(Un)Happy Black Tot Day

 Ian Williams, Rumpundit, commiserates Black Tot Day
Saturday  31 July is the 40^th Anniversary of Black Tot Day when the Royal Navy abandoned the daily grog ration for its sailors. Do hoist  a dark rum to mark the occasion. The British decision to abandon a centuries-old tradition of high octane fighting spirit and replace it with high megaton Trident submarines has proven to be a financial and naval disaster. When it waived the rum rules, Britannia abandoned all pretension of ruling the waves!

The first reference to Navy rum was by Samuel Pepys, who although best known for confiding his sex life to his diary, was the civil servant in charge of the Navy. He authorized the Navy in the Caribbean to issue rations of rum to the sailors based in Jamaica.

Soon, however, rum was a major constituent of the Navy’s fuel supply. Admiral Vernon, after whom George Washington’s home Mount Vernon was named, decided that it was better for the health and safety of his ships and crew to mix the rum with water before issuing it, and to issue the half pint in two servings. He was known as  “Old Grog” because he wore a waterproof cloak made of “grogram,” a mixed fabric that served before oil-skins and that gave the name to the mixture.

His orders were that the grog was to be mixed in a “scuttled butt.” The idea that scuttlebutt was sailor’s chat around the water cask is a post-Prohibitionist invention. It was the rum barrel that loosened the tongues of the eagerly waiting tars.

Navy regulations insisted that once the grog had been mixed, it had to be served promptly, otherwise it would thrown overboard, because it went “flat.” I’ve experimented, and it’s true! While the rum is in a colloidal suspension in the water the droplets of rum hit the tastebuds and taste as strong as normal spirits but once they are dissolved it tastes like watered rum!

The US Navy initially adopted British grog rations but then under influence from the growing whiskey industry, swapped over to what was presented as a more patriotic spirit after 1806. During the Civil War, the US Navy abolished the ration completely, perhaps taking advantage of the connection between abolitionism and prohibitionism, both of them gaining the upper hand with the departure of Confederate personnel. However it was only the ratings who were deprived.  It was not until 1913 that officers were coerced into official abstinence.

In contrast, the British Admiralty was frankly scared of the mutinous consequences  of depriving ratings of their historical entitlement, and it kept issuing Royal Navy rum, until 1970, when they overcame public nostalgia by breathalyzing the pilot of  a nuclear submarine after he had drunk his ration.

In fact, for centuries, the Royal Navy had maintained naval supremacy despite often inferior technology compared with its Spanish and French rivals, because its crews, pressganged or volunteers, outfought their enemies. And looking at it analytically, the major observable difference was the rum ration, which is why wanabee naval powers like Czarist Russia and Japan also served up rum.

British captains and admirals still have the discretion to order “Splice the mainbrace!” for special occasions, however, and naval lore is still steeped in rum, which in Britain was known as “Nelson’s blood,” since allegedly the devoted tars donated their rations to bring the Admiral’s body back from Trafalgar to London.

I checked it out in the Gibraltar library in the contemporary newspapers, and sadly,  the Admiral's body was carried back to London pickled in Spanish Brandy, aguardiente. Perhaps the tars did not want to waste the good stuff... but I have not been able to prove or disprove the story that the coffin was drained by the time it arrived in Britain. The tars might have preferred rum – but any spirit in a drought was long-standing tradition.


This week Sukhinder Singh of Speciality Drinks in London launched Black Tot – an exclusive bottling of Navy Rum over 40 years old – a find for rum-drinkers equivalent to discovering Tutankhamen’s pickled stiff, except the archaeologists never brought the young pharoah back to life, while the old rum has indeed been revived. It  was in sealed ceramic flagons allowing its unique biochemistry to play out over almost half a century.

In the Admiralty, the most coveted job was to sit on the committee that each year assessed what proportions of Jamaica, Trinidad and Demerara rums was consistent to maintain the formula, and Speciality's experts have topped up the work of all of those departed palates to ensure that the bottles live up to expectations.

If you can’t get some, then “up spirits” on Saturday with any dark rum and shed a tear for bygone glory!

Green indeed

Global fuming
Speculator
Investor Relations Magazine

Jan, 2008

What’s green and intoxicating? Ian Williams fuels up
back

‘Green’ has different connotations, the most (over)used conjuring benign visions of environmental soundness. Another implies being gullible and easy to trick. The two sometimes even converge – for example, when health-conscious consumers are tricked into buying overpriced tap water decanted into disposable bottles made of potentially toxic petrochemicals and trucked across continents.

You may think nothing could be greener than bio-fuels, but there are ominous aspects to this issue. Sugarcane is one of the most potent sources of vegetable energy, which is why Brazilians began to put the stuff in their gas tanks when they weren’t drinking it in their caipirinhas. But even cachaca producers complain that bio-ethanol production is driving their costs up the spouts of their stills, while environmentalists note with concern that sugarcane plantations are encroaching on the Amazon rainforest, one of the globe’s last big carbon sinks.

For some Caribbean countries faced with huge imported fuel bills and idle fields because of US and EU protectionism, sugar alcohol as fuel makes sense. But in a world where billions go hungry every day, turning corn into gasoline seems obscene: the grain it takes to fill one SUV tank with bio-ethanol could feed a person for a year.

What’s more, the idea is as dubious economically as it is ethically. There are processes that use waste oils, cornstalks, grass or almost any organic garbage to make bio-diesel, but they do not have big lobbyists on the Hill. Corn gas is economically sustainable only in an insulated environment of corporate welfare, a cocoon of subsidies, tax breaks and high-tariff barriers against imported sugar. It is not even slightly environmentally sustainable. It uses almost as much carbon-based fuel in its production as it delivers, while the resulting higher corn prices will lead to the prairies being plowed, destroying the regrowing carbon sink there.

But corn ethanol makes lots of political sense because politicians collect sack-loads of campaign contributions from its manufacturers and the Florida sugar barons who could not otherwise compete with the Caribbean and Brazil. And in US politics, it’s never a bad thing to have the farm lobby on your side. In the current paranoid climate, it also helps to imply that every dollar that goes to the Midwest corn barons is not going to a fundamentalist Arab sheikh.

Most perniciously, the green glow around corn gas relieves the pressure on Washington and Detroit to do anything about the gas-guzzling monstrosities wallowing along America’s roads. Washington refuses to set carbon limits, enforce stricter fuel efficiency standards or in any way lessen the nation’s addiction to cheap liquid fuel, while simultaneously pumping tax dollars to the corn gas emitters.

Some years ago, Speculator predicted the imminence of the $100 barrel of oil. My grim satisfaction at being correct is made even grimmer by the acquisition of an oil-heated home in the mountains and a car to get to and from it. Even so, I still believe gas is far too cheap in this country – and only higher fuel taxes will force economic design on Detroit and rational planning on the cities.

McChrystal Clear and on the Record

Ian Williams,
Letter from America
3 July 2010
Tribune

When I came to the US in 1989, to begin with, I was euphoric. In Britain, Private Eye was spending half its cover price in fighting libel suits, and had even introduced the novel concept of fact checking to some of its bemused correspondents. However, in the US, a public figure could not sue for libel! My euphoria soon died down. The American media was bland and spineless.

Shortly after I arrived, one of the veteran anchormen of American television spoke at a seminar arranged by the BBC in of its last Reithian moments and explained how television was now breaking the stories. I got the first question. If TV was so good, how had it completely missed the Savings & Loans scandal, which was then the biggest financial scandal in US history (and which incidentally contained many of the lessons about the perils of deregulation that had so clearly not been learnt two decades later!)?

His answer was revealing. He admitted my point, but explained that, “No one had raised it on the Hill.” My riposte was that since everyone on the Hill had their hands in the till, why would they? But there was the principle: news was what the establishment deemed to me news.

A week ago, a real journalist, Michael Hastings, revealed in Rolling Stone magazine the culture of contempt that General Stanley McChrystal the commander in Afghanistan had for the civilian politicians they were supposed to be serving. His colleagues in the media excoriated him. No one disputed the accuracy of his reporting, but what he had said did not fit into the establishment template of our noble warriors fighting for freedom, even it did match the General’s recidivist record of using tame media to manipulate the politicians.

Media critics slammed Hastings for breaking the journalistic ethic of reporting what was said “off the record,” even though Pentagon rules specifically excluded such a category. Even more bemusingly, the press quoted off the record, un-named Pentagon sources to prove that Hastings had broken the rules!

The CBS foreign affairs correspondent, joining the wolf-pack, complained that Hastings had never served his country, unlike the General. Neither, of course, had she. But it seems that a military service was only essential for negative reporting. Boosting the Pentagon has lower application standards. Apart from establishment pressure, there was also the mundane professional detail. Any beat correspondent who went off at a tangent to the spin being given them would be barred from access to the public figures and their spinning spokespeople. Hastings had shown them up.

In the real world, journalistic etiquette about sources might have an ethical dimension when protecting whistleblowers’ risking their jobs, freedom and lives, but it does not when it comes to revealing that the US military thinks and acts as if they were the real authorities in a banana republic.

When Wikileaks distributed a video clip of a US helicopter gunning down Reuters reporters in Baghdad and the shooting up a van filled with children that came to help them, the US response has been to arrest the alleged leaker and put out a hue and cry against Wikileak founder Julian Assange. The Pentagon had denied it could find the video when Reuters asked for it under the Freedom Of Information act. There has been little or noise from the American commercial media about the incident, the leak, or the authorities’ reaction. But they could find the energy to calumniate Hastings.

Several years ago, however, Judith Miller of the New York Times went to prison for refusing to reveal her sources for the administration’s outing of a CIA agent. The journalists’ organizations jumped up and down with indignation, and tried to make her into a heroine of journalistic ethics, even though in the real world, she was part of a media-manipulation plot by the Bush-Cheney administration to pass off invented information about Iraqi weapons and to punish those, like CIA agent’s husband who had questioned the veracity of this information.

In an impromptu interview with a rabbi the doyenne of the White House press corps, Helen Thomas suggested that Israeli Jews get out of Palestine and get back to Poland or Germany instead of occupying another people’s land. At 89 years old she had skipped on the nuance, and failed to distinguish between settlers and people born in Israel. It was probably time for her to go gently into that good night, but in the end she went chased with torches and pitchforks wielded by reporters many of whom had cheered us into war in Iraq.

New York Times correspondent Jeremy Peters started his story with unconscious irony, “To many in Washington, two sets of rules seemed to apply for journalists covering the president: those for regular White House correspondents, and those for Helen Thomas.” But what he should have explained is that the rules of journalistic sycophancy are self-imposed. They too could have asked probing questions, or followed on when it was clear the answers were evasive or mendacious. But as they showed during the Iraq War, most correspondents would not have quibbled if the President had declared the Earth was flat. The more enterprising might have asked it was a circle, or square. No wonder journalistic ethics is an oxymoron. There is ethics and truth. And there is collaboration in establishment accepted evil.

The Ayatollah of Canterbury

The ayatollah of Canterbury

The life of ayatollah Hussein Fadlallah shows that Islam can be liberal without assisting Western policies

*
o Ian Williams
o guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 6 July 2010 09.00 BST
o Article history

Today Lebanon will see the funeral of Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, the Grand Ayatollah often described as the "spiritual advisor" to Hezbollah. Of course, in many parts of the West that immediately starts a chain of associations leading directly to terrorism, Islamo-fascism, anti-Westernism and so on. Some might even see significance in his death, at 75, on July 4th, which will doubtless bring up his support for the attack on the American marine barracks in Beirut. But then they might also think about the joint Saudi/alleged CIA operation that tried to kill the Ayatollah with a massive bomb but ended up killing 80 men and women worshippers at his Mosque.

The Saudis later apologised, but Washington's "whoops, sorry," must have been lost in the mail, which did not stop the Ayatollah from immediately denouncing the attack on the World Trade Centre.

In fact, the Ayatollah, who had his own website (http://english.bayynat.org.lb/) epitomised what Western critics, with varying degrees of sincerity have been suggesting Islam should be. He took the West at its face value, decried the idea of theocratic rule in affairs of state and indirectly paved the way for Hezbollah, formerly the party of economically, socially and politically excluded Lebanese Shi'a to become part of a, relatively, democratic polity.

In a small way, his indicative fatwa, allowing women to use nail polish by turning obscurantist Islamic doctrine around, symbolizes his achievement in helping Hezbollah and Lebanese Shi'a into the mainstream. It is almost inconceivable to think of middle class Lebanese women without manicures! More importantly, instead of being a strict constructionist as claimed by the Justices of the Supreme Court, he took into account the original intent of Islamic family law, and interpreted it in the light of modern society to emphasise women's rights.

There is no doubt that the Ayatollah Fadlallah was a modernising and progressive influence in Islam, much more "modern" than many of his Christian counterparts.

A year ago he told the Wall St Journal "I don't believe that Welayat al-Faqih has any role in Lebanon… Perhaps some Lebanese commit themselves to the policy of the Guardian Jurist, as some of them commit themselves to the policy of the Vatican. My opinion is that I don't see the Guardianship of the Jurist as the definitive Islamic regime."

Hopefully such statements will inoculate the Hezbollah against any Iranian-influenced successor who wants to reinsert theocracy. But this Ayatollah's stand against religious authorities interfering in the polls compares favourably with American bishops telling Catholics to vote against candidates who support a woman's right to choose, or indeed the Evangelical conservatives in the US – not to mention the Christian Democrats of Europe who have been known to support the Vatican's views on occasion.

The Ayatollah supported Hezbollah in their battle against Israeli occupation, and supported the Palestinians as well, which will of course militate against acceptance of him as a cozy Episcopalian Ayatollah, although Rowan Williams's predecessors have not been averse to claiming the support of the Almighty against Britain's enemies.

As the Ayatollah's funeral takes place, along with whatever sura from the Quran, maybe there should be a quotation from that eminent theologian Robert Burns for the benefit of Western commentators, "O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us/ To see oursels as others see us." As a happy atheist I can say, as religious leaders go, here went one of the better ones.

Hypocrisy Rules OK?

United Nations, Pages 31-32
Hypocrisy on the March—From the U.S. And Israel to France and Morocco
By Ian Williams

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. July 2010
Ahmed Bujari, representative of the Western Sahara’s Polisario Front, speaks to reporters on April 20, 2010, following the Security Council decision to extend the mandate of the MINURSO peacekeeping force by one year. (U.N. photo/Eskinder Debebe)
THE FIRST week in May saw a media storm in Israel when the Hebrew tabloid Yediot Ahronot broke the news that, while he was an appeals court judge in apartheid South Africa, Richard Goldstone was in some way linked to rejecting the appeals of 28 death sentences.

Alan Dershowitz once wrote a book called Chutzpah (not available from the AET Book Club), and in his response to the allegations he and Israel's odious Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman personified it, jumping up and down in righteous glee that Goldstone had been proven unfit to sit in judgment on a democratic state like Israel. Some of the usual suspects went even further in deep psychoanalytic studies of why Goldstone was expiating his deep guilt by beating up on Israel and thus currying favor with the U.N. Human Rights Council.
At no point did any of this newly principled mob raise any new evidence to rebut or refute the generally irrefutable Goldstone Report. Indeed, the fervor of their ad hominem attacks suggests that they can't find any.
Even by the usual hypocritical standards of Israel and its supporters, this is chutzpah on so many levels, one hardly knows where to begin. For a start, however, although Lieberman promptly circulated the news to Israeli embassies across the world, it was the newspaper that dug it up—probably inspired by the same South African Zionists who tried to stop Goldstone from attending his grandson's bar mitzvah.
So why had Israel's famed secret services not done a background check on Goldstone and unearthed this earlier? Could it be because they regarded him—as indeed he regarded himself—as a friend of Israel, and as such to be excused a few executions?
Or could it be that wiser heads in the Israeli Foreign Ministry had not wanted to stir up memories of Israeli's vital role in supplying the apartheid regime, its biggest customer, with weaponry? Its collusion in buying yellowcake from South Africa, and their mutual assistance in developing nuclear weapons and means of delivery? The sole purpose of the Boer Bomb, after all, was to kill untold millions of black Africans if the white redoubt ever was seriously threatened. Or maybe they did not want to remind people of years in which sanctions were violated by blood diamonds from South Africa being exported and processed in Israel?
While many South African Jews took an active part in the anti-apartheid struggle, they tended not to include strong Zionists and pro-Israel supporters. Judge Goldstone, by contrast, was embraced by Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. So who would you rather have validating your anti-apartheid credentials: Mandela or Lieberman? Tutu or Dershowitz?
Indeed, hearing the chorus of "gotcha!" and "Told you so!" from American pro-Israel types reminds me of the conversation I had with Rabbi Arthur Herzberg about the Lobby that dare not let you speak its name. Most American Jews and American blacks opposed apartheid, of course. How, I asked Herzberg, had the issue of the South Africa-Israel connection never been a matter of public discourse, even among liberals in the U.S.? He paused, and complimented me on my acuity, before telling me that the Jewish caucus and the Congressional Black caucus leaderships had essentially agreed on a pact. In return for the CBC not raising the issue, they were assured of full support from the Jewish caucus for their domestic agenda.
Goldstone does not need any ethical validation from people who still support apartheid in Israel and the occupied territories.
Human Rights Hypocrisy
Hypocrisy is always a good theme for a column, so let's move to the northern tip of the African continent from the U.N. Security Council—where we had the France of Sarkozy fighting tooth and nail to keep a human rights monitoring clause out of the current resolution to extend the mandate of MINURSO in Western Sahara, even in the face of calls from its European allies like the UK and Spain.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon weighed in that he "remains very concerned about alleged violations of human rights" and that "his Personal Envoy, Christopher Ross, and the Secretariat will continue to work to promote the human rights of Sahrawis." The U.S. faced firmly in both directions and claimed that it is "deeply concerned about the allegations of human rights abuses by the parties." However, reports from within the Council suggest that Washington's concern did not run so deep as pressuring France—which was otherwise almost totally isolated—from backing Morocco. The UK, Mexico, Uganda, Austria, Brazil, Spain and Nigeria all favored a monitoring exercise. Russia, China and other countries with human rights issues seemed to have sat out this battle, which is almost a shame, since if they had joined with Paris it might have led to even more public ignominy for the latter.
There is, of course, only one reason Morocco and its French patron do not want to include a human rights monitoring machinery in the Western Sahara peacekeeping mission—the only one in the world without one. It is the same reason Israel refuses to mount a credible investigation into Operation Cast Lead: because they know what any such mission will find.
There was a minor success in the resolution—920, for the record—the preamble of which read, "Recognizing that the consolidation of the status quo is not acceptable in the long term." But, of course, it did not answer the question so familiar and equally unanswered on resolutions about the other scofflaw state at the opposite end of the Mediterranean: "So what are you going to do about it?"
The answer, of course, is to call for negotiations with no preconditions—which in the case of both the Sahrawis and the Palestinians implies abandoning their legal rights to self-determination and their occupied territories.
Nukes, Nukes, Who's Got the Nukes?
And, while hypocrisy is under discussion, the visit of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad to New York for the review conference of the Non-Proliferation Treaty was not a bad example. It is worth recording that his human rights record is deplorable, that he may have stolen the last election and, even if he didn't, he certainly acted as if that was what he was doing. On the nuclear issue, however, he almost certainly is speaking for the majority of Iranians. While some might long for the good old days when the GOP, Israel and Iran colluded to arm the Contras, Iran's president has now, of course, become a pariah in the U.S.—and not, one might add, for his human rights record.
In fact the Iranian president called the possession of nuclear arms "disgusting and shameful," and added, "Even more shameful is the threat to use such weapons."
But while Iran was in the pillory for standing there and renouncing any attempts to build nuclear weapons, there was the stunning sound of silence regarding North Korea, whose human rights record makes Iran seem a civic paradise, not to mention Pakistan, India and, of course, Israel—all of whom actually do have nuclear weapons.
There does seem to be some movement, however. The Permanent Five, including the U.S., expressed support for a nuclear-free Middle East. Once again this is greeted with surprising silence—perhaps because for the pro-Israel camp to vent its customary indignation against the Obama administration's allegedly anti-Israeli stance would involve publicly admitting that peace-loving, defenseless Israel actually has nuclear weapons.
And then we complete the circle, since there is strong evidence that Israel's nuclear arsenal was built up with help from apartheid South Africa. Go fulminate, Alan Dershowitz.

http://www.wrmea.com/component/content/article/353/9649-hypocrisy-on-the-marchfrom-the-us-and-israel-to-france-and-morocco-.html

4 July, Independence Day: a rum business

Nations' founding myths are just that. The US is no exception, with commerce and corruption alongside highminded heroics


* ian
*
o Ian Williams
o guardian.co.uk, Sunday 4 July 2010 14.00 BST
o Article history

Tea Party tax protest Revered memory: a modern Tea Party tax protest. Photograph: Getty Images

All countries have their special founding myths and legends. And all of them are eminently challengeable. 4 July no less than others. Independence Day is, of course, the special day for the Tea Partyers and Tea Baggers, when they can re-declare independence from their elected president and government, and maybe even free their Medicare from alien government control.

This Sunday, I will be at Tea Party-free barbecue, drinking and watching the fireworks. (The Third Benedict Arnold Appreciation Society annual barbecue is not until the Saturday after.) I used to love Guy Fawkes' night, (known in Boston before the Irish immigration as "Pope's Day") even though I deplore capital punishment and occasionally toast Mr Fawkes as the only man to enter parliament with honourable intentions.

In fact, Congress actually declared independence on 2 July, and then took two days to draw up an explanation of why they did it. And, says William Hogeland, author of the deliciously subversive book Declaration, it was not actually signed until later; while, indeed, many of those who did eventually sign had not even been at the meeting that declared independence, nor drew up the declaration. And showing a spirit that American politicians have shown ever since, some of those who did sign had, in fact, vigorously opposed the whole process.

Hogeland adds a whole new dimension, however. It was not the invisible hand of Adam Smith that brought the new country into being, but rather the carefully hidden hands of Sam Adams. He does not appear in the wonderful musical and film of 1776 – and one reason is that while he was there all along, he kept out of sight and did his work from behind the scenes, a composite Karl Rove and Dick Cheney of the era. His letters enjoined recipients to burn them on arrival. Most of them did, but enough were lax enough to show his fingerprints all over the actual Declaration, if not the document.

The Boston Tea Party itself is iconic and tied to 4 July in more ways than the obvious – certainly, in ways unsuspected by modern Tea Party types. It embarrassed many of the Bostonian leaders of the opposition to Britain such as John Adams, since they were well aware that the revolt was organised by his cousin Sam Adams to get rid of the cargo of duty-free tea, which was going to undercut the warehouses-full that he had smuggled in previously. Sam Adams knew that the worthy burgesses of Boston would buy the cheaper East Indian Company product if it hit the markets. But he also probably calculated that it would provoke the British into destructive countermeasures.

An affluent merchant, Sam Adams used and manipulated the poorer, genuine, revolutionary-minded citizenry and militiamen for his purposes; and he certainly did not share their anti-plutocratic sentiments.

Later, the heroic legend of the Tea Party covered up the sordid reality that the real issue of contention was the taxes on molasses the colonists used to make rum, for drinking, trading for slaves in Africa and helping wipe out the "savages". Needless to say, these were uncomfortable details for the abolitionists, prohibitionists and evangelists who later wrote the histories and drafted the legends of the new country.

Similarly, as Hogeland details, Congress began with a majority of "reconciliationists", who wanted to come to a deal with the British. Sam Adams wanted independence and worked behind the scenes to get it, including mounting what amounted to a military coup against the newly-elected government of the state of Pennsylvania, which was elected on a reconciliationist ticket. In effect, Congress overturned the state's charter – one of the many crimes alleged against King George in the Declaration.

The result was a document of some contradictions. Its original draft tried to blame the king for forcing the slave trade on the unwilling colonists, but Congress did not have the chutzpah of today's Astroturf cultivators behind the Tea Party, and pulled that one. Instead, it chose to ignore all those dark-skinned people who may have been "endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights", but from which so many of the signatories had alienated them.

The Declaration complained that King George had "endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalisation of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither", which ought to mean that he should be popular in Arkansas, and, indeed, with the Tea Party at large.

The perfidious George also "kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies, without the consent of our legislatures… He has affected to render the military independent of, and superior to, the civil power." Wow, who knew those founding fathers were against the military? Did anyone tell General McChrystal?

George even emulated his successor George W, since the founders reviled him for "depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury; for transporting us beyond seas, to be tried for pretended offenses." Of course, Guantánamo springs to mind – but what is this? No Hanoverian waterboarding?

But no hard feelings. Almost the only readily available American beer that is drinkable is named after Sam Adams, and its advertising slogan, which I came across on my first visit, was "Drink Revolting Beer". The bartender explained it was an awful, bitter and undrinkable brew, but then reconsidered: "Hey, you're a Limey, you'll love it."

I will hoist one to the memory he tried so hard to expunge.

The Spies of Life

The Cold War is so over
By Ian Williams

Asia Times 2 July 2010

WASHINGTON - It's not quite James Bond. The Murphy couple in their New Jersey Home with cans of coke, Bud Lite, and bottles of ketchup in front of them definitely made to be shaken not stirred. As for deep undercover, a Russian accent from someone with an archetypal Irish name like Murphy had even the friendly neighbors wondering what the deal was.

Now with the arrest of the Murphys and the rest of their, well, "unregistered agents of foreign governments ring", everyone is wondering what the deal was. The Federal Bureau of Investigation(FBI) had been watching them for a decade, either as puzzled as everybody else, or collaborating in an elaborate implicit job-creation scheme between the Russian and American agencies.

The Murphys and three other couples were among 10 individuals suspected of acting as undeclared agents of a foreign country who the United States Department of Justice announced on June 28 had been arrested the previous day as a result of an FBI counter-intelligence investigation. Nine of the suspects were given fake identities and cover stories to establish themselves in the US, the FBI said.

When I came to the United States before the end of the Cold War, a stalwart of the foreign press corps was the only Russian journalist who did not live in their own walled compound. He had his own mid-town apartment, his own big American car, went to every reception and was clearly on another payroll apart from his newspaper for whom he never wrote. Did he collect information on the US, on journalists? He appeared on prime-time television, where he explained Soviet policy in flawless colloquial American English.

He would have made a good sleeper. Why send someone with an accent and a totally inappropriate name? Many of these 10 had notable Russian accents completely at odds with their assumed identities, and ironically, if they had used Russian names no one would have noticed with the massive post-Soviet immigration to the US.

It was the anomalies people noticed. Several of the couples had children whom the prosecutors alleged were to provide cover. The thought of James Bond pushing a baby buggy for deep cover seems unconvincing. There seems to be no evidence that they passed on serious secret information, and much of what they did allegedly seek, like information on administration personnel's attitudes to Russia
, could have been obtained by journalists or even by trawling the web.

That is why they are charged only with being unregistered agents of foreign governments - an accusation frequently made against lobbyists - rather than with espionage. Nor do spies traditionally post pictures and details on social networking sites like Facebook. Adding to the Keystone Cops ambience, sultry redhead Anna Chapman was arrested when she went to the police to hand in a fraudulent passport that an undercover FBI agent pretending to be an undercover SRV (Russian Foreign Intelligence Service) agent had given her that weekend.

The news of FBI involvement has to be taken into consideration, with the bureau's extensive record of using paid informants to provoke people into crime and then arresting them for it. Last week in upstate Newburgh, a defense attorney asked for bail for four alleged terrorists accused of conspiring to blow up a synagogue. [1]

The attorney assured the judge that her clients were in no danger of committing any crime - as long as they had no contact with the FBI paid informant who had put them up to it and provided the weaponry to do so. In fact, a disturbing number of "terrorist" trials show FBI plants instigating the criminal acts, but the magic word "terrorist" is usually enough to blow away any defense of "entrapment".



It is clear that the SRV was up to something, but was as clueless as the FBI. Both agencies continued their old Cold War habits when neither had much to gain for it, except gainful employment for their recruits and handlers. The SRV spent untold sums running this singularly useless network for a decade. The FBI was watching them all that time and only moved when they thought that some of them were leaving the country.

Moscow is huffing and puffing at Cold War moves, but it has not really explained why it was paying people who had assumed entirely inappropriate identities and gone undercover in the US. The FBI can't explain it either, although the Central Intelligence Agency could probably draw up a supporting brief since they are almost certainly running similar networks across the globe, including in Russia.

So what are their chances in court? The days of the Red Scare are down now, so they would certainly get a better hearing than the Cuban Wasp network, the five Cuban agents whose work in monitoring Cuban American exile groups got Draconian sentences - in Florida, dominated as it is by Cuban exiles. Jonathan Pollard, sentenced to life for spying for Israel, allegedly put US security at risk, which is why even the Israel lobby has not managed to get his sentence reduced.

But once the FBI gets onto a case, the Kafkaesque proceedings can destroy lives. Wen Ho Lee, accused of spying for China, eventually pleaded guilty to one charge to avoid over 50 others with the risk of being sentenced to life. In the end, president Bill Clinton apologized to him, and he won a substantial cash settlement from the government and media.

In this case the loud noise from Moscow and the absence of seriously damaging information offer a wide range of outcomes. Russia could simply round up a dozen or so Americans in Moscow and offer to swap. The FBI will need to be vindicated, which an admission could do. The prosecutors could offer deportation, since most of the false identities make accused illegal immigrants, or there could be plea bargaining of the traditional style. One mystery is what happens to the children born in the US. In a sense they are wards of state - but which state?

Would they want to stay in the land of ketchup and Bud Lite, or become pensioners of a grateful Russian state - which could find uses for the vernacular American English they have acquired?

There is clearly Inspector Clouseau-like culpability to go round on both the Russian and American side. It might be time for their respective presidents to order their respective spooks to note that the Cold War is over.

Note
1. Trial of alleged synagogue bomb plot gang thrown into chaos over withheld evidence New York Daily News, June 4, 2010.

Ian Williams is the author of Deserter: Bush's War on Military Families, Veterans and His Past, Nation Books, New York.

(Copyright 2010 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

Rabe Review

2:30 Catskill Review of Books

Ian Williams talks to David Rabe, playwright, author about his latest novel "Girl by the Road at Night: A Novel of Vietnam ."


rabe


Catskill Review of Books
2:30 every Saturday on WJFF 90.5 Fm
www.wjffradio.org

A Tale of Two Lynchings

Sadly, this reincarnation of MEI has come to end and is being suspended, so this is my last article in the last issue. Anyone out there with a big chequebook and media ambitions should get in touch! Ian

A Tale of Two Lynchings

Passionate Detachment - Ian Williams' America
Middle East International 11 June 2010

In the Eastern Mediterranean, armed Israeli commandos equipped for ‘crowd control’ in that distinctively lethal way reserved for Palestinian crowds, faced a ‘lynching’ by ‘terrorists’ armed with bars. One of them even might have had a knife to confront the might of the IDF. One expects better from a country whose founding myths include David and Goliath.
Within a week, there was a much more plausible lynching, as veteran correspondent Helen Thomas was forced into premature retirement by the combined weight of successive White House spokespeople, and the supine press corps she had often shown up with her aggressive questioning.
In an impromptu interview with a rabbi at the White House, Thomas had suggested that Israeli Jews get out of Palestine and get back to Poland or Germany instead of occupying another people’s land. If she had been a neo-con saying that Palestinians should move out because they had all these Arab countries to move to, she would have been safe, respected and invited to all the major conferences. But at 89 years old, she had skipped on the nuance and failed to distinguish between settlers and people born in Israel. It was probably time for her to go gently into that good night, but in the end she went chased with torches and pitchforks.
Thomas played by normal journalistic rules, not those of a deferential royal palace reporter. New York Times correspondent Jeremy Peters started his story with unconscious irony: “To many in Washington, two sets of rules seemed to apply for journalists covering the president: those for regular White House correspondents, and those for Helen Thomas.” He should have explained that the rules of journalistic sycophancy are self-imposed. As they showed during the Iraq war, most correspondents would not have quibbled if the president had declared the Earth was flat.
Ari Fleischer, press secretary of George W Bush, washed the blood of Iraq off his hands and demanded she go. Judith Miller, the conduit for fictions that started the war, joined the fray for Fox News. Clinton’s press spokesman, Lanny Davies, followed suit. “If a journalist, or a columnist, said the same thing about Blacks or Hispanics, they would already have lost their jobs,” he inveighed, but failed to point out anywhere where a Black or Hispanic government had occupied another disenfranchised people’s country for over four decades in defiance of international law.
Barack Obama’s press secretary Robert Gibbs joined the mob with strong words – “offensive and reprehensible.” Now, it is true that Thomas’ longevity on the front row of the White House briefing room might have dulled her sharper edges, but the outrage of the American media at her remarks is a stunning contrast to the relative silence over the murder of eight Turks and one Turkish-American on the Mavi Marmara, and the way the media headlined each Israeli official lie and then ignored the retractions: on the 50 al-Qa’ida operatives who became undocumented, the ‘Auschwitz audio’ that was revealed to be edited and wrongly attributed, or even the alleged shots fired at the commandos.
Certainly the victims’ families and the Muslim world that Obama is trying to reassure, let alone those in the West who are concerned about human rights, have waited in vain for the White House to consider mass slaying on the high seas “offensive and reprehensible”. Sadly, in the US, many of those who profess concern for human rights have an Israeli exception. Patrick Buchanan, Thomas’ nativist alter ego on the right, quite correctly baited the liberal defenders of Binyamin Netanyahu’s latest outrage who rushed to sign the AIPAC letter supporting it despite a clear ethical stand from the J-Street lobby. He wrote, “today, liberal Democrats who regard Martin Luther King as a moral hero for championing non-violent civil disobedience to protest injustice are cheering not the unarmed passengers trying to break the Gaza blockade, but the Israelis enforcing the blockade.”
I am not alone in wondering at Buchanan’s conversion to civil rights and evocation of King, but it is true that it might come as a surprise to Mark Regev and the Democrats in Congress that Rosa Parks did not stay sitting on the bus to get comfortable, nor did her contemporaries go to the Greensboro Woolworth’s lunch counter for coffee, home fries and two eggs sunny-side up. They went to make a point. And the political descendants of their then southern conservative opponents are now shoulder-to-shoulder with liberal Democrats defending the murder of protestors.
While much of the American discussion on the fallout from the flotilla massacre is in line with a French states- man’s comment on one of Napoleon’s barbarism (“It was worse than a crime! It was a mistake”) Obama’s silence breeds impunity. At every level, from the Israeli cabinet down to the staff sergeant who killed six people at point blank range with a pistol, they have solid evidence that there will be no repercussions. Indeed, the sergeant is in line for a medal. Build settlements in defiance of the US – send more aid. Devastate Gaza to international condemnation – the US will double the stockpile of bombs and munitions available for immediate transfer.
The blockade of Gaza is against UN Security Council Resolution 1860 that the US allowed to pass. It is opposed by every country in the world and demurred at by the US. Yet Washington’s support is unwavering. What is a staff sergeant with a Glock supposed to think? Promotion and a medal, of course, and perhaps even a US congressional resolution of congratulations and a quick green card?

History through the bottom of a (BP) barrel

Letter From America
Tribune 4 June 2010

Ian Williams

BP is an icon for the previous century. Its consciously green but now sadly ironic logo recalls the period under Lord Browne when it stood for “Beyond Petroleum,” and was one of the first of the oil companies to break from the Seven Sisters’ solidarity of climate change denials.

The company has always suffered from the Confucian curse of living in “interesting times.” Who remembers now its genesis as the Anglo Iranian Oil Company, or the part First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill played in its founding to ensure the supply of fuel for the Royal Navy’s dreadnoughts and keep the Empire safe?

The company’s machinations in Iran and British and later American government involvement tapped a deep vein of fundamentalism in Teheran that is still gushing decades later. Just across the Persian Gulf, the US determination to get dibs on equal shares of Middle Eastern oil meant propping up the Saudi tribe who named the country after them, imposed its own fundamentalist cult on it, and then swamped more modern and tolerant forms of Islam in a gush of oil dollars.

The other thing about the company was of course that Churchill made sure the company was British government owned. It produced untold billions for the British Treasury over the years and functioned successfully and commercially for much of the twentieth century. When the New York Times automated epithet machine used to add to Margaret Thatcher “the Prime Minister who privatized the loss making state industries,” we used to protest this intrusion of ideological mythology by pointing out that the companies she privatised were in fact making bucketfuls of money for the public purse, and that she had in fact sold them to her friends at a huge discount. It was, of course, left to later prime ministers to privatise public services like British Rail so that the private owners could make even bigger losses and bill the Treasury for the difference.

And so on to the twenty-first century, where BP, having expanded by buying Rockefeller’s old Standard Oil of Ohio, inherited some sloppy management styles and seems to have added some its own. Standard Oil was split by trust-busting US governments a long time ago, but the well lubricated wheel of fortune spins around, and as BP’s stock price plummets, commentators muse the possibility of a merger with or takeover from Exxon. Exxon was renamed from Esso, that is SO, that is Standard Oil, and so it would reconstitute the old Rockefeller empire.

Exxon is rabidly ideological and has fought all climate change mitigation and conservation legislation in the US. It would be sweet payback to take over heretical John Browne’s former company, even if it left him spinning in his retirement. The merger would face far less regulatory problems than before because the once might big seven sisters now control much less of the world’s oil reserves than before. Why would that be? Because outside the Anglo-Saxon world, the reserves are all owned by state-owned companies – like BP used to be. But in the US, the merged company would probably dominate the US political process even more.

Sadly, in the US, the oil companies own the state and not the other way round, which brings us round to the present gusher in the Gulf. It now emerges that not only did oil lobbyists dominate legislative proceedings on Capitol Hill, undermining the power of regulators, but they effectively ran the inspectorate charged with enforcing the attenuated regulations. Of course, when it came to oil rig installations it was not just the oil companies. Playing a prominent role was Halliburton, Dick Cheney’s own gang, that managed so successfully to privatise war in Iraq.


The federal Minerals Management Service inspectors who were supposed to check the rigs passed on the forms to the companies to fill in themselves. And of course, the background, like a Greek Chorus accompanying the whole tragedy are those Republican Convention delegates who dithyrambed Sara Palin’s apotheosis chanting “Drill Baby Drill.” After all, it was Washington’s reluctance to install even European style conservation and mileage standards that leads oil companies to boldly go where no drills have gone before in the uncharted depths of the Arctic and the Gulf of Mexico.

Of course, the Republicans are blaming this gush of oil on Obama, just as they blamed the gush of trillions of dollars in the financial crisis. And the worrying thing is that he is still trying to be bi-partisan and show that he is business friendly in the face of rabid and unscrupulous opponents whose fixed principle is that business is always right. Everytime Sarah Palin or similar Republican luminaries speak they should be greeted with “Spill Baby Spill!”

So what inhibits Obama? Well, reminiscent of New Labour’s worst exemplars it is difficult to attack the Drill Baby Drill crowd when so many Democrats had their hands in the till of the oil companies as well. In the end, perhaps that is the exiguous moral superiority of the Democrats that they are not shameless enough to go ahead and attack anyway.

And as for BP, should we not support it as an iconic British company? Well, check the share register. Like Cadbury’s, the other patriotic standard bearer, non-UK mostly US shareholders, , almost certainly own the majority of the company.

Come back Winston. If not all, much may be forgiven.

Hyphenated America

Hyphenated America
Passionate Detachment, Middle East International, 27 May 2010

From Ian Williams

In the equations of bigotry, substituting the terms, as in algebra, reveals the prejudice. For ace neo-con Daniel Pipes, Rima Fakih, an Arab-American of Muslim background, winning the Miss USA pageant, made him “suspect an odd form of affirmative action”. He does seem to have had the acuity to pull back from his initial knee-jerk position, unlike the rest of what perforce we will call the Judeo-Christian blogosphere.

In the great prejudicial spirit of having cakes and eating them, Fakih was an unworthy floozy because she had performed in some pole-dancing contest – and a crypto Shi’i Hizbullah agent because she was, after all, Arab and, what is more, Lebanese. Her appearance in a skimpy bikini was deep uncover for some even deeper Islamic plot. Others speculated that the admittedly odious Donald Trump, owner of the franchise, had contrived her victory in order to further some business deal with Arabs.

If you wanted investment from, say, Saudi Arabia, it is arguable that getting young Arab maidens to prance about in their underwear is not the way to go. But it is such sheer lunacy in the commentary that showed the deep vein of ugly and irrational anti-Muslim prejudice. At least Pipes conceded that Fakih had qualifications as a beauty queen, by being, well, attractive. Now let us reverse the terms of the equation. Patrick Buchanan, a paleo-conservative of the old nativist school, pointed out that if Elena Kagan were nominated to the Supreme Court, it would mean an overwhelmingly Protestant state was being judged by six Roman Catholics and three Jews. Even though Buchanan is a Catholic himself, his mathematics brought down hellfire on his head, with accusations of anti-Semitism redoubling against him.

It is easy to be suspicious of American, and indeed modern Anglo-Saxon bean-counting. After all, when you consume beans, you get flatulence. After Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir or Indira Gandhi, the idea that electing women to positions of power necessarily did much, either for the world in general or women as a group, had, surely, been discredited. Indeed, the conservatives have had their own fun with the idea: the only black judge on the Supreme Court bench is the un-regenerately conservative Clarence Thomas, whose views have little or no support whatsoever from black Americans.

The term ‘Judeo-Christian’ may have begun as a reflection of perceived Western cultural identity, but there is little doubt that its use in the United States has often been a conscious attempt to create a spurious philosophical unity between Jews and Christians – and against Muslims, who are being punished for the mistake of inhabiting the place that Zionists had decided was their own. After all, on the big theological issues, who is closer? Muslims who revere Jesus and Mary, and even accept the virgin birth, or Jews who either ignore or disdain the Galilean prophet? If Muslims are excluded for adding an extra prophet, how do we fit in the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith?

However, this rhetoric, with a big helping hand from the likes of Usama Bin-Laden, has successfully positioned Muslims as the outsiders. It would, truly, be anti-Semitic to say that all Jews are crooks because of Bernie Madoff, and prejudicial to cast all blacks as murderers because of Willie Horton. But far too many Americans can safely assume that because al-Qa’ida claims to be Muslim, all Muslims are tainted with its crimes.

That is why, within days, the usual suspects exploded again. Near the World Trade Centre in downtown New York, two new mosques are under consideration for congregations that are already worshipping in the vicinity. Mark Williams, Chairman of the Tea Party Express, denounced them as monuments to the 9/11 hijackers, and derided their dedication to the “Monkey God”. Admittedly, with the sophisticated sense of balance so characteristic of the Tea-Partiers, he apologised. But it was to Hindus he said sorry, in case anyone mistook his words as a slight against the god Hanuman.

Facebook immediately had 45,000 people sign up for a page denouncing the attempt to build a mosque close by. They had even more signing up for the page demanding cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in response to threats from some fanatical Muslims against cartoonists. Many of the signatories invoked a defence of free speech, but once again we substitute the terms.

When Mayor Rudi Giuliani tried to close down a Brooklyn museum for showing works that included a crucifix in urine, I do not remember hosts of defenders racing to micturate on icons. Rather, they protested his disregard for the First Amendment, and indeed went to court to overthrow his decision to de-fund the museum.

It all leads to the unsurprising conclusion that in the modern United States, there is only one permissible form of naked prejudice. The good news is that the statements made about Arabs by the pro-Israeli right, including the convenors of the Tea Party crowds, reveal their bigotry, and that alienates them from most Americans, including American Jews. If it weren’t that the know-nothing minority was disturbingly large, it would be almost music to the ears to hear bigoted blowhards talking themselves out of political influence in such a fashion.

The End of the Beginning for Obama?

Obama must take the gloves off

After the success of the healthcare reforms, Obama’s position suddenly looks much stronger
by Ian Williams
Sunday, April 11th, 2010 Tribune

The United States creaked triumphantly into the middle of the 20th century when Barack Obama’s team finally squeezed through his healthcare reform bill.

The string and sealing wax effort will need patches almost immediately – although it could have done without the President’s executive order banning federal money being spent on abortions. That was his price for the anti-abortionists in his own party, who were prepared to let 30 million uninsured real people die prematurely in order that embryonic life be preserved or, rather, that no taxpayers’ money be spent on their potential termination.

Those on the left of the Democrats who held out to the last for inclusion of a public option were right to stand firm for as long as they did, but right to fold when the time came. This was a once in a century possibility to rewrite the agenda.

The Republicans, whipped in by the far right, were and are solid against any reform that Obama might introduce – even if many elements of the bill had in the past been proposed by their own party luminaries such as Richard Nixon.

The Republicans’ detachment from reality should make them unelectable, but that depends on how successfully they can detach the electorate from the real world – and their degree of success is worrying. One almost has to admire their cynical Orwellian skill in brandishing two fingers on each hand to voters and persuading them that they make five.

They have been relatively successful in persuading millions that the bank bailout – conceived and passed under George W Bush and executed by Bush appointees to deal with a disaster that had developed and come to fruition under Bush – is really an Obama plan. Perhaps the most eloquent commentary on the Bush presidency is his complete absence from the casting call for the role of national elder statesman. His silence suggests that he has shrunk into the obscurity he worked so assiduously to achieve.

Or perhaps, for the paranoid among us, the Republican leadership has made a conscious decision to let Bush and his mistakes drop into the memory hole. By ignoring him, they help to obscure the disaster of his two terms. After all, they have persuaded millions that the way to protest against the big business domination of American life is to vote for the Republican Party which epitomises that domination. Indeed, it is the Republicans who are fighting to the last vote to thwart any plans to stop government regulation of the banks and financial houses or any attempt to recoup through taxes the bonuses with which the guilty chief executives are rewarding themselves.

The classic Republican poster was “Get the government’s hands off my Medicare”. Medicare is the public healthcare option for American pensioners, which is so successful that Taiwan took it as the model when it introduced a national health service 15 years ago, and is the system that the left Democrats want extended to all citizens. The Republicans would love to destroy it on ideological grounds, but cynically concede that this outstanding example of “socialised medicine” is so popular with senior citizens – who vote in disproportionate numbers – that they try to appear as its defenders.

The first problem for the Democrats is their equivalent of “new” Labour – the Democratic Leadership Council and the so-called “Blue Dogs” that function as a conservative fifth column in the US Congress and are always prepared to hold crucial votes to ransom, whether it be to stop the public option or dilute financial regulation.

To be fair to the Republicans, because of this faction, the Democrats under Bill Clinton were equally to blame for deregulation and the general adoption of the neo-liberal consensus. But since fairness has disappeared from the political arsenal in Washington, it is not the history, more the present that inhibits the administration from coming out with all guns blazing.

Then there is the temperament of Obama. With America’s poisonous history, there is no doubt his election marked a huge milestone. But it would almost be a form of inverse racism to assume the election of a black President in itself changed the country, rather than symbolising the possibility of change. Margaret Thatcher’s election in Britain was not necessarily a big step forward for womankind, any more than all-women shortlists have moved the Labour Party leftwards.

As I said when he was elected, Obama is no leftist, despite the fevered nightmares of the right and the daydreams of the left. He is a vast improvement on Bush and the Republicans, but of all comparisons that is the most odious. He is certainly committed to social justice in a way that they are not – but his choice of tools to effect that still ties him to the neo-liberal Republican/DLC bankers’ consensus.

At the same time, the disciplined war of attrition waged by the Republicans against his agenda, particularly healthcare, has not stopped him making some much improved appointments, for example in the National Labour Board. Now he has won on healthcare, one can only hope that he follows through with an all-out assault on the industry lobbies and the Republicans and Democrats who dance to their tune.

This would prove popular for the mid-term elections, put the blame for the crisis back where it belongs and allow him to build on his achievements. At home, as in the Middle East with Benjamin Netanyahu, if Obama wants to succeed, now is payback time.
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Fundamentalism, not faith

Passionate Detachment

Ian Williams, Middle East International 7 May 2010

When the Times Square bomber was first reported to be white, many liberal Americans, even atheists, muttered silent prayers that it was a ‘Tea Partier’ trying to make a point. The would-be bomber was in fact Pakistani, and many on the net don’t read past the first syllable, so that made him an honorary Palestinian.

Not that it made much difference, since looking through the prism of American Islamophobia, the distinction between terrorist, Muslim and Palestinian is infinitesimal. The same week, the state of Arizona gave its police force basically the right to demand proof of legal residence from anyone in the state. To be fair, they are more likely to be looking for a Miguel than a Muhammad, but heaven help anyone they stop with a double-whammy name like Omar, both Hispanic and Arabic.

It reminded me of the year after 9/11 when I was coming out of Newark airport and saw a South Asian man in a blazer and tie being led away by immigration officers as his white American wife ran after him shouting: “What’s up, Muhammad?” Comment was truly superfluous.

In an only slightly more sophisticated version of this red-neckery, right after the bomb was discovered, Senator Joseph Lieberman called for the immediate removal of citizenship from any suspected terrorist so that the allegedly guilty party could be deprived of any due process rights. Admittedly, there were also calls for the immediate removal of the senator’s Harvard law degree, since it did not take a great legal mind to see that there were serious flaws in the idea.

Just as in Arizona, Lieberman wants to grant to police and other officials not often renowned for their sensitivity the power to arrest anyone whose name or looks they do not like, and deprive them of due process rights.

Incidentally – showing that the likes of the senator do not really see themselves as others see them – Lieberman was asking for the existing laws that take away the passports of US citizens serving in foreign armies to be extended to terrorists. He is on shaky ground here. Each year, several hundred Americans volunteer for service with the Israel Defense Forces. Their passports could be forfeited – but that never happens. Which is just as well, since Lieberman could lose many voters and even more supporters if it did.

Faisal Shahzad seems to have confessed to both the bomb and to having been trained in Pakistan to make it. One can have no sympathy for someone who wanted to kill and maim hundreds of civilians thronging Times Square, but it is interesting that he was caught by old-fashioned police work, with no FBI paid informers inciting him. Nor was he tortured and incarcerated here or anywhere else. Indeed, it was so old-fashioned that the cavalry came to the rescue: it was a mounted policeman who saw the fizzing bomb and cleared the area.

In short, the system worked without any of the violations of human rights that Lieberman called for. However, the senator’s solution is based on a firm conviction that Muslims have a lesser regard for human life than so-called ‘Judeo-Christians’, even though the latter include the Stern Gang who blew up the King David Hotel, killing Jews, Christians and Muslims in a multi-faith bloodbath, and the deeply patriotic army veteran Timothy McVeigh, whose bomb in Kansas City did the same. McVeigh told a reporter before being executed: “Death and loss are an integral part of life everywhere. These people in Oklahoma that lost loved ones, I’m sorry. But you know what? We have to accept it and move on.”

Of course, we have to be careful not to do mirror-image stereotyping: just because McVeigh was a Christian gun-rights fanatic, Joe Stack (who flew his plane into the IRS building) opposed taxes, and Sen Lieberman seemingly has an implacable anti-Muslim and pro-Israeli attitude, does not mean that those who attend Tea Party rallies are all terrorists, even if they share so many principles. Indeed, this fact brings into focus the axis between far-right Christianity and far-right Zionism, which so many American Jews find disturbing.

However, all of those beliefs are identifiably home-grown, or at least naturalised through long domicile in the country. There is no doubt that for a significant number of Americans, Islam is still alien, even though there are probably more Muslims than Jews in the United States. The pairing of Muslim and fundamentalism comes more easily than Jewish (or Christian) and fundamentalism, even though the evidence clearly shows that it is the fundamentalism, not the faith, that moves people to horrendous acts.

Brown and Barack

Written for publication before the result of the UK election would be known, which is why, of course, I did not mention the war- Fawlty style

Ian

Barack Bamboozled by Bankers?

Letter from America Tribune 7 May 2010

Ian Williams

Any rational billionaire would think twice before wanting to see crazed ideologues elected to run their country. If you had a big financial stake in a country would you want see it run by people with only a tenuous connection to reality, like Tories verging on dual membership with the UKIP and BNP or Republicans who think that Obama is a foreign Muslim and who are prepared to see people die in their thousands rather than countenance abortion or socialized medicine? Which is of course why business people  have put their money behind New Labour and the New Democrats – both happily untainted by ideology and pragmatically adaptable to their own best interests.

But on a single issue, like regulated trading for the finance industry, or indeed protecting health insurers, the torrents of cash now flow to the Republican Party despite its trying to stop a financial reform bill by loudly claiming that it was too soft on the bankers.

Republican strategist Frank Luntz had drawn up a plan that party leaders have followed almost to the letter. "Public outrage about the bailout of banks and Wall Street is a simmering time bomb set to go off on Election Day. Frankly, the single best way to kill any legislation is to link it to the Big Bank Bailout."  In reality, there is no link. Indeed  the very bailout that they are reviling was a Republican Bush era administration measure designed to cope with a crisis that had indeed been brewing for decades but came to boiling point while he was President and was too busy invading Iraq to pay attention.

The Republican leadership followed this breathtaking cynical ploy through, to the point of threatening a filibuster of any debate on the bill. And it could play to decades of Alice in Wonderland output from Fox and the mainstream. The party blamed big government for the crisis, which is true, up to a point. Except that it was government’s acts of omission that actually caused it: its withdrawal from its previous oversight and regulation.

The floodgates are now open with cash pouring towards the Republicans and lobbyists bending their ears, which is what makes the new, mid-Atlantic phenomenon of conservatives masquerading as radical populists so truly nauseating.

It was of course, not the nonexistent bailout, but the regulation, the scrutiny of derivatives – and much overlooked, the extension of shareholder rights- in the bill that outraged the monstrous regiments of Mammon. The general staff of those regiments is the Business Roundtable, which represents CEOs of the biggest corporations and has put untold millions of shareholders money into pressuring Congress to defang the Securities and Exchange Commission and averting any threat to their looting.

American shareholders, who nominally own American companies, have no rights to vote on the pay of executives or the board, nor even the right to nominate new directors and campaign for them. It is this formula for a self-perpetuating self-enriching oligarchy at the helm of companies that has destroyed American industry, impoverished American workers and corrupted American politicians at every level.

Only a very confident and cynical group could pull off such an inversion of reality. But confident and cynical is what they are – and imbued with mistrust of government is what their constituency is – unless the government is locking up foreigners, Muslims and radicals, in which case it is always right.

What also helped was that the Republicans have a point about Obama’s banking bill, just as they had a point about his Healthcare reform. Big business and bank lobbyists had indeed secured too many concessions. It is also true that Goldman Sachs and Wall Street gave more money to Obama and the Democrats than they did to Republicans, which is of course what inhibits the Administration from a more vigorous all-out attack on the sharks and vultures of the banking world, leaving the radical populist rhetoric to the opposition.

For once again, many Democrats have played their part, usually those belonging to the equivalent and inspiration for New Labour, the Democratic Leadership Council, whose text is “the poor ye shall always have with you,” with a subtext – “so ye can ignore them and pander to the rich.” The rich in this case is the Business Roundtable.

Sadly, in the short term that has been true, but the traumatic effect of the meltdown has been to stir up the poor and everyone else. Neither Republicans nor Democrats now want to be seen siding with the bankers – in public at least. What happens behind closed lobby doors is another matter.

Several Democrats trousered the bankers’ cheques and but told them that it was more than their jobs were worth to defy public sentiment on the issue. The Republicans  reconsidered the effect on the public of filibustering financial reform, which would have made daily  headlines of their opposition and exposed their outrageous claims to popular scrutiny. They dropped the filibuster. But perhaps from the bankers’ point of view, they earned their money. Their ferocious opposition to the Democrat Bill has made it appear as if it were far stronger on the bankers than it actually is.

So where is Obama in all this? Sadly, like Gordon Brown, he genuinely does seem to believe what the bankers in his administration tell him, even as he deplores what he would call excesses. He has not yet realized that it is all about excess. What Adam Smith said “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices,” is even more true of bankers.