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February 15, 2009
OT 09-06
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This from Haaretz
“U.S. fends off Israeli pressure, decides to help plan ‘Durban 2′”
The Obama administration said late Saturday it would participate in planning a United Nations conference on racism, despite concerns the meeting will be used by Arab nations and others to criticize Israel.
The U.S. will decide later whether to participate in “Durban 2,” the second UN-sponsored World Conference Against Racism.
The State Department said it would send diplomats next week to participate in preparatory meetings for the World Conference Against Racism, which is set to be held in Geneva, Switzerland in April and which some countries including Israel have already decided to boycott.
In a statement released late Saturday, the State Department said the U.S. delegation to the planning discussions would review current direction of conference preparations and whether U.S. participation in the conference itself is warranted.
“This will be the first opportunity the (Obama) administration has had to engage in the negotiations for the Durban Review, and – in line with our commitment to diplomacy – the U.S. has decided to send a delegation to engage in the negotiations on the text of the conference document,” the department said.
“The intent of our participation is to work to try to change the direction in which the review conference is heading,” it said. “We hope to work with other countries that want the Conference to responsibly and productively address racism around the world.”
Officials in Jerusalem expressed concern that Israel and Barack Obama’s administration are on a collision course over the U.S. decision to participate in the conference.
The Foreign Ministry has sought to block efforts by senior U.S. officials to convince Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to alter American policy set during the Bush administration not to attend the conference, which is regarded by Israel as a forum of anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli vitriol.
Israel is boycotting the conference because a declaration equating Zionism with racism is expected to be made there. In addition, it is expected that the organizers and participants will charge that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians, and, like before in Durban, will make anti-Semitic statements.
The Bush administration agreed with Israel last year that the U.S. would not participate unless it received guarantees that the conference would not become a stage for anti-Semitism and one-sided criticism of Israel, as occured during the first Durban meeting in 2001.
Canada also announced that it was boycotting the conference and the Foreign Ministry has tried in recent months to convince European Union countries to also avoid participating.
The Foreign Ministry received confidential telegraphs from Israel’s embassies in Washington, the United Nations and Geneva, about a possible change in the policy of the new U.S. administration regarding “Durban 2.”
“Iran and Arab countries will once more take over the conference, and if the U.S. participates in ‘Durban 2,’ it will be a major blow,” a senior Israeli diplomat told Haaretz. “This will pull the rug from under us and will lead to the participation of many more countries in the conference.”
In one of the telegrams, a number of Obama officials reportedly pressed Secretary of State Clinton to announce the U.S. would participate in the conference.
One of the leading officials pressuring Clinton on “Durban 2” is the new U.S. ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, who was Obama’s close campaign adviser.
Rice is also pushing for the U.S. to join the UN Human Rights Council, which is based in Geneva. The body had been boycotted by the U.S., in part because of its one-sided criticism of Israel.
President George Bush had accused the HRC of opting to focus on Israel instead of dealing with the genocide in Darfur.
The other official pushing for American participation in “Durban 2” is Samantha Power, another Obama adviser at the National Security Council.
Power participated in the initial Durban conference as the representative of a non-government organization and is known for her strong criticism of Israel. In the past, she expressed support for cutting U.S. military assistance to Israel and transferring the funds as aid to build a Palestinian state.
Senior State Department officials contacted Israeli diplomats and asked them to take swift action to block the Durban initiative.
“This is the time for Israel and Jewish organizations to intervene,” U.S. officials said.
Now is Obama showing a flicker of difference with the Bush Admin, or does he feel he can serve Israeli interests better by managing and redirecting the conference? The fact that Haaretz is complaining about it implies the former, but we will see if it can be derailed. Also, the balance of power is changing, and if the “one state solution” comes into view, then the two state solution becomes much more attractive.
The mere fact that Shimon Peres had to argue against the one state solution shows how seriously they take the threat of it.
(the link is to the Cleveland Plain Dealer but it was originally in the Washington Post)
Posted by: Lysander | Feb 15 2009 16:01 utc | 1
b
it seems the angelopolous film at the berlinale got short shrift – have seen no reviews – like the last film perhaps it will dissapear without trace
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Feb 15 2009 16:07 utc | 3
from the Haaretz article posted by Lysander:
The U.S. will decide later whether to participate in “Durban 2,” the second UN-sponsored World Conference Against Racism.
(iirc correctly the refusniks and hesitants have been US, Israel and Canada, haven’t looked it up right now.)
Contemplating participating in Durban II is the very minimum a black US president could do. Not because he has to appear in front of the ppl – US citizens – in favor of racial equality (etc.) as none of them know about Durban. They hang on the US exceptionalism, and care nothing for racial issues outside of the parochial blah – in the grip of Obi Mania all common sense is lost, which of course was the aim.
He is supposed to assume a role, he is supposed to step up and follow through, he has contracted to spin and legitimize, and both up the discourse against racism and for the ‘moral compass’ which allows for some stupendous exceptions. If he doesn’t step up to the plate here it is bad news for him. He may be able to refuse with many excuses, still early in his term.
My guess is he, the US, will not participate, no envoy will be sent.
Posted by: Tangerine | Feb 15 2009 17:35 utc | 4
http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/02/social-collapse-best-practices.html
I was puzzled after reading this, what to expect in time that’s
coming. Is this exaggerated or real? Am I naive? Scary.
Any comment.
Balkanac,
I don’t think you are naive. But just to add to the intrigue, I get a “The page cannot be found” message when I click your link.
I think a semi-/general answer to your question “what to expect in time that’s coming?”, is that we are entering an age of societal bifurcation when the shit has already hit the fan and is now spewing worldwide. So a general answer is to “Duck”. Not facetious. Get out of their support system as much as possible. If it means growing your own food, as much as you can, in your window sill, not using their (corporations useless but highly advertised shit/puke resource consuming junk) or whatever, you get the idea, I hope, and then
Do_It!
We have to obsolete their systems and products as much as possible for our present situation, and leaarn to live without ‘them’.
Posted by: Juannie | Feb 15 2009 19:26 utc | 6
@Juannie
From some reason there is one forward slash extra at the end of link.
http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/02/social-collapse-best-practices.html
Posted by: Balkanac | Feb 15 2009 19:32 utc | 8
From the Peres Editorial:
Dissenters from the two-state solution contend — not without some reason — that Gaza and the West Bank are too small to absorb the Palestinian refugees. Yet this would also be the case under the one-state formula; it would result in a state that is merely 24,000 square kilometers and that already overflows with a population exceeding 10 million (5.5 million Jews and 4.5 million Arabs). While cynics might question the size of the West Bank and Gaza, optimists should look no further than Singapore for reassurance.
One state would be too small to absorb the refugees, but the occupied territories, which are less than a quarter of the size of the one state is not too small because it would still be less dense than Singapore?
Is this guy serious?
Posted by: Arnold Evans | Feb 15 2009 19:33 utc | 9
Balakanac,
thanks, the link works now but I haven’t read it. I will.
to follow up to my #17:
and after you have really begun to implement these changes into your lifestyle, encourage, not cajole, your friends to do the same.
Posted by: Juannie | Feb 15 2009 19:47 utc | 10
Israel’s real fear is the burgeoning population growth which will put Israeli Jews into the minority. Today’s news is that Gaza’s population has hit 1.4m and has grown 40% over the last 10 years.
http://www.straitstimes.com/Breaking%2BNews/World/Story/STIStory_338794.html
Posted by: Ensley | Feb 15 2009 20:05 utc | 11
The Obama administration will most likely fail in pressuring the Durban 2 convenors to take zionism off the agenda. The notion that any meeting on racism could fail to address the most egregious racism on the planet today, zionism, is insane, but there you go. What Obama and co will then try to do is use Obama’s unwhiteness to discredit the conference, after all how could a brown person be a racist? That riff is an oldie but a goodie, so if Obama says that it is the conference organisers who are racist ie anti-semite, then the media and mainstream whiteys will go along with that.
For the rest of us surely now is the time to wrest anti-semite back from the zionists. I want to spew every time I hear some evil israel supporting prick call anyone who defends Palestinians who are no less semitic than jews, an anti-semite.
We have put up with that shit for too long and this conference and the toxic garbage that these creeps are bound to release into the atmosphere as a smokescreen, will provide an ideal occasion to claim the word back.
Posted by: Debs is dead | Feb 15 2009 20:33 utc | 12
The article was trenchant and highly pertinent. And 9939 words in what I tried to convey in 553. Not at all disparaging but observant. In the forum he presents it “Cowell Theatre in Fort Mason Center, San Francisco, to an audience of 550 people.” the temporal usage is appropriate. It’s expected.
debs,
my thoughts turned to you as I wrote the above. You have been here for years but I have gleaned relatively little from your comments. My problem not yours, but I share this for what it’s worth because what I have gleaned from you is still significant. I can only absorb relative brevity. I have been trying to read all the way through your posts lately as I do value what you say and I’m appreciating you more and more. You have such a superb command of our language in expressing your thoughts/views that I bet you could easily summarize your insights into a tenth of your usual posts to get a few more of we slower ones. Probably sounds like sarcasm but I swear from my heart, it’s not. I would love to assimilate more of your communication.
Posted by: Juannie | Feb 15 2009 20:44 utc | 13
Debs @12 you’ve been a diamond to us bar flys. Thanks for sharing your sharp thoughts and passion.
The attempt to project Obama’s color and heritage – partly from the third world and wearing that middle name of “Hussein” – as a tool of a bankrupt foreign policy can only pass muster to those who are not on its recieving end. No amount of identity politics and talk of “perceptions” can erase the pain of a steel boot in your mouth.
We should expect Obama and company to do their utmost to gut Durban 2 of any meaningfull text redefining anti-semitism which implicates the Israeli state’s year-in-year-out actions as racist and of course any mention of war crimes in Gaza but also the US’s previous and current actions that have demonized and vilified an entire category of people, i.e. muslims.
=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzLLdj1l6HU/Redefining Anti-Semitism
Posted by: barfly | Feb 15 2009 21:14 utc | 14
Love in the Time of Cupcakes? Your link is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oY5rV84Io6Y
Posted by: Dee Dee | Feb 15 2009 21:43 utc | 15
here’s a question for all the euro folks but first an explanation. i am french but haven’t lived in france in 27 years. left paris in 1982 and moved to a’dam where i lived for 11 years then left a’dam to los angeles in 1992/93. i am returning to europe as my folks are getting old and i need to be close to them. here’s the question: what can i expect from europe? how have things changed? i’m not sure yet where i’ll be relocating to but i will spend sometime in paris (where my folks live) but my best friends are in a’dam and might ultimately have to move there as i think it’ll be easier for me to find a job there.
thank you all for taking the time to read this. i know it’s a bit out of the ordinary but i figured that an outside opinion (not friends or family) would be good.
guy.
Posted by: charmicarmicat | Feb 15 2009 23:40 utc | 17
@5 Good instinct, to question that. Kollapsnik is imprecise about the US/COMECON parallels and he confounds his predictions with that peak-oil business. Russia collapsed from terms-of-trade deterioration. That’s the US’ problem now too. In the USSR’s case, oil got cheap as agricultural imports got dear. The US has taken a much sharper hit to its terms of trade as capital markets abruptly discounted its chief export, IOUs. But current domestic Verelendung actually gives the US kleptocracy a breather by stanching the macro bleeding – forced expenditure reduction can pay down debt. There won’t necessarily be any consequences for stability as the US populace gets used to debt peonage, predatory and increasingly militarized debt collection, and tent cities (no really, now there’s an NGO that mercifully sets them up). Eroding human development will simply be criminalized for reliable control, and the country’s fate will be decided by contending elites. If the bankers manage to perpetuate current graft norms so they can walk off with their winnings, China will get screwed. Japan’s rentiers will get screwed. Saudi princelings will get screwed. Europe will get screwed. The little tweak that upends US oligopoly will have to come from offshore. Nostalgic mass thrashing at the barricades will be worse than useless until international capital markets have softened up the US oligoi.
Posted by: …—… | Feb 15 2009 23:54 utc | 18
Here’s your little tweak:
US intel predicts Israel-Iran war in 2009
(source: Press TV)
Sunday, February 15, 2009
The US intelligence chief reportedly expects Israel and Iran to engage in a major military confrontation before the end of the year.
Dennis Blair, the newly-appointed head of US intelligence, said Tel Aviv will eventually declare war on Tehran as a last-ditch effort to curb Iran’s enrichment capabilities, Israeli daily Ha’aretz reported on Saturday.
Detailed military plans to bomb Iran’s nuclear infrastructure have long been on the table in Tel Aviv.
Israel accuses Iran, a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), of pursuing a military nuclear program.
Iran, however, says it enriches uranium for civilian applications and that it has a right to the technology already in the hands of many others.
In an annual threat assessment to Congress on Thursday, Blair reconfirmed the findings of a 2007 intelligence report, asserting once again that Iran is not currently working toward weaponization.
The retired admiral said that while Iran has made progress in enrichment, there is proof that Tehran “does not currently have a nuclear weapon, and does not have enough fissile material for one”.
The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) issued in November 2007 by sixteen US intelligence agencies has been an obstacle to Israeli efforts in building a case for war against the Islamic Republic.
In a Friday interview, former Israeli UN ambassador Dan Gillerman nevertheless revealed that Tel Aviv is preparing a military offensive against the country.
Gillerman explained that Israel could no longer afford to wait for international efforts to bring Iran’s enrichment to an end.
Israeli legislator and weapons expert Isaac Ben-Israel has also called for Tel Aviv to attack Tehran in the coming year.
The Israeli calls against Tehran come at a time when prospects for direct US-Iran diplomacy have increased significantly in recent weeks.
Iran and the US have had no diplomatic ties for almost thirty years, but in an abrupt volte-face in the White House policy of isolating Iran, US President Barack Obama has vowed to break the ice and create conditions for the two sides to “start sitting across the table, face to face” in the coming months.
“I think there’s the possibility, at least, of a relationship of mutual respect and progress,” Obama said at his first prime time press conference on Monday.
“My expectation is, in the coming months, we will be looking for openings that can be created where we can start sitting across the table face-to-face with diplomatic overtures that will allow us to move our policy in the new direction,” he added.
Israel fears US-Iran talks may lead to rapprochement between the two countries — a development that may be able to slightly change the balance of power in the Middle East.
Iran has shown openness toward US calls for dialogue but insists that Washington should be seeking lasting ‘change’ and not a mere shift in tactics.
Posted by: Para Bola | Feb 16 2009 0:48 utc | 19
felicitations for the people of venezuela – with between 54 – 60% for the yes vote. it would seem that umperialism can no longer frighten the people
the international commentators visibly angry that the people have decided so
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Feb 16 2009 2:10 utc | 20
felicitations for the people of venezuela – with between 54 – 60% for the yes vote. it would seem that umperialism can no longer frighten the people
the international commentators visibly angry that the people have decided so
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Feb 16 2009 2:10 utc | 21
@19 May be. Add in a nice gesture, coupled with some big private equity stakes so Carlyle, Blackstone, etc. can chew up and spit out the bankrupt banks (subject to meaningful structural regulation, a big proviso), temporarily disrupting payoffs for Congress, while multilateral pressure is applied to remind the US of the international covenants it signed… and something might give just a hair. Unless of course the war starts first, then we’re going to annihilate you all in world-girdling thermonuclear fire for Christ.
Posted by: …—… | Feb 16 2009 3:23 utc | 22
interesting picture on bagnews,
Bagnews
class war anyone?
Posted by: sabine | Feb 16 2009 5:45 utc | 23
Of course no one in the media comments on the hypocrisy of Israel using the nuclear non-proliferation treaty as an excuse for bombing iran. Has anyone else heard of a state that isn’t a signatory to a treaty using that treaty as an excuse for agression before?
The racist ersatz state of israel isn’t a signatory to the NPT and couldn’t be since it is completely in breach of all of that treaty’s provisions itself. israel not only has mobs of enriched uranium, they are in possesion of several hundred thermo-nuclear devices which are attached to a range of different delivery systems many of which are aimed at Iran.
In another odd mix-up amerika doesn’t regard israel’s refusal to sign up as being worthy of the sanctions especially on trade in weapons and nuclear material that other states which refuse to sign the NTP are subjected to.
If racist israel suffers from such blinding hubris that they do indeed use the NPT as an excuse to attack iran, it will be the last act in their seedy little exhibition of israeli exceptionalist motivated anti-semitism, because that cynical act of self-serving deceit might still play out in the boondocks of middle amerika but it won’t play sympathetically anywhere else. The reaction from the rest of the world will make it extremely difficult for amerika to continue to hold the telescope to their eye-patch when they are asked to consider apartheid israel’s nuclear capability.
The truth has been out there for 20 years in which amerika has managed to narrowly avoid having to acknkowledge police state israel’s nuclear weapons but that has taken some ridiculous contortions.
If israel doesn’t have nuclear capability why has Mordechai_Vanunu been incarcerated since 1986 including 11 years in solitary confinement. Even after he completed his prison sentence this man of peace has been kept confined by the racist police state of israel.
If israel uses nuclear weapons to attack iran for breaching the NPT, as this old article in the Times suggests, any remaining credibility anti-semitic israel had enjoyed from the west’s bourgeoisie would disappear. It has been 60 years since a nuclear device was detonated in anger, although most people realise that it would only take one to open the floodgates. If israel can do it so can any other state especially other non-NPT signatories like india, north korea or pakistan who will feel entitled to blow shit up as well.
Posted by: Debs is dead | Feb 16 2009 6:28 utc | 24
— 18) Sent “There won’t necessarily be any consequences for stability as the US populace gets used to debt peonage, predatory and increasingly militarized debt collection, and tent cities…” to my non-combat buddy languishing contentedly tax free, free BQ’s and all you can eat, in one of our hundreds of overseas military resorts, err, bases (that’s where the other $400B goes EVERY YEAR, four times more than one-time Obama infrastructure plan, ad infinitum). He immediately fired back a screeching 36-point incoming, ‘WHY DON’T YOU MOVE TO IRAN WHERE THE HATE IS 24/7!’, which made me laugh, because my Iranian correspondent says life is miserable there for the same corruption-as-mafia reason that Bush destroyed America with, which my Russian correspondent sardonically jokes about after decades of debt peony, and my Chinese correspondent remains tight-lipped fearing Full Spectrum Dominance Police State Soon Coming to Theatres Near You, as though 2000 was the Second Millenia for all of us, everywhere. We’re all debt peons now, Iranian and Russian, American and Chinese alike. The only Winners the 3W’s, Wall Street, Washington DC and West Point.
Posted by: Anuther de Bacle | Feb 16 2009 6:51 utc | 25
i’m surprised nobody’s mentioned this wrt the obviousness of israel treating a conference on racism like the plague.
Likud chairman Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday branded as “legitimate” rival prime ministerial candidate Avigdor Lieberman’s electoral campaign against Israeli Arabs.
Netanyahu was referring to Lieberman’s vow to pass a citizenship law that will “prevent the disloyalty of some of Israel’s Arabs.”
Lieberman’s hardline Yisrael Beiteinu has built its campaign ahead of next week’s general election around the slogan: “No citizenship without loyalty,” which is directed at Israeli Arabs, some of whom the party accuses of constituting a fifth column.
since when do democracies require loyalty oaths to racist policies? theatre of the absurd.
Posted by: annie | Feb 16 2009 10:25 utc | 26
Balkanac #8, check out badger’s latest post.
[Al-Mukhtar said]: The financial collapse, and the warnings that the attack on Iraq would lead to the collapse of America itself–this was among the good ideas of the resistance, which took aim in this way at their Achilles heel. He stressed that the resistance’s focus on financial attrition came from the fact that the dollar is lord and master in American, and [financial attrition] was the only way to make America exit from Iraq.
Posted by: annie | Feb 16 2009 11:22 utc | 27
Well, another worrisome backtrack by O who daily discovers his inner-republican.
Probably a betrayal of his campaign promise not to continue homeland security raids on “illegals.”
Posted by: slothrop | Feb 17 2009 1:58 utc | 28
Continued from “The Right to Choose” so as not be OT.
Obamageddon and r’giap,
I have read several things on Cuba’s agricultural successes after Russia stopped supporting their industrialized base, but “Cuba: The Accidental Revolution” went further and covered more to give me a better understanding of Cuba under Castro.
The agricultural successes play well into what many here in VT are lobbying the state legislature to support. In fact I get to meet with all the legislators from our county every Mon. morning and ag. and Health Care were the two main topics this morning, both of which could be modeled after or influenced by Cuba’s successes. My wife watched it with me and plans to use the milk cow pasturing technique demonstrated in the video (she’s getting her first Jersey heifer this spring). I am ordering the DVD and will attempt to get some of our legislators and/or friends to watch it. I think some, maybe most of them could be receptive.
Anyway, excellent link. If others wish to watch it I’d recommend you use Obamageddon’s #8 link as it is one continuous uninterrupted play. Among other things I gleaned “Service, Altruism and Gratitude” from the video and I am grateful for the links.
Posted by: Juannie | Feb 17 2009 2:33 utc | 29
Sourash say that the Americans are forcing Maliki to recreate “Saddamism”:
Maliki’s efforts to improve his relations with Sunni Arab tribes, the Baathist, the nationalists in Nineveh Province, Tikrit, and his recent contacts with the former army officers, are most likely pressured on him by Washington.
Shourash warns that in the above “package” there is also:
Maliki wants to activate an old political equation in Iraq, adopted by former Iraqi dictators in the past, and used by Saddam Hussein also.
The equation is to maneuver among the conflicts between the three Iraqi components (Sunni Arabs, Shiites and Kurds), according to the following mechanism:
The ruler (which is mostly Sunni Arab) will form an alliance with the Shiites to strike the Kurds. The second stage is to be close to the Kurds, who are Sunnis to strike the Shiites.
Posted by: annie | Feb 19 2009 18:42 utc | 31
norman finklestein’s withering attack on the fool cordesman
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Feb 19 2009 20:27 utc | 32
b, i just got a message my comment and AFP link re the unification meeting of palestinians in egypt is held up w/the spam filter til your approval. here’s some text
RAMALLAH, West Bank (AFP) — Palestinian factions including the secular Fatah movement and its Hamas rivals will meet in Cairo on Wednesday in a new reconciliation bid, officials from both groups said on Saturday.
“Egypt has informed (Palestinian) president (Mahmud) Abbas and the factions that it will launch a dialogue on February 25 with all Palestinian groups,” Azzam al-Ahmed, the head of the Fatah parliamentary bloc, told AFP.
He added that five commissions would be created to look into the main points of conflict between the two main Palestinian factions, including reforming the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and the security forces.
Hamas confirmed that it had received an “official invitation” from Egypt.
Posted by: annie | Feb 21 2009 18:16 utc | 33
it seems the finklestein dissapeared so i shall relink – it’ a fabulously tough piece
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Feb 21 2009 19:12 utc | 34
Wisconsin to deploy largest force since WWII
Feb 19, By Larry Sommers from http://www.army.mil. link
or just look at the picture: link
Operation Iraqi Freedom!
Posted by: Tangerine | Feb 21 2009 19:31 utc | 35
b, thought you might be interested in this
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Feb 21 2009 19:58 utc | 36
@ #35
thankfully the big flag at the end was horizontal. It would have been just a little too weird were it vertical. also missing was a big portrait of the prez…..maybe they haven’t got the new ones out yet.
Posted by: dan of steele | Feb 21 2009 19:59 utc | 37
jesus Tangerine , that’s disgusting. all from one state. fuck
Posted by: annie | Feb 21 2009 20:08 utc | 38
@rgiap – @36 – it’s nonsense – saw someone taking it apart and will not bother to do so here.
Main issue was – the city where those nuts think Osama is is majority Shia …
Slothrop,
I actually agree with the approach Napolitano is taking. She is going after the employers of undocumented workers. that is the only way any kind of solution can be brought about. only punishing the workers has not worked and never will. as long as there is a chance of making a bit of money, people will take chances, little to lose and some dollars to send home if it goes well.
go after the employers on the other hand and the market for illegal labor goes away. this will have an affect that some items such as produce and janitorial services will cost more but the tax base should increase and fewer citizens would be on the dole. I can think of no better way to address the issue. I am curious to hear your thoughts.
Posted by: dan of steele | Feb 21 2009 20:57 utc | 41
dos
i think what obama is doing in relation to detainees is deeply shocking – i thought the empire might tone down its repressive jurisprudence(in fact, the absence of it) but it is just being sculpted for the same interests as cheney – it is just dealing with a public relations problem but not with the central legal one
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Feb 21 2009 21:33 utc | 42
remembereringgiap,
when I posted the comment that is now #38, Tangerine’s comment was #35. I believe b then released annie’s comment from the spam trap and it pushed Tangerine’s and yours down one.
in other words, my smirk about the big flag was in reference to the Wisconsin soldiers all assembled in the arena receiving benediction or whatever prior to marching off to war.
If on the other hand, you are referring to my question to sloth on the migrant worker issue, I submit that this is the first time I have heard any administration threaten to go after local businessmen. Sure there have been raids here and there but I always took them to be business related….maybe jealousy from someone who is not getting as much as the other. When Napolitano says…
What we are going to do is really focus on the employers and make sure that they are subject to criminal penalties for violating the law. I met with the attorney general for the United States, Eric Holder, to talk about how we unite the forces of the U.S. Attorney’s offices across the country with our offices to make sure that those who are actually benefiting financially in large scale from this pay a criminal sanction.
it seems to me to be a step in the right direction.
Posted by: dan of steele | Feb 21 2009 21:50 utc | 43
no, dan, i was referring more to the maintenance by obama re bagram, re rendition, re the questions relating to detainees that went through the courts on friday
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Feb 21 2009 22:02 utc | 44
& you know dan, that for a communist & materialist – i am fundamentally a fairly superstitious fellow – & where a jurisprudence is bent & corrupt so is the society that created it
you know that in italy it is almost the extreme opposite with the judges & magistrates being the state in absence of a real state&& it was as clear as day the other week that berlusconi’s defence of life as sacred was really meant to say his life is sacred thus untouchable by these judges
& we know berlusconi & his british pals will never see the inside of a prison where they rightfully belong
the electoral politicians of this world were well described by brechts ‘the rise & fall of arturu ui’ nearly 70 years ago – though there’s more burlesque today
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Feb 21 2009 23:13 utc | 45
dos
I read the “attention tyo demand-side immigration” as more raids.
You make a good point about enforcement as an antidote to low wages. Based on what I know, the downward pressure on wages from illegal workforce participation is miniscule. This is admitted even by rightwing researchers like Borjas from Harvard. The problem is open-shop states in the West and no collective bargaining.
But as Napolitano says: “that’s Congress’s job.”
Posted by: slothrop | Feb 21 2009 23:40 utc | 47
it would seem volcker & soros are both shitting themselves at the catastrophe scenarios on-face & at the same time wetting themselves at the profits that are to come – in nightmares considerably worse than my own
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Feb 21 2009 23:55 utc | 48
“The Obama administration, siding with the Bush White House, contended Friday that detainees in Afghanistan have no constitutional rights.
In a two-sentence court filing, the Justice Department said it agreed that detainees at Bagram Airfield cannot use U.S. courts to challenge their detention. The filing shocked human rights attorneys.
“The hope we all had in President Obama to lead us on a different path has not turned out as we’d hoped,” said Tina Monshipour Foster, a human rights attorney representing a detainee at the Bagram Airfield. “We all expected better.”
ap
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Feb 22 2009 0:25 utc | 49
Have to agree with slothrop going after the workers on the grounds they don’t have the correct pieces of paper to work is just more divide and rule from the elites.
I haven’t seen too many whitefellas in amerika that have any proof that the local first people or whatever is the current nom de jour for amerika’s indigenous population, has issued them with work permits, but the idea of encouraging the already dreadful conflict between the poorest people in amerika, the unemployed documented Vs the employed undocumented is truly horrendous and I’m sure no one here intended that.
FWIW I am equally opposed to my taxes in NZ being spent on overzealous whitefellas (frequently migrants themselves) chasing unwhite people (usually Thais or Samoans) who want to work here.
The reasons that locals aren’t in jobs at a time when workers are in demand are complex and totally unrelated to ‘competition’ from undocumented workers. It is the social problems caused by a decay of the education and welfare systems that in turn are in brought about by governments’ refusal to fund society’s structural safety nets, that have caused this malaise which is often wrongfully labelled unemployment.
‘Unemployed’ people should only be those who are rightfully considered part of the workforce. Too many citizens who don’t have work that are labelled “unemployed” are actually too socially, psychologically or physically disabled to be in the workforce.
The resolution of those disabilities is possible but it requires a huge turnaround by the community, especially community leaders such as politicians, employers, even unionists on what constitutes work and who gets paid how much for what.
That would break the cycle of alienation so that the next generation of citizens from clans formerly considered ‘hopeless’ would be less inclined to fall to the disabilities which laid waste to their antecedents.
Most of the disabilities are more likely to strike the poor, which is why the ruling elite has been so eager to convince the rest of the community that ‘guestworkers’ only be allowed to stay short term and then be made to take their problems which were engendered in amerika, back to their original community.
The wages issue which is quite separate, won’t be fixed until all citizens have the power to ensure that they can demonstrate how invaluable they actually are to the community they live within. For workers the method will likely be by way of industrial action. Poor people who aren’t part of the workforce have an even harder row to hoe but neither group will be able realise that goal as long as they fight amongst themselves.
Posted by: Debs is dead | Feb 22 2009 1:28 utc | 50
Well, this is going to be my hardest task to date. I have to come up with a good argument to counter Debs is dead. It is daunting at best because he always speaks with passion and has a very good historical perspective. but I want to try simply because I need to understand this whole migrant worker thing much better than I apparently do now.
going after the workers on the grounds they don’t have the correct pieces of paper to work is just more divide and rule from the elites
Is it not the elites themselves who have encouraged workers from other countries to enter the US in this case, without the proper immigration paperwork and work permits to toil in the fields for what would be slave wages in the US? What affect does this have on the rest of the workforce in that area? would it not depress wages? I would guess that landowners and property owners might benefit because of lower labor costs which allow them higher margins. I can not see how this can benefit the rest of the indigenous workforce. In addition, since you have a group of people who are excluded from society because they can be arrested and deported at any time, with no protection whatsoever and completely vulnerable a very fertile environment for organized crime is created. just as the Italians had their families to offer a kind of parallel government so do other ethnic groups. with organized crime comes a lot of other bad stuff such as prostitution and loan sharking.
Another downside to irregular, if you dislike the word illegal, workers is that those workers have no stake in the future of the community. they know they will never receive any of the benefits of belonging to that society so they are likely to not contribute anything either. as soon as the employment goes away, so do they. that is likely to contribute to the isolation of the group.
yet another problem I see with having temporary workers come in from a poorer country is that it allows the poorer country to continue on without addressing its own problems. by sending a portion of its unemployed abroad they don’t have to pay unemployment or deal with any of the social costs related to those unemployed workers. how can simply passing your problems off to someone else be a good thing?
as for us whitefellas not getting work permits from the red men I cannot answer. how long do I have to carry the original sin? In my own case, my grandparents went through all the legal channels and got their visas and work permits from whitefellas, they did not kill natives nor steal their land….it was already stolen and had been for about 100 years. at what point does land belong to the people who live there? after a thousand years? or does it need to be even more than that? do only the members of the first tribe to settle somewhere have the right to live there?
in closing, I return to the original point. Migrant worker conditions are absolutely horrible and should not be supported in the wealthiest nation on earth. since the first invaders these conditions have existed, first with slavery and indentured servants and then with more subtle ways of suppressing the unskilled and uneducated. Slavery was abolished and unions were formed. all this was done against the wishes of the elites. to me it follows that in order to stop the exploitation of migrant workers the elites need to suffer and what Napolitano proposes is about the best we can hope for. If you, Debs do not agree perhaps you might offer a concrete step that she could take to better address the problem given the constraints she has.
Posted by: dan of steele | Feb 22 2009 10:32 utc | 51
That week in Monterrey, newspapers reported, Mexico clocked 167 drug-related murders. When I lived there, they didn’t have to measure murder by the week. There were only about a thousand drug-related killings annually. The Mexico I returned to in 2008 would end that year with a body count of ,more than 5,300 dead. That’s almost double the death toll from the year before—and more than all the U.S. troops killed in Iraq since that war began.
But it wasn’t just the amount of killing that shocked me. When I lived in Mexico, the occasional gang member would turn up executed, maybe with duct-taped hands, rolled in a carpet, and dropped in an alley. But Mexico’s newspapers itemized a different kind of slaughter last August: Twenty-four of the week’s 167 dead were cops, 21 were decapitated, and 30 showed signs of torture. Campesinos found a pile of 12 more headless bodies in the Yucatán. Four more decapitated corpses were found in Tijuana, the same city where barrels of acid containing human remains were later placed in front of a seafood restaurant. A couple of weeks later, someone threw two hand grenades into an Independence Day celebration in Morelia, killing eight and injuring dozens more. And at any time, you could find YouTube videos of Mexican gangs executing their rivals— an eerie reminder of, and possibly a lesson learned from, al Qaeda in Iraq.
Then there are the guns. When I lived in Mexico, its cartels were content with assault rifles and large-caliber pistols, mostly bought at American gun shops. Now, Mexican authorities are finding arsenals that would have been incomprehensible in the Mexico I knew. The former U.S. drug czar, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, was in Mexico not long ago, and this is what he found:
The outgunned Mexican law enforcement authorities face armed criminal attacks from platoon-sized units employing night vision goggles, electronic intercept collection, encrypted communications, fairly sophisticated information operations, sea-going submersibles, helicopters and modern transport aviation, automatic weapons, RPG’s, Anti-Tank 66 mm rockets, mines and booby traps, heavy machine guns, 50 [caliber] sniper rifles, massive use of military hand grenades, and the most modern models of 40mm grenade machine guns.
These are the weapons the drug gangs are now turning against the Mexican government as Calderón escalates the war against the cartels.
Sam Quinones, writing in Foreign Policy.
Posted by: Jeremiah | Feb 22 2009 18:04 utc | 52
A year-end report by the Pentagon’s Joint Forces Command names two countries as likely candidates for a “rapid and sudden collapse” — Pakistan and Mexico.
The report, named “JOE 2008” (for Joint Operating Environment), states:
“In terms of worse-case scenarios for the Joint Force, and indeed the world, two large and important states bear consideration for a rapid and sudden collapse: Pakistan and Mexico. The Mexican possibility may seem less likely, but the government, its politicians, police and judicial infrastructure are all under sustained assault and press by criminal gangs and drug cartels. How that internal conflict turns out over the next several years will have a major impact on the stability of the Mexican state.”
Mexican officials were quick to deny the ominous claim. Exterior Secretary Patricia Espinosa told reporters that the fast-escalating violence mostly affects the narco gangs themselves, and “Mexico is not a failed state.”
Could a Sudden Collapse of Mexico Be Obama’s Surprise Foreign Policy Challenge?
Posted by: Jeremiah | Feb 22 2009 18:06 utc | 53
Before I highlight the specific events that are undermining the Mexican Nation-State, let me talk first for a moment about what it means for a Nation-State to collapse, an important topic as it’s an experience that will become increasingly common over the next decade. When a Nation-State collapses, the cities don’t all catch on fire simultaneously whilst roving hoards pillage the countryside and the population starves. Nation-State collapse is not the apocalypse—it is exactly what it suggests to be: the collapse of the notional union of Nation and State under one central, viable government. Nation-State collapse also doesn’t suggest that there will no longer be Nation-States. It is my prediction that there will be a Mexico, an Iraq, etc. for quite a long time. What collapse does mean is that the importance of Nation-States will decline sharply, as they become increasingly ineffectual both domestically and internationally. Nor does the decline of the Nation-State mean the decline of Nationalism and similar identifying sentiments. Quite the opposite: as States increasingly fail to care for their constituent Nations, those Nations will become increasingly susceptible to the black shirts and brown shirts of history, but these movements will be increasingly dissociated from States, more similar in organizational model to al-Qa’ida than to Nazi Germany.
Mexico: A Nation-State Dissolves? (from Sept 2007!)
Posted by: Jeremiah | Feb 22 2009 18:09 utc | 54
Canada and the U.S. have signed an agreement that paves the way for the militaries from either nation to send troops across each other’s borders during an emergency, but some are questioning why the Harper government has kept silent on the deal.
Neither the Canadian government nor the Canadian Forces announced the new agreement, which was signed Feb. 14 in Texas.
The U.S. military’s Northern Command, however, publicized the agreement with a statement outlining how its top officer, Gen. Gene Renuart, and Canadian Lt.-Gen. Marc Dumais, head of Canada Command, signed the plan, which allows the military from one nation to support the armed forces of the other nation in a civil emergency.
The new agreement has been greeted with suspicion by the left wing in Canada and the right wing in the U.S.
The left-leaning Council of Canadians, which is campaigning against what it calls the increasing integration of the U.S. and Canadian militaries, is raising concerns about the deal.
“It’s kind of a trend when it comes to issues of Canada-U.S. relations and contentious issues like military integration. We see that this government is reluctant to disclose information to Canadians that is readily available on American and Mexican websites,” said Stuart Trew, a researcher with the Council of Canadians.
Trew said there is potential for the agreement to militarize civilian responses to emergency incidents. He noted that work is also underway for the two nations to put in place a joint plan to protect common infrastructure such as roadways and oil pipelines.
David Pugliese, Canwest News Service
Will Canadian military forces be marshaled to assist US/Mexican energy and border interests?
Posted by: Jeremiah | Feb 22 2009 18:13 utc | 55
MEXICO’S BAZAAR OF VIOLENCE
The most likely existential security threat to the United States isn’t likely to originate from southwest Asian terrorists or a conventional war with China. Instead, it will originate from Mexico’s open source insurgency as:
* The Mexican state becomes hollow and unable to maintain any semblance of control over its territory. Fiscal bankruptcy, driven by declining oil revenues and a global economic depression, will eliminate any remaining legitimacy it has with the countryside (already tenuous due to extreme income stratification).
* The narco-insurgency in the northern provinces morphs into a national open source insurgency with thousands of small groups all willing to fight/corrupt/intimidate the government. Many, if not most, of these groups will be able to power themselves forward financially due to massive flows of money from black globalization. The result will be a diaspora north to the US to avoid the violence.
* Economic failure, a loss of legitimacy and economic deprivation in the US creates an environment for the rapid proliferation of domestic groups willing to fight the government in order to advance their economic interests. Catalyzed by connections to Mexico’s functional and lucrative bazaar of violence (read “Iraq’s Bazaar of Violence” for more on how this works), these groups carve out their own territory in the US. Experience shows that once these groups gain a foothold, they become nearly impossible to defeat (although they can be co-opted).
John Robb, writing at his blog, Global Guerrillas.
Posted by: Jeremiah | Feb 22 2009 18:16 utc | 56
By Sara Miller Llana | Christian Science Monitor
MEXICO CITY — Even for Mexicans accustomed to ghastly headlines chronicling the country’s drug-related violence, the current level of killing in Tijuana causes consternation. Some 200 people have been slain in one month. Last weekend turned into one of the city’s deadliest: Nearly 40 were killed, four of whom were children, and nine of them beheaded.
McClatchy and the Christian Science Monitor seem to have long compilations of these stories.
Posted by: Jeremiah | Feb 22 2009 18:20 utc | 57
Just how secure is America’s southern border?
Human migration as a hydrology problem.
It certainly isn’t new to discuss anything these days in terms of fluidity and flow, perhaps least of all global migration. From academic daydreamers intoxicated with Deleuze to mundane AP writers simply reporting the news, the floods of migrants, the deluge of border crossers, and the waves of refugees, seem like common phrases in most of the discourse on migration. It’s almost the vernacular it seems to compare the movements of refugees to oceanic tides, or, chaotic rivers, desperate inundations, masses crashing on the shores of statehood’s rejection, seeping past the gates towards the doorsteps of a surrogate homeland. Just as unstagnant water exists in a state of constant motion, human migration, too, presses on in its own state of permanent unsettlement, in its own form of hyper-alluviality, I suppose, wandering in all directions and dimensions – like global capital personified, or something.
..snip..
Apparently, the new $21.3 million, 5.2-mile fence along the monument’s southern border, basically turned into a dam during the storms on July 12th. The wire-mesh construction, meant to prevent crossers and vehicles but allow water to pass through, halted the natural flow of floodwater along the border when, according to a National Park Services report (pdf), “Debris piled up against the fence, including in drainage gates designed to prevent flooding, and the 6-foot deep fence foundation stopped subsurface water flow.” So, instead of flowing north to south, as I understand it naturally should, the floodwater carried laterally through the port of entry pooling 2 to 7 feet high and causing tons of damage to the ecology and nearby businesses.
via (the always excellent and incredibly verbose (bring a lunch)) Subtopia.
Posted by: Jeremiah | Feb 22 2009 18:26 utc | 58
Tangentially related:
If someone could be bothered to check the history of amerika’s territorial growth since independence I imagine you would find the same duopoly of deceit. One party aggressively expanding the territory while the other alleges to be a party of peace, only it never gives anything back the aggressors stole (initially from native amerikans, later from Mexico, later still anywhere in the world that amerika thought it wanted) and when something goes down which means that amerika must strike while the iron is hot to get the land and the less aggressive party is in power, that party does a policy reversal alienating it’s base but nevertheless participating in the grab. I imagine that was the mechanism by which 100 plus treaties with the indigenous people were broken.
One of MoA’s own.
My comment: will the hollowing out of Mexico be used as a pretext for a US landgrab?
Posted by: Jeremiah | Feb 22 2009 18:29 utc | 59
Mexico is in oil-induced political and financial turmoil because its one massive oilfield Cantarell has gone into rapid decline for geological reasons while Mexico’s (subsidised) domestic oil consumption is growing. Mexico is seeing its largest single source of foreign income decline every month, while domestic demand for oil is growing at a pace that will see Mexico become an oil importer by 2014 according to some estimates.
via The (ever-prescient) Oil Drum.
Posted by: Jeremiah | Feb 22 2009 18:33 utc | 60
A quick note: the series of links I’m leaving here are from my own Google Reader and del.icio.us bookmarks – I’m not just sitting here spamming stuff I find in a websearch today.
But I am in my pajamas.
I hope you’re all weathering this well.
Posted by: Jeremiah | Feb 22 2009 18:36 utc | 61
will the hollowing out of Mexico be used as a pretext for a US landgrab?
Yep …
This was today’s simple answer to a simple question.
Yeah, but when one links all the seemingly disparate events together: Mexico, the banking crisis and solution which only makes things worse, Pakistan and Afghanistan, Iraq, Georgia, etc. — as I did, and as Richard K. Moore did, one becomes a “conspiracy theorist.”
Clearly that is not acceptable, so the only allowed reaction is to scream at each separate injustice until one loses one’s voice: “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to….”
For Mexico, the bounds of the permissible allow a heated discussion of “illegal immigration” and whether we should allow more duskies in, or kick the one’s already here out.
Bounded powerlessness, with the Left as gatekeepers.
Posted by: Malooga | Feb 22 2009 19:20 utc | 64
Oops sorry Dan I did a hit and run yesterday and only saw your response just now.
Firstly in answer to your suggestion that undocumented workers have no stake in the community, I would say that has been proven incorrect time and time again when migrants have been allowed to, they have usually chosen to stay and prosper.
The claim that undocumented workers are parasites is false. That is anyone who is employed, especially in the low pay jobs of undocumented workers is probably putting far more back into the community than they take out. Firstly there is the wealth that is being generated straight off their labour, secondly the money that the worker is spending in the community where/he she lives which as hard as some migrants may try to avoid it, the bulk of the worker’s wages are being spent in the local community with only a small percentage repatriated to their families, who mostly want to join them anyhow. That is the real injustice of the newer sanctions which prohibit access to medical legal and welfare systems for undocumented workers. The chances are great that they are contributing more to the community which shuns them than most of the ‘legitimate’ community members. Not that this should matter, social justice requires that everyone gets the same shake of the stick.
These ploys to try and work out who is paying more than others, are petty and mean arguments designed to divide humans, so they can be exploited more easily. Humans contribute in all sorts of unseen or invisible ways, counting contributes is the equivalent of keeping a ledger of friends’ favours to each other, in an effort to determine whose turn it is to be nice.
As for the poor working conditions of undocumented workers, I couldn’t agree more, but it is the fact that they aren’t allowed to work legally that restricts them to poorly paid ‘black’ work.
The long term solution to undocumented workers is for the nations that receive them that don’t want them, to support real economic assistance programs to turn around conditions in the countries they come from. In the case of amerika that would mainly involve taking their foot off the throats of the nations of Latin America whose populations have been exploited by yanqui capitalism for over a century.
As an option most people would choose to stay at home given the choice between staying in a secure community or travelling into uncertainty. Those that don’t, the adventurers that every society breeds are most often an asset to their new communities anyhow.
NZ has a history of many thousands of ‘illegal’ workers from the Pacific Islands and South East Asia, for some reason those people have much more difficulty getting residents’ permits than people from europe north america and lately south africa, yet every now and again when either the courts or the politicians force an amnesty on their illegality, NZ has been shown to have benefited from their presence.
The fact that migrants tend to be enterprising and hard working is exactly the reason why regarding them as parasites is unfair and misleading.
Ironically it is those migrants that voters are told are the most enterprising – the so called business migrants who arrive already rich that tend to contribute the least to their new society. In the main they are more interested in the new community’s lower cost of living or better environment (which they then try to make just like back home when it suits them).
I understand the impetus driving the fortress amerika protectionism that has overtaken the amerikan left but as an internationalist I can’t support it, before everyone hops in I do need to point out that doesn’t mean I support capitalist exploitation of the lower costs arising from worse social contracts in some nations, but that should never be used to justify workers’ elites where workers hide behind protected economies assisting capitalist exploitation of other societies. That unfortunately was the model for the ‘old’ amerika.
Posted by: Debs is dead | Feb 22 2009 19:26 utc | 65
re mexico, last night i was (only) glancing at the latest book by stratfor’s george friedman, which elaborates his predictions for the next 100 years of geopolitics, and he puts an emphasis on the rise of mexico as a world power & one that directly challenges the united states, perhaps even an irredentist reconquest of the u.s. southwest. having read many of the same stories that jeremiah highlights above, i had to chuckle at the time i was persuing the book, but now i wonder if there’s not something deeper that connects these two seemingly contradictory points-of-view, if only that the futurist one provides the pretext for contemporary preemptive actions.
Posted by: b real | Feb 22 2009 20:06 utc | 66
thanks Debs,
I really think we are on the same side with this but as usual I fail to convey my thoughts accurately. My beef is not with people who come to work in the US, my problem is with the irregular migrant worker/undocumented immigrant and the culture of corruption that it breeds. Since those unfortunates, good people I am sure just as most everyone is, must stay underground they are exploited. That is the part I don’t like. If they were paid the same wage as everyone else no one could complain as it would truly be the case of some people accepting work that natives won’t touch.
there are cases that call for temporary workers, especially in agriculture. additional workers are only needed for a couple of weeks a year during harvest and there is no reason why those workers, if they are to come from Mexico or where ever cannot have temporary work permits. A program (H-1B) that directly affects people in my line of work in the IT world is already in place so there is a precedent.
as for your suggestion that rich countries help the poorer ones to better their lot, well good luck with that. I don’t believe that will ever happen. I maintain that making slavery riskier by coming down on the employers of undocumented workers will do more to change the laws and allow some kind of regular migrant worker program with accompanying healthcare and safeguards enjoyed by legal/regular workers.
Posted by: dan of steele | Feb 22 2009 20:39 utc | 67
“The rise of check cashing places is directly tied to the growth in illegal immigration. How do you think illegal immigrants manage their finances? They can’t open bank accounts because you need SSN’s to do that. But they have bills to pay like anyone else. So they have to go to check cashing places where the cash they have or the checks they receive can enter the financial system. If you think of the money they collect for work as “illegal”, this is how that money gets laundered.“
Posted by: Jeremiah | Feb 22 2009 21:51 utc | 68
Connections:
In January 1995, one year after the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and immediately after Rubin was sworn in as Secretary of Treasury, Mexico was suffering through a financial crisis possibly resulting in default on foreign obligations. President Bill Clinton, with the advice of Secretary Rubin and Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan, provided $20 Billion in US loan guarantees to the Mexican government through the Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF).
In 1997 and 1998, Treasury Secretary Rubin, Deputy Secretary Lawrence Summers, and Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan worked with the International Monetary Fund and others to effectively combat and contain financial crises in Russian, Asian, and Latin American financial markets. In its February 15, 1999 edition, Time Magazine dubbed the three policymakers “The Committee to Save the World.” [7]
Mr. Rubin appears the “cast” of James B. Stewart’s seminal work “Den of Thieves.” (see page 12).
Rubin is a member of the Africa Progress Panel (APP), an independent authority on Africa launched in April 2007 to focus world leaders’ attention on delivering their commitments to the continent. The Panel launched a major report in London on Monday 16 June 2008 entitled Africa’s Development: Promises and Prospects[17].
Rubin has been touted as a possible appointee to a cabinet post for President Barack Obama. Rubin, alongside Austan Goolsbee and Paul Volcker, is one of Obama’s economic advisers.
From Rubin’s APP:
Davos – 30 January 2009. A new report being launched today by Kofi Annan, Chair of the Africa Progress Panel, states that “Africa can be an important part in a global economic stimulus plan”, stating that “the scope for investment in Africa is vast”. Documenting the economic growth and positive political trends of the last few years, the report states that “Africa’s medium to long term prospects are better now than at any time since independence”.
..snip..
“Rich country governments and institutions must lend strong support to address the problems of climate change, by investing in adaptation and in the prevention of deforestation, and by increasing funding for renewable energy in Africa.
Regarding Africa:
The 2002 National Security Strategy> (NSS) outlined a blueprint for military cover enabling increased activity on the continent, positioning the global war on terror (GWOT) as both a key task for military forces and as an amorphous talking point, necessary to justify the stepped up interest in the area. The image of Africa portrayed as a haven of “terrorist cells,” “porous borders,” “civil wars,” “poverty” and “disease”, all of which not only makes humanitarian efforts more difficult, but also “threatens .. a core value of the United States — preserving human dignity.” The document also identified “South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, and Ethiopia” as “anchors for regional engagement.”
One of the only allusions to the role that the National Energy Policy played in this new NSS was the proclamation that “We will strengthen our own energy security and the shared prosperity of the global economy by working with our allies, trading partners, and energy producers to expand the sources and types of global energy supplied, especially in the Western Hemisphere, Africa, Central Asia, and the Caspian region.”
Posted by: Jeremiah | Feb 22 2009 23:03 utc | 70
CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico – This border town’s police chief stepped down Friday after criminal gangs made a chilling demand: Resign or we will kill more local officials.
Public Safety Secretary Roberto Orduna announced he was leaving his post only hours after gunmen killed a police officer and a jail guard and left signs on their bodies saying they had fulfilled a promise made Wednesday to slay at least one officer every 48 hours until Orduna quits.
The slayings were a grim sign that criminal gangs are determined to control the police force of the biggest Mexican border city, with a population of 1.3 million people across from El Paso, Texas.
Elsewhere..
Assailants in an SUV hurled two grenades at a police station in the Pacific resort town of Zihuatanejo on Saturday, wounding one officer and four civilians.
Police and soldiers stepped up patrols and set up extra checkpoints after the attack in the popular beach town north of Acapulco, according to the Guerrero state Public Safety Department.
Three taxi drivers, a woman and a policeman were hurt
Grenade attacks have become a fixture in Mexico’s brutal cartel-related violence. Last week, five civilians and an officer were wounded in a grenade assault on a police patrol in western Michoacan state.
In central Mexico, gunmen wielding AK-47s opened fire on two restaurants Saturday, killing two people. The first attack occurred in the town of Acelia and the second in at a highway eatery south of Mexico City.
Police were trying to determine the motive and whether the two attacks were related.
Gang violence is surging in Mexico despite the deployment of 45,000 soldiers across the country to root out drug cartels. Beheadings, attacks on police and shootings in clubs and restaurants are a daily occurrence in some regions.
Just under a year ago:
MEXICO CITY – The public security director of Ciudad Juarez resigned Sunday as gangland-style killings escalated across Mexico.
Guillermo Prieto tendered his resignation just eight days after the city’s police chief was cut down by a volley of 60 bullets in front of his home.
Posted by: Jeremiah | Feb 23 2009 0:45 utc | 71
jeremiah – in your research have you come across any useful info on the connections of these brutal mexican slayings to guatemala’s kaibiles?
Posted by: b real | Feb 23 2009 4:10 utc | 72
@b real: only in the most tenuous sense. I am not at all aware of the kaibiles by name or individual history. Thank you for the link.
Posted by: Jeremiah | Feb 23 2009 6:11 utc | 73
CABIN IN THE WOODS
A simple A-frame cabin in the woods
ceiling swooping down like two drastic bird wings.
Drafty cracks let bites of winter sneak through
with single pane windows more like membranes
than efficient glassy barriers against the cold.
Feeding the fire, my wife observes, is like tending
to the hungry need of our infant son. Imagine,
she exclaims, if it was always like this, for us,
during winter.
Not yet, the inching darkness murmurs
like the creek outside gurgling along unseen
beneath thick sheets of ice.
We are doing this for fun; a weekend getaway
shitting in the outhouse and heating water
to clean the dirty dishes from last night’s meal.
We are not huddling before the flames to survive.
There are plenty of outlets for light, refrigeration,
and music from the speakers of a computer.
Such is our modern perch upon the precipice
that I recline in comfort reading a fantastical tale
about a sudden, dramatic abolishment of spark
negating in an instant the progress of combustion.
Always forgetting the proximity of implosion
I warm up our nice, combusting car outside
as we gather together our scattered belongings.
Red glowing embers die quietly like foreigners
in an occupied land, while at home in the land
of plenty, plenty go, sink, and disappear.
My wife will be disappointed that another poem
has stumbled toward this reality. I am sorry
but until it’s not true it will have to be remembered.
Posted by: Lizard | Feb 23 2009 6:27 utc | 74
More on Mexico, specifically its relationship to the global energy market:
Mexico- the first domino to fall?
Mexico has long relied heavily on Cantarell, the super-giant discovered in 1976, and until recently the world’s second largest oil field. Cantarell is unique in that it formed as a result of a massive meteor that crashed into the ocean off the Yucatan Peninsula over 60 million years ago, forming the Chicxulub crater. This is thought to be the meteor that radically changed the earth’s climate, killing off 75% of the species on earth, including the dinosaurs. Over millions of years, the massive crater eventually produced over 30 billion barrels of oil.
In the mid-1970’s angry shrimp fishermen, led by Senor Cantarell, stormed the Pemex offices in Veracruz, complaining about oil oozing out of the sea bed, ruining their shrimp nets and demanding compensation. Pemex had no wells in the area, but that was soon to change, along with the fortunes of Mexico.
As of May 2005, Cantarell was producing 2.2 million barrels of oil per day (65% of total Mexican production). Today the figure is roughly 900,000 barrels per day. The most troubling aspect is that the decline rate is accelerating, estimated at 2.5% per month currently, or 30% annually.
No oil exports after 2009?
According to Matt Simmons, by the end of 2009, Mexico will no longer be an oil exporter. If Simmons is correct, it will be very difficult to replace the oil revenue that has supported 40% of the Mexican budget. The Mexican government has recently taken the unprecedented step of voting to allow foreign oil companies to explore for oil in Mexico. In a country that celebrates the 1938 nationalization of its oil industry as a federal holiday, it was clearly an act of desperation. Promising offshore discoveries in Mexico will likely take decades to bring to production, according to Simmons, due to the extreme depths and massive technical challenges.
Unfortunately, it may be too little too late to replace the rapidly disappearing Cantarell production. In as little as 12-24 months, the effects may be felt both in Mexico and the US. Replacing the 1.3 million barrels per day the US now imports from Mexico won’t be easy (the US imports 1.4 million barrels per day from Saudi Arabia by means of comparison). For Mexico, the problems run much deeper, as they must quickly diversify their economy or face wrenching economic and social dislocations. The adjustment period will likely bring great change and tumult, perhaps across the border as well.
Tony Allison, writing in Financial Sense Online.
Posted by: Jeremiah | Feb 23 2009 16:46 utc | 77
Section 1. Statement of Regulatory Philosophy and Principles.
(a) The Regulatory Philosophy. Federal agencies should promulgate only such regulations as are required by law, are necessary to interpret the law, or are made necessary by compelling public need, such as material failures of private markets to protect or improve the health and safety of the public, the environment, or the well-being of the American people. In deciding whether and how to regulate, agencies should assess all costs and benefits of available regulatory alternatives, including the alternative of not regulating. Costs and benefits shall be understood to include both quantifiable measures (to the fullest extent that these can be usefully estimated) and qualitative measures of costs and benefits that are difficult to quantify, but nevertheless essential to consider. Further, in choosing among alternative regulatory approaches, agencies should select those approaches that maximize net benefits (including potential economic, environmental, public health and safety, and other advantages; distributive impacts; and equity), unless a statute requires another regulatory approach.
(b) The Principles of Regulation. To ensure that the agencies’ regulatory programs are consistent with the philosophy set forth above, agencies should adhere to the following principles, to the extent permitted by law and where applicable:
(1) Each agency shall identify in writing the specific market failure (such as externalities, market power, lack of information) or other specific problem that it intends to address (including, where applicable, the failures of public institutions) that warrant new agency action, as well as assess the significance of that problem, to enable assessment of whether any new regulation is warranted.
(2) Each agency shall examine whether existing regulations (or other law) have created, or contributed to, the problem that a new regulation is intended to correct and whether those regulations (or other law) should be modified to achieve the intended goal of regulation more effectively.
(3) Each agency shall identify and assess available alternatives to direct regulation, including providing economic incentives to encourage the desired behavior, such as user fees or marketable permits, or providing information upon which choices can be made by the public.
(4) In setting regulatory priorities, each agency shall consider, to the extent reasonable, the degree and nature of the risks posed by various substances or activities within its jurisdiction.
(5) When an agency determines that a regulation is the best available method of achieving the regulatory objective, it shall design its regulations in the most cost-effective manner to achieve the regulatory objective. In doing so, each agency shall consider incentives for innovation, consistency, predictability, the costs of enforcement and compliance (to the government, regulated entities, and the public), flexibility, distributive impacts, and equity.
Posted by: Jeremiah | Feb 23 2009 17:11 utc | 78
secrecy news: Tunnels Beneath U.S. Borders Proliferate
Smugglers continue to construct tunnels beneath U.S. borders to transport drugs, illegal aliens and other contraband, according to an internal briefing prepared by a U.S. Northern Command Task Force.
Dozens of tunnels have been found in recent years, including some of remarkable sophistication, but it is likely that others remain undetected. Overall, between 1990 and November 2008, 93 cross-border tunnels were discovered, a Task Force briefing slide stated (pdf). Thirty-five of those were in California, fifty-seven in Arizona, and one in Washington State.
Some of the tunnels are primitive, “hand dug” affairs. Others are the product of surprisingly ambitious and complex engineering projects. In one extraordinary case in 2006 (pdf), a tunnel was discovered near Otay Mesa in California that began with a 90-foot deep vertical shaft on the Mexican side that gradually ascended to an exit point in California more than half a mile north. Seven feet in height, electrical power and ventilation were provided throughout the tunnel. “This tunnel was the longest yet found under the U.S. border,” the new briefing indicated.
The Task Force briefing, which has not been approved for public release, was inadvertently posted on the Internet by U.S. Northern Command before being withdrawn last week.
…
links at original
Posted by: b real | Feb 23 2009 17:24 utc | 79
Jeremiah-
I loved the post at 78. Wonderful photos and a very peaceful place, thanks for sharing.
Posted by: David | Feb 23 2009 17:25 utc | 80
ditto
the jeremiahs and davids and lizards and sabines that have come into this cyberworld give me far more hope than a batallion of corporal waldos. much appreciation for all of your contributions, and hope for many more of your ilk to come.
Posted by: Malooga | Feb 23 2009 17:45 utc | 81
If we read these stories merely as accounts of the spread of a technology, IEDs, we read them too narrowly. American and other foreign troops in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan are learning more than how to make IEDs and how effective they can be. They are learning by direct observation how a place works when the state disappears.
To the large majority of American and European soldiers, this is a lesson in horror. They return home thankful they live in a place where the state endures. The last thing they want is to see their native country turn into another Iraq or Afghanistan.
But a minority will learn a different lesson. They will see statelessness as a field of opportunity where people who are clever and ruthless can rise fast and far. They look upon themselves as that kind of people. They will also have learned it is possible to fight the state, and how to do so. The effectiveness of IEDs is part of that lesson; so are the power and rewards that come to members of militias and gangs. In their own minds, and perhaps in reality, they will have found a new world in which they can hope to thrive.
William S. Lind, writing at Defense and National Interest.
My comment @ b real: this is what I mean by a ‘tenuous’ connection i mentioned in another thread. This generation (Boyd calls it ‘4GW’) is learning by direct observation, versus a monolithic dissemination system like SOA. Second, it’s my sense this generation is more interested in maintaining stateless chaos than replacing the state (Hamas).
Posted by: Jeremiah | Feb 23 2009 17:45 utc | 82
Don’t call me a follower of MoA.
Following MoA is an intensely personal endeavor in which you spend each minute of your life with the universal pulse. you follow the fluid and infinitely shifting MoA and experience its myriad wonders. You will want nothing more than to be empty before it – a perfect mirror, open to every nuance.
If you put labels on who you are, there is separation from MoA. As soon as you accept the designations of race, gender, name , or fellowship, you define yourself in contrast to MoA.
That is why those who follow MoA never identify themselves with the name MoA. They do not care for labels, for status, or for rank. We all have an equal chance to be with MoA.
Reject labels.
Reject identities.
Reject conformity.
Reject convention.
Reject definitions.
Reject names.
—-
Playfully adapted from 365 Tao, Deng Ming-Dao.
Posted by: Jeremiah | Feb 23 2009 18:53 utc | 83
i remember slothrop pushing a line that we were being too melodramatic about the antiquities in iraq & if i remember correctly he linked to some harpers article which really downplayed the sacking of baghdad
with the opening ir the museum today – they have revealed that they have considerably less than a quarter of what existed before the invasion of iraq
indeed on the sacking of the libraries, galleries & museums – the terrible sacking – & emasculation of a culture – we hear not a word, we hear not a whisper
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Feb 23 2009 21:32 utc | 84
the one i’m thinking of wasn’t harpers, but claiming as “definitive” an article by “Colonel Matthew Bogdanos, US Central Command, Iraq Museum Investigation”. discussion started on this page
Posted by: b real | Feb 23 2009 22:33 utc | 85
No, the argument there was whether the US intended that the museum be sacked. There is no proof the army wanted the artifacts stolen.
Posted by: slothrop | Feb 23 2009 22:47 utc | 86
Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan was on CNBC last week, ranting about Fannie Mae (FNM) and Freddie Mac (FRE):
“I think the solution here ultimately is going to be ultimately, a nationalization of both Fannie and Freddie. And I hope a restructuring in nationalization more capital coming from taxpayer money. And then split them up into five or ten separate entities and sell them back in the market.”
Appearing with Greenspan on the “Closing Bell” show was PIMCO’s Managing Director and portfolio manager Paul McCulley. PIMCO, the world’s largest bond fund manager, hired Greenspan in May 2007 as a consultant. Yet at no time during the interview did Maria Bartiromo ask Greenspan and McCulley to disclose this relationship and how nationalizing the GSEs would result in a windfall profit for PIMCO.
via Seeking Alpha.
“The raging debate over whether to nationalize C and/or BAC is semantics at this point. With politicians in DC dictating executive pay, marketing expenses, employee trips, dividend policy, etc… with their tens of billions of pfd stock (which may now be common with an amazing sleight of hand with no new money) and the guarantee of almost a half trillion $s worth of assets, both are already wards of the state.
But, whatever step the government may or may not take, healing the banks directly is still only dealing with the symptoms and not the disease.
That disease is ‘an overleveraged consumer and falling home prices‘ — when its cured, it will heal the symptoms that is a troubled bank sector. Shifting bad assets from the banks to the govt is just a shell game as we’ll pay for it one way or another. The $64k question is what will happen to bond holders . . .
Peter Broockvar via Barry Ritholz.
“We will move heaven and earth to ensure that bond holders will be paid on schedule.”
HD Palmer, finance spokesman for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, to the AP. The correct mindset for the privatopia scenario and a good demonstration on how global financial markets will increasingly dictate the priorities of all governance.
via John Robb @ Global Guerrillas.
My comment: Another case of simple question, simple answer?
Posted by: Jeremiah | Feb 23 2009 23:05 utc | 88
Here is the rant iI wrote for the latest issue of my publication. Nothing great, but I thought a few of you might appreciate the last graph
I like to spend far too much of my morning reading political blogs and catching up on the world news.
There was a time I fancied myself political. I’d spend vacations reading political histories and follow news out of D. C. like some folks follow sports.
I was silly then; believing as I did that the average person could change the system. It was with the naivete of youth I watched the machinations of corporations and government working to ruin America, and thought I was witness to “progress.”
I can blame part of my fascination with politics on my high school senior year civics teacher, Ms Wick.
I thought she was the most attractive, intelligent, and exciting female I’d ever met, though she was 25 years older. And I doubt I’m the only young man who found politics more interesting after one of her courses. She was very inspiring and the ripples from her teachings continue to splash upon the shores of my thoughts twenty-three years later.
Ms Wick, Alex P. Keaton (from Family Ties) and Rush Limbaugh, when he was broadcasting out of Sacramento, California, were my early inspirations… Please forgive me it was the mid-Eighties and “Greed is Good” was the mantra and I was young and dumb, with two hippies as parents. It could have happened to you too.
I started working at my local paper the September after graduation when the rest of my friends either went off to college, or left town to join the military. They were learning to be photographers and journalist and I was working as one. Luck.
Jeff McGraw was the sports editor at the paper, a pitcher for the Olives (the area’s AAAA baseball team) and a really smart guy. I think he could hear Limbaugh’s show mumbling out of the darkroom, and to counter this affect, he started loaning me books by Hunter S. Thompson.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was the primer but then the more serious journalism; Hell’s Angeles, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, The Great Shark Hunt – and these books opened my eyes to politics dark underbelly.
Working for the paper brought me in contact with the local movers and shakers; one of the biggest surprises for me was hanging-out in the teacher’s lounge at my old high school and witnessing how the “adults” were as cliquish and petty as the students had been.
During the five years I worked full-time for the two California dailies, I drove with police gang units, neighborhood policing units, military personal; I photographed two Vice Presidents, sat in court though some heinous criminal trials, covered local political races and tried to photographed the images editors wanted to see. There were many times I didn’t shoot a photo because I knew it would hurt a source and probably affect my job.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I didn’t just wake-up one day and decide to have these kooky beliefs like I do.
I’ve been trying to find a convenient label I could tattoo upon my forehead to help my friend’s figure out why I’m so weird. Unfortunately there isn’t a simple word to describe my political beliefs, because politics are too complicated to sum-up with a single word.
There are those who are so in love with their particular political organization they can’t see how the people running the show (corporations and their lobbyist) have perverted both party’s intentions until there is no longer much separation between the two.
When I look at Washington I see a bunch of greedy, self-serving, power-hungry fools that are going to screw about 98% of us, regardless of our party affiliation.
The only people that government helps are those that help government (or at least help the politicians) and that would be the billionaires who can afford to pay for lobbyist.
I wish I had a solution I could offer that wasn’t some lunatic fringe craziness involving large vats of boiling peanut oil – but even these don’t satisfy my impulse for revenge and I realize as fun as it might be to watch, it would do little to prevent future problems.
Karl Marx and Ayn Rand are arguing like old lovers in my head and I don’t know how many more vases my temporal lobes can take having broken against them. I hope those two come to an understanding soon… OUCH!
Posted by: David | Feb 23 2009 23:58 utc | 89
You had Ms Wick too?
jus’ jokin’
Oh, and I forgot Parviz, and may other newbies I’m sure, who bring so much to the table here.
Posted by: Malooga | Feb 24 2009 2:12 utc | 90
There is no proof the army wanted the artifacts stolen.
There is however a mountain of prim-facie proof that they deemed the museum, the libraries, and the archives not worth lifting a single fucking finger to protect.
Posted by: anna missed | Feb 24 2009 3:02 utc | 91
All high school guys need a Ms Wick but I might have learned more if she had explained the Federal Reserve or the real power of lobbyist or even just clued us boys in on women in general, I’d have learned more. But there is a lot to be said for teachers who inspire you to learn things on your own, maybe even more so.
Though these days I wish Ms Wick would have taught English…
I am new here and I never experienced the billmon years, but I can say the general dialog from most posters has been very informative to me. I’ve found I am forming better arguments to support my beliefs when I’m talking with friends because of the information I’m able to read here, and also because my beliefs are challenged everyday when reading some post.
I like to bop around the internet and check-out what other people’s opinions are, and as most here know, I find people are generally sheep bleating like echos what ever their party’s shepherds tell them. I find some of that here too, but at least most of it more nuanced than waldo.
Reading at the MoA bar is a bunch of fun, but like a night of drinking liquor it often leaves my head spinning in too many divergent directions:) It’s hard trying to stay on top of all the information here and continue to lead a somewhat normal (at least for me) life. I don’t know how b does it.
It helps me to know that there are others who see the insanity for what it is , regardless of what political hill they stand upon. War fought with anything more violent than single pump BB guns or paint balls stops being a game and becomes a horror quicker than your mom can say, “you’ll put your eye out!”
I’ve been thinking an odd thought, what if there were a salary-cap for corporations to remain private, say $500 million U.S. If they became larger than that, their employees would have to be given a stake in the company? Would that be bad for the economy? I hate rules, because they usually become bent to favor some particular group rather than the greater good, but I think when it comes to money we need to ask, “How much is enough?”
At what point is wealth required to kick back to the peasants? And how much?
I know from waiting tables that dinners feel that going out to eat is some constitutional privilege, and that tipping isn’t. It seems that caring for your fellow man must fall into this mentality also; that there shouldn’t be a requirement to help the downtrodden because wealthy people will do so regardless, and are more likely to help with more money in their pockets. Yeah right!
Where would our tax dollars be better spent; having universal health care in the us or buying more weapons? Inexpensive higher education or cheaper luxury taxes on yachts?
I can go on and on.
Fuck the rich.
Posted by: David | Feb 24 2009 3:24 utc | 92
one of the dynamics i think exists in the poem i posted is the implied position of class/leisure and the guilt that emerges from “the speaker” in regard to the exterior events that privilege/leisure must ignore to preserve the satisfaction of “roughing it” for a few days in the woods.
though i am by no means richy rich, through marriage i am more favorably positioned going into whatever materializes in the years to come than many. much of my work as a poet is an attempt to achieve and maintain a balance between attack and reflection, because more than anything i want to be effective in exploring the limits of my own experiences. acknowledging privilege and working through guilt i hope to arrive at poems that are both engaging and honest.
*
i came across this article a few days ago from CNN Asia about an 11 year old girl using her poetic language against the Taliban. though obviously courageous, this story, and the girl’s adoration of Obama, are co-opted for propaganda purposes, which is disgusting.
there is most definitely a dynamic yet consistent power structure in place that every day becomes more obvious. for some of us impatience leads to uncivil discourse because what little is left for us to determine is slipping from our grasp.
everyone here, whether i agree or not, contributes to my personal and ever-evolving attempt to understand why everything is so fucked up and if anything can be done to change it.
for that and much more, thank you.
Posted by: Lizard | Feb 24 2009 5:11 utc | 93
Jeremiah@78: thank you, just caught it. the images are beautiful and make me think immediately about Into The Wild.
Posted by: Lizard | Feb 24 2009 6:20 utc | 94
Interesting article on Israeli attempts to destabilize Pakistan:
“The Great Game Revisited”
Posted by: Parviz | Feb 24 2009 14:20 utc | 95