Does Israel Have a Right to Exist as a Jewish State? - Ali Abunimah on RAI

Continuing on with the interview of Ali Abunimah, this one I liked because of how he logically destroys the argument that Israel needs to exist because it is a place of refuge for all Jews in the world.

First of all, no one in the world has another country as an insurance policy that if something ever happens to someone in another country, they run back to another country. That other country is most likely of lower social & economic value. So, if a Jew / Israeli Zionist living in Toronto or Montreal or Chicago or Paris or Adelaide or Seoul ever feel threatened, then he / she has another developed country, Israel, as an insurance policy, where he / she can move to, with full citizenship rights, as soon as he / she steps on that land. That "insurance" is also maintained with heavy militarization & brutal control of its indigenous population, & that indigenous population doesn't have any citizenship rights in that country. Doesn't that sound like early European colonizations of North America, Australia, South Asia, Middle East, & the whole African continent, where Europeans brutally controlled the indigenous populations of these continents up until as recently as the mid-1900s? So, the early colonizers of the world are in full support of latest colonizers of Palestine. That's definitely "shared values," & in some respect, even "shared history."

Secondly, what really struck home with what Abunimah says that how Israel can say that it is a safe refuge for all Jews of the world & then essentially contradict that by saying that it is a country which is under constant threat of annihilation by its Arab neighbours. If it's under constant threat of annihilation, then it cannot be a safe refuge.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0YfWpiPDU0

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: ... in chapter two, Ali discusses does Israel have a right to exist as a Jewish state. And here's a quote from that chapter:

States either exist or do not exist, as other states either recognize them or they do not. But no other state has claimed the abstract right to exist. If Israel is indeed a normal state among the nations, as its Zionist founders wished it to be, then it has no greater "right to exist" than East Germany, Czechoslovakia, South Vietnam, or the Soviet Union. All those states dissolved, and there's no one with any standing to bring a case in any form demanding they be resurrected on any abstract right to exist separate from their legitimate residents' right to self-determination.

So the right of the Jewish state to exist is usually stated as something based in something--what they would say would be unique, which is the Holocaust, or the genocide against Jews in World War II, that--they would argue, I would say, defenders of the Jewish state, that this isn't like a Soviet Union or any of these other places; because of this genocide, Jews need this state to defend them because of hundreds and even thousands of years of discrimination in Europe. So what do you make of that argument? 'Cause they do see the Israeli state as an exceptional case.

ALI ABUNIMAH, COFOUNDER, ELECTRONIC INTIFADA: Well, I actually discuss all those claims in the book and, I think, address them fairly systematically.

But a basic point is that, of course, historically Zionism began--yes, it began as a response to the systematic persecution that Jews faced in Europe. It was rejected by most Jews at the time, and, in fact, for many decades. But it started long before the Holocaust. I mean, the Holocaust would be a sort of a post hoc justification for Zionism, given that the two are separated by many decades.

But I question the claim that the way for Jews to have security and to feel secure is through an exclusivist state that requires so much violence against the Palestinians. And it required immense violence to create it, because, of course, Palestinians were the majority in the area that became Israel. And it requires immense violence to maintain it, because I think Israel's struggle over the past few decades has been, really, to conceal from the world the amount of violence that is needed to maintain an exclusivist state in a geographic area that didn't have a Jewish majority, and today, where Jews are at most 50% of the population, if not already a minority.

And so this requires you to think about different ways of organizing life so that you don't have this constant combat to maintain the supremacy of one group over another.

JAY: Well, just to give the argument, I know people ... that support a Jewish state will give the argument, it could happen again, what happened in Europe. And, actually, you can see the rise of fascism in Europe again in Ukraine and in France, and also in Germany and other places. And this idea that's fairly deeply rooted because of what happened during World War II, certainly in the Israeli public opinion, to some extent in Jews outside of Israel and North America, that there's this place of refuge--and there's certainly this idea that this tiny little state is surrounded by this far, far larger Arab population, and only through having essentially a militarized state could you have a safe haven. I mean, that's the psyche.

ABUNIMAH: Well, there's a number of claims there. First of all, you have to examine from a moral and ethical point of view the notion that Jewish Americans or Jewish Canadians should have a spare country as an insurance policy when the creation and maintenance of this spare country comes at a brutal price and brutal suffering of its indigenous people, who have to be expelled, kept as refugees, corralled in ghettos like Gaza or Qalqilya, treated as second-class citizens, and constantly demonized. Is that ethically a price that anyone should be asked to pay as an insurance policy for people living quite comfortably in Montreal or Chicago or other parts of the world? I think that's questionable.

The other point is that even if one accepts the premise, there's a basic contradiction in the Israeli narrative, or the Zionist narrative, of Israel as a safe haven and a final refuge for Jews should things go bad in other parts of the world, and the propaganda message that Israel is under constant threat, constantly beset by enemies, whether it's Hezbollah in Lebanon or Hamas in Gaza or Iran's nuclear weapons, and is always on the brink of destruction. I mean, it can't be both. It can't be both a safe place and this dangerous place.

And to the extent that Israel has become, really, the most dangerous place in the world for Jews, one has to examine what are the dynamics, what are the structures, what are the realities that perpetuate conflict and bloodshed and hostility, and I would argue, and I do argue, that it is the effort to create and maintain an exclusivist state at the expense of the indigenous Palestinian population, a colonial state, and therefore the way to undo this hostility is through decolonization, is through going forward to a situation and, in a sense, returning to a situation where Jews and Palestinians can be part of the same entity, and to do away with this notion of Palestinians as a demographic threat, which is how the Israeli mainstream talks about them in which I understand to be really racist language. But it's how even many liberal supporters of a Jewish state talk that we have to maintain a Jewish majority.

What's the price of maintaining it? How do you do that? What remedies do you have if Palestinians have too many of the wrong kind of baby? It creates an ugliness and a violence that I think many liberal Jewish supporters of Israel in this country and around the world have refused to recon with. And they think that this can all just be wished away by continuously repeating these slogans about two states living side by side in peace and never having to reckon with the reality of what ethnic segregation means in Palestine. It means ethnic cleansing. It means violence. It means racist laws. It means constantly viewing Palestinians as a presence that pollutes the land.

JAY: The idea of the need for a Jewish state, not a secular state, not a modern democratic state--as many people say, you can't have a modern democratic state and an ethnic-based state. Now, Israel's not the only one. You have the Islamic Republic of Iran and you have Pakistan and other countries that consider themselves religious-based, and it amounts to a large extent ethnic-based--certainly in Iran it does. I think the Iranians see it as much a Persian state as they do an Islamic state, and their laws are like that, in the sense that if you're of any kind of Iranian descent, if you have Persian blood in you, if you are Canadian and go back to Iran, they will consider you Iranian one way or the other.

ABUNIMAH: But that's not--you know, I always find it interesting when people defend Israel based on comparisons with countries like Pakistan or Saudi Arabia or Iran as if those are models that anyone aspires to or defends in terms of--. Israel compares itself to Western liberal democracies. It doesn't say, we're like Iran or we're like Saudi Arabia.

But the claim that Israel is, for example, the law of return that you're alluding to is just like a law that says that somebody of Irish descent can go back and get an Irish passport is a fallacy that I take on in the book. The example of Ireland comes up all the time. Ireland has a law that says, if you have one grandparent born on the island of Ireland, then you can go and claim Irish citizenship. And some people say, well, this justifies things like Israel's law of return for Jews. No, it's totally different, because the Irish law doesn't contain any provision that you have to be Catholic or you have to be Celtic or some other ethnoreligious criteria. If you're Protestant from the North, if your grandparent was Protestant from the North, if your grandparent was from any kind of background, you qualify, whereas the Israeli law is designed to give privileges to people Israel identifies as Jewish, wherever they are in the world, and specifically to deny them to Palestinians who are born in the country or whose parents or grandparents are born there. So I'm not here to defend other states and to say that other states are our models.

Palestinians Can Learn From the African-American Struggle - Ali Abunimah on RAI

Another good interview. What I really liked in this interview is the piece where Abunimah says how US, which is usually held up as the role model of integration of diverse population, cannot actually be held as that kind of role model where there's so much systematic racial injustice there.

Continuing onwards, he says something, which really struck home that even if Palestinians do achieve the dream of one-state solution where Israelis & Palestinians live side by side, peacefully; Palestinians, in fact, be heavily discriminated & oppressed, similar to Muslims in India are still discriminated & Blacks in South Africa who are still trying to come out of discrimination & oppression they were suffering during apartheid.

Then, Abunimah says something which informed & blew my mind that how Israel & US do have "shared values"; the values all American Presidents have always talked about for the past 6 decades or so. That's the "shared values" of discriminating against & oppressing Palestinians, African-Americans, Latinos, & other "coloureds". Racism is very much entrenched in Israeli & American societies, alike. On top of that, & especially in light of what happened in Baltimore & other American cities, & even in Toronto, the American law enforcement agencies visit Israel on a regular basis, to receive training on how to be better at security. They watch & learn torture techniques in Israel where Palestinians, adults & children alike, are tortured in Israeli prisons.

So, it shows me the ignorance of general public in North America & pretty much all over the world when US, Canada & Europe are held up as paragons of human rights, when these countries are no different from Israel, & treat their coloured populations in no different way; by making harsher criminal laws, hypermilitarization of policing, making education unaffordable, & keeping good jobs away from them.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kODMTcMsb_E

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: So, in chapter one of the book--I'm going to read a quote--you talk about what Palestinians can learn from the African-American struggle:

While abolishing the racism and violence of Zionism practices against Palestinians is the key to justice and peace in historic Palestine, no less than the abolition of slavery and Jim Crow in the United States were absolutely necessary, recent American history demonstrates that systems of racial control and the ideologies underpinning them remain robust and adaptable. A formally liberal and rights-based order can allow a system just as oppressive as Jim Crow to hide and flourish in plain sight.

One of your themes in the first chapter is what Palestinians can learn from African Americans. And we're in a city that's 65% African-American, and you've lived in Chicago for 20 years, a city with a very large African-American population. So what do you think Palestinians can learn from the African-American struggle?

ALI ABUNIMAH, COFOUNDER, ELECTRONIC INTIFADA: Well, if I can just give some context to that quote, which I think helps to answer that as more and more people have recognized that the so-called two-state solution is over, there's--more and more people are arguing, including myself, for a single democratic state encompassing what is today Israel and the occupied territories.

And often people say, well we ought to have equal rights as in the United States or as in some other countries, and what I felt that it was necessary to do is to really interrogate that and to say, well I don't think we can sincerely or honestly hold the United States up as a model when in fact there is so much systematic racial injustice.

And so what that quote leads into is a discussion of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, which was a very important book for me and for many other people, to explain how equality before the law officially in the United States can coexist with mass incarceration. And that serves as a warning for Palestinians that even if they achieve full liberal rights in a single state, they may not get out from under the yoke of racism and oppression and apartheid.

But it also requires us to examine the kind of so-called shared values. And that's from a chapter in the book called "Shared Values, Shared Struggle", that at every occasion, President Obama and all his predecessors will tell us that, oh, the United States and Israel have shared values. And so what are these shared values? And I argue that it includes things like a really racialized view of the world, where Palestinians, in the case of Israel, and African Americans, Latinos, and other people of color in the United States are viewed as some kind of demographic threat that needs to be policed and controlled and surveilled.

And these shared values take a very real form when you see ... that the top police brass from almost every major U.S. city and many smaller cities have been taken on junkets to Israel by groups including the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, groups sponsored by AIPAC, the Israel lobby group, and they take them to places like Megiddo Prison, where Palestinians are routinely tortured, including children, held in solitary confinement. And then they come out and they say, oh, the Israelis are so good at security and in living in a tough neighborhood. And even that language of the tough neighborhood, it comes out of a racialized American discourse. And they say, you see all these quotes from American police chiefs saying, oh, the Israelis are such experts, we're going to take what we learned back to Chicago, back to L.A., back to Baltimore.

And, in fact, Israel is--its niche now is the so-called homeland security industry, where they're exporting billions of dollars of goods, weapons, and services to federal, state, and local police and judicial authorities. So there's a real kind of convergence of ideology and business interest, where, in a sense, if you're fighting mass incarceration in the United States or if you're fighting what Israel is doing to Palestinians, you really need to be part of the same fight, because it's the same corporations profiting from them and it's the same politicians who are talking about Israel as a paragon of human rights and a model for the United States while backing the hypermilitarization of policing, the rail to jail for schoolchildren in the cities, particularly African-American schoolchildren, where we see public education being gutted and privatized and at the same time we see prisons flourishing.
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JAY: I think it was the 1940s where it was made illegal. But if you had a subdivision, a new subdivision just outside the city or a suburb in Baltimore, you actually had to sign an agreement in your deed which said that you could not sell your house to blacks--or Jews, for that matter, but particularly targeted with African Americans. Later, it was formally made illegal and then informally was still in force: if you actually tried to sell your house, you could be--there would be repercussions in terms of the people that own the subdivision; and later they used blockbusting to play this. But as late as 1969 in Baltimore, there was ... in The Baltimore Sun, there was a section of real estate classifieds for whites, a section for Jews (a separate section), and no section for blacks.

ABUNIMAH: Well, and that was true in Chicago and that was true all over the country. And it's important to--and that was true in Canada, by the way. And it's important not to lay all this history on the South and to forget how entrenched and systematic and formal this segregation and racism was throughout the United States. And the legacy of that is that cities like Chicago are still the most segregated in the world in terms of the ongoing effects of that.

But that kind of segregation, which we view today as a negative result of racism that we now repudiate, is actually the goal that Israeli policymakers are working towards with many of the laws. There's a statement from the Israeli Housing minister a few years ago, Ariel Atias, who says that we have populations mixing who shouldn't be mixing and we have to keep them apart, and so Israel actually pushing policies designed at promoting ethnoracial, ethnoreligious segregation.

But this doesn't stop President Obama from these heartfelt declarations of the values he shares with Israel. And I find that to be a particularly tragic and cruel irony, given that his own election victory is seen as being one of the fruits of the sacrifices so many people made in the civil rights struggle, that, someone like him, whose election was unimaginable, even a decade ago, is today promoting a country like Israel, whose racism against Palestinians, against Africans, against others is so systematic.

JAY: What are some other examples on the housing side in Israel of where there isn't this equal citizenship?

ABUNIMAH: Well, it's on so many levels. It's on the micro level, where you have Jewish and non-Jewish citizens in present-day Israel, where Palestinian citizens of Israel have actually had to go to court for the right to live in Jewish neighborhoods. But it's also on the macro level. I mean, what is Gaza? Gaza is really an open-air prison where 1.7 million people live. 80% of them are refugees from areas that are now part of Israel. And the only reason they have to live in a fenced open-air prison in Gaza and can't go back to their lands--most of which are empty, by the way, in what's now southern Israel--the only reason they can't go back is because they're not Jewish. If they were Jewish, Israel would tear down the fences and say, come on home. So it's the micro level, where you have hundreds of Israeli rabbis, municipal rabbis whose salaries are paid for by the state, who've issued these public calls saying it's forbidden to rent to Arabs--you know, if you own an apartment, don't rent it to an Arab--and at the same time this macro level segregation. It's almost like, to use a South Africa analogy, the petty apartheid and the grand apartheid.

And, by the way, the reason these rabbis have been issuing these calls in recent years is because Israel has not allowed even the Palestinian population who are citizens of Israel to build a single new town in 65 years, has taken most of their land. So what are they trying to do? They're trying to get houses in areas where the houses are being built, which is in Jewish areas, and then they're being met with these kinds of decrees.

"How Drug and Driving Addicts Talk" by Andy Singer

 

"How Drug and Driving Addicts Talk" - Andy Singer, US

South Korea: Suicide Nation

A good short piece to think about, accompanied by a 25-mins long video.

Second last paragraph goes into a little more detail about suicides & some causes of it, & they all paint a picture of any so-called modern country. Modern, Westernized countries from North America (US & Canada) to Western Europe (Germany, France, UK etc.) to Asia (Japan & South Korea) might have achieved economic successes but they have come at a great social cost of hyper-competition, isolation, & mental illnesses.

Most people in these countries are busy in the rat race. There's hyper-competition at every level of school & career, & at every age group. Every parent is running from one task to another to make themselves & their children look "successful" in the eyes of the society. Children are enrolled in all kinds of extra-curricular activities & parents are trampling over anyone who come in their way to achieve their own economic / career successes. Of course, with such busy lives, who can have any time to take a peaceful time when one can sit down to reflect upon life in general, talk to each other among family members (including elderly family members), talk to neighbours (to actually know them & not merely talk to them to boast of one's own successes), & ultimately, self-reflect & take a breather.

All this hyper-competition & this worldly race to be better than that another guy leads one to nowhere. This "pursuit of happiness" actually leads one to chronic mental illness & other side effects of it; stress, fatal diseases, anger issues, loneliness, marriage breakdowns etc.

Now, this problem of hyper-competition is quickly creeping into developing countries of Latin America (Brazil, Argentina, Chile etc.), Africa (Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa etc.), South Asia (India, Sri Lanka etc.), China, & Vietnam etc. They are developing fast & their populace wants to emulate the Western countries, unfortunately, right down to the horrible side effects of development; mental illnesses, loneliness, marriage breakdown, suicides etc.

Although, the piece ends with a question that we may never know the real reasons of why South Koreans are committing more suicides than say, people of Namibia or Iceland, I can offer my opinion, here. The comparative countries stated in that statement are the wrong countries to compare to, in the first place. Anyway, there are several other factors at play, here. Iceland is not considered as much of a developed country as, even, South Korea or Japan. Iceland is not even a G20 country. Plus, it's much smaller in size in terms of population (329,000) compared to South Korea's 51 million (both 2015 stats). Of course, population size has a direct relationship with that society's level of competition. Mix in the level of economic development & you get a potent environment for mental illnesses. Similarly with Namibia, economic & population size (2 million as of 2011) play a huge part why South Korea is more susceptible to mental illnesses.

Besides the level of economic development & population size, religious affiliation of that country's population also affects how much hyper-competitiveness leads one to commit suicide. Religious people often ask for divine help when they are in problems. But religion is on the decline in industrialized world, & as such, people of the modern, industrialized, Westernized countries are far more prone to suicides than say, Uganda or Panama or Hungary or even Saudi Arabia.

There's one more problem with people around the world. Most of the people want to compare their lives against their colleagues, neighbours, or extended family members. But they forget to look & see how great their lives are compared to their own compatriots, & even people in other countries, who are living in worse conditions than them. South Koreans, in general, are in much better condition than millions in South Asia, Africa, & in Latin America. Heck, even in industrialized countries of US, Canada, UK, Australia etc., millions are homeless & live way below the poverty line. We humans are forgetting to count our blessings, whatever & however many / little they are, & prefer short-term successes over long-term consequences. If we start to take a long-term view & always look to the person who is less fortunate than us, then we wouldn't be having these mental illnesses, since we will always know that we are in better condition than that other person.

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http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/peopleandpower/2015/08/south-korea-suicide-nation-150827070904874.html

Loneliness, poverty, chronic illness, losing one's job, the death of a loved one or the breakdown of a marriage - there are many reasons why people fall prey to heartbreak & despair, but most of us, thankfully, will find a route out of that unhappiness or at least develop ways of dealing with it.

Even for those who can not, whose sadness turns into the 'black dog' of overwhelming clinical depression, the right help can still make a crucial difference to being able to cope - be it medical care, the understanding of therapists or the love & support of family & friends. Eventually some sort of recovery takes place, some balance & perspective is restored.

Yet for some the experience of depression can be so profound that none of this works, that all remedies & assistance seem valueless & there appears to be only one way out - to end it all & takes one's own life. Such a step is, of course, a mark of absolute & final desperation, a tragic, wasteful act that can often be cruelly devastating for the people left behind. But people still do it, many thousands around the world every year; lost souls whose mental health has been damaged & stretched beyond breaking point.

Curiously though, some societies & cultures seem more prone to suicide than others. Take South Korea, for example, where suicide has become the fourth most common cause of death, with up to 40 of its citizens taking their own lives every day. For the last eight years it has had the highest suicide rates in the industrialised world (and the second highest in the whole world behind Guyana) & it is now, astonishingly the number one cause of death for its citizens between the ages of 10 & 30.

Delve a little deeper into these statistics (gathered as the nation has become more concerned about the phenomenon) & you will find that men commit suicide twice as often as women; that children & young adults will cite the stress of living in a hyper-competitive society or pressure over exam results & college entrance as the main reason for contemplating suicide; that middle-aged South Koreans most often turn to it through concern over personal economic problems; & that the elderly will kill themselves (or consider doing so) because of isolation as a result of the breakdown of the traditional family unit.

Each of these facts & figures, so easy to write out, conceals a sad personal story, a life that has somehow lost its purpose & meaning or an unbearable anguish that has been crying out for relief. And they still do not explain why South Koreans are more susceptible to suicide than, let's say, the people of Namibia or Iceland.

If We Remain Predators, the Planet Will Cast Us Off - Lawrence Wilkerson on Reality Asserts Itself

A good discussion on how the leaders of our world have to find common grounds (& we all have many common grounds than a few differences) to find & implement solutions for much much bigger problems in all our lives. These problems of climate change, hunger, thirst, fatal diseases etc. are only increasing in the absence of a true & honest leadership, who is willing to work together towards a common goal, instead of creating more opportunities to fight one another.

As Larry Wilkerson says near the end of the interview that if we keep being predators (i.e. if we keep fighting each other & always looking to take more than share equally), then "let's just keep being predators and watch the planet cast us off, because the planet is going to cast us off, or at least a sizable majority of us. There's no question in my mind about that. The planet will go on as it went on after the dinosaurs, but human life might not. And that's the nature of the challenge that we confront in this century."

This world needs the leadership who is willing to improve humanity's condition in several ways on many fronts. Will the world ever see such kind of leadership?

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6TUcOsAwd0

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: So there seems to be kind of two parallel processes going on. And I'm talking about--I mean, it relates to U.S. foreign policy almost with all countries, but right now I'm interested and I think everyone's interested in relations with China, even though the heat is with Russia right now. Certainly President Obama's Asian pivot in the long-term strategic thinking of the United States is: how do you manage the relationship with China?

And what I mean by two different processes. There's a tremendous amount of economic integration. China holds more U.S. Treasury bills, I think, than anyone--any single place on earth. They have massive amounts of U.S. cash, tremendous integration in terms of the labor, Chinese labor providing commodities for the American market, and so on and so on, a great deal of economic integration, you can say even codependence on each other. On the other hand, over here there's the Asian pivot on the American side. There's the strategy--what most people call an encirclement of China. ... Well, hedging on both sides is pretty massive, the buildup of the American military and the buildup of the Chinese military. ... And if this Cold War with the Russians gets even hotter and the sanctions start to really threaten Russia's ability to export its energy, the obvious thing is we'll sell it all to China.
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But in terms of the danger of war, which process is kind of more dominant? 'Cause it each has its own logic. You would think the commercial integrations logic would trump that there ever really would be that kind of confrontation. On the other hand, when you have these enormous military buildups, the logic is somehow, someday, something happens.

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON, FMR. CHIEF OF STAFF TO COLIN POWELL: I think you're right, and it's something to watch very carefully and something to try to form policies to prevent, I think. Hedging strategies can get out of hand on both sides. China's almost preposterous, grandiose claims in the South China Sea can get out of hand. These sorts of things have their own momentum, and before you know it, you're staring at something that looks like you can't get out of it, whether it's over Taiwan, the most likely fire point, or whether it's over something else we can't even see now, like, for example, Filipino occupying a rock in the South China Sea. It's not a situation that I would say is fraught with danger and potential for danger right now, but it could be easily. It doesn't have the in-your-face aspect of Ukraine, this sort of great-power standoff, Russia or Moscow and Washington, but it has, I think, a much longer term ability to ruin not only U.S.-China relations, ultimately, but to impact the entire globe.

JAY: And how much is this driven by a real concern that this rivalry with China over ... markets, over raw materials, and such and such really requires a military alternative versus how much is this driven by what you were saying in the first segment, oligarchs (on both sides, really, but I would say here it's more the American side) who just need another place to have a military buildup, because everybody makes a killing out of this?

WILKERSON: Yeah, well, the president of China right now is having a hard time trying to go after some of his oligarchs, who are just too corrupt for his own liking. And this is reaching a point where it may be destabilizing for the Communist Party in and for China ultimately. So I'm watching that very closely.

But at the same time, you have a situation here that's ripe for a great-state relationship. What do I mean by a great-state relationship? Well, you sort of had that in 1648 with Westphalia, which sort of set the road for monarchs and their peoples to be sovereign and to exercise some tolerance and so forth, a state system you could argue we're still operating under. You had the Atlantic Charter, too. The Atlantic Charter was--here's the greatest empire in the world, receding, to be sure, and the nascent empire meeting and saying, we're going to get together and have a great-state relationship to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. And it worked. And the world had sort of a Pax Americana for half a century, virtually.

We need some sort of relationship like that between Washington and Beijing today, I think. And I do not mean in any way that we should rule the world together. What I mean is the challenges that we're going to confront in the 21st century, challenges that could be existential, challenges like climate change, challenges like enough water to drink, enough food to eat, and so forth--I've seen some projections that say--by climatologists whose views I respect, that say by the end of this century we could have only arable land and water enough for some half-billion people. What we do with the other 9 billion? Where do we bury them, even? How do we deal with that kind of massive change in human relationships with this planet? So these are huge challenges. So what I'm saying is you need this kind of great-power relationship, this great-state relationship to begin to lead the way for others to follow, others who are already doing a good job of it, like Germany, for example, to meet these challenges which are much bigger than whether or not Taiwan is a part of China or whether or not Ukraine is a part of Russia. These are tactical skirmishes on the fringes of challenges that may have major impact on human life on this planet, and yet we don't seem to be able to get the leadership to move to face and confront these challenges.

JAY: ... I guess the question came down to is capitalism as we know it out of these kinds of answers and not capable of producing this kind of leadership. This concentration of ownership, and so much in the hands of a section of capital that's essentially parasitical, betting on derivatives markets and just gambling with no interest in really strengthening the real economy of the United States and taking advantage, wherever they can, around the world, the politics that reflects that, I mean, to get to what you're talking about, that kind of relationship between states that will face up to climate change and, I think, a looming, very deep economic crisis that's going to hit that's going to be, you know, 1930s styles or worse--.
...

So in terms of the discussion, discourse that ordinary people need to start getting their heads around, I mean, does it not--you have to start talking about who owns stuff, who has power in the United States, and what to do about it.

WILKERSON: Adam Smith's invisible hand in Wealth of Nations is now not an invisible hand. It's the hand of oligarchs. So if you want a succinct answer, if capitalism is going to help--going to be the economic, philosophical engine of this, meeting these challenges, it's going to have to return to Adam Smith, but not just in Wealth of Nations, but also in his moral sentiments. You've got to have a different version of capitalism. It cannot be predatory capitalism, which both China and the United States are exemplifying massively today, China like the U.S. did in the 1890s, 1880s, 1890s, and the United States in this new form of collateralized debt obligations and all the rest of these financial innovations that do nothing but make the rich richer and the poor poorer. So it's got to be a different brand of capitalism or it's got to be a new economic system.

JAY: Yeah. And do we not have to then jettison all the baggage and shadow of the Cold War rhetoric--McCarthyism, House un-American activities committees, all the stuff that has such weight to stop you from discussing a new economic system?

WILKERSON: This is the huge component of a great-state relationship that would have to be--it would have to manifest itself and it would have to do so before you get into the challenges and the way you're going to meet them. And what do I mean by that? I mean what Malcolm Byrne and John Tirman--at MIT, Malcolm at George Washington--have called empathy: you have to understand the other person's side. Think of the Ukraine today. Think of Iran today. You have to crawl into the other person's shoes and understand their side. And that means you have to recognize their culture. You have to, to certain extent, honor the right they have to have that culture. You have to honor the right they have to design their own political system and so forth, and quit this messianic desire to bring these people down, those people down 'cause they're evil and contemptible. You have to eliminate the politics of fear as much as possible. And you have to work together. You have to genuinely work together.

That doesn't mean--Admiral Locklear said this recently, United States commander in the Pacific, probably the most influential man in terms of immediate U.S.-China policy, U.S.-Asia policy: he said China and the United States have more in common than they do have differences. It's not a large majority, but it's a majority. The problem we have, the challenge we have is to deal with the friction created by that minority of issues where we don't agree. Well, that's what a great-state pact does. It says, we are going to push those issues aside, work on them if we can in the corridors, and try to fix what we can. But we've got to have a relationship that basically begins together (because you can't do it alone; you can't; no country can do it alone), meets the challenges that we're confronting in this century, which are huge.

JAY: But is part of the problem is that the people that are making policy here in the United States, they do put themselves in the other shoes, in this sense? They look at themselves and they said, well, you know, we're predatory, so they are too, so let's just do worst-case scenarios dealing with predatory supposed allies that we know eventually--like we did with with the Germans, we may have economic integration, we may trade with them, but we're also ready to go to war with them because we're all really predators and that's what predators do.

WILKERSON: If that's the case, then let's just keep being predators and watch the planet cast us off, because the planet is going to cast us off, or at least a sizable majority of us. There's no question in my mind about that. The planet will go on as it went on after the dinosaurs, but human life might not. And that's the nature of the challenge that we confront in this century.

In this century, in my grandchildren's lifespan, major, major impacts will begin to occur, indeed may already be occurring. Pacific nations, for example, like Palau understand they're going to be underwater and they have to relocate their whole populations. These kinds of things are going to happen with a frequency and a drama that is going to convince everyone. But is it going to be too late?

"Income Inequality" by RJ Matson

"Income Inequality" - RJ Matson, Roll Call, Washington, DC, US

Who Makes US Foreign Policy? - Lawrence Wilkerson on Reality Asserts Itself

Couple points to highlight from this interview of Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson (former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell):

1. As I always blog that there's no such thing as "democracy" in this world. Many countries, & billions of people either say that "they are living in a democratic country" or "they are fighting for democracy", but everyone of them think "democracy" is merely voting in "free & fair elections". That's not democracy. Democracy is not merely about voting in elections, but it's much more. Democracy is when the voice of the majority of a nation are heard on major internal & external issues; issues which are affecting a country.

But, as this interview proves once again, that the wealthy people of United States, for instance, are controlling the government, & hence, all the major decisions American government makes; regardless of it's domestic or foreign matters. As Larry Wilkerson says, that "the oligarchs ... buy the president and thus buy American foreign policy." He also gives example of this is similar to what happens in Putin's Russia. I completely agree with it. Many Americans will of course disagree with it, but it's the bitter truth. There's no "democracy" in US, since it doesn't matter what the general public needs or wants, it's the rich elites who get what they want.

2. Another point I frequently make in my blogs is that arms sales around the world, ironically, by the permanent members of UN "Security" Council, create more chaos & deaths around the world than brutal dictatorships.

Such international arms manufacturing companies as Lockheed & Raytheon vigorously lobby politicians in US, UK, Canada, France etc. to allow them to sell international arms & weaponry to such countries as Saudi Arabia, China, Israel, Nigeria, UAE, Bahrain etc. Then, these countries have to find any excuse whatsoever to use that stockpile, & hence, wars start. Poor people die in large numbers in neighbouring countries like Palestine, Yemen, Syria etc.

But who benefits from all these arms & weapons transactions? Definitely not Saudi Arabia, UAE, or Nigeria. These countries are importing these arms & hence, they are indebted to their Western counterparts. But companies like Lockheed & Boeing, & of course, those politicians who pushed their countries' foreign policies towards more belligerence & wars, benefit tremendously. As Larry Wilkerson says in regards to the re-emergence of another potential Cold War era between US & Russia that "this group alarms me probably more than any other in the world, and particularly my own country--that is interested in a constant state of war, or as near a constant state as possible, because they sit behind all the belligerents and make money."

So does the majority of American or Russian public want their countries at each other's throats? Or how about the new Asian pivot of America? Does the majority of Americans want US & its Asian allies (Philippines, Japan etc.) banding together against China? I don't think so. But do they have any say in this matter? Of course not. So is this "democracy" when the general public suffers because their tax dollars, which they are paying just so they can get better public infrastructure, education, healthcare etc., are actually being used towards military hardware & a perpetual war against the world?

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZW8T4NA3Is

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Larry, you were right at the center of the State Department. Back when you were there, and then sort of extrapolating to today, who runs U.S. foreign policy? 'Cause there's this sort of feeling there's this grand design and, grand machinations and chessboard-playing and all of that. Where are the centers of power for making U.S. foreign policy? 'Cause it seems to me it's not just the president.

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON, FMR. CHIEF OF STAFF TO COLIN POWELL: I think you're right. And part of what I teach--and I teach post-World War II policy more than anything else, but we have to go back into the past to understand that policy. Part of what I teach is how since World War II and the acquisition of this enormous power by what in essence is the new Rome in the world, the United States, part of the shift that takes place in manipulating and managing that new power is a centralization of foreign policy away from the old cabinet places where it used to take place, most prominently through the Foreign Service and through the secretary of state, to the White House and to the creation of the 1947 National Security Act, the National Security Council. So if you ask me pro forma where does it exist today, it exists more in the National Security Council and its staff than it does anywhere else, certainly anywhere else in the cabinet. So what I'm saying is it's centralized in the White House.

But what does that mean in terms of, I think, your real question, who's behind the White House, and who's therefore behind U.S. foreign policy, more or less? I think the answer today is the oligarchs, which would be the same answer, incidentally, ironically, if you will, for Putin in Russia, the people who own the wealth, the people who therefore have the power and who more or less ... buy the president and thus buy American foreign policy. ...

JAY: There seems to also be centers or circles of power. For example, Lindsey Graham and John McCain seem to represent an alignment of forces. It seems that the fossil fuel industry, military-industrial complex--and certainly not that they are exclusively backing McCain and Graham. They have their hooks into both parties and to--they're kind of a hidden hand throughout much of American politics. But it seems to be a somewhat distinct center. And then Wall Street seems to have even--although it's not monolithic, it's a distinct center of power. What's the actual dynamic? Like, how do they influence National Security Council decisions? How do these processes take place? Where do the discussions take place?

WILKERSON: I think it's probably less fundamental and less precise, and therefore less in the interest, often, of the United States than you might think or that the American people might think. Because of what you've just suggested, that there are many poles in American foreign-policy, from the Congress to even the Supreme Court, to the White House, to the State Department, the Foreign Service, and so forth, it's a very complex mix, and it's rarely ever articulated in a way or manifests itself in a way that good leadership can control it, handle it, and manage it toward a real strategic objective. That's part of our problem in the world today.

But I would submit to you that certain oligarchs, anyway, big food, big pharmacy, big energy, oil, real estate, things like that, they like it this way because then they can flow into the void in the particular region or function or both that they want to control, that they want to manipulate, and do so effectively, whether it's subsidies from the federal government for oil companies or whether it's massive efforts by the government, clandestinely or otherwise, to influence someone like Monsanto being able to operate in Latin America and do the things that it does. So it's incredibly complex, difficult to analyze from a strictly governmental standpoint.

But when you start probing and you start analyzing, you begin to discover that there are centers in this mess, if you will, that are getting what they want. And what they want is basically wealth and power. And they then turn that wealth and power back into political contributions, which now almost have no limits, no constraints on them, and they influence people like John McCain and Lindsey Graham and Bob Menendez and Chuck Schumer and Barney Frank when he was in there and so influential with the banking committee, and they get what they want in terms of legislation that oftentimes I'm convinced the legislatures do not even realize they're doing. They don't understand that they're fulfilling this objective of a particular oligarch or conglomeration of oligarchs. And yet they're doing it, and they're doing it because they are well paid for doing it, in the sense that their PACs are flush and full and they get reelected.

Is John McCain motivated entirely by this? Is Bob Menendez motivated entirely by this? Of course not. They're not intellectual giants, and they don't spend lots of time analyzing this situation in the complex ways that we do. So they think they're actually fulfilling their principles and bending over a little bit to accept the money and the cash necessary to do that. So that's how the system works. That's not even half the explanation, but that's how the system works. And, incidentally, it has worked that way for a very long time, I would say probably since about Andrew Jackson coming into the White House after we'd really established ourselves.

JAY: I think it's a really interesting point, because those of us that sit back doing this geopolitical analysis--and we look at what are the objective interests of the powers and what are the objective interests of the different parts of these powers, and then we kind of think there's people making policy the same way, but they kind of ... what's the crisis that I'm going to deal with today? How am I going to make money out of this tomorrow? It seems to me that with the odd exception of ... the Brzezinskis and these type of people that seem to think in a broader way--most of it seems to be what is in it for me today, the hell with tomorrow, & not so conscious of the forces. I mean, one of the things that always hits me is when you look at the predictions of who would win World War II. Most of what I've seen is by 1940, '41, it was pretty clear Hitler's going to lose. Now, if you're in the German monopoly capitalist class doing analysis, you'll say, well, this is not leading to anything good for us; why aren't we bailing? But the forces of refusing to accept the reality of it were far too strong.

WILKERSON: Well, that's a good point. I would say--and I don't subscribe to conspiracy theory normally, but I would say there were forces behind that shadow, if you will, who were doing quite well, Swiss, German, American, and others who were more or less feeding off the conflict and got very wealthy feeding off the conflict, just as they did off World War I, even more dominantly with respect to the United States in particular, German reparations and so forth. We made a ton of money off of World War I, and we really didn't contribute a whole lot, if you'll remember. We were only really there substantially for a very short period of time, roughly April 1917 to Armistice Day. So there is a group that's interested in this kind of thing--and this group alarms me probably more than any other in the world, and particularly my own country--that is interested in a constant state of war, or as near a constant state as possible, because they sit behind all the belligerents and make money.

JAY: And there seems to be sectors of the economy that profit from volatility, brinksmanship, geopolitically, which leads to massive arms sales. And I've mentioned before on air that I was at this dinner of this organization that does military advice and policymaking to Middle Eastern countries, mostly about arms purchases, and of course who backs the organization's advice is Lockheed Martin and Boeing and, all the military manufacturers. So the brinkmanship sells weapons. And then, of course, Wall Street also does great in volatility, 'cause--especially if you're one step ahead, which the insiders are. But then there's other parts of the economy. ... if you're trying to sell stuff to the American public, massive volatility is not particularly good for you.

WILKERSON: No, it's not. The real economy in this country, though, has shrunken so dramatically since World War II--I show the stats to my students, and I usually use the CIA stats. I can't remember them precisely right now, but I can give you general idea. In 1945, we were about 25% or so services and about 60% or so what was called heavy, medium, or light industry, manufacturing mostly. It's completely the opposite today. It's about 11% to 12% manufacturing, and the latest stat--and this is a precise number from the CIA--76% services. So you don't have the same real economy, if you will, and you don't have the same GDP reflective of that real economy. And that's a very different economy to wage war under than the one we had when we entered World War II, for example. Very different. And you could say in some respects this shadow behind the power that makes money off war, period, no matter who's the belligerent, makes money off that volatility now, especially with computers that are able to assist them in doing so, like currency manipulation, for example, or just general speculation. With computers you can do it at lightning speed and you can do it in a nanosecond, and you can make billions in that nanosecond, and you don't care about what you're doing to the real economy, because you're raking in the dough.

JAY: Has the American elite, including that section which profits on near war and profits on actual war--but in general has there come to a conclusion now that ... if you want a really good Cold War, a really good arms race, then Russia's the right one to do it with?

WILKERSON: That's an interesting speculation. ... I think what's happening is people are beginning--people, these people I'm talking about, who really understand the dynamics in the world--and some of those are in the White House, no question about it. Some of them are people bearing the burden of public policy. No question about it. ... what's happening ... with Ukraine and with Russia, of course, is what you just said: hey, ... we yearn for the solidity and the stability of the Cold War, and my God, Putin's giving it back to us. Let's accept the offer.
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JAY: ... Is this coming from the Obama administration? Or is it coming from--and this is where I get to who makes U.S. foreign-policy--how many lines of this kind of policy exist that kind of circumvent the White House and the National Security Council?

WILKERSON: I don't think they necessarily circumvent it. I think they are at times in tension within it, but I don't think they necessarily circumvent it, like, for example, Dick Cheney did in the Bush administration. I think what you have is you have people like Samantha Power and Susan Rice who are right-to-protect-people. This is very traditional. This is messianic Christianity manifesting itself in a secular way. This is we have to bear the brown person's burden, we have to go fix these problems in the world. So this is not something new. It's just got a more sophisticated manifestation in 2014.

And it makes a difference. It made a difference in Somalia when Madeleine Albright and Boutros Boutros-Ghali were pushing for state building in Somalia, when any anyone with a brain could have seen impossible task, you're going to fail, and you're going to have to leave ignominiously, which is exactly what Bill Clinton had to do. It manifested itself in the Balkans and in Kosovo. Two days of bombing and Milosević will cave. 78 days later and the threat of ground forces and Milosević finally caves.

So there's that strain, a messianic strain that's always been there.

Then there is a strain of real power, realpolitik. And that's people who are actually trying to achieve American interests, whatever they may be, and the way they think they should be achieved. I would put President Obama in that category.

And then you've got people who are closet neoconservatives, who really do feel that America has to assert itself periodically at a minimum in order to teach the rest of the world that it can't climb the hill on which America is the king.

JAY: But Ukraine is setting up we have to teach Putin a lesson, except you helped create the conditions where you have to teach Putin a lesson ... and more or less play into Putin's hands.

WILKERSON: Well, this is a chess game, to a certain extent, played on multiple levels simultaneously. And when you have a person like Putin with the capabilities that Putin has--I would suggest to you that the KGB and the GRU or NKVD, whenever you want to talk about, were probably the best intelligence people in the world for a long time. When you've got those kind of capabilities, you can do things, and particularly when you're operating on interior lines.

I'll take you into a military jargon here. Interior lines means I've got a border with you and I can move my tank 15 feet and kill you. But I am the person going to contest that tank, and I'm 10,000 miles away, and I've got to fly my tanks into your country before I can even take you on. The advantage of operating on those interior lines is really, really huge. It'd be like us doing something in Mexico and Russia trying to object or us doing something in Cuba and Russia trying to object. It's really difficult. You can do it, but it's really difficult.

So there are a lot of things operating with respect to Crimea, Ukraine, Odessa, and so forth, Georgia, right now that play into what some of these people, like ... John McCain, Lindsey Graham, would love to see happen, and that is the development of a new Cold War, a new Cold War with old antagonists.
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WILKERSON: ... When Jim Baker and George H. W. Bush really accomplished what I think was one of the real diplomatic feats of the end of the 20th century, the reunification of Germany, whether we agree with that or not, they did it, and they did it without a shot being fired. It was wonderful to watch H. W. Bush do that, and Jim Baker. But one of the reasons they could do it was because they assured Gorbachev, and later Yeltsin, that NATO would be quiescent, it wouldn't move, it wouldn't threaten Russia. In fact, I was there when we told the Russians that we were going to make them a member -- observer first and then a member and so forth.

Well, that fell apart on the fact that they perceived right quickly that we weren't really serious. And then we start, under pressure from Lockheed Martin and Raytheon and others, to sell weapons to Poland and weapons to Georgia and weapons to Romania and everybody else we could bring into the fold. Under those pressures and others, we started to expand NATO and stuck both our fingers in the Russian eye, so to speak, immediately. It's clear to me why Putin responded in Georgia and why he's now responding to Crimea in Ukraine. This is what great powers do when they get concerned about their so-called near abroad.
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