevant parties and obtain consent while preserving anonymity.

Under such a system of laws, the case that prompted Justice McHugh's request to the Legislature would have no success. The mother, known as Jane Doe, is seeking child support from a man whose sperm she purchased from a fertility clinic. The genetic information she seeks does not bear on a matter of life or death. Hers is precisely the type of case that wise legislation would foreclose, for the betterment of the majority.

Fertility advances have served to strengthen the bonds of parenthood and to extend the joy of family life. Anonymous donations have made many advances possible, and Massachusetts must do all it can to bolster a successful system. The happiness of thousands of families, and perhaps millions of children yet to be conceived, depend on it.

Race and Class in Civil War Mississippi

2009-07-31T11:50:00.015-05:00

The recent arrest of a black Harvard professor by a white Cambridge cop has allowed the mass media to talk about racial and class inequality as if only blacks or other minorities have reason to be concerned about the former and whites only have reason to be concerned about the latter. The actual history of race and class in the deep South shows how wrong this view is.

During the summer break between my sophomore and junior year in college I, along with several other Dartmouth College students, took a job in Talladega, Alabama at the black Talladega College as an Upward Bound tutor of black high school students. It was 1966 and we decided that, on our time off work, we would join the Civil Rights Movement by registering black people in town to vote.

I recall walking down a dusty red clay road in sweltering heat, past shacks on the right hand side of the road, until we got to identical shacks further down the road on the left hand side. Very poor whites lived in the first set of shacks on the right, and very poor blacks lived in the second set of shacks on the left. As we passed the shacks on the right, we would see white people looking at us, but we ignored them. Day after day during that summer we walked right past the whites to get to the blacks. The whites never demonstrated any hostility to us whatsoever, and we reciprocated by never demonstrating the slightest interest in them. We didn't know if they were registered to vote or not. It never even occurred to us to find out. It was only decades later that it occurred to me to wonder why not.

In retrospect, the reason was clear. We had all absorbed the dominant idea: poor whites in the deep South are racists. We had images in our heads of poor whites waving the Confederate Flag, lynching blacks, and joining the Ku Klux Klan. Why would we want to register such people to vote?

But sometimes reality conflicts with the dominant ideas about it. The history of race and class in the heart of Mississippi during the Civil War demonstrates this.

On March 8, 1864 Captain A.F. Ramsey of the Confederacy's 3rd Mississippi Regiment wrote to Major J.C. Denis, the regional provost marshal about an attack on a Confederate installation in New Augusta, Mississippi. Of the attackers, Ramsey wrote, "They stated they were in regular communication with the Yankees, were fighting for the Union, and would have peace or hell by August. They told the negros they were free."

The attackers were natives of Mississippi, not Yankees. They were whites--the sort of whites that were called "poor white trash" by the "better" folk of the Confederacy. They came from Jones County and nearby counties of rural Mississippi, where they were small "yeoman" farmers who owned no slaves and were proud of that fact. They farmed small plots of land, and as fugitives who had been conscripted into and then deserted from the Confederate Army, they hid in the swamps around their farms.

Sally Jenkins, a journalist, and John Stauffer, chair and professor of the History of American Civilization at Harvard University wrote a book about these anti-Confederacy whites of Mississippi. Their book is titled "The State of Jones" because Jones County, Mississippi, virtually seceded from the Confederacy during the Civil War. This book tells about an important aspect of race relations in American history that is unknown by most Americans. Here are some things I learned from it.

In their attack on the Confederate installation, these "poor white trash"

"surrounded the home in which the local conscription officer, Captain John J. Bradford, of the 3rd Mississippi Regiment, was staying. In broad daylight they called him outside and took a vote on whether to hang him. He was 'pardoned' after he promised to quit the conscription service and swore never again to enter the county or to in any way aid in attacks against them. They took three more prisoners at gunpoint, liberated the local slaves, and seized a dozen horses, government stores, ammunition, and cooking utensils. They issued provisions to destitute families in the neighborhood."

Confederate Lieutenant General Leonidas Polk wrote to President Jefferson Davis that the Jones Countians were "in open rebellion, defiant at the outset, proclaiming themselves 'Southern Yankees,' and resolved to resist by force of arms all efforts to capture them." Polk "ordered elements from two of the most battle-hardened regiments in the whole of the Confederacy army, the 'Bloody' 6th Mississippi and the intensely loyal 20th Mississippi, to conduct an expansive sweep of the lower Mississippi, combing the several counties between the Pearl and Tombigbee rivers for deserters." They arrested about 500 men in seven counties.

Here's one way the yeoman farmer "guerillas," led by Newton Knight, fought back against Polk's "rebel" troops:

"Another better-laid trap succeeded. Some of the area farmwives invited the troopers to a dance party at Levi Valentine's. The cavalrymen arrived to find a Negro fiddler sawing on his instrument and friendly local girls eager to waltz. But as they cavorted, the Jones County men crept up on the guards for an ambush. As the cavalrymen realized the trap, chaos erupted. The women fled out the back door, while the rebels bolted toward the front porch, where Newton's men met them with a brace of gunfire. Two cavalrymen and one guerrilla were killed in the exchange."

At this time slaves who were able to do so left the plantations and headed for Union positions. By the end of 1863 about 50,000 former slaves were serving in the Union Army. One slave woman named Rachel, who was owned by relatives of Newton Knight, remained with her owner.

"Newton's most reliable ally and source of sustenance was Rachel...The young woman knew both the ways of the swamp and the kitchens of Confederates. Rachel ferried food, clothing and information to Newton. She regularly crossed the boundaries between Confederate households, the slave cabins, and the hidden civilization in the swamp, carrying news to Newton and keeping him apprised of rebel movements...For the rest of the war, Rachel would operate as Newton's 'intelligence,' ...she became Newton's spy, his eyes and ears."

During the fighting, Newton was unable to stay with his wife and family on their farm, and he and Rachel became, in effect, a married couple who later raised children and had grandchildren together.

General Polk's determined effort to capture Newton's men failed. "All the Confederate cavalry, artillery, and crack infantry regiments had done was give him temporary pause. Nor had they solved the larger problem of desertion in the ranks: only 20 percent of the five thousand active deserters in Mississippi had been caught and returned to duty."

Non-slave-owning "poor white trash" deserted from the Confederate army in large numbers for four main reasons. They hated being treated like dirt by the slave-owning officers. They hated the Confederate government for allowing men who owned twenty or more slaves to remain at home with their families while poorer men were conscripted. They hated the Confederate government for sending agents to attack their wives--robbing them of food and the means to keep themselves and their children alive while their husbands were away. And they were unwilling to risk their lives to defend the institution of slavery. In fact, they believed in equality of all human beings. Newton Knight and his followers were Baptists who "practiced foot washing, lay preaching, and egalitarian worship in unadorned buildings. The central tenet of their faith was that all humans were equal in God's eyes and infused with God's spirit. 'God is no respecter of persons' was one of their favorite passages from the Bible. Another was: 'Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them; and them which suffer adversity, as being yourselves also in the body.'"

The "poor white trash" of Mississippi formed an alliance with the slaves against the Confederate slave-owning elite. As Jenkins and Stauffer write: "Also, every day more blacks liberated from plantations came into the swamps to join the struggle."

The poor whites of Mississippi who fought the Confederacy alongside slaves did so because of working class values that they shared with slaves. The fact that poor whites may have believed some racist lies about blacks that constituted the dominant ideas of the day is not nearly as important or significant as the fact that their working class values led them to ally with slaves to fight the racist ruling class. Racism came from the upper class, and anti-racism came from the working class--black and white--in Mississippi during the Civil War.

Knowing about this history of class struggle in Mississippi during the Civil War makes it easier to understand how, in the 1930s throughout the South, black and white tenant farmers united in the Southern Tenant Farmers Union against the large landowners and the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow laws, and waged successful strikes for better conditions.

The idea that in a society where blacks are on average worse off than whites, being poor and white means being racist is simply not true. It is a myth that the elite loves us to believe, because it causes well-intentioned people, like me and my fellow Dartmouth students in 1966, to view working class whites as the enemy. This myth helps the elite to equate "anti-racism" with "anti-white working class" and thus divide and rule the working class.

The elite is only strengthened when people, in the name of "fighting racism," wrongly assert that ordinary white people benefit from racism and are, therefore, the source of racism. Newton Knight and his men freed slaves while fighting the upper class of the Confederacy because they were for equality and opposed to oppression of anybody--black or white. They knew it was worse to be a slave than a "free" poor white, but they also knew that slavery didn't benefit them, it benefited those who oppressed them. They knew their fight against the Confederacy was strengthened by the solidarity they had with the slaves. Likewise, the slaves who joined with Newton Knight's men knew that the important thing about those men was not that they were better off than slaves but that they were fighting against oppression.

The "left" phrase, "White Skin Privilege," with its implication that working class people with a white skin benefit from racism because they are "privileged" to live in a society in which black people are on average worse off than whites, is profoundly misleading. Thank goodness Newton Knight's men and the slaves they allied with had never heard of that phrase. And thank goodness they all understood that both racial and class inequality are a problem for working class people no matter what their race.

The White Cop and the Black Professor

2009-07-25T18:59:00.017-05:00

White police Sgt. James Crowley insists that he did nothing wrong in arresting and handcuffing black Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in his home last week on the charge of disturbing the peace.

Despite the fact that Professor Gates had shown Sgt. Crowley identification and Sgt. Crowley knew the professor was the legal occupant of the home he was in, Sgt. Crowley claims that his police training taught him that when the professor allegedly directed angry and disrespectful language towards him it became necessary to arrest and handcuff the professor. Sgt. Crowley says racism had nothing to do with it; he was just doing what he was trained to do. Sgt. Crowley's fellow officers, some of whom are black, as well as the Superintendent of Cambridge police, agreed with Sgt. Crowley. Sgt. Crowley said he had nothing to apologize for. He was simply doing what police are trained to do.

You know what? Sgt. Crowley is right. And that is exactly the problem with the police in the United States.

Police are trained to act as authoritarian thugs when they are dealing with people who are not obviously of, or loyal to, the very wealthy elite who rule the nation. Let us give Sgt. Crowley the benefit of the doubt about how Professor Gates behaved. Let us dismiss the professor's claim that he was respectful and that he merely asked if he was being treated the way he was because he was a black man in America, and let us dismiss his claim that he simply asked for Sgt. Crowley's name and badge number. Let's assume for the sake of argument that Sgt. Crowley's account is true--that the professor spoke loudly and angrily and disrespectfully towards Sgt. Crowley. A non-authoritarian, non-thuggish police officer would have ignored that behavior, and just left the scene after determining that no law was being broken. The professor was not disturbing anybody's peace* except perhaps Sgt. Crowley's, and the solution was to just say goodbye and leave. But that is not what Sgt. Crowley was trained to do.

The police in our society are trained to enforce law and order. The order is inequality, based on extremely unequal private property ownership. A few people own billions of dollars of property, most do not even own their own home free and clear, and many own nothing but debt. Class conflict is largely over the question of whether our society should be based on equality or inequality in property ownership, and hence in social status. When people at the bottom do anything that seriously threatens the inequality of the status quo, like carry out a labor strike that actually aims to shut down production, or wage a general strike that threatens to become a revolution as happened in Seattle in 1919, or even just exercise the right to bear arms while being black, the police are called in to suppress it, often with ruthless violence.

Public police departments, historically, were created to suppress workers' strikes; they are publicly funded versions of the private security goon squads that employers initially relied upon for this purpose. The FBI, for example, is actually a spinoff of the notoriously brutal strike-breaking private Pinkerton National Detective Agency.

The police are trained to enforce law and order in an unjust and unequal society, and a big part of doing this requires that they make ordinary people obey them out of fear. Everybody knows that if you are stopped by a policeman while driving your car, you risk being handcuffed and jailed, if not shot, if you are anything less than absolutely deferential to the police officer. Parents, especially the poorest, know they must teach their children this survival lesson. When I was collecting signatures for a ballot question at a shopping mall, which I have a constitutional right to do despite it being private property, the police ordered me to leave. When I told the police I had a right to be there, they refused to listen. They were arrogant and thuggish. When I tilted my head to read the sideways badge number of the policeman, he said, "What are you looking at?" in a threatening manner and told me to leave or he'd arrest me. This is how they are trained to behave towards both white people (like me) and black people.

WHAT ABOUT RACE?

What about it? Even if the police treated whites and blacks exactly the same way, they would still be authoritarian thugs enforcing class inequality. That's their job. And that's the problem.

President Obama knows that police departments play the same role in society that he, himself, is playing--they defend class inequality and they serve the very wealthy at the top of society. Obama's invitation to Sgt. Crowley to join him and Professor Gates over a beer in the White House is meant to make it clear to the American people that, despite occasional "incidents" that may require smoothing ruffled feathers, police departments in the United States are to be accorded respect and deference. President Obama--the Cop in Chief-- is not part of the solution; he is part of the problem.

----------------

* If the charge was actually "disorderly conduct" the point remains the same: it is as absurd to arrest somebody for disorderly conduct inside his own home as to arrest somebody for indecent exposure inside his own bathroom.

Beware of Cost-Cutting Health Care Reform

2009-07-21T19:55:00.023-05:00

A majority of Americans have told opinion pollsters (read the opinion poll results here) that they want good health care to be a right enjoyed by everybody--rich or poor. Americans have said they wouldn't mind paying higher taxes to make it so. Americans want single-payer universal health care (which, by the way, would cost LESS than what is now spent on health care because it would eliminate insurance company profits and the enormous administrative waste that a multiple-payer system imposes on every hospital and doctor's office.) A February, 2009 poll found that, "When given a choice of the current system or one 'like Medicare that is run by the government and financed by taxpayers,' voters overwhelmingly chose the latter. A solid majority (59%) say they would prefer a national health insurance program that covers everyone, over the current system of private insurance offered to most through their employer."

It is bad enough that the politicians (fronting for the corporate elite they serve, and with backing from the elite-controlled mass media) have ruled out single-payer, which they most certainly have done. But it is worse than that. They are planning to introduce reforms that will make our health care system even worse than it already is. In the name of providing health care for all, they are implementing reforms that actually aim to reduce health care for the masses.

There is method in their madness. First, they want Americans to feel insecure so that we will be easier to control, and not having health care when one really needs it makes one feel very insecure indeed. Second, they want everybody to be enrolled in a health insurance plan in order to more directly control and restrict how much care people can get. They don't want people without health insurance getting their care at the emergency room of a hospital where more dollars might be spent on their care than the elite want. The elite intend to use health insurance as a means of limiting health care, by providing poor Americans with health insurance policies that severely restrict how much care they will pay for. This is already happening in Massachusetts, where the state now requires everybody to purchase health insurance and offers a "public option" policy to compete with private insurers, similar to what Obama's proposed plan would do. Here is how The New Ledger on March 26, 2009, reported on the reality behind the hype:

"First, it [the state] expanded subsidies for low-income (below 300% of the federal poverty line) residents to obtain health insurance. While this sounds like a valuable benefit being provided to indigent Massachusetts residents, the funding for those subsidies was primarily pulled from the state’s so-called “free care pool,” which had provided medical and mental health services to poor Bay Staters at locations ranging from community clinics to emergency rooms, regardless of their insurance status. As an ironic result of this program, more poor residents had access to subsidized insurance, but fewer could afford care when faced with a deductible and coinsurance – meaning the amount the patient had to pay up front before insurance kicked in, and the percentage of treatment costs past the deductible that fall on the policyholder. The burden of paying for service the Health Care Reform Act placed on the state’s indigent population, combined with the draining of resources from facilities that had previously cared for the poor free of charge, left a larger number of poor Massachusetts residents without access to care than before the system was ostensibly “reformed” to help them gain more affordable access to care."

Massachusetts, while expanding health insurance coverage to poor people, is dismantling the hospitals and health care services that provide health care to those people. The details about how this is being done are described in the Boston Globe August 10, 2009 Op-Ed by Ellen Murphy Meehan, titled "The state's fraying health safety net," which I have copied below. Meehan writes:

"In our state and around the nation, poor whites, African-Americans, Latinos, and Asian-Americans get their care at certain hospitals - the hospitals in their backyard. These hospitals have been the state’s partners in providing care for those who have gained coverage under reform. Despite this unique role, the hospitals have been abandoned and are compelled to deliver care with fewer resources...healthcare reform will fail in its objectives if it serves to dismantle healthcare services for the disadvantaged that it was designed to serve."

Meehan describes the true effect of health care reform but writes that it was "designed to serve" the poor; had she told the truth--that it was designed to ration health care for the poor but not the rich--her article would probably not have seen the light of day.

[FLASH: On September 14, 2010 the Boston Globe front page headlined the fact that the Boston Medical Center, which serves Boston's poorest residents, is being forced to make severe cuts in staff and it faces a budget crisis. The full article is copied below.]

The corporate elite has given the politicians and mass media the job of persuading the American public to view cuts in our health care as a positively good thing: no mean task. How are they going about it?

They are telling us that the problem with our current health care system is not just that some people lack health insurance, but that "health care expenses are out of control" and something has to be done to contain and eventually reduce them: "bend the curve down" as they say.

The message is that we need to ration health care. Thus, after President Obama's grandmother died following hip replacement, he told a New York Times Magazine interviewer, "Whether, sort of in the aggregate, society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else's aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they're terminally ill is a sustainable model is a very difficult question." This interview gave Op-Ed columnists a green light to start talking about the wisdom of rationing health care spending "at the end of life," when a disproportionate amount of health care dollars are spent. How much is it worth, really, to extend Mother's life a few weeks if she has a terminal illness? Which is more important, keeping Dad alive past the age of 88, or paying for a new elementary school?

This "don't waste money on keeping old people alive" theme is couched in oh-so-rational rhetoric. But it is in fact shockingly despicable. Let us be clear about why, exactly, it is despicable. It's not that rationing health care, per se, is wrong. It is undeniable that society has only a finite amount of wealth to spend, and we have more needs than just health care. So one way or another, by explicit or implicit decisions, we will limit how much we spend on health care in total and for different categories of people, and this means rationing.

The question is not whether to ration health care, but when to do it. The time to tell somebody, "We're sorry but we, as a society, can't afford to pay for health care that could keep you alive or make your life more enjoyable, because we need that money for something more important," is AFTER, not before we have begun telling people, "We're sorry but we, as a society, can't afford to pay for your multiple mansions and your yacht and your Lear Jet and your personal team of physicians and your personal chefs and fitness trainers and butlers and chauffeurs and maids and nannies and pilots etc. that make your life so enjoyable, because we need that money for something more important." Until the latter rationing has kicked in, it is just morally reprehensible to advocate the former.

One way they are trying to introduce overt health care rationing in Massachusetts was revealed by the Boston Globe on July 17, 2009, when it reported that a state commission including key legislators and Governor Patrick's administration "wants private insurers and the state and federal Medicaid program to pay providers a set payment for each patient that covers all that patient's care for an entire year and to make the radical shift within five years. Providers would have to work within a pre-determined budget, forcing them to better coordinate patient's care, which could improve quality and reduce costs." (As if "improving quality" would be as likely as "reducing costs"!)

Another way they are trying to persuade Americans to support reducing our own level of health care is by telling us that it is important that health care reform legislation not increase the federal deficit with increased health care spending in the federal budget. Thus the Republicans make a big deal about asking the Director of the Budget Office if Obama's health care plan will increase or decrease federal spending on health care, and when he replies, "increase," they say, "Aha! It is going to cost Americans even more than the already bloated cost of health care." What they don't mention is that true health care reform, meaning a single-payer system, would reduce the overall cost of health care by eliminating the insurance company middle man, so that the rise in federal taxes to pay for it would be more than offset by the reduction in premiums people now pay to private insurance companies.

Related to the aim of reducing medical care for the masses is the theme that electronic medical records are good for patients. No doubt there are some advantages to patients (and doctors and hospitals) in converting medical records to electronic files that can be shared easily within and between institutions. My medical record is presently mostly electronic, and it is a convenience to me to have it readily available to all of the doctors I see, even when they are in different buildings. There is another advantage of electronic medical records: they can more easily be used for medical research to learn what treatments work better than others. Privacy protection is a challenge, but that might be a solvable problem.

These pluses, however, are not the main reason that the elite are advocating making medical records electronic. Their chief motive here was revealed by a Boston Globe editorial July 21, 2009, which I have copied below because it illustrates elite health care propaganda so nicely. This editorial supports the state commission's proposed radical shift to paying a set amount for the year for a patient (i.e. "accountable care") and explains why electronic medical records are important to make it work: "One carrot [to persuade providers to make the radical shift] will have to be tax credits or outright subsidies to speed up doctors’ and hospitals’ adoption of electronic medical records. Such records are crucial to the coordination that accountable care organizations should be able to provide." Electronic medical records will be used, in other words, to ensure that no patient gets more care in a year than the predetermined set amount.

Beware of health care reformers who speak of "cost cutting," "accountable care," "electronic medical records," "end of life health care costs," "rationing care" or "making sure everybody has health care" when they don't speak about the importance of making sure that everybody--rich and poor alike--has equal status (and I don't mean "some are more equal than others") when it comes to the amount of health care they are entitled to in our society. For many of us, our very lives are at stake.

The fight for good health care for all is fundamentally a revolutionary fight for real democracy and equality. The reason we don't have good health care for all is very simple: the ruling corporate elite doesn't want us to have it; they want to keep society very unequal, they want to make sure real power stays in their hands, and they want us to feel so insecure that we will be easily controlled by them. These are the same reasons our government wages unjust wars and supports Israel's ethnic cleansing and so many other morally wrong things. The struggles against all of these injustices are fundamentally the same struggle for real democracy and equality.

Boston Globe editorial:

How to pay doctors

July 21, 2009

PAYING FOR healthcare on a fee-for-service basis is an inflation engine that, unless something changes, will cause health spending in this state to double by 2020. A legislative commission wants to replace fee-for-service with per-capita payments that would be handled by groups of healthcare professionals with full responsibility for an individual’s care. One-fifth of doctors in the state are already paid this way. Making it the norm could be the secret to better, less costly medicine.

Ideally, this shift in incentives will mean that a patient, for instance, will leave a hospital with enough discharge support so that she won’t be re-admitted a week later. Or, a primary-care physician checking an overweight patient for a strep throat will have enough time to talk to the patient about exercising more to lose some pounds. A well-crafted “global’’ payment system should pay for such preventive measures in ways that fee-for-service does not.

The commission issued its report on the same day last week that the head of the Congressional Budget Office told Congress that its various health reform proposals, including ones with a public insurance plan to compete against high-overhead private plans, would all raise federal spending. This state’s three-year experience with its health reform supports his conclusion. Less than 3 percent of the population is now uninsured, but costs have escalated.

A switch to global payments in the hands of so-called accountable care organizations with doctors, labs, imaging specialists, and even hospitals could bring costs under control. When health insurers used a capitation system in the 1990s, patients were denied care unfairly. To avoid such problems, the commission calls for rigorous monitoring and a focus on quality.

A first step will probably be legislation to create some kind of public board or authority to work out the specifics of the sticks and carrots that would wean providers from fee-for-service. One carrot will have to be tax credits or outright subsidies to speed up doctors’ and hospitals’ adoption of electronic medical records. Such records are crucial to the coordination that accountable care organizations should be able to provide.

To help ensure that any new payment system produces better care and not just cheaper care, the oversight panel should include at least one representative of a consumer group. The Legislature should also give the board more direction than the report provides. In 2006, lawmakers opted to let the Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector Authority work out many details of new health plans for the uninsured. But totally revamping health payments is a far more complex task that will require more explicit marching orders from Beacon Hill.

Boston Globe Op-Ed

The state’s fraying health safety net

By Ellen Murphy Meehan
August 10, 2009

AS NATIONAL policy makers fashion a healthcare bill modeled in no small part on Massachusetts’ landmark health reform law, they need to address a major flaw that has emerged here.

Three years into our healthcare experiment, health coverage gains have been remarkable. Medicaid enrollment is estimated to have grown from less than 1 million before the reform law to 1.2 million in 2010, and altogether, in Medicaid and private plans, more than 428,000 have gained coverage. Families and individuals who had never had health coverage have access to health plans and services that were previously unattainable.

At the same time, however, hospitals that serve the largest proportion of those newly covered and low-income populations have seen their state-funded payments diminish or be eliminated. By receiving lower rates, they have helped to subsidize health reform. But the consequence of their diminished rates is financial losses and the prospect of the loss of critical services for poor and disadvantaged populations.

By design, the state’s landmark health reform was supposed to “true-up’’ Medicaid rates, raising them closer to cost than the current 60 percent to 70 percent reimbursement of cost, a critical step since Medicaid enrollment growth has been a key component of health reform. Instead, as health reform has been implemented, rates have declined for many hospitals, and special payments for hospitals that serve a disproportionate share of low-income patients have been eliminated - long before the current recession began.

That is the core issue surrounding Boston Medical Center’s lawsuit against the state - a grave concern that other safety-net hospitals seek to compel the Commonwealth to address.

In Washington now, as in Massachusetts in 2006, who will pay for this coverage is hotly debated. In Massachusetts, officials took the federal Medicaid disproportionate-share payments designed by federal law to support hospitals that serve the needy and built them into expanded Medicaid and subsidized Commonwealth Care coverage. But this has left those hospitals, located in the state’s poorest urban communities - Lawrence, Holyoke, Brockton, Boston, Fall River, Cambridge, and others - with no compensation from Medicaid for the vast amount of care they deliver at rates that are still well below cost.

In our state and around the nation, poor whites, African-Americans, Latinos, and Asian-Americans get their care at certain hospitals - the hospitals in their backyard. These hospitals have been the state’s partners in providing care for those who have gained coverage under reform. Despite this unique role, the hospitals have been abandoned and are compelled to deliver care with fewer resources.

Healthcare for these populations is largely separate and it is rapidly becoming unequal.

A word of caution to the Obama administration: Policy makers looking to Massachusetts as a model for national health reform had better keep a watchful eye on Boston Medical Center’s suit, and reconsider the wisdom of redirecting scarce Medicare and Medicaid disproportionate-share dollars away from hospitals that serve the poor. Expanded coverage must go hand in hand with financially stable providers. In the worst-case scenario, coverage that’s financed by eliminating the payments that underpin health care services to the disadvantaged is a road map to rationing of care.

Many of us who have advocated for universal coverage applaud the dramatic gains and successes of Massachusetts’ health reform law. It shows that innovative policy can overcome longstanding obstacles. Our experience also shows, however, how carefully and cautiously the redirection of scarce dollars must be made. The role of hospitals in poor communities is especially important in our society, but they have not been treated fairly in Massachusetts, and the gross inequities are becoming more apparent.

While we recognize that the present fiscal crisis means we must focus attention on bottom-line numbers, Massachusetts really needs a policy based on substance and the reality that people are directly affected by the plight of safety-net hospitals. The Boston Medical Center suit points out that healthcare reform will fail in its objectives if it serves to dismantle healthcare services for the disadvantaged that it was designed to serve.

Ellen Murphy Meehan is a healthcare consultant and executive director of the Massachusetts Alliance of Safety Net Hospitals.

BMC will cut 119 jobs, push for funds

Facing $175m loss, hospital wants more Medicaid money

HOSPITAL FACING DIRE STRAITS
“We can not cut our way to prosperity or to even break even. We need additional revenue,” said BMC’s CEO, Kate Walsh.

By Kay Lazar Globe Staff / September 14, 2010

Boston Medical Center announced yesterday that it would reduce its workforce by 119 people as it scrounges for savings to reverse losses projected to reach $175 million in the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30.

The hospital, which employs almost 6,000 people and treats many of the city’s neediest patients, said that the layoffs would account for only a small portion of the savings it needs and that it is hopeful additional Medicaid money requested earlier this year by the Patrick administration will soon be approved by the federal government.

The hospital also is seeking additional payments through a lawsuit it filed last year against the state, accusing it of illegally cutting payments made to the hospital for treating thousands of poor patients.

If no additional funding is found, the hospital, the state’s largest provider of medical care to poverty-stricken families, projects that it will run out of cash reserves by next fall.

“We can not cut our way to prosperity or to even break even. We need additional revenue,’’ Kate Walsh, Boston Medical Center’s chief executive, said in an interview. She added that she did not expect the hospital would get to the point of running out of money, but if that happens, it would probably lead to significant downsizing of staff or consolidation of services with another provider.

“It’s important that we preserve the mission of Boston Medical Center,’’ she said.

The 119 layoffs include 44 nurses and 30 management staff. The union that represents many of the workers, 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, said the cuts will affect a wide swath of services including nursing, patient access coordinators, dieticians, and clinical engineers.

Walsh said if the federal government approves the new money — $90 million a year for two years — by the end of this month, the hospital plans to use some reserves to bring its losses for this year to about $35 million.

Patrick administration spokeswoman Jennifer Kritz said the state is “committed to working closely’’ with BMC and several other hospitals that care for many poor patients to help them receive additional federal funding, but could not say when that money might be coming.

In the meantime, Walsh did not rule out further belt-tightening. She is scheduled to address staff members today in a series of meetings to outline six task forces that will be charged with finding ways to further streamline operations.

“We will be redeploying people and staffing more directly to demand,’’ Walsh said. “If we have people on days and there is more clinical need in the evenings, we will be matching our workforce to where our patients need us.’’

Earlier, BMC had projected a $134 million loss for this fiscal year, but Walsh, who became chief executive in March, said several key factors changed, creating the larger $175 million budget hole. She said the hospital’s growth in revenue from outpatient services was not as great as anticipated, and the hospital cared for more Medicaid patients than it had expected and was paid less than expected for that care. She said the hospital is reimbursed for about 60 cents for every dollar it spends on Medicaid patients.Continued...

That Medicaid reimbursement is at the heart of the hospital’s lawsuit against the Patrick administration, which was filed in July 2009. The state calculated the new Medicaid rate by considering the average cost of caring for Medicaid patients at Massachusetts hospitals and paying 75 percent of that amount to encourage efficiency, the lawsuit contends.

The Patrick administration declined to comment yesterday on the pending lawsuit. In an e-mailed statement, the state’s Health and Human Services secretary, Dr. JudyAnn Bigby, said the state recognizes the “vital role’’ safety-net hospitals such as BMC play in caring for low-income patients.

“In the face of unprecedented budget challenges, everyone funded and served by state government has felt the impact,’’ Bigby said. “We remain committed to continuing our work with Boston Medical Center.’’

In earlier interviews, state officials have said that Boston Medical Center’s costs are 20 percent to 30 percent higher than those at similar hospitals, suggesting that cost savings are possible.

Walsh in yesterday’s interview said the hospital does have a large proportion of veteran staffers who are unionized and are paid at the higher end of the scale. But she said that is not out of line with other city hospitals.

“I believe we have demonstrated that we are in the middle of the pack of Boston teaching hospitals and our cost structure is derived by that and is further challenged by the kind of patients we care for,’’ she said.

“I believe,’’ she added, “that the state now recognizes we share their goal of delivering the right care to the right patient at the right place as effectively as possible.’’

Veronica Turner, executive vice president of 1199SEIU and a former BMC employee, said in a statement that Boston Medical Center is already among the most efficient in Massachusetts, a reference to the notice the hospital sent the union explaining that the layoffs were 1/8intended to make the hospital more efficient.

“Patient care access is suffering because the state has failed to provide fair reimbursement for care, and its management is not effectively communicating with staff about a plan for the hospital’s future,’’ the statement said.

Kay Lazar can be reached at klazar@globe.com.