The Radical Reconstruction of Society Itself

Posted on March 22, 2009 by RagBlog

It is unfortunate that we wish so deeply for change and progress from the darkness of the past eight years, that we neglect to look at the facts objectively (see the comments to the post just below). There is unquestionable improvement from the Bush administration, but there are glaring weaknesses and defects in the Obama administration. As progressives, we must work for the necessary change that this society is destined to make, whether we like it or not. Peak oil, global climate change, and the failure of capitalism will propel us down a road that obsoletes the status quo. Now is the time to get on the train and go forward progressively.

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog


Obama and the Left, Such As it Is
By Paul Street / March 21, 2009

Here (below) is the original extended version of a significantly abbreviated speech I gave at a forum on “The Left and Obama” in Chicago. The forum was held on February 28, 2009. It was organized by Haymarket Books. The other speakers were James Thwinda (Jobs for Justice), John Nichols (The Nation), and Sharon Smith (International Socialist Review and Haymarket author). I have put brackets around the main sections that went un-read (regrettably) for reasons of time. (In retrospect I would have reconfigured the address to include the bracketed sections) I have also inserted a few book and article citations for readers…

Remarks at ‘The Left and Obama’ Panel
February 28, 2009

In a time when the nation’s leading newspaper of record The New York Times can claim as it did yesterday that the corporate-neoliberal Obama administration is undertaking “a bold and even radical departure from recent history” in service to “progressive” goals, it’s important for people on the left to remember what we are about. For my brand of the Left, it’s not about Wall Street-funded politicians and officeholders and their quadrennial corporate-managed candidate-centered electoral extravaganzas. It’s not about the political class’s shifting, self-interested policy palliatives and their carefully crafted, mass-marketed imagery and deceptions. It’s not about balancing majority progressive desires and popular needs with the structurally super-empowered desires of the wealthy Few. It’s not about restoring legitimacy to and faith in the profits system and the military. It’s not about smooth-talking pseudo-saviors who are going to fix our messes for us from on high. It’s not about manipulating the electorate and managing popular expectations and calibrating hope from the top down.

It’s about building, re-building, and expanding citizen and working-class power from the bottom up. It’s about trying to create a responsive, democratic, egalitarian and issue-based political culture and politics between and across the narrow-spectrum , corporate-crafted, candidate-centered election spectacles so many of us have been trained to see as the sum total of “politics”. It’s about meaningfully confronting what Barack Obama’s supposed hero Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, called “the triple evils that are interrelated: (1) economic exploitation (really capitalism); (2) racism (deeply understood); and (3) militarism or imperialism. (I would add some other interrelated evils, including sexism and ecological ruin, to Dr. King’s list). It’s about advancing what Dr. King called “the real issue to be faced” beyond “superficial” questions: “the radical reconstruction of society itself.” Believe it nor not, it us about the struggle for “a socialist society in which human needs are not sacrificed for the needs of the rich” (Lance Selfa, The Democrats: A Critical History [Chicago: Haymarket, 2008], p. 197). As part of the process towards bringing such real and progressive change into being, Haymarket Books author Lance Selfa notes, we have to “recognize the Democratic Party as one of the chief pillars of the system that perpetuates exploitation and oppression.” (Selfa 2008, p. 198)

Barack Obama, my thesis holds, is no special and magical exception to this basic longstanding fact of American political life. He and the broader Obama phenomenon (which dates in the outward political culture from his instantly famous Keynote Address to the Democratic Convention in the late July of 2004) is distinctive however in the astonishing extent to which he, his marketers and the corporate media have been able to convince left-leaning liberals and progressives and many ordinary people that he is on their side and that his special centrist, supposedly non- or post-ideological brand of so-called progressivism is the most that could ever be attained on the road to a better society and politics.

Selling that conviction is no small part of why Obama was hired by the American ruling class and given the job of president. It’s not for nothing that Goldman Sachs gave Obama $900,000 a small part of the astonishing $37.5 million Obama got from the finance, insurance and real estate industries during the last election cycle. It’s not for nothing that Obama got three fourths of his campaign cash from people giving more than $200 – the same big donor percentage as George W. Bush in 2004. It’s not for nothing that Obama set new records in corporate election funding and achieved a level of fawning corporate media love that is almost beyond belief.

What much of the American state-capitalist elite wanted is somebody who can give the American corporate system and empire a much-needed public relations makeover, a re-branding as they put it. Obama is the Empire’s New Clothes. The masters wanted their rotten old profits system repackaged as something truly new and different in the wake of the long national and global Bush-Cheney nightmare. As they say in elite advertising journals and editorial pages, “Brand Obama” is the new and improved, outwardly progressive, democratic, and human face for that damaged product line called “Brand USA. The Bush and Cheney “reign of error” did profound damage to popular perceptions of American capitalism, power and empire at home and abroad. The political class needed someone who could give the system a vivid new slate-cleaning aura of novelty and freshness while leaving core dominant institutions and ideologies intact.

And that was a job for which none of the other Democratic presidential candidates were qualified to the same extent as Obama. He was blessed not just with intelligence and charisma and a Harvard Law degree but with the unmatchable benefits of not being white, of having a Muslim name, of having once technically opposed (on practical, not principled grounds) the invasion of Iraq, and of having worked some years as a community organizer. Thanks to his interesting history and to his national novelty, Obama naturally struck numerous corporate and military insiders as precisely the sort of person who could brilliantly advance the business and imperial agenda while containing and pacifying an angry and increasingly desperate and impoverished populace. After vetting him very carefully starting in late 2003 and determining that he was in fact a deeply conservative, privilege-friendly and vacuously neoliberal politician, much of the power elite got it. “Who better,” they decided… “Who better than Obama to be the public face for the long-predicted massive taxpayer bailout of parasitic high finance? Who better than Obama to provide cover for the reconfiguration of U.S. military control of strategically hyper-significant Middle Eastern oil resources in the wake of Bush’s Iraq fiasco? Who better to safely channel popular angers and to attach alienated segments of the citizenry to the corporate and imperial state and to refashion America’s image around the world?”

The elite is getting what it paid for. Sean Hannity’s maniacal ravings aside, Obama has been anything but a “starry-eyed [left wing] idealist” since he won the election. I don’t have time here to go into a detailed account of his presidential record to date. If you want such an account from a critical Left perspective, and I hope you do, please have a look at the ZNet piece I published yesterday under the title “Obama’s Violin: Calibrating HOPE since the Election.” The first part of the title comes former Clinton administration official David Rothkopf’s early post-election observation that Obama was following what Rothkopf called “the violin model: you hold power,” Rothkopf said, “with the left hand and you play the music with the right.” You campaign and gain office with populace-pleasing progressive-sounding rhetoric but you make policy in standard service to existing dominant corporate and military institutions.

Obama’s violin performance is being expertly marketed by dominant media. We are told by the Times that Obama is making “a radical departure from the past” even as he proposes to increase the so-called defense budget, even as he makes it clear that he will be leaving 50,000 so-called “residual” troops in Iraq well past August of 2010, even as he increases the level of violence in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and even as he cannot pay elementary honest attention to the legitimate grievances and claims of the Palestinian people.

Obama is a “radically progressive departure from the past,” we are told from on high even as he says he will cut the federal deficit in half but cannot bring himself to embrace the elementary bank nationalizations that are obviously required in the current economic crisis. Even as he refuses to advance the obvious cost-cutting social democratic health care solution: single payer national health insurance. Even he can only set up a middle class task force but not a poverty and inequality task force. Even as he promises to spend untold billions and trillions on further bankers’ bailouts executed with zero citizen oversight and direction.

Obama is a radical progressive break, we are told, even as he does not utter one word about the overdue labor law reform he campaigned on, the Employee Free Choice Act. Even as he fails to advance such basic elementarily progressive measures as a moratorium on foreclosures, a capping of credit card interest rates and finance charges, and the rollback of capital income tax rates to 1981 levels, Even as his tepid and inadequate stimulus plan is over-loaded with business-friendly tax cuts and woefully short on labor-intensive projects that will put people to work right away. And even as he asks for twice the amount of money to sustain the criminal invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan as he proposes to set aside per year as part of a reserve fund that might pay for just more than half the amount required to give the uninsured health coverage… in 10 years. [Even as he pays a presidential visit to Caterpillar, the company that sells occupation and apartheid bulldozers to Israel and the first major U.S. manufacturer in decades to break a major strike with scabs.]

[Now, its one thing for The New York Times, a leading part of the corporate establishment, to play along with Obama’s big violin performance. That’s what we would expect. What’s more bothersome for many of us on the left it to see so many parts of the so-called progressive community chime in with their own little fiddles and kazoos – to hear the Executive Director of Moveon.org respond to the Iraq plans by saying people trust the president’s campaign promises, to hear the AFL-CIO and Change to Win staying remarkably mute in their public comments on EFCA and to see them accepting corporate health care reform over the single payer system that most Americans would support. Its deeply troubling to see The Nation (the weekly journal of the official U.S. “left”) absurdly call Obama’s budget proposal “an audacious plan to transform America” in progressive ways. Right after the election The Nation said that I “Obama Needs a Protest Movement” (The Nation, November 13, 2008) not that the people and democracy need one. This was an excellent expression of so-called left liberalism’s deeply ingrained habit of subordinating movement concerns to the needs of the Democrats’ leading politicians.] [1]

[Its’ vexing to see the NAACP and the Urban League too enamored with the simple fact that “black but not like Jesse” Obama is African American to press him to undertake real initiatives against the deep and pervasive institutional racism that lives on even as the nation celebrates its willingness to vote for a certain kind of black candidate. Its annoying to see Ms. Magazine produce a cover saying that Obama is “what a feminist looks like” even as Michelle Obama is relegated to the role of domestic helpmate and as Obama continues to praise a vicious welfare elimination that especially targeted poor women and children of color. And on a more personal note it’s sad to see so many progressive people I’ve known for many years – including some good friends – turn a willfully blind eye to anything and everything critical of Obama and even to childishly fantasize that the new president is one of them. I can’t tell you all here how many liberal friends and associates I’ve had tell me how Obama “gets” this or “gets” that. “You know,” they say, “he really gets the Israel-Palestine issue.” He “gets the progressive left-labor agenda?” They look hurt when you say, “if you are right, doesn’t that just make it worse? And doesn’t his knowledge of left positions, as far as it goes, just make him more effective in trying to screw us over? Oh yeah, he ‘gets’ us alright!”]

All of us on the progressive Left need to take a certain reasonable degree of responsibility for Obama’s behavior to date. Real progressive change is our challenge, not Obama’s. The esteemed radical historian Howard Zinn reminded us of a basic point in an essay titled “Election Madness” last March:

“Let’s remember that even when there is a ‘better’ candidate (yes, better Roosevelt than Hoover, better anyone than George Bush), that difference will not mean anything unless the power of the people asserts itself in ways that the occupant of the White House will find it dangerous to ignore…..Today, we can be sure that the Democratic Party, unless it faces a popular upsurge, will not move off center. The two leading Presidential candidates have made it clear that if elected, they will not bring an immediate end to the Iraq War, or institute a system of free health care for all.”

“They offer no radical change from the status quo. They do not propose what the present desperation of people cries out for: a government guarantee of jobs to everyone who needs one, a minimum income for every household, housing relief to everyone who faces eviction or foreclosure. They do not suggest the deep cuts in the military budget or the radical changes in the tax system that would free billions, even trillions, for social programs to transform the way we live.”

“None of this should surprise us. The Democratic Party has broken with its historic conservatism, its pandering to the rich, its predilection for war, only when it has encountered rebellion from below, as in the Thirties and the Sixties.”

[You don’t have to be a flaming anti-capitalist leveler like me or many of us here this evening to think that what passes for a left today in the U.S. is being far too respectful towards the new regime. As John Judis (no “far leftist,” as Obama’s radical critics are commonly described by his “progressive” supporters) recently argued in the liberal-centrist journal The New Republic (in an essay titled “End the Honeymoon”), a major reason that Obama has gone forward with a conservative and inadequate economic plan “is that there is not a popular left movement that is agitating for him to go well beyond where he would even ideally like to go. Sure, there are leftwing intellectuals like Paul Krugman who are beating the drums for nationalizing the banks and for a $1 trillion-plus stimulus. But I am not referring to intellectuals, but to movements that stir up trouble among voters and get people really angry. Instead, what exists of a popular left is either incapable of action or in Obama’s pocket.” By Judis’ analysis, the U.S. labor movement and groups like “Moveon.Org” are repeating the same “mistake that political groups often make: subordinating their concern about issues to their support for the party and its leading politician.” (J. Judis, “End the Honeymoon,” The New Republic, February 13, 2009)]

But enough critique. There is inspiration to be found in interesting developments suggesting real movement toward progressive change beneath and beyond the false “Hope” propagated for self-interested purposes by politicians: a daring and largely successful workplace occupation (to secure severance benefits and wages from an absconding employer)on Chicago’s North Side (at the Republic Window and Door plant on Goose Island) last December, rising popular resistance to rampant foreclosures and evictions; student occupations at the New School and New York University, plans for antiwar marches that will call Obama out on his rehashed imperialism, including his deadly escalation of the United States’ criminal wars on Afghanistan (and, more fatefully perhaps, Pakistan). There is rising anger (feared as “dangerous populist excess” in the White House and the media) about the ongoing bailouts of the very financial institutions that drove the U.S. and global economy over the cliff.

Obama can surf the people but the inverse is true as well. Progressive activists and citizens can escape the clutches of Obamanist “repressive de-sublimation.” They can evade the containment and exploitation of their hope and anger to re-legitimize dominant oppression structures. They can ride and steer the Obama wave into places (both within and beyond or beneath electoral politics) closer to true progressive ideals.

Left progressives might productively think of “the Obama phenomenon” as a sort of (watered down and strictly electoralist) bourgeois revolution: it will fail to deliver on democratic promises made to a populace it had to rally to defeat the old regime. Now that populace is supposed to return quietly (and hopefully) to remote and divided private realms, doing their little jobs and buying stuff and watching their Telescreens while the new system-maintaining coordinators do their serious work.

There is left-progressive potential in Obama’s false promises and in his ongoing and impending failures. The energy and hopes he rode and channeled will need more genuinely democratic, liberating, and anti-authoritarian outlets than an Obama (or a Hillary Clinton or a John Edwards) presidency could ever have been expected to provide. As the brilliant Marxist David Harvey has recently noted, the new administration’s economic plan is doomed to failure thanks to the conservative constraints of U.S. political culture and to “deep tectonic shifts in the spatio-temporal disposition of capitalist development”

Spatio-temporal tectonics aside, it’s up to citizens and activists, not politicians, to carry through on progressive promises Obama is unable and/or willing to fulfill and then to move forward (as we must) to what Dr, Martin Luther King Jr. called (in a posthumously published essay titled “A Testament of Hope”) the “real issue to be faced” beyond “superficial” questions: “the radical reconstruction of society itself.” As Obama himself noted (along with John Edwards) repeatedly noted during the campaign, in a comment that has not fallen from his lips since he reached the White House, “change doesn’t happen from the top down. Change happens from the bottom up.”

Among the many reasons we don’t hear that very much any more from Obama or other top Democratic politicians, one deserves special mention amidst the current remarkable capitalist breakdown. People engaging in change from the bottom up are often wont to imagine and act on their often previously hidden desires for “a world turned upside down” – for a life beyond the pre-historic oppression structures any new head-of-state is bound to support. Long live the permanent revolution.

[Paul Street (paulsrtreet99@yahoo.com) is the author of many essays, reviews, speeches, and book, including Empire and Inequality: American and the World Since 9/11 (Paradigm, 2004), Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), and Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (www.paradigmpublishers.com/Books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=186987). Street will speak on “Change and Continuity: An Assessment of Obama’s Early Administration” on Tuesday, March 24, 2009 at 7pm, Paul Engle Center, 1600 4th Av SE Cedar Rapids, Iowa. ]

NOTES

[1] Please see (published after this speech was delivered), Harpers’ Magazine president John MacArthur’s excellent Op Ed, “Obama is Far From a Radical Reformer,” The Providence Journal (March 19, 2009). MacArthur notes that the official U.S. “left” ahs joined the right in creating the false impression that “a crypto-socialist has taken up residence in the White House…Such a reading of Obama is absurd,” MacArthur notes, adding that “left and right persist in the fantasy that the president is a Mr. Smith goes to Washington character prepared to ‘take on’ the powers that be…The left pretends that [top corporate neoliberal economist and former Clinton Treasury Secretary Lawrence] Summers isn’t really Obama’s chief economic adviser, while the right pretends that the former Treasury Secretary has converted to left-wing Gaullism. In reality, Summers and [current Treasury Secretary Timothy] Geithner are in place precisely to prevent real reform of a banking system that helped put Obama in the White House…Obama, a moderate with far too much respect for the globalized financial class, is surely the unleft, unradical president. Which makes you wonder why left and right find common cause in saying otherwise.” MacArthur’s editorial can be read online at www.commondreams.org/view/2009/03/18-6

Source / Z-Net

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Canada: War Criminal Good, Peacenik Bad

Posted on March 21, 2009 by RagBlog

After allowing George W. Bush into Canada to speak, it is telling that the same government would bar the British MP George Galloway.

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

George Galloway, the Respect MP, reacts angrily outside the Commons
in July 2007 after being told he faces suspension.

British MP Galloway barred from Canada over ‘supporting Hamas’
By DPA / March 20, 2009

Outspoken British anti-war member of parliament (MP) George Galloway Friday denounced as “outrageous” a decision by the Canadian authorities to refuse him entry on the grounds of national security.

Galloway, a former Labor politician who has now set up his own political party, said in London that he would not accept the ban imposed ahead of a speech he had planned to give in Toronto.

The 54-year-old maverick politician, who left Britain’s ruling Labor Party in protest at its support for military intervention overseas, was refused entry to Egypt in 2006. He is an MP for his Respect Party.

“All right-thinking Canadians, whether they agree with me over the wisdom of sending troops to Afghanistan or not, will oppose this outrageous decision,” he said in London Friday.

He was due to speak at a public forum entitled “Resisting war from Gaza to Kandahar” in Toronto on March 30.

According to the Press Association Friday, a spokesman for Canada’s immigration minister, Jason Kenney, has made clear that the decision will not be overturned.

Galloway had been deemed “inadmissible” to Canada under section 34(1) of the country’s immigration act.

Kenney’s spokesman, Alykhan Velshi said the act was designed to protect Canadians from people who fund, support or engage in terrorism.”

“We’re going to uphold the law, not give special treatment to this … street-corner Cromwell who actually brags about giving ‘financial support’ to Hamas, a terrorist organization banned in Canada,” Velshi was quoted as saying by the British Press Association.

Source / Haaretz

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Obama: Seize the Moment and Shitcan Your Corrupt and Inept Economic & Military Teams

Posted on March 21, 2009 by RagBlog

President elect Barack Obama introduces his new economic team: (From l.) Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Council of Economic Advisers chair Christina Romer, and NEC director Larry Summers. Photo: Martinez Monsivais/AP.

Obama’s Moment is Passing Quickly
By Dave Lindorff / March 20, 2009

The actions of Obama’s Chief Financial Adviser Larry Summers and his Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner in permitting the payment of $165 million in bonuses to AIG executives (Summers, according to the Wall Street Journal, actually pressed Sen. Chris Dodd, D-CT, to secretly remove a bar to the payment of such bonuses from the bailout bill) and the storm of public outrage that has followed public disclosure of those payments, provides President Obama, whose administration is stumbling badly on many fronts, with an opportunity to turn things around and avoid political disaster.

He should promptly demand Geithner’s and Summers’ resignations, and should also fire the CEO of AIG, Edward Liddy (as 80% owner of AIG, the US has the power to do that anytime). It would also be a good idea at the same time to fire the CEOs of all the leading banks that are at this point surviving on government bailouts.

This would allow Obama to correct the fundamental mistake he made during the transition period following the November election in installing a bunch of Clinton-era economic advisors and Bush holdovers to be his economic team.

The US economy is in disastrous shape, and it is going to take new ideas, and people untarnished by the last 30 years of deregulatory excess and unsavory links to Wall Street, to rescue it. Obama has no shortage of good people to turn to: Nobel economist and NY Times columnist Paul Krugman, former World Bank Chief Economist Joseph Stiglitz and economist James Galbraith all spring immediately to mind as people who could offer new and better approaches to addressing both the immediate crisis and the longer-term challenge of restoring the health of the nation’s economy, and of making it work for everyone, instead of just the wealthy few.

Of course, it could be that Obama is really not interested in radically changing the US economy, and its financial system. He has certainly accepted the tarnished coin of the Wall Street establishment during his campaign, and could simply be doing their bidding, but one has to operate on the hope that this is not the case. After all, the Obama campaign also raised an unprecedented amount of cash from ordinary folks, and if money is influence, he owes those little people big time.

In any event, it seems clear that if this president who spoke during his campaign of “hope and change” continues to cater to the bankers and the corporate interests that want to see no major revamping of the economic system and the regulatory apparatus, he is headed for a one-term presidency–and a sad and failed one at that.

The voters who sent Obama to Washington have been willing to extend him the benefit of the doubt, even when he made his almost uniformly lousy cabinet picks. They were willing to grant that he had been handed a disastrous situation by the last administration.

But as each week passes, the disaster becomes less Bush’s and Cheney’s, and more Obama’s.

The same can be said of Obama’s other big crisis: the two endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Again, Obama has largely retained and accepted the advice of the same people who helped run these huge policy disasters during the Bush/Cheney years, and is buying the basic assumptions of those two wars. He is most certainly not ending the Iraq conflict, and is now talking about leaving as many as 50,000 US troops in Iraq for years–as many as were in Vietnam in the fall of 1965. He is reportedly talking about doubling the number of troops in Afghanistan to over 60,000, and about expanding the war into Pakistan, and not just the tribal areas, but Baluchistan province, a heavily populated part of that country. This latter decision, which could lead to an explosion in Pakistan, and the collapse of the central government, could lead to an huge demand for more US troops in the area–perhaps hundreds of thousands more–and even to India’s entry into the conflict.

This is as outrageous and doomed a strategy as is his economic program of trying to salvage the nation’s zombie banks while nickel-and-diming a “stimulus” program for ordinary people.

He should seize the moment, shitcan his corrupt and inept economic team and sack his military advisers, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates and his Centcom commander David Petraeus, and bring in people who will tell him how to get the US out of both conflicts pronto.

If he fires and replaces his economic and military teams, and announces both a quick end to the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and the immediate break-up of the country’s big failed national banks and financial institutions, he has a chance to become a great president. If he does not, it is as predictable as the rising of the seas that his presidency will be a failure. We are nearing a point where the American public is going to lose patience with the half measures, the continuing pouring of national treasure down the twin sinkholes of the failed financial institutions and the two endless wars in the Middle East, and the tone-deaf behavior of cabinet secretaries and advisors who don’t have a clue about how average Americans are living these days.

This is President Obama’s moment for action. Firing Geithner and Summers would be a good start.

Americans should make an effort to let President Obama know that they want more than token stimulus programs. (Just consider this: official unemployment is now 8.1 percent, but only 4.5% of American workers are able to collect unemployment benefits, and meanwhile, real unemployment is closer to 18 percent. That’s a lot of hurt, and not a lot of help.)

A good idea would be to join a march on the Pentagon set for this Saturday, March 21, (natassembly.org/MarchOnPentagon.html) and a two-day program of demonstrations against Wall Street set for April 3 and 4 in New York City (www.bailoutpeople.org).

[Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net.]

Source / Common Dreams

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France : Millions Take to the Streets in Protest

Posted on March 20, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Massive protest against French President Sarkozy in Paris, March 19, 2009. Photo by Pascal Le Segretain / Getty Images / The Independent.

Streets in central Paris were packed with protesters waving anti-Sarkozy placards and chanting slogans, with badges reading ‘Get lost you little jerk!’, the now infamous comment made by Sarkozy to a protester at an agriculture show…

By James Mackenzie / March 19, 2009

As many as three million people took to the streets across France today to protest against President Nicolas Sarkozy’s handling of the economic crisis and demand more help for struggling workers.

The protests, which polls show are backed by three quarters of the French public, reflect growing disillusion with Sarkozy’s pledges of reform as the crisis has thrown tens of thousands out of work and left millions more worried about their jobs.

Bright spring sunshine helped the turnout and the total reported by union organisers surpassed the 2.5 million seen on an earlier day of protest on Jan. 29.

Streets in central Paris were packed with protesters waving anti-Sarkozy placards and chanting slogans, with badges reading “Get lost you little jerk!”, the now infamous comment made by Sarkozy to a protester at an agriculture show, much in evidence.

“There are more and more workers who feel they are not responsible for this crisis but that they are the main victims of it,” said Bernard Thibault, head of the CGT, one of the eight trade unions organising the strikes.

More than 2 million people are out of work in France and despite an easing in inflation, even many with a job struggle with the high cost of living.

A large public sector payroll and a relatively generous welfare state has kept French people better protected than many in other countries but there has been deep public anger at plant closures and stories of corporate excess.

Sarkozy, elected in 2007 on a pledge to shake up the French economy, has seen his approval ratings plunge as he has poured billions into bailing out banks and car makers but rejected union demands for higher pay and tax hikes for the rich.

“People are in the streets and they are suffering, there are more and more people out of work and something has to be done,” said Sylvie Daenenck, marching in Paris. “We shouldn’t just be giving money to the bosses.”

The CGT said 3 million people had joined the protests, with hundreds of thousands at the main rally in Paris and tens of thousands taking part in marches in provincial towns and cities. Police, however, put the Paris total at just 85,000.

Sarkozy’s room for manoeuvre has been limited by the dire state of French public finances, which have been drastically strained by the need to prop up the fragile financial sector.

But a series of disputes, ranging from strikes by university staff to unruly protests by workers at a tyre plant in northern France, have underlined a worsening climate of discontent that the government fears could escalate.

Workers at the Continental tire factory pelted managers with eggs at the protest this week and the government and business leaders have been acutely aware of the danger of unrest spilling over into the kind of violence seen in the urban riots of 2005.

Transport, energy and some government offices were all affected and unions said there was also strong participation by workers from the private sector, although there was no general shutdown of the economy. Most businesses and public services functioned at close to normal levels.

The unions have presented a long list of demands, including a boost for the lower salaried, more measures to protect employment, a tax hike for high earners and a halt to job cuts planned in the public sector.

The government has introduced a 26 billion euro ($36 billion) stimulus plan aimed at business investment, and after the Jan. 29 strike Sarkozy offered 2.65 billion euros of additional aid to help vulnerable households weather the storm.

But there is little prospect of an improvement in the situation, with many analysts predicting the economy will contract by 2 percent this year and unemployment will jump 25 percent to almost 10 percent.

Source / Reuters / The Independent

Thanks to S. M. Wilhelm / The Rag Blog

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The Israelis Are Having Their Own Winter Soldier

Posted on March 20, 2009 by RagBlog

Israel troops admit Gaza abuses

An Israeli military college has printed damning soldiers’ accounts of the killing of civilians and vandalism during recent operations in Gaza.

One account tells of a sniper killing a mother and children at close range whom troops had told to leave their home.

Another speaker at the seminar described what he saw as the “cold blooded murder” of a Palestinian woman.

The army has defended its conduct during the Gaza offensive but said it would investigate the testimonies.

The Israeli army has said it will investigate the soldiers’ accounts.

The testimonies were published by the military academy at Oranim College. Graduates of the academy, who had served in Gaza, were speaking to new recruits at a seminar.

“[The testimonies] conveyed an atmosphere in which one feels entitled to use unrestricted force against Palestinians,” academy director Dany Zamir told public radio.

Heavy civilian casualties during the three-week operation which ended in the blockaded coastal strip on 18 January provoked an international outcry.

Correspondents say the testimonies undermine Israel’s claims that troops took care to protect non-combatants and accusations that Hamas militants were responsible for putting civilians into harm’s way.

‘Less important’

The Palestinian woman and two of her children were allegedly shot after they misunderstood instructions about which way to walk having been ordered out of their home by troops.

“The climate in general… I don’t know how to describe it…. the lives of Palestinians, let’s say, are much, much less important than the lives of our soldiers,” an infantry squad leader is quoted saying.

In another cited case, a commander ordered troops to kill an elderly woman walking on a road, even though she was easily identifiable and clearly not a threat.

Testimonies, which were given by combat pilots and infantry soldiers, also included allegations of unnecessary destruction of Palestinian property.

“We would throw everything out of the windows to make room and order. Everything… Refrigerators, plates, furniture. The order was to throw all of the house’s contents outside,” a soldier said.

One non-commissioned officer related at the seminar that an old woman crossing a main road was shot by soldiers.

“I don’t know whether she was suspicious, not suspicious, I don’t know her story… I do know that my officer sent people to the roof in order to take her out… It was cold-blooded murder,” he said.

The transcript of the session for the college’s Yitzhak Rabin pre-military course, which was held last month, appeared in a newsletter published by the academy.

Israeli human rights groups have criticised the military for failing to properly investigate violations of the laws of war in Gaza despite plenty of evidence of possible war crimes.

‘Moral army’

The soldiers’ testimonies also reportedly told of an unusually high intervention by military and non-military rabbis, who circulated pamphlets describing the war in religious terminology.

“All the articles had one clear message,” one soldier said. “We are the people of Israel, we arrived in the country almost by miracle, now we need to fight to uproot the gentiles who interfere with re-conquering the Holy Land.”

“Many soldiers’ feelings were that this was a war of religion,” he added.

Defence Minister Ehud Barak told Israel Radio that the findings would be examined seriously.

“I still say we have the most moral army in the world. Of course there may be exceptions but I have absolutely no doubt this will be inspected on a case-by-case basis,” he said.

Medical authorities say more than 1,300 Palestinians were killed during Israel’s 22-day operation, including some 440 children, 110 women, and dozens of elderly people.

The stated aim was to curb rocket and mortar fire by militants from Gaza. Thirteen Israelis, including three civilians were killed.

Source / BBC News

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Many Innocents Still at Guantanamo — Will Obama Make It Right?

Posted on March 20, 2009 by RagBlog

See A Prison of Words by Noah Feldman below.

Ex-Bush Official to AP: Many at Gitmo Are Innocent
March 19, 2009

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — A former Bush administration official says many Guantanamo detainees are innocent, and have been held only because U.S. officials hoped they would know something important.

Lawrence B. Wilkerson was chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. He says only two dozen or so of the roughly 800 men held at Guantanamo are terrorists. About 240 prisoners remain at the US military prison.

“There are still innocent people there,” Wilkerson told The Associated Press on Thursday. “Some have been there six or seven years.”

Wilkerson says he learned of their innocence through State Department briefings and military commanders. He first made the allegations in an Internet posting this week.

The Pentagon has said the detainees are dangerous enemy combatants.

Source / AP / New York Times

A Prison of Words
By Noah Feldman / March 18, 2009

Cambridge, Mass. — HAS the Obama administration changed the legal rules for detaining suspects in the war on terrorism, or is it continuing in the footsteps of the Bush administration?

We got a clue last week when the Justice Department filed an important document “refining” the government’s position in lawsuits over those held at Guantánamo Bay. Hailed by supporters as a leap forward, yet criticized by human rights groups as being little different from what came before, the filing reveals a distinctive approach to constitutional law. Cautious and modest where George W. Bush was ambitious and brash, Mr. Obama still claims the authority necessary to sustain almost everything his predecessor did.

Perhaps what’s most important here is what Mr. Obama’s lawyers do not say. The Bush White House long insisted that the president had inherent power as commander in chief to do whatever it took to defend the country — including overriding American and international law. The Obama filing, however, is silent on the topic of inherent executive power. Indeed, the magic words “commander in chief” never even appear.

Technically, the Obama lawyers have not abandoned the argument for broad presidential power, just implied that such authority is unnecessary to get them what they want.

Yet omitting the claim to unfettered executive authority shows respect for Congress and international standards. In effect, the Obama administration is saying to the courts that if the detainees cannot be held as a matter of federal or international law, judges should release them. This approach is brave — so brave it might even prove foolhardy if the courts, sick of nearly a decade of detention, decide to clear the decks.

The filing argues that the authorization for the use of military force passed by Congress after 9/11 — the contemporary equivalent of a declaration of war — gives the president the powers any sovereign would have under the general principles of the international law of war. Relying on international law to make sense of Congress’s grant of power has deep roots in our constitutional tradition.

In the context of America’s present global military posture, however, the rediscovery of this notion is little short of astonishing. The laws of war, mostly designed for old-fashioned struggles between sovereign states, often do not fit today’s circumstances. The Bush administration saw this mismatch as an occasion to treat the Geneva conventions as “quaint” (in the words of Alberto Gonzales, the former White House counsel).

The Obama lawyers, however, seem to believe that the international law of war is flexible enough to serve their interests — and even to expand the president’s power to detain suspects beyond the strict language used by Congress when it gave President Bush authority to carry out his war on terrorism.

Here is where the law gets complicated: In 2001, Congress told the president he could make war on anyone who had “planned, authorized, committed or aided” the Sept. 11 attacks. The Bush administration, though, went further; it claimed the power to detain any “enemy combatant,” defined to include “anyone who is part of or supporting Taliban or Al Qaeda forces or associated forces.” In an unfortunate legal overreach, one administration lawyer said the government could detain a “little old lady in Switzerland” whose donation to an Afghan orphanage ended up in the hands of Al Qaeda.

In place of the “enemy combatant” definition, the Obama administration now claims the right to detain anyone who “substantially supported” terrorists. Thankfully, the Obama standard would free the little old Swiss lady. But the words “substantial support” do not come from international law any more than Bush’s “enemy combatant” did.

The administration lawyers suggest in their brief that “substantial support” of terrorists could be defined by some unspecified analogy to the laws of detention in traditional armed conflict. Yet the details are left to the imagination; and when push comes to shove, this language might well include all the Guantánamo detainees, including those who never belonged to a terrorist group.

The upshot is that the Obama approach is potentially broad enough to continue detaining everyone whom the Bush administration put in Guantánamo in the first place. The legal theories are subtler, and the reliance on international law may prove more attractive to our allies. But President Obama is stuck with the detainees Mr. Bush left him, and some may pose a real danger. Faced with this conundrum, and pressed for answers by judges who are rightfully impatient, the administration is hurrying to reframe existing powers in new legal doctrines.

The true test of whether Mr. Obama has improved on the Bush era lies in how his administration justifies its decisions on the 241 remaining Guantánamo detainees, whose cases will now be evaluated internally and reviewed by the courts. If the new legal arguments actually affect who goes free and who stays in custody, then they will amount to meaningful change. Without real-world effects, though, even the most elegant new legal arguments are nothing but words.

[Noah Feldman is a law professor at Harvard, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a contributing writer to The Times Magazine.]

Source / New York Times

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Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti Turns 90

Posted on March 19, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Photo of Lawrence Ferlinghetti by Deanne Fitzmaurice / SF Chronicle.

Catching up with Lawrence Ferlinghetti

‘Oldies such as myself talk about the good old days with nostalgia since that was when they were young and beautiful (and full of testosterone).’ — Lawrence Ferlinghetti

By Heidi Benson / March 19, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO — On Tuesday [March 24], poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti turns 90. Nearly 60 years ago, he came to San Francisco, fell in love with this “small white city,” and soon after co-founded City Lights Books. One of the most vibrant and long-lived cultural institutions in town, the store remains an international magnet for the imaginative, as does the Web site for City Lights Booksellers & Publishers, Citylights.com

Mayor Gavin Newsom has declared that March 24 will henceforth be called “Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day,” in honor of his “enormous contributions to our city’s life and culture,” while the bookstore staff invites everyone to send along birthday wishes, via e-mail, to: lfbirthday@citylights.com.

Q: When you were named San Francisco’s first poet laureate in 1998, you spoke of the damage to the culture caused by the yawning gap between the city’s rich and poor. Have your worst fears been borne out?

A: When I arrived in the city, the citizens seemed to have an island, considering San Francisco a kind of offshore republic, founded by gold miners and gold diggers, cast-off seamen and vagabonds, railroad barons and rogue adventurers and ladies of fortune. What with the electronic revolution and the Information Age, we have joined the rest of the world.

Oldies such as myself talk about the good old days with nostalgia since that was when they were young and beautiful (and full of testosterone).

Q: You served as a ship’s commander in the Pacific during World War II. What’s the most important thing you learned in the Navy?

A: In four years at sea, I learned that the sea is a monster and can turn on you at any time. Seeing Nagasaki made me an instant pacifist.

Q: How have the concerns of poets changed since you began writing?

A: In the social revolution of the 1960s, the chant was “Be here now.” Today with television, e-mail and especially cell phones, it’s “Be somewhere else now.”

Q: Your favorite 19th century American poet?

A: Walt Whitman, of course. He gave voice to the people and articulated an American populist consciousness.

Q: Why do you prefer the term wide-open poetry to Beat poetry?

A: I never wrote “Beat” poetry. Wide-open poetry refers to what Pablo Neruda told me in Cuba in 1950 at the beginning of the Fidelista revolution: Neruda said, “I love your wide-open poetry.”

He was either referring to the wide-ranging content of my poetry, or, in a different mode, to the poetry of the Beats. Wide-open poetry also refers to the “open form” typography of a poem on the page. (A term borrowed from the gestural painting of the Abstract Expressionists.)

Q: Can writing be taught?

A: It has to be taut.

Q: Is texting poetry?

A: It can be.

Q: You’ve always been an activist, as well as an artist. What do you advise activists who are complacent now that a new, seemingly more enlightened administration is in charge?

A: The dictatorial reign of George the Second almost destroyed our civil liberties as well as our economy.

We shall now see whether an “enlightened” administration can defeat Washington, D.C.,’s culture of corruption. The press has given socialism a bad name, falsely equating it with Soviet Communism. What is needed today is a form of civil libertarian socialism in which all democratic civil rights are fully protected.

What with shrinking energy resources and radical climate change, a worldwide planned economy is needed. Why won’t any politician even whisper it?

Q: In the upcoming film of “Howl,” James Franco will play Allen Ginsberg. Who is playing you?

A: Charlie Chaplin.

Q: Who is the love of your life?

A: Life itself is the love of my life.

Q: What’s the secret of your beautiful skin?

A: Genetics.

Source / SF Gate

Lawrence Ferlinghetti – Last Prayer

Thanks to Mariann Wizard and Bob Simmons / The Rag Blog

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HEALTH CARE / ‘Economic Power Must be Regulated with Prudence’

Posted on March 19, 2009 by Thorne Dreyer

Pope Pius XI, 1857-1939 A.D.

‘Economic power is headstrong and vehement, and if it is to prove beneficial to mankind it must be securely curbed and regulated with prudence.’ — Pope Pius XI, May 15, 1931.

Government and single payer health care: Caving to the special interests

By Dr. Stephen R. Keister / The Rag Blog / March 19, 2009

This past Sunday I made an exception to my usual regime and watched Meet the Press. From the ongoing discussion two points stood out:

1.) In Europe the “recession” was as prevalent as it is here in the United States However, the level of public anxiety is much more tempered since the majority of Europe’s social democracies have excellent ongoing health care for all; the state sponsored educational systems, through university level — if the student is qualified — are intact, and the unemployment insurance is much more extensive.

2.) During the presidential campaigns none of the candidates discussed help for the poor, and since the inauguration of President Obama there has not been a whisper. Yet the campaign was marked by the sub-rosa text concerning which candidate was a “better Christian!” Perhaps one should recall the Homilies of St. Basil: “The bread that you store up belongs to the hungry; the cloak that lies in your chest belongs to the naked; and the gold that you have hidden in the ground belongs to the poor.” Again, I noted previously that a survey showed that 70% of American “Christians” had not read the Sermon On The Mount!

Why mention these two subjects? Health care is currently one of two items on the front burner for many Americans. Yet we must concede that those blessed with wealth can avail themselves of much better care, such as boutique care at a well known clinic, while the poor are relegated to the Repug’s treatment place of choice, the local emergency room. The rate of chronic disease is statistically much lower among the well-to-do than among the underprivileged. Of course, the other subject in the headlines is the unconscionable executive bonus fiasco within AIG and the other Wall Street financial firms. There are parallels which we will allude to later.

The recent White House Conference on Health Care was a sham as far as the delivery of a program of health care to the citizens of our nation. I have seen no in-depth discussion of the proceedings in the mainstream media; however, there have been a number of excellent expositions of the underhanded back-scratching of the insurance industry on the internet. For the sake of brevity I will call attention to the article by Helen Redmond at SocialistWorker.org, “Left Out From Obama’s Health Care Summit.”

Universal, single payer health care as promoted by Physicians For A National Health Program and Rep. John Conyer’s HR 676 were all but disregarded save for late permission for Dr. Oliver Fine of PNHP to give the single presentation for single payer/universal care.

Interestingly, in the March 13, 2009, Time Magazine there is an article regarding the “gang of nine” in the United States Senate at work producing a plan as a sop to the insurance industries with an estimated cost of approximately 40% more than that propounded by Dr. Fine at the White House conference. Of course, there is no reason to suspect that Dr. Fine and PNHP are dependent on the financial largesse of the insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry. Further, all the plans, save that of Rep. Conyers and PNHP, hint at the need to require by government fiat that the underprivileged purchase private health insurance. This matter was addressed from the standpoint of constitutionality in my last Rag Blog article.

All of this deferential treatment of the insurance cartel, despite the fact, reported by Bloomberg News on March 11, 2009, that the cost of private insurance has increased in price by 119% for family coverage, since 1999. Yet, every 30 seconds someone in the U.S. files for bankruptcy because of their medical bills. and an estimated 18,000 Americans die each year because of lack of insurance. In a recent poll cited in Op-Ed News, 74% of the public endorsed a “public health insurance plan like Medicare.” This is confirmed by a separate poll in the Huffington Post of the same date showing that 73% of voters approve of a public health insurance plan. Further details are available in Barbara O’Brien’s excellent posting on AlterNet, “Why Conservatives Are Radical on Health Care”

President Obama has shown insight regarding health care at several levels: his opening up of stem-cell research, his executive order regarding the availability of contraceptives, and his recent appointments of Margaret Hamburg and Joshua Sharfstein to the top positions at the FDA. It is gratifying to see people with professional knowledge and integrity, without peripheral connections to the pharmaceutical industries, replacing the Bush hacks that have threatened our pharmaceuticals and food supply for the past eight years.

Yet, in spite of these encouraging moves it would appear that the Obama administration is giving way to the same pressures and incentives from the health insurance industry and pharmaceutical makers that were evident in his appointment of members of the Wall Street gaggle to his Treasury Department and as White House economic advisers. As for health care, one would have expected, from the campaign promises, new faces providing the lead in health care, as one might have expected from an economic team (Krugman, Stiglitz for example) rather than the tired old bunch of Milton Friedman acolytes that ended up overseeing the AIG and related messes. Perhaps, to avoid becoming a one term president, Obama should listen intensely to the voice of the people rather than caving in to the powerful forces that underlie the Washington establishment. There still may be time. Once again the president blew it regarding the Charles Freeman affair by bending to the will of a small but wealthy interest group.

In the entire health care discussion, and I have eluded to this on prior occasion, there has been only minimal discussion regarding the physician shortage, especially among GPs and internists, in this country. In France, for instance, there are enough physicians, with excellent academic back grounds, to make house calls!

If we can ever offer medical care for all there just still would not be enough physicians to provide adequate and thoughtful care. Hence, we must immediately address getting more doctors available, not specialists from India, or exotic specialists trained in the USA. I have previously suggested government subsidization of medical education, in the European model, or creation of a medical academy, such as the Naval Academy at Annapolis, with stipulations that after internship the graduates spend six years in a medically deprived area. Another unique institution has recently appeared in this area, a free standing Osteopathic College of Medicine. This is not affiliated with a university which envelops multiple doctoral programs, nor is there an affiliated large university hospital teaching/research complex. It amounts to what in Europe would be considered, perhaps, an advanced trade school. I had content for three or four years with the students, who tend to be older than those in the university affiliated medical schools, while an attending physician at a local free clinic. These students are intense and devoted and have a first rate passage percentage on the state/national boards. One problem, as with the conventional medical schools, is the high indebtedness upon graduation, that forces them into high paying specialties.

One is delighted to see the growing populism and public anger regarding the bungled health care and economic situations. However, as an old man I am cautious and I have noted several other authors expressing concern that the anger dare not take to the streets as it does in Western Europe. Here we are confronted by a totally different culture that does not tolerate public outcry very well. The progressives and liberals are not cohesive, but tend to be diverse and willing to debate and argue. The right is organized, dominated by rite and ritual, unquestioning of their leadership, and could quite easily put brown shirts on the NRA and follow the “man on the white horse.” We have discussed the Weimar Syndrome previously.

We must keep up a continual barrage of messages to our “representatives,” alluding to the fact that we are aware of their subservience to the powers of the lobbies (which we can confirm on opensecrets.org). We must have local gatherings of unions, civic organizations, and progressive groups and petition our elected representatives. We must write letters to the editor, realizing that many will not be published (as is the case here with The Erie Times News) if they show an overly “liberal” bent, or conflict with the wishes of the newspaper’s advertisers. (Unfortunately, those that appear here seem to be chosen on the basis of eighth grade writing ability and thought processes. It must be emphasized to local governments, as well as to employers, that single payer, universal care, will result in considerable financial savings with employee coverage. Some states like Pennsylvania are pushing state-wide single payer, universal coverage, we must back their efforts with will and determination. Again, this has a chance of passage with help of the citizens. One should note that the MSM is not broadly involved in the discussion.

I intended to refer once again to the matter of physician payment, systemic corruption and waste in research and academia, the immorality of health costs and advertising, the rip offs of the public by the pharmaceutical industry, but with my editor’s permission will broach these matters later.

[Dr. Stephen R. Keister, a regular contributor to The Rag Blog who lives in Erie, PA. He is a retired physician who is active in health care reform. His previous articles on The Rag Blog can be found here.]

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Canada Allows War Criminal in to Speak

Posted on March 19, 2009 by RagBlog


Canada breaking the law by hosting war crimes suspect George W. Bush
By John Mcnamer / March 18, 2009

The Canadian government has knowingly allowed the violation of both Canadian domestic law and international human-rights law by failing to stop former U.S. president George W. Bush from crossing the border for a paid speaking engagement with a private Calgary audience.

Many competent international authorities have concluded that the available evidence establishes that Bush and the Bush administration committed torture and other war crimes and crimes against humanity. Therefore Canada now has a duty to condemn, investigate, prosecute and punish those crimes.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Attorney General Rob Nicholson and other responsible ministers were notified on March 11 of specific evidence clearly demonstrating there are reasonable grounds to believe Mr. Bush has been complicit in torture and other war crimes.

Under Canada’s immigration laws, if there are reasonable grounds to believe a person is complicit in these crimes, entry to Canada must be denied.

The test is not whether a person has been convicted, but whether there are reasonable grounds to think they have been involved in such crimes.

Even though Canadian officials were referred to the overwhelming evidence of Bush’s involvement in torture government officials apparently took no action to bar Bush or commence an investigation.

In fact government officials did not even feel the need to bother with the courtesy of a reply to Lawyers Against the War (LAW).

LAW plans to consult with peace and justice advocates in Canada and around the world with a view to maximizing the likelihood of successful prosecutions that would be a move toward restoring the rule of law.

Many around the world are pressing for proper prosecutions. In the U.S., release of a major complaint alleging war crimes against 31 Bush administration officials prepared by the Robert Jackson Steering Committee is expected in April.

This initiative is led by Professor Lawrence Velvel, Dean of the Massachusetts School of Law.

A growing number of people completely agree with UN Special Rapporteur Martin Scheinin, who recently said, “We have had a witch hunt for alleged terrorists for the past seven and a half years. . . . Now I think the witch hunt is over and it is time for the law to step in.” Prof. Scheinin also said states are under a positive obligation to conduct independent investigations into alleged violations of the right to freedom from torture or other inhumane treatment.

[John McNamer, 61, is a member of LAW from Kamloops. He was awarded the Bronze Star Medal while serving in Vietnam with the U.S. Army’s 4th Infantry Division.]

© Copyright (c) The Province

Source / The Province

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Blackwater Is Staying in Iraq, Against Iraqi Wishes

Posted on March 19, 2009 by RagBlog

Blackwater Chief Executive Officer Erik Prince defends his company’s performance in Iraq before the House oversight committee in 2007. Photo: Associated Press.

New Deal for Blackwater
By Jim McElhatton / March 17, 2009

Days after the Baghdad government decided it no longer wanted the company then known as Blackwater in Iraq, the State Department signed a $22.2 million deal in February to keep the embattled contractor working there through most of the summer, contract records show.

The decision keeps Blackwater – since renamed Xe – in Iraq months longer than anyone has suggested publicly, while raising questions about why the U.S. would pay a contractor for work in Iraq if it may not be able to operate there legally.

The State Department has been under pressure from Blackwater critics, including several in Congress, not to renew the company’s contracts in Iraq. Much of the concern stems from a 2007 incident that left 14 Iraqi civilians dead and six former Blackwater guards facing manslaughter charges. One of the guards pleaded guilty, but the company was accused of no wrongdoing in the incident.

In late January, the Iraqi government said it would not renew Blackwater’s operating license and that the company would have to leave as soon as a joint Iraqi-U.S. committee completes its work on guidelines for the operation of private security companies. State Department officials said they would honor the decision.

On Feb. 2, a department spokesman was asked whether officials planned to renew one of Blackwater’s contracts past May. The spokesman, Robert Wood, said the department had told Blackwater “we did not plan to renew the company’s existing task force orders for protective security details in Iraq.”

But records available through a federal procurement database show that on that same day, the State Department approved a $22.2 million contract modification for Blackwater “security personnel” in Iraq, with a job completion date of Sept. 3, 2009.

“Why would you continue to use Blackwater when the Iraqi government has banned the highly controversial company and there are other choices?” asked Melanie Sloan, executive director of the nonpartisan Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

State Department spokesman Noel Clay said the contract modification involves aviation services. “The place of performance is Iraq, but it is totally different than the Baghdad one that expires in May,” he said.

Ms. Sloan called the State Department’s explanation of the Feb. 2 deal a “parsing of words” and said “they should just be straight with us.”

Xe spokeswoman Anne Tyrell declined to comment on the status of the company’s work in Iraq or the Feb. 2 contract modification. She said the company was aware that the State Department had indicated that it did not plan to renew its contracts in Iraq but that Xe officials had not received specific information about leaving the country.

“We’re following their direction,” she said.

The Iraqi Embassy in Washington had no comment on the Blackwater contract when contacted on Monday.

The State Department has given clear indications for months that the Iraqi government might not be renewing Blackwater’s operating license.

Harold W. Geisel, the State Department’s inspector general, told the congressionally mandated Commission on Wartime Contracting at a Feb. 2 hearing that officials were awaiting the outcome of an FBI report into the 2007 shooting incident before deciding whether to keep Blackwater in Iraq.

“The issue is not only one of, well, what we would like to do, but it also is to some extent what the department can do,” Mr. Geisel said of decisions about the future of Blackwater’s role in Iraq, according to a transcript of the hearing.

“Blackwater had certain assets that the department determined the other contractors did not have,” he said, citing the company’s 24 aircraft as an example.

Nonetheless, Mr. Geisel said his office did “advise the department that they better start planning for when the Iraqis say this is it with Blackwater. And without getting into diplomatic negotiations, I believe the department is planning for this eventuality, which is clearly not too far off.”

Scott Amey, general counsel for the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit group that investigates federal contracting, said the State Department’s decision to continue paying Blackwater for security in Iraq raises broader questions about federal procurement practices.

“This case highlights the fact that the U.S. government over-relies on contractors and that it isn’t in a position to hold them accountable,” he said. “Continuing to do new business with questionable actors flies in the face of spreading trust, peace and democracy around the world.”

The contractor, based in North Carolina, recently underwent a big shake-up. The company changed its name to Xe, pronounced “zee,” last month. Also, a subsidiary, Blackwater Lodge and Training Center, which secured the State Department’s $22.2 million contract modification, was renamed.

Blackwater founder Erik Prince and company President Gary Jackson have resigned.

Mr. Prince has donated nearly a quarter-million dollars over the years to political causes. More than half of the donations went to the National Republican Congressional Committee and the Republican National Committee, according to a 2007 Democrat-led House committee report, citing data from the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

Blackwater also had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying Congress, according to Senate records. It contributed between $10,001 and $25,000 to former President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation. Mr. Clinton released the donor information last year to avoid conflict-of-interest questions about his fundraising activities and the duties of his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, as President Obama’s secretary of state.

Despite any political good will that the company might have generated from its lobbying and political activities, it was unable to dodge fallout from the Sept. 16, 2007, shooting incident in Baghdad, in which prosecutors said six former guards went on an unprovoked rampage, shooting innocent Iraqi civilians.

Five of the former guards have pleaded not guilty to manslaughter charges, while a sixth pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and attempted manslaughter. Attorneys for the former guards say they fired in self-defense.

Source / Washington Times

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Cheney’s Version of Iraq Accomplishment Tainted

Posted on March 18, 2009 by RagBlog


Cheney’s Mission Accomplished
By Juan Cole / March 17, 2009

Dick Cheney: “I guess my general sense of where we are with respect to Iraq and at the end of now, what, nearly six years, is that we’ve accomplished nearly everything we set out to do….”

What has Dick Cheney really accomplished in Iraq?

* An estimated 4 million Iraqis, out of 27 million, have been displaced from their homes, that is, made homeless. Some 2.7 million are internally displaced inside Iraq. A couple hundred thousand are cooling their heels in Jordan. And perhaps a million are quickly running out of money and often living in squalid conditions in Syria. Cheney’s war has left about 15% of Iraqis homeless inside the country or abroad. That would be like 45 million American thrown out of their homes.

* It is controversial how many Iraqis died as a result of the 2003 invasion and its aftermath. But it seems to me that a million extra dead, beyond what you would have expected from a year 2000 baseline, is entirely plausible. The toll is certainly in the hundreds of thousands. Cheney did not kill them all. The Lancet study suggested that the US was directly responsible for a third of all violent deaths since 2003. That would be as much as 300,000 that we killed. The rest, we only set in train their deaths by our invasion.

* Baghdad has been turned from a mixed city, about half of its population Shiite and the other half Sunni in 2003, into a Shiite city where the Sunni population may be as little as ten to fifteen percent. From a Sunni point of view, Cheney’s war has resulted in a Shiite (and Iranian) take-over of the Iraqi capital, long a symbol of pan-Arabism and anti-imperialism.

* In the Iraqi elections, Shiite fundamentalist parties closely allied with Iran came to power. The Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, the leading party in parliament, was formed by Iraqi expatriates at the behest of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1982 in Tehran. The Islamic Mission (Da’wa) Party is the oldest ideological Shiite party working for an Islamic state. It helped form Hizbullah in Beirut in the early 1980s. It has supplied both prime ministers elected since 2005. Fundamentalist Shiites shaped the constitution, which forbids the civil legislature to pass legislation that contravenes Islamic law. Dissidents have accused the new Iraqi government of being an Iranian puppet.

* Arab-Kurdish violence is spiking in the north, endangering the Obama withdrawal plan and, indeed, the whole of Iraq, not to mention Syria, Turkey and Iran.

* Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi women have been widowed by the war and its effects, leaving most without a means of support. Iraqi widows often lack access to clean water and electricity. Aljazeera English has video.

* $32 billion were wasted on Iraq reconstruction, and most of it cannot even be traced. I repeat, Cheney gave away $32 bn. to anonymous cronies in such a way that we can’t even be sure who stole it, exactly. And you are angry at AIG about $400 mn. in bonuses! We are talking about $32 billion given out in brown paper bags.

* Political power is being fragmented in Iraq with big spikes in the murder rate in some provinces that may reflect faction-fighting and vendettas in which the Iraqi military is loathe to get involved.

* The Iraqi economy is devastated, and the new government’s bureaucracy and infighting have made it difficult to attract investors.

* The Bush-Cheney invasion helped further destabilize the Eastern Mediterranean, setting in play Kurdish nationalism and terrifying Turkey.

Cheney avoids mentioning all the human suffering he has caused, on a cosmic scale, and focuses on procedural matters like elections (which he confuses with democracy– given 2000 in this country, you can understand why). Or he lies, as when he says that Iran’s influence in Iraq has been blocked. Another lie is that there was that the US was fighting “al-Qaeda” in Iraq as opposed to just Iraqis. He and Bush even claim that they made Iraqi womens’ lives better.

The real question is whether anyone will have the gumption to put Cheney on trial for treason and crimes against humanity.

Source / Informed Comment

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Seattle P-I Becoming First Internet Only Newspaper

Posted on March 18, 2009 by RagBlog

Roger Oglesby, right, of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, announced the paper’s final print edition. Photo: Dan DeLong/Seattle Post-Intelligencer, via Associated Press.

Seattle Paper Shifts Entirely to the Web
By William Yardley and Richard Pérez-Peña / March 16, 2009

SEATTLE — The Seattle Post-Intelligencer will produce its last printed edition on Tuesday and become an Internet-only news source, the Hearst Corporation said on Monday, making it by far the largest American newspaper to take that leap.

But The P-I, as it is called, will resemble a local Huffington Post more than a traditional newspaper, with a news staff of about 20 people rather than the 165 it had, and a site with mostly commentary, advice and links to other news sites, along with some original reporting.

Other newspapers have closed and many more are threatened. But the transition to an all-digital product for The P-I will be especially closely watched in an industry that is fast losing revenue and is casting around for a new economic model.

For one thing, the closing may end up putting greater pressure on the surviving and financially struggling Seattle Times, because of the end of a joint operating agreement between the two papers. It may even bring closer the day when Seattle has no local paper at all.

And the way The P-I is changing might hint at a path for future newspaper closings. To some extent, in shifting its business model, it will enter a new realm of competition. It will compete not just with the print-and-ink Times, but also with an established local news Web site, Crosscut.com, a much smaller nonprofit organization that focuses on the Northwest. The move shows how some newspapers, in the future, may not vanish but move the battle from print to the digital arena.

“The bloodline will live on,” Roger Oglesby, the paper’s publisher and editor, told the employees Monday morning in the newsroom. The Web site will remain at the paper’s address, SeattlePI.com, and assume its new form on Tuesday.

Under the decades-old joint operating agreement, The Times handled all non-newsroom operations for both, like printing, delivery, advertising and marketing. Hearst executives said they were dissolving that agreement, but it was not clear how that would affect the money-losing Times. It will no longer have to share revenue with Hearst, but it will also be unable to share expenses — the same situation The Denver Post found itself in after its rival, The Rocky Mountain News, folded late last month.

For their part, Times executives said that the end of The P-I was a short-term challenge, but a potential lifeline in the long run. “Had Hearst not made this decision, the survival of The Times was unlikely,” said Jill Mackie, vice president for public affairs at The Times.

The new P-I site has recruited some current and former government officials, including a former mayor, a former police chief and the current head of Seattle schools, to write columns, and it will repackage some material from Hearst’s large stable of magazines. It will keep some of the paper’s popular columnists and bloggers and the large number of unpaid local bloggers whose work appears on the site.

Among those survivors is Monica Guzman, 26, who writes The Big Blog, which she describes as tapping into “the conversation about news in Seattle, whatever stories are getting buzz, whatever people seem to be most interested in talking about.”

Sitting at her desk surrounded by departing reporters who packed boxes quietly or sipped whiskey, Ms. Guzman said it was “more than this hunk of paper” that she would miss, but her colleagues and their encyclopedic knowledge and instincts. “To go on without some of that, it’s a little scary,” she said.

The P-I lost $14 million in 2008. Hearst announced in January that if it could not find a buyer, it would cease printing. Few people expected a buyer to emerge.

Hearst hopes to capitalize on the healthy Web traffic The P-I already has, about 1.8 million unique visitors a month, according to Nielsen Online. It usually outranks the online readership of The Times, despite much smaller print circulation, 118,000 on weekdays last year, compared with 199,000 for The Times.

“We clearly believe we are in a period of innovation and experimentation, and that’s what this new SeattlePI.com represents,” said Steven R. Swartz, president of Hearst’s newspaper division. “We think we’ll learn a lot, and we think the Seattle market, being so digitally focused, is a great place to try this.”

The new P-I will be led by Michelle Nicolosi, executive producer of the site since 2005, who has been an editor and prize-winning reporter. David McCumber, the managing editor, and Mr. Oglesby will not stay with The P-I, but will remain with Hearst in some capacity, executives said.

Hearst said it would offer severance packages to about 145 employees. Because the newspaper has had no business staff of its own, the new operation plans to hire more than 20 people in areas like ad sales.

Among the new columnists, Hearst said, will be Norm Rice, a former Seattle mayor; Maria L. Goodloe-Johnson, who heads the city’s public schools; John McKay, a former United States attorney; and two former governors.

David Brewster, the publisher of Crosscut, praised Hearst for “creating new journalism,” rather than completely shutting down The P-I. “There’s definitely room,” he said. “Seattle will be quite a vital place.”

Ruth Teichroeb, an investigative reporter who was among those who lost their jobs, said she worried about what would be lost. “The thing that’s always been closest to my heart is The P-I’s coverage of the underdog, people who are invisible,” she said. “Those people who have the least voice in society are losing access to another part of the mainstream media.”

[William Yardley reported from Seattle, and Richard Pérez-Peña from New York.]

Source / New York Times

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