Monthly Archive for September, 2008

James Petras, petras.lahaine.org, 27 September 2008

Human Rights Watch, a US-based group claiming to be a non-governmental organization, but which is in fact funded by government-linked quasi-private foundations and a Congressional funded political propaganda organization, the National Endowment for Democracy, has issued a report “A Decade Under Chavez: Political Intolerance and Lost Opportunities for Advancing Human Rights in Venezuela” (9/21/2008 hrw.org).

The publication of the “Report” directed by Jose Miguel Vivanco and sub-director Daniel Walkinson led to their expulsion from Venezuela for repeated political-partisan intervention in the internal affairs of the country.

A close reading of the “Report” reveals an astonishing number of blatant falsifications and outright fabrications, glaring deletions of essential facts, deliberate omissions of key contextual and comparative considerations and especially a cover-up of systematic long-term, large-scale security threats to Venezuelan democracy posed by Washington.

We will proceed by providing some key background facts about HRW and Vivanco in order to highlight their role and relations to US imperial power. We will then comment on their methods, data collection and exposition. We will analyze each of HRW charges and finally proceed to evaluate their truth and propaganda value.

[Read the analysis]

Mitri I. Musleh, Palestine News Network, 25 September 2008

Long before discussing a one or two state solution, there must be an agreement to end the occupation.

Over the past 60 years or so the situation in Palestine has reached astronomical dimensions that stretch far beyond what could have been expected.

In the midst of it all, Palestinians past and present have watched their young killed, jailed or exiled, their homes blown up, their fields ravished and their olive trees uprooted, their freedoms ripped away from them and their country depleted by the day.

All of this was done to them by Israel and its supporters in the name of freedom, godly wish and imperialism.

How do you explain to a young Palestinian that his father is being kept in Israeli jail because he was born Palestinian? How do you explain to a young Palestinian that his sibling was shot because he or she wanted to look out of the window? How do you explain to a young Palestinian that he has to ration his drinking water so an Israeli youngster can swim? How do you explain to a young Palestinian that all of the countries in the world are against you because you keep saying no to occupation, corruption and imperialism?

[Read the editorial]

McCain Seeks to Delay First Debate
Elisabeth Bumiller, New York Times, 24 September 2008

Senator John McCain said Wednesday that he would temporarily suspend his presidential campaign on Thursday to return to Washington to deal with the financial crisis and the $700 billion bailout package now before Congress.

Mr. McCain said he told Senator Barack Obama that he was asking the Commission on Presidential Debates to postpone the debate scheduled for Friday night.

“I am calling on the president to convene a meeting with the leadership from both houses of Congress, including Senator Obama and myself,” he said. “It is time for both parties to come together to solve this problem.”

Updated 1511 24 Sept.:

Obama supporter and chief debate negotiator Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., told MSNBC that “we can handle both,” when asked about his reaction to McCain’s call to postpone the first debate because of the administration’s bailout plan.

He believes they are making good progress on Capitol Hill on the bailout and his initial reaction is that the work on the Hill should not preclude the debate from taking place.

An Obama campaign official told ABC News the Democratic presidential candidate called McCain this morning to suggest a joint statement of principles.

McCain called back this afternoon and suggested returning to Washington.

Obama is willing to return to Washington “if it would be helpful.” But reiterated Obama intends to debate on Friday.

McCain’s campaign informs TPM it will be taking down its ads. A commenter asks, “but will they make any move to have the 527′s take down theirs?”

By Gideon Levy, Ha’aretz, 21 September 2008

Nothing helped. Not the pleas, not the cries of the woman in labor, not the father’s explanations in excellent Hebrew, nor the blood that flowed in the car. The commander of the checkpoint, a fine Israeli who had completed an officers’ course, heard the cries, saw the women writhing in pain in the back seat of the car, listened to the father’s heartrending pleas and was unmoved. The heart of the Israeli officer was indifferent and cruel. For over an hour, he would not let the car with the young woman in labor pass through the Hawara checkpoint on the way to the hospital in Nablus. Not to Tel Aviv; but to Nablus; not for shopping, not for work; but to get to the hospital in an emergency. Nothing helped.

Nahil Abu-Rada is not the first woman to lose her baby this way because of the occupation, and she won’t be the last. At least a half-dozen checkpoint births that ended in death have been documented here over the years, and nothing has changed. No punishments, no lessons, not even a request for forgiveness from parents who lose their children because of the coldheartedness of soldiers.

The occupation kills – never has this slogan sounded so true as on that night, two weeks ago, at the Hawara checkpoint south of Nablus. No convoluted excuse or explanation from the Israel Defense Forces spokesman (military sources were quoted the day after the incident, making this outrageous comment: “This baby would have died anyway”) can erase the simple, chilling fact that for officers and soldiers in the occupation army we have established, human feeling has become alien, at least when it comes to Palestinians. Or the fact that there are still officers and soldiers in the IDF who behave with such lack of feeling toward a woman in labor who is about to lose her child.

[Read the article]

Where, oh where, is America’s Vladimir Putin, who will drive out the oligarchs who have stolen the country’s treasure and debased its currency? – Spengler, Asia Times

Stopping a Financial Crisis, the Swedish Way
Deal Book, 23 September 2008

A few American commentators have proposed that the United States government extract equity from banks as a price for their rescue. But it does not seem to be under serious consideration yet in the Bush administration or Congress.

The reason is not quite clear. The government has already swapped its sovereign guarantee for equity in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage finance institutions, and the American International Group, the global insurance giant.

Putting taxpayers on the hook without anything in return could be a mistake, Urban Backstrom, a senior Swedish finance ministry official at the time, told The Times. “The public will not support a plan if you leave the former shareholders with anything,” he said.

Spengler believes Americans are gamblers who will save the bank to keep the credit flowing.

Luigi Zingales (.pdf) explains why debt-for-equity is not on the table:

The major players in the financial sector do not like it. It is much more appealing for the financial industry to be bailed out at taxpayers’ expense than to bear their share of pain. Forcing a debt-for-equity swap or a debt forgiveness would be no greater a violation of private property rights than a massive bailout, but it faces much stronger political opposition. The appeal of the Paulson solution is that it taxes the many and benefits the few. Since the many (we, the taxpayers) are dispersed, we cannot put up a good fight in Capitol Hill; while the financial industry is well represented at all the levels. It is enough to say that for 6 of the last 13 years, the Secretary of Treasury was a Goldman Sachs alumnus. But, as financial experts, this silence is also our responsibility. Just as it is difficult to find a doctor willing to testify against another doctor in a malpractice suit, no matter how egregious the case, finance experts in both political parties are too friendly to the industry they study and work in.

Paulson’s Folly
Steve Maich, Maccleans.ca, 22 September 2008

We’ve had market crashes before. We’ve had bad recessions before. They’re not nice, but we survive them. Part of what has helped us survive is the distinction between private enterprise and public finance. Public finance should be used to address the damage from market crashes. If you had a trillion dollars to spend, you could do an enormous amount to help people hurt by a market crash. With a trillion dollars, you could create a public program to halt home forecloures, for example. You could go on a massive public infrastructure spending program to employ all the tradespeople hurt by the housing collapse (and address a huge and simmering long–term threat to the economy at the same time). That’s just two examples.

They have managed to terrify people, in order to convince them that this is the only way they could prevent a return to the Great Depression. I think they’re saddling our generation, and our kids generation with a greatly diminished future, for the sake of temporarily bolstering the status quo, and bailing out a handful of incredibly irresponsible institutions that ought to be allowed to fail.

[Read the post]

hat tip for all links to Housing Crash News from Patrick.net (exception: Zingales)