Category Archives: Political Rants

Political Rants

Strange medicine.

Obama’s Middle East address was full of familiar themes. There’s been a lot of dust kicked up about the suggestion that any lasting peace in Israel/Palestine should be based on the pre-June 1967 borders with mutually agreeable land swaps. That was a bit like Gingrich saying he didn’t believe in gutting Medicare and turning it into a lame, unworkable voucher program. Nothing draws criticism like brief moments of relative sanity. But I digress.

What wasn’t surprising about the speech? The hard swipes at our perennial punching bags, Syria and Iran. The heavily caveated criticism of Bahrain and Yemen. The non-existence of Saudi Arabia. These are all too attractive not to make it into the final draft. But in my mind, there were probably three items worth referencing:

“Drawing from what we’ve learned around the world, we think it’s important to focus on trade, not just aid; and investment, not just assistance. ” 

This was the magic of the marketplace passage that’s been previewed over the past few days. Obama promised to get the IMF and World Bank working to “modernize and stabilize the economies of Tunisia and Egypt.” What he didn’t say was that the mass protests in Egypt he referenced earlier were fueled, in part, by neoliberal reforms of the type he’s describing. All I can say is that the revolutionaries in Egypt and Tunisia had better be on their guard, because plugging their economies into the Washington consensus only means striving to be another Honduras.

“For decades, the conflict between Israelis and Arabs has cast a shadow over the region. For Israelis, it has meant living with the fear that their children could get blown up on a bus or by rockets fired at their homes, as well as the pain of knowing that other children in the region are taught to hate them. For Palestinians, it has meant suffering the humiliation of occupation, and never living in a nation of their own.”

This is, in a sense, boilerplate framing of the issue. Only Israelis are killed, blown up, etc., in this conflict. Palestinians are merely “humiliated”. From this statement, you’d never know that the vast, vast majority of deaths in this conflict have been among the Palestinians. Also, you never hear this or any president talk about Palestinian security. The only time they use the term security in reference to Palestinians is when they’re talking about Palestinian responsibility to ensure Israeli security. That thing Obama said about every nation having the right to defend itself? Within a few lines he was talking about a “demilitarized” Palestinian state. So much for self defense.

Still, the 1967 borders argument is a rare glimpse at sanity, and I credit him for it. Will it last the weekend? We shall see.

The Strauss-Kahn Consensus.  Not sure why Dominique Strauss-Kahn is under arrest. He only did to that poor woman what the IMF has been doing to poor countries for decades, to choruses of praise from the U.S.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

What now.

Gingrich has thrown his hat into the presidential ring. That should go well. Not so long ago, he was the most hated man in America. I have to think he has moved up from there – perhaps that fact alone has encouraged him to try. Or maybe he’s pulling a Buchanan and using it as a fundraising, image-building exercise. (Great way to sell books.) Either way, I can hardly imagine a less likely or desirable prospect, and I don’t think I’m alone in this. It’s no accident – the policies he has been most closely associated with over the years are wildly unpopular. The current crop of GOP congresspeople represent an odious distillation of his most extremist positions. What’s not to hate?

Back when the Newt was Speaker, I wrote a song about his crusade against welfare – one cheerfully joined by Bill Clinton and various other Democrats, eager to throw the poor over the side for a few cheap political points. Written like a bloodthirsty hymn sung aboard a pirate ship, the lyric went, in part, like this:

Please, Newt Gingrich, save us from welfare dependent mothers
whose hungry infants threaten our fortunes with default
Please, o Speaker, drive them away from this captain’s table
Please drive them from below the salt!

Bring to us the biscuit, that humble little biscuit
Please add it to our bounty, we savor every crumb
Take it from the infant, that greedy mother’s infant
Please pluck it from his toothless gums!

Mr. Speaker – we beseech thee, for the gods of war and industry
Mr. Speaker – we beseech thee, please… Bless This Feast!

Imagine the singing pirates being all of those industrialists, corporate CEOs, and generals/admirals who benefit from budgetary largess, year after year, to the tune of billions of dollars (at the expense of all of the rest of us, including many in dire need) and you’ll get the idea.

I suppose it makes sense that Newt would think this is a good time for him, since the ethos of greed and further targeting of the poor/working class has descended upon us once again. Given today’s sensational announcement that the Social Security trust fund will be expended in 2036 (instead of 2037), after which the fund would only cover 75% of its costs (assuming we never come out of deep recession and never again experience economic growth above 1% a year), he may be right.

But I doubt it.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Last resort.

Bin Laden has been found. Why doesn’t it surprise me that he was living in a luxurious gated community, not a cave? Used to better things, I suspect. Given the history of his involvement with the Afghan-Pakistani-American covert war against the Soviets in the 1980s, it is also unsurprising that he would make his home in the heart of perhaps the most militarized garrison town in Pakistan – a place literally crawling with ISI operatives, no doubt. It is simply inconceivable that at least some elements of the Pakistani military and/or intelligence services were not aware of his presence. (One wonders what the reaction might have been had he been discovered in a highly fortified mansion in a garrison village just outside of Damascus or Teheran.) 

The interpersonal connections between ISI and networks like Al Qaeda were built up over the course of decades. How else could such a notorious terror leader hide in plain sight, except by the same kind of tolerance shown to killers like Jose Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch?

Okay, so… that’s done. Now, when do we accord justice to those guys who used our military to destroy Afghanistan and Iraq, killing hundreds of thousands of people? I’m not suggesting execution, of course, but a trip to the Hague might discourage copy-cat criminals. I’m just saying.

Then there’s the question of killing Bin Laden’s brainchild, the bottomless Afghan war. Let us face it, getting stuck in Afghanistan is precisely what he wanted us to do. This is not guess work – he said it numerous times. (Rachel Maddow’s recent pieces on this have been pretty solid.) Bin Laden drew satisfaction from the fact that he had helped bleed the Soviet Union dry by supporting the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan and Pakistan during the 1980s. That wasn’t the first empire battered by such an adventure. He was confident that we would destroy ourselves with an open-ended commitment there. (Iraq was just a bonus coup-de-grace we administered to ourselves.)

The fact is, I can already hear Bin Laden cackling from his watery grave as we expend more lives and treasure on the fool’s errand that is the Afghan war, drawing funds from vital health care, education, public works – you name it.  It’s time that enterprise received what he got, before it finishes us.