My August Break: Further Reading for NewsLinkers

"Summer Tale" by Eleonore Weil

David Seaton's News Links

Like I do every year, inshallah, I am taking the month of August off: this year I am retiring to my dacha/hill-station in the mountains outside Madrid.  As always, I leave with the firm proposal to do nothing at all except read, sleep and walk.. but reality will interpose itself in the form of a front porch that needs to be stripped, sanded and repainted. Oh well.

Every year, when I go off, I try to leave something for my regular readers to enjoy, a treasure trove of goodies, so that they will not have forgotten me (sniff) by September.

This August I've decided to leave a long list of links to articles I have collected over the last few months in the course of my work, a few random things  that I enjoyed when I found them and that I hope my readers may find interesting. I confess that I am too lazy to sort them out as to subject matter or even importance, but you'll find them in roughly chronological order, with the most recent first. I have taken the trouble to re-test the links before pasting them in, but I can't guarantee how long they'll work. Enjoy! DS

List of Articles

Robert Skidelsky: Consolidators versus Stimulators - Project-Syndicate
Gideon Rachman: Lunch with the FT: Oleg Deripaska

Mexico: Downward drift - Financial Times

Escape from Mexico - The National Interest  

Why 2011 Will Be A Bummer - Huffington Post 

In Ireland, a Picture of the High Cost of Austerity - New York Times 

James Surowiecki: The dangers of financial illiteracy in America - New Yorker 

Worst retreat of Arctic sea ice in thousands of years: study - The Montreal Gazette 

Is it OK to Cheat in Football? - Project Syndicate 

What If He's Right? - Clusterfuck Nation

William Pfaff: America's Record of Lost Wars and Failed Interventions 

Martin Hutchinson: Back to the Kaiser's World - Prudent Bear

Hackers Aren't Only Threat to Privacy - Wall Street Journal

The Slow Fade of Meatspace -Reason.com

The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is  - NYT
The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is (Part 3) - NYT

The internet: Everything you ever need to know - The Observer 

Daniel and Tony Judt: Generations in the Balance - New York Times

Gary Becker: Will Africa finally take off?

Raghuram Rajan: Jobless Recoveries and Manic Policies - Project Syndicate

Martin Hutchinson: The Asian Inflation Bug - Prudent Bear

Tom Engelhardt: Entering the Soviet Era in America  

Checkmate - Club Orlov

Immanuel Wallerstein: Impossible Choices in a World Depression

For Analysts, Things Are Always Looking Up - Businessweek

Education Does Not Guarantee Economic Achievement - Forbes

Turkey, Stealth Superpower - Asia Times

Jürgen Habermas: Germany and the Euro-Crisis - The Nation

The increasing ‘humanisation’ of our pets - Financial Times 

Seeking Power: Europe's Extreme Right - Center for Security Studies,  Zurich, Switzerland 

Your toilet paper and the recovery - MSN Money

Music industry on verge of collapse - Celebrity Buzz 

The U.S. Is Not Too Big To Fail - The New Republic

Surging costs hit food security in poorer nations - Businessweek

Bernie Madoff, Free at Last - New York Magazine

Higher education's bubble is about to burst - The Examiner

Cow manure powers computers down on the data farm - The Times 

Steven Pearlstein: Calling out Bernard Madoff but falling on deaf ears - Washington Post

At the Heart of the Crash - New York Review of Books

Why I'd rather be punched in the testicles than call customer service - The Oatmeal

Wiki Leaks: No Secrets - New Yorker 

The new poor: Blacks in Memphis Lose Decades of Economic Gains - New York Times

Will Europeans accept a generation of 'austerity'?  - BBC News

Easy Money, Hard Truths - New York Times
The Machines That Ate the Market - Businessweek
Austerity Does Not Produce Prosperity - Huffington Post
Legendary Investor Is More Worried Than Ever  - Wall Street Journal
The short sale of American icons - MarketWatch
How U.S. drug policy is making Mexican cartels more deadly - Foreign Policy
The history of the toilet - Guardian 
An American Chernobyl - ClubOrlov
The New Poor: In Job Market Shift, Some Workers Are Left Behind - New York Times 
Thieves Flood Victim’s Phone With Calls to Loot Bank Accounts - Wired
Detroit Saved from Detroit by Marijuana - BlackBook 
Martin Hutchinson: Thatcher, Papandreou or Adenauer? - The Prudent Bear 
A Sampling of Chinglish - New York Times
Woody Allen: Will the real Avatar please stand up - New Yorker
Chinese leaders revive Marxist orthodoxy - Asia Times
Google Delivers Foreign Tongues at the Press of a Button - Der Spiegel
Amartya Sen: The economist manifesto - The New Statesman
Powerful People Are Better Liars - Harvard Business Review
Seeing Tongue, Spray-On Skin, Transplanted Hand: Military’s Extreme Medicine Wing - Wired
The Exotic in the Eyes of African Beholders - New York Times
Iqbal Z. Quadir: The economics of social progress - McKinsey 
Tony Judt: Ill Fares the Land - New York Review of Books
It's Impossible To "Get By" In The US - Zero Hedge
Tony Judt: What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy? - New York Review of Books
Gideon Rachman: Cameron’s Tories point to isolation - Financial Times
Super-sizing the "Last Supper" - Reuters
Why writing software is not like engineering - University of San Francisco   
The History of the Honey Trap - Foreign Policy 
How I Got the Goods on Madoff, and Why No One Would Listen - Businessweek 
Porn: Good for us? - The Scientist

Some second thoughts about the Af-Pak Wikileaks

Julian Assange

From The Weekly Standard: One of the more interesting aspects of the WikiLeaks document dump is the persistence of intelligence reports indicating collusion between al Qaeda, al Qaeda-affiliated parties, and Iran. By itself, this should not be surprising. The 9/11 Commission, Clinton-era federal prosecutors, and many others have found evidence of such cooperation. Still, it is widely assumed that such an alliance is impossible due to theological differences between Sunni al Qaeda and the Shiite mullahs. The WikiLeaks documents demonstrate, once again, that the world does not abide by armchair assumptions. Our terrorist enemies are not mindless automatons. When it comes to confronting their common enemies, collusion is the order of the day.

"Think the worst and you'll be right" Spanish proverb

David Seaton's News Links

To start off with I love the idea of WikiLeaks: the dirty linen of the powerful on public view... irresistible. I was very impressed by the video of the murder of the Reuters journalists in Baghdad and I was eagerly waiting during the countdown for the 300,000 secret items that WikiLeaks handed over to the New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel, which have been compared to Daniel Ellsberg's "Pentagon Papers" and initially I was very impressed by the breadth and depth of "linen" now on display. Certainly the futility of war  in Afghanistan was on full view for the world to see.

I began to have second thoughts on the flimsiest of motives: I was repelled by Julian Assange's face when I first saw it: the eyes, the mouth. I immediately thought, "wow, this guy sure could make a good  living playing petty thieves or perverts in police procedural films with a face like that". I looked him up in Wikipedia and saw that he had a pretty funky childhood and youth, more like Colton Harris-Moore the barefoot-bandit's than Daniel Ellsberg's but with the difference that I kind of like the barefoot-bandit's face. But hey, I thought, he who is without strange parents, let him cast the first stone. Live and let live.

However, you could say that my antenna were up and quivering already when I read the first items of the leaks that pointed to a connection between Al Qaeda and Iran. I thought, uh-oh, that sounds familiar, that is the same rap the neocons tried to hang on Saddam Hussein in the run up to the invasion of Iraq and there are still quite a few Americans who think that Saddam was involved in 9-11.  As it so happens that at this very moment the Israel lobby and the usual suspects are busy baying at the moon trying to drum up support for an attack on Iran -- as they always have been, "real men go to Tehran" --  isn't it convenient that this damning bit of evidence connecting Ahmadinejad with Osama bin Laden comes wrapped up conveniently in the most impeccably progressive of packages and just when America's politicians are looking for campaign donations?

Well, you might ask, doesn't this massive leakage damage the war effort in Afghanistan, and I would ask in return, when did the neocons ever give diddly squat about the war in Afghanistan, which they have always considered a distraction from more important affairs, like trashing Iraq and Iran? I mean, after all, what threat does Afghanistan pose to Israel?

So, could this enormous flood of leaks from WikiLeaks about the war in Afghanistan in reality be protective covering for a massive misinformation operation, one which kills two birds with one stone: weakens the distracting Af-Pak war effort and provides some sort of personal reason for Americans to want to attack Iran? Certainly, when I read the article in the neocon bible, Rupert Murdoch's, "The Weekly Standard", which I quote above, I began to get that old feeling: been there, done that, here we go again.

So I would say, whoa there, lets stop and go though all of this with a fine tooth comb and see where they want to take us with all of this: because I would agree with President Obama, when he says that Afghanistan is the "good war", in the sense that it is "good", if it keeps us too busy there to get into even worse trouble elsewhere... Kind of like methadone for American militarism. DS

Reading Don Quixote, while Iceland takes a leak

 Gustavo Doré's Don Quixote

David Seaton's News Links

This summer I am rereading the world's first, and still probably the world's best novel, "Don Quixote", by Miguel de Cervantes. The first time I read it, my Spanish was nothing like it is today, nor is the life experience that I bring to the book now in any way comparable to the weltanschauung of the boy I was then. Every page holds treasures that I missed before, and what is most amazing of all, is how, despite the archaic, 17th century Spanish, the book is still more "modern" than any contemporary best seller: the truth about human beings never grows old.

Don Quixote is such a funny book because Cervantes uses the most prosaic details of everyday life in La Mancha, which is like a Spanish Peoria, as the triggers for the Don's delusions of knightly feats of daring-do. It is the quality of his marvelously bald and plausible descriptions of warts and all reality that makes Don Quixote's delusions so hilarious, noble and pathetic. For example, windmills, as common in La Mancha as grain elevators in the Middle West, become giants to his mad eyes, sturdy, no-nonsense country girls become fairytale princesses and the 17th century Spanish equivalent of two dollar hookers in a fleabite motel become noble ladies in a mighty castle... it goes on and on...

Imagine the owner of a gas station on the steppes of Indiana, who watches old "A-Team" reruns till he goes mad and starts to think he is "Mr. T" and then goes out armed to the teeth on a "mission": that is basically the starting point of this greatest of books. Not that hard to imagine in an American context is it?

However, don't get the idea that inventing this stuff is simple, it takes the genius of a Cervantes to pull it off. Normally reality is funnier than anything that you or I could ever dream up, but Cervantes's way of looking at the contrast between who we think we are and who we really are is available to all.

An example of Cervantes's method applied to the contemporary USA: imagine a president of the USA that thought that he could make the waters recede and the climate change, while all the secret information in the Pentagon was heading for Iceland. DS

America: if it's broken, fix it

Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) - Vedute di Roma

Every time I come back to the United States, the airports, the roads, the public spaces look to me more tattered, battered, old-fashioned. Modernity is no longer self-evidently here. Timothy Garton-Ash, The Guardian

At a time when China is building hundreds of miles of subway lines, tens of thousands of miles of highways, a couple of dozen nuclear power plants, and a network of tens of thousands of miles of high-speed intercity rail lines, the US struggles to launch a single substantial project. China saves and invests; the US talks, consumes, borrows, and talks some more.  Jeffery Sachs - Financial Times

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The two quotes above, and the articles they originally appeared in, go straight to the heart of America's central problem: decadence.

What other word than decadence could describe not rebuilding a crumbling, decrepit homeland, its political arteries clogged with leftover scraps of Cold War ideology and wounded self-esteem, a land with its potholed roads and tumbling bridges.

What other word than decadence could describe leaving the homeland to rot, while at the same time spending uncountable treasure fighting (and losing) counterinsurgency wars a world away?

What other word but decadence could describe not fixing a moldering school system, that is literally a Polaroid of the country's future, while sending aircraft carrier battle groups to the Persian Gulf and Korea, perhaps to set off another trillion dollar war?

That something so obvious, something that so many people would favor, such as using their tax money for rebuilding the country that they pay taxes in, shows so little sign of happening indicates a paralyzed political system.

Perhaps the issue of rebuilding America might recycle US militarism and substitute its mass of "rice bowls" for an endeavor more positive that would generate equal or superior wealth; that would end political paralysis and also end massive unemployment in the USA...

Could the simple obviousness of all this be the very reason that the country is not allowed to focus its energies on doing it? If the previous sentance makes sense, it shows how far we have come down a road to ruin.

Not fixing what is broken, not renewing what is worn and tattered and not rebuilding what once was one of the best, if not the best, public education system in the world, makes the "audacity of hope" into the hollowest of slogans.

To me the mystery of the Obama presidency deepens and thickens, the distance between what was sold and what is being delivered is so great...

The positive side of Obama's election is that it has shown that the American people are still able to dream and to hope on a big scale and the down side is that the country's great tradition of "there is one born every minute" is also still very much alive. These two currents in America's personality seem to have joined together in this presidency. DS

The mystery of Barack Obama thickens

A year after President Barack Obama's political honeymoon ended, his job approval rating has dropped to a negative 44 - 48 percent, his worst net score ever, and American voters say by a narrow 39 - 36 percent margin that they would vote for an unnamed Republican rather than President Obama in 2012, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today. Quinnipiac University

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Obama's falling poll numbers are not a great mystery, the economy is bad and people are suffering, it is natural that whoever is in office when things are this bad is going to see it reflected in the polls. What I do find mysterious is how Obama's once legendary power to communicate and inspire the American people seems to have totally left him, leaving the impression of a politically tone deaf technocrat.

This tone deafness is extraordinary in any professional politician: even the most modestly endowed of them, down to a town alderman, usually possess an innate ability to connect with people. Even George W. Bush, America's worst president, was able to take a bullhorn, climb up on a pile of rubble, put his arm around a fireman and be an inspiring leader, if only for a moment.

I can imagine a hundred reasons for Obama's policies to come unstuck, the ability to inspire and the ability to get things done are not the same, Obama had never actually done anything before becoming president he was elected because of his power to uplift and inspire.

As many lovers will testify, the ability to seduce and the ability to perform do not always go hand in hand. In Presidential politics John Kennedy was a perfect example. JFK never ever really got much done, but he never lost his power to seduce and to charm the American people. Time has revealed a disturbingly dark side to Kennedy that I'm sure the future will never reveal in Obama, but Kennedy's way with words and his ability to sway people never left him, no matter how mediocre his actual performance was. But Obama's power of seduction seems to have left him completely.

In a previous post I wrote that this disappearance of precisely the qualities that took Barack Obama meteorically from total obscurity to the White House, in an astoundingly short time, was so sudden, so abrupt, that it reminded me of some sort of witch's curse from a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm, as if his "three wishes" had been used up getting to the presidency and the Good Fairy had decamped... Cinderella's carriage turning into a pumpkin and the horses into mice. Magic to get there and poof, the magic disappears...

I'm not surprised that he can't get much done, Bush left things so screwed up that even FDR or Lincoln would have had trouble sorting it all out, but I cannot remember anything as mysterious as Obama's sudden lost charisma in a whole lifetime of observing politics and politicians. DS

"Chicken Little of the Week (Year?)" Award

BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling operation may have triggered an irreversible, cascading geological Apocalypse that will culminate with the first mass extinction of life on Earth in many millions of years. The oil giant drilled down miles into a geologically unstable region and may have set the stage for the eventual premature release of a methane mega-bubble. (...) "The consequences of a methane-driven oceanic eruption for marine and terrestrial life are likely to be catastrophic. Figuratively speaking, the erupting region "boils over," ejecting a large amount of methane and other gases (e.g., CO2, H2S) into the atmosphere, and flooding large areas of land. Whereas pure methane is lighter than air, methane loaded with water droplets is much heavier, and thus spreads over the land, mixing with air in the process (and losing water as rain). The air-methane mixture is explosive at methane concentrations between 5% and 15%; as such mixtures form in different locations near the ground and are ignited by lightning, explosions and conflagrations destroy most of the terrestrial life, and also produce great amounts of smoke and of carbon dioxide..." The warning signs of an impending planetary catastrophe—of such great magnitude that the human mind has difficulty grasping it-would be the appearance of large fissures or rifts splitting open the ocean floor, a rise in the elevation of the seabed, and the massive venting of methane and other gases into the surrounding water.(...) The people and property located on the greater expanse of the Gulf Coast are sitting at Ground Zero. They will be the first exposed to poisonous, cancer causing chemical gases. They will be the ones that initially experience the full fury of a methane bubble exploding from the ruptured seabed. The media has been kept away from the emergency salvage measures being taken to forestall the biggest catastrophe in human history. The federal government has warned them away from the epicenter of operations with the threat of a $40,000 fine for each infraction and the possibility of felony arrests. Why is the press being kept away? Word is that the disaster is escalating. Methane is now streaming through the porous, rocky seabed at an accelerated rate and gushing from the borehole of the first relief well. The EPA is on record that Rig #1 is releasing methane, benzene, hydrogen sulfide and other toxic gases. Workers there now wear advanced protection including state-of-the-art, military-issued gas masks. Reports, filtering through from oceanologists and salvage workers in the region, state that the upper level strata of the ocean floor is succumbing to greater and greater pressure. That pressure is causing a huge expanse of the seabed-estimated by some as spreading over thousands of square miles surrounding the BP wellhead-to bulge. Some claim the seabed in the region has risen an astounding 30 feet. The fractured BP wellhead, site of the former Deepwater Horizon, has become the epicenter of frenetic attempts to quell the monstrous flow of methane.(...) A huge gash on the ocean floor—like a ragged wound hundreds of feet long—has been reported by the NOAA research ship, Thomas Jefferson. Before the curtain of the government enforced news blackout again descended abruptly, scientists aboard the ship voiced their concerns that the widening rift may go down miles into the earth. That gash too is hemorrhaging oil and methane. It’s 10 miles away from the BP epicenter. Other, new fissures, have been spotted as far as 30 miles distant. (...) Methane levels in the water are now calculated as being almost one million times higher than normal. If the methane bubble—a bubble that could be as big as 20 miles wide—erupts with titanic force from the seabed into the Gulf, every ship, drilling rig and structure within the region of the bubble will immediately sink. All the workers, engineers, Coast Guard personnel and marine biologists participating in the salvage operation will die instantly. Next, the ocean bottom will collapse, instantaneously displacing up to a trillion cubic feet of water or more and creating a towering supersonic tsunami annihilating everything along the coast and well inland. Like a thermonuclear blast, a high pressure atmospheric wave could precede the tidal wave flattening everything in its path before the water arrives. When the roaring tsunami does arrive it will scrub away all that is left.  Helium.com

"Cor, 'at's better out than in, innit?" (British expression celebrating flatulence)

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All I can say is that the world better end soon or I am going to become a total skeptic.

I mean, I believed in the great Swine Flu epidemic and spent most of last winter frantically washing my hands and sneezing into my elbow while I waited for the economy to collapse and the euro to disappear, but the idea of the world ending in a huge, cosmic fart off New Orleans really takes the cake.

Where does this appetite for immanent catastrophe come from?

I live among some of the world's most skeptical people, the Spanish, and they have a saying when somebody comes up with a story like the one above, "ya será menos", which translates more or less as, "by now it's probably less". Most Spanish people believed that the whole swine flu thing was a conspiracy of Donald Rumsfeld's to sell Tamiflu, while I was washing my hand twenty times a day... "ya será menos" they said and it turns out they were probably right.

Being American, I naturally love this catastrophe stuff and lap it up, but this methane-end of civilization story is really jumping the shark and if the Gulf of Mexico doesn't crack a rat, and soon, my reactions to such future chickenlittleishness will be... Ya será menos. DS

Er, uh... it seems the world is coming to an end... whatever.

Chart from ClusterStock

We are witnessing (how) a peak in a parabolic finance/asset/stock bubble of world proportions, is going to pan out. I think the entire credit crisis can be looked at from that perspective. We are merely witnessing the relentless unwinding of the biggest financial bubble in history. And, ominously, this particular bubble has grown from the end of WW2 to the present. That is one HUGE economic bubble, and this one envelops the entire world. This is not just a bubble in one country's economy. We are talking about the deleveraging of the greatest economic/finance bubble in history. Once the level of leverage reached 60 to 1, it becomes impossible to stay ahead of the deleveraging, even for central banks. The implications are staggering. Every major economy in the world is involved. The outcomes of deleveraging this monster bubble, represented by the green oval, will be what I term Credit Crisis II. At 60 to 1 leverage, a loss of 1 to 2% wipes out the capital. Christopher Laird

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These days the zeitgeist is rich with "end of the world" scenarios. The one I have quoted above is one of the milder ones: in it the waters are not going to rise or oil peak, in it sentient life on our planet is not directly threatened, we simply have to "deleverage", that is to say, pay back all the money we owe... all of us... simultaneously.

If I understand even a tiny bit of its implications, it would seem that most, if not all, of the wealth of our world is fictitious and that right now we are, every man jack of us, everywhere in the world, more or less in the position of a holder of Confederate currency and bonds on the eve of Appomattox.

Here is another quote from "gold bug", Mr. Laird:

Cross linkages reveal that it is virtually impossible, even with bailouts, to purge the ever growing $500 billion and counting losses of capital from the banking/financial system. The latest numbers being speculated on are the losses will be over $1 trillion (IMF) and $2 trillion or more (Roubini).

Now, maybe $2 trillion doesn't sound like a lot compared to the entire world economy. The trouble is, that capital is leveraged anywhere from 10 to 50 times by the financial system. Fannie and Freddie have 60 to 1 leverage.

Losing $2 trillion of capital will totally wipe out the entire world financial system for a decade because of the leverage at 60 to 1. Basically, unless those losses can be purged in some way, it has to be earned back over a period of years/decades. That essentially cripples the entire world financial system.

If all this is so and it plays out as Laird prophesies, it will mean levels of universal, simultaneous social unrest such as has never been seen in all history and will require massive government intervention and the nationalization of practically everything to keep people eating and maintain the basic infrastructure of civilized life... socialism, you might call it.. the question will be, if it is going to be coordinated internationally by the G-20, the EU, IMF and the WTO or will it be "national socialism", with all the baggage those two words carry. Whatever the remedies employed, we would be looking at a situation every bit as game changing, more so probably, than the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Raptured or ruptured?

Experience tells us that it probably wont be as bad as Laird paints, although experience is an all too faulty guide to totally new situations.

But, until the sky finally falls, the sheer proliferation of "Chicken Little" wannabes like Christopher Laird seems significant in itself... The ice is melting, the cows are farting, the oil is peaking, Jesus is in the green room, Obama is a communist, take your pick.

Me, while waiting for civilization to collapse, for the trumpets to sound, I think I'm going to chill out with a Spanish summer classic called "tinto de verano", which is basically one to one chilled red wine with iced Seven-Up.

Very nice stuff on a sweltering summer night, taken in good company, watching the world go by, sitting in a sidewalk cafe. DS

War in the Middle East: from Yellow to Red Alert

War drums are beating in the Middle East. In a short time, the United States has increased the number of its carrier strike groups opposite Iran to three, and reports are raining down of a tightening ring of American and Israeli concentrations all around the Islamic Republic. On the diplomatic front, the Israelis are unusually concerned about their international image (for example, making concessions in Gaza) while their top officials - including Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself - are shuttling between Jerusalem and Washington. Victor Kotsev - Asia Times

I ask myself: what are Israeli warships doing for the first time in the waters of the Persian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s maritime areas? Fidel Castro - Granma

The temptation for President Obama to double down on Iran will grow rapidly as he concludes that Afghanistan will remain a festering sore as far as anyone can peer into a murky future, hardly a recipe for success at the polls in November. With a war in Afghanistan, which is bound to get worse, and a military theater in Iraq replete with sectarian violence, the bombing of Iran may give Mr. Obama a three-front war - and a chance to retain both houses of Congress.  Arnaud De Borchgrave - Washington Times

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In fighting summer forest fires there is a critical point, which might be expressed as (+35º -30% +35Kph): If the temperature is over 35 degrees Celsius, the humidity is less than 30% and  the wind is blowing harder than 35 kilometers per hour, a major forest fire could and probably will break out at any moment.

When you have the optimum conditions in a long, hot, dry, summer, one windy day, a piece of broken glass in the sunlight, a cigarette, a field mouse chewing through a wire or an arsonist trying to buy charred land cheaply: in an instant, anything can set off a fire that consumes thousands of acres and many lives.

This might be an apt metaphor for the situation in the Middle East right now.

If you are following the news, you can see that the tinder is dry and there are potential sparks aplenty: Iran, flotillas, settlers, Gaza, Hamas, Hezbollah and the alembic of Israel's coalition politics. Nothing new there, but for the "red alert" there also has to be a high wind.

What is the equivalent of the "high wind" in today's Middle East?

To my mind there are two factors that make me fear that a war in the Middle East could be imminent.

The first is simply meteorological. In the summer there are less clouds in the sky than in the autumn and air strikes are easier to carry out.

The second is that both Democrats and Republicans would like to win the midterm elections in November and neither one of them would want to do or say anything to offend the powerful Israel lobby at a time like this.

That means that a rather attractive window is open at this moment for Israel to attack Iran.

The question remains, is the USA going to attack Iran simultaneously or are all those US carrier battle groups in the Persian Gulf just to keep watch on the Israelis?

Of course, even when all the elements are there, the low humidity, the hot weather and  the wind, forest fires are not inevitable... but at that moment you are mostly dependent on luck. Such, I fear, is the case today in the Middle East. DS

World Cup Final: Spanish victory, Dutch self-betrayal

"I'm all for teams going into matches with a gameplan, but I just don't think there is any place in football for the way the Netherlands approached this match. They kicked the opposition up and down the pitch for 120 minutes - but in the end, Andres Iniesta ensured World Cup glory went the right way, to Spain." Alan Hansen - BBC Sport

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Rinus Michels, the man who "invented" Dutch football, the man who created "The Clockwork Orange", must be turning over in his grave,while watching the Dutch selection lose yet another World Cup final after playing some of the ugliest, most mean-spirited, thuggish, anti-football in living memory.

Finally the elegant football of Spain won out, a style based on intricate collective passing and possession: sublime, brilliant and beautiful, where sheer skill defeats brawn and size.

The irony is great, because the Spanish style is actually the maximum expression of the classic Dutch style, created by Michels in Ajax Amsterdam in the 1970s and developed by him in Barcelona with Johann Cruyff as a player and continued by Cruyff later as Barça's coach, later perfected by Cruyff's disciple Pep Guardiola. This is the same style that Louis Van Gaal (also ex-Ajax, ex-Barcelona) is also introducing successfully in Bayern Munich and which is the heart of the exciting new German national team.

"Total football", the original Rinus Michels concept, means everyone defends and everyone attacks in a constant flow... this is Barça's football and there are seven Barça players on the Spanish squad. What they do is dominate the entire field beginning with the center field. The only way to occasionally defeat it is like the USA did last summer in the Confederations Cup, like Switzerland did in the first round, like Paraguay nearly did in the second round and like Inter Milan did to Barça in this year's Champion's League and Holland tried to do on Sunday night: park a bus in front of the goal and pray you can score on a fast breaking counterattack. There is no other way.

This perfection was a long time coming. For a football obsessed nation, with some of the world's best club sides, a mysteriously long time.

Why it took so long for Spanish football to come up with a winning formula has an interesting story behind it.

Old Spanish republican loyalists returning from exile in the 70s gave me an interesting angle on this process.

In the 1920s and 30s, they told me, Spain played a similarly technically skillful and elegant football as they do today, but, as football is a working class sport, so naturally most of the best players and coaches of the time were men of the left, thus when the Civil War was lost, they were either dead, imprisoned, purged, or had emigrated. Those were the days without video so all their accumulated skills were lost to Spain. This was football's version of ethnic cleansing.

The fascist regime had very few qualified trainers and I was told that, for example, the technique of "putting English" or a curve effect on the ball in a free kick, had been completely lost. The fascists tried to supplement the lack of basic skills with something they called, "la furía española", somehow overwhelming the opposition with their hairy chested macho temperament... since Spanish people are generally some of the smallest in Europe, this tactic led to many disappointments.

Finally, in great part thanks to the Holland-Spain connection, Spain has rediscovered a style that fits their natural proclivities: elegant, incisive and rather tauntingly cruel, something perfect for players like Xavi and Iniesta, who Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times calls the "brilliant midgets", to defeat bigger, stronger and faster men... Bullfighting with the opposing team as the bull.

In present day Spain's cheerful implacability on the football pitch, you can see why the Tercios de Flandes had such a run back in their day... also at Dutch expense.

There is even ideology involved in all of this.

When American wing nuts accuse soccer of being "socialist", they may have a point, at least in referring to the Barça-Spain way of playing the game.

This way of playing football is not about stars, it is about supremely skilled individuals pooling their talents and playing "all for one and one for all", where that most socialist of formulas, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs", is rigorously applied: they all need and want the ball all the time. When they lose it, they all try to get it back and then when they get it back, they pass the thing around and around until they all get their share of it... the only problem is that  they refuse to share the ball with the other team.  Oh, well, like Joe E. Brown told Jack Lemmon, "nobody's perfect". DS

Tea Time: the sense behind the nonsense

No better proof of a dysfunctional -- and broke -- system of government than the U.S. Congress passing additional funding for the Afghan war -- $300 billion thus far -- while simultaneously denying the unemployed an extension of benefits -- and then taking a 10-day Independence Day vacation. Arnaud de Borchegrave

It is irrefutably clear to us that if we do not make substantial cuts in the projected levels of Pentagon spending, we will do substantial damage to our economy and dramatically reduce our quality of life.  US Reps Ron Paul and Barney Frank

"Today it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism" Slavoj Zizek

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At the end of the Second World War the United States was the only industrialized country that had not been bombed into rubble. As they rebuilt and reequipped themselves, the world's demand for all the goods that America could produce was infinite. That simple fact is at the heart of America's phenomenal post-war affluence: the good jobs with high pay and all that came with it. The story of America's perceived decline is no more than the story of the rest of the world's development. This is not difficult to understand, it is pure logic.

Logic is not a painkiller.

People are in pain, their self-image and self-esteem are being shredded at an accelerating rate in this crisis.

A system that was considered almost maternally friendly has been seen to have become predatory, hostile... eating its young. The effect is that of being caught up in a natural disaster: fear, panic, malaise, anger, paranoia are the reigning emotions. To address them in an aseptic technocratic manner is politically tone deaf.

People are suffering right now and their emotions are right at the surface, on the boil. They must be expressed. Only the Tea Party expresses them, they have the field to themselves

Since because of the Cold War, left-wing populism, with its echoes of "class warfare", has been extirpated from the USA, the only populism remaining is right-wing populism... So that is what we have right now. People who once would have supported Huey Long, now support Ron Paul or Rush Limbaugh. The important thing is express the hurt and anger.

Many commentators dismiss the Tea Party movement's disparate mixture of people that runs from socially tolerant libertarians to Christian "right to lifers" as not making much sense. They miss the point totally.

Not making any sense is part of their attraction.

Movements of this type don't have to make sense, in fact they often work better if they don't make sense. Wonkish, technocratic logic short circuits the emotions and gives them no outlet; it is totally inadequate in the face of the situation, in the same way as an forensic surgeon's autopsy findings would not be read at a funeral instead of a preacher's eulogy of the dear departed.

"No-drama Obama" is exactly the wrong tactic to take.

It was the emotions that he stirred that carried him into the White House and strangely enough this power to move people seems to have deserted him as soon as he achieved his goal... like a curse out of a fairy tale.

This loss of the power to move people seems to have left him naked and unprotected facing the obviously race-driven hostility of the right.

You have to ask yourself why a centrist president, seemingly beholden and in thrall to every sort of corporate lobby and special interest is being called a "socialist"?

This makes no sense, why is Barack Obama being called a "socialist" of all things?

Because, although the word "socialist" is an insult in much of America, it is considered much more politically correct and acceptable than the "N" word.

That simple.

America is the land of the euphemism, where "enhanced interrogation techniques" stands for "torture" and "collateral damage" stands for dead women and children spread over a foreign landscape.

When Foxy Tea Partiers say, "I want my country back", what they mean in sanitized, Amspeak is "get that c**n out of the White House!". For these people to have an African-American in the White House is the final stake through the heart of their tattered self-image. There is no way that president Obama could ever please them except by applying for the position of White House butler. Trying to triangulate this emotional stew, to find some mythical center for himself is a fool's errand. That center might exist for a white president like Bill Clinton right now, but it  certainly doesn't exist for a black man named Barack Hussein Obama.  He must give his base as much emotional food as his mere existence gives his enemies or his presidential charisma will disappear like Cinderella's horse and carriage.

Obama might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb.

Just as the mere sight of his his face charges up the right:  it is foolish of him to cool off his supporters with flat technocracy. He must strive to give them what they thought they would get when they voted for him.

They could forgive him failing in the effort and still love him, but they will never forgive him not making the effort.

During World War One, a French general was accused of taking his army "to the Rubicon".... and instead of crossing the Rubicon, of simply passing out fishing poles and inviting his soldiers to fish.

Like the French general in the story above, Obama has arrived at the banks of the Rubicon and instead of crossing it has invited his base to sit down and fish. DS

¡OLÉ!

¡OLÉ!

Eleonore Weil

My memories of the Fourth of July

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Fourth of July, like Christmas, is something that connects a lot of us directly with our childhood.

Most of my Fourth of July memories center around summers spent in the little village in west-central Illinois where my maternal grandmother was born and raised.  A village where my Glaswegian great-great grandfather's gravestone is the only one in the older part of the graveyard that he didn't carve himself... He was a marble carver who spent his life carving angels, tiny lambs and fancy mausoleums, he built the family's red brick house with his own hands in the 1840s.

The village sits between the Illinois river and the Mississippi, a little over a half hour's leisurely drive from the hometown of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and Samuel Clemens: Hannibal Missouri.  When I look back on that part of my childhood I feel like a refugee from Walt Disney's "So Dear To My Heart"... which perhaps I am. I've been away a long time, but as they used to say, you can take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy.

And at the center of those Fourth of July memories is the county fair: the pie baking contests, the 4-H stock judging, where proud, water-combed, farm kids competed for best of show with the animals they had raised that year and then at night, when it got a bit cooler, the harness racing. The delicate arrogance and the mincing strut of the trotting horses pulling the whizzing sulkies and the subtle strategies  of the drivers in their luminous silks, played out under the moth besieged lights of the fairground race track.

On the last night of the fair, the grand finale was always (at least forever in my memory) "Jack Kochman's Hell Drivers": Jack and his drivers roaring stock cars down the track onto a ramp and then jumping a long line of cars or deliberately crashing them and the suspense of waiting for the driver to climb out of the wreck unhurt and wave to the cheering crowd. And then, after the dust settled and the lights lowered... bam, whooooooooooo, pop, pop, BOOM, pop, pop, bappitybappitybap... whoooooooooooo, BOOM... sizzle.

The fireworks.

From the melting ice cream on your sticky little fingers late on a sweltering summer night, to the "bombs bursting in air", the "Fourth" is something that overwhelms you with its sense of occasion even before you learn how to talk. These pre-verbal memories are the secret door to self-knowledge. And every year they roll around to remind you of how much time has passed. DS

A unique opportunity for peace in our time

Ensuring there's enough money to pay for the war will require reforming the country's entitlement system, Boehner said. He said he'd favor increasing the Social Security retirement age to 70 for people who have at least 20 years until retirement, tying cost-of-living increases to the consumer price index rather than wage inflation and limiting payments to those who need them. "We need to look at the American people and explain to them that we're broke," Boehner said. House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio)

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I found the above quote in a post by Dean Baker at TPM Café and the above chart was delivered to my mail box  a couple of days ago and I think they compliment each other very nicely

In them I see one of the few hopeful developments to appear in a very bleak world.

Finally, the most politically active American citizens, the elderly, the only ones who always vote, are being told clearly that their pensions must be sacrificed to America's endless wars, wars fought in places that most Americans can't find on a map.

I don't think they are going to stand for it.

The ensuing confrontation could change US politics beyond recognition, because there are probably quite a few Democrats who are as willing to sacrifice the standard of living of America's elderly to the gods of imperial war as Republicans like congressman Boehner are. (Note: Boehner is pronounced "bayner" not "boner").

In my opinion, this could have the germs of a real, sustained political movement in it, something like the Civil Rights struggle of the 1960s.

Real politics, sit-ins, strikes, demonstrations, hounding of lawmakers, not just voting for a "messiah" and then sitting back waiting for the loaves and the fishes to appear.

Our greatest consolation as Americans would be if the elderly of America brought peace to the world by using their votes and ample free time to put an end to America's culture of endless wars. DS

Burger and fries, hold the spies.

Russia's Foreign Ministry condemned the arrests of 10 alleged Russian spies in the United States, calling them baseless Tuesday, and senior lawmakers suggested they had stemmed from a conspiracy in the U.S. government to undermine President Obama's efforts to improve relations with Moscow. Washington Post

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I find this case of the Russian spies extremely strange and the timing of their arrests especially disturbing and suspicious, coming, as they do, so soon after the feel good "Hamburger summit".

This incident makes the president of the United States look ridiculous at a moment when Russian cooperation is essential in a multitude of sensitive areas, not the least of which is Afghanistan.

I really cannot believe this is a coincidence, as it seems perfectly timed to embarrass the president and perhaps derail to some extent the "reset" in US-Russian relations.

Since these suspected spies gave no indication that they planning to flee, nor do they seem to have penetrated into any sensitive, sanctum sanctorum of America's secret life, which would require them to be immediately neutralized, then the question has to be: why were their arrests timed to coincide with an elaborately staged thaw in US/Russian relations?

So, lets go over this again.

If the spies had not come into the possession of America's family jewels, then the questions  have to be in the line of:

• Did the president of the United States know that the arrests were going to be made when he invited Medvedev out for hamburgers

• If he didn't, why not?

• Who should have told him that didn't tell him?

• Who, would benefit by cooling off American/Russian relations?

• Are they in the administration itself?

• Is this a "one off" job of specific US/Russian relations sabotage, or are there "factions" within the government who are trying to weaken the president?

These are the truly important questions that should be asked and answered and as I write this, I don't see them even being asked. DS

General McChrystal covers his... flank

Fatheaded hubris is going to take a severe hit in the years to come and Americans are going to want someone to blame it on. I think that they will blame it on whichever poor, helpless, sap wins the White House this year. Self quote - News Links, 9/15/2008

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The McChrystal affair is much simpler than it looks.

I'm sure that McChrystal knew perfectly well what he was doing and that he was only trying to get himself fired for some other reason than not winning the war. I would interpret this whole incident as a clear sign that those who understand these things already consider Afghanistan a lost cause.

I think that this quote from the Rolling Stone article is the key to all of this:

Today, as McChrystal gears up for an offensive in southern Afghanistan, the prospects for any kind of success look bleak. In June, the death toll for U.S. troops passed 1,000, and the number of IEDs has doubled. Spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the fifth-poorest country on earth has failed to win over the civilian population, whose attitude toward U.S. troops ranges from intensely wary to openly hostile. The biggest military operation of the year – a ferocious offensive that began in February to retake the southern town of Marja – continues to drag on, prompting McChrystal himself to refer to it as a "bleeding ulcer." In June, Afghanistan officially outpaced Vietnam as the longest war in American history – and Obama has quietly begun to back away from the deadline he set for withdrawing U.S. troops in July of next year. The president finds himself stuck in something even more insane than a quagmire: a quagmire he knowingly walked into, even though it's precisely the kind of gigantic, mind-numbing, multigenerational nation-building project he explicitly said he didn't want.

Even those who support McChrystal and his strategy of counterinsurgency know that whatever the general manages to accomplish in Afghanistan, it's going to look more like Vietnam than Desert Storm. "It's not going to look like a win, smell like a win or taste like a win," says Maj. Gen. Bill Mayville, who serves as chief of operations for McChrystal. "This is going to end in an argument."

McChrystal didn't want to go down with the ship.

Experts agree that the most difficult military maneuver of all is to organize an orderly retreat from an impossible position. Knowing when the position is hopeless, creating distractions and withdrawing under their cover with the least possible damage to oneself is universally considered the summum of the soldier's art and the mark of an able general.

McChrystal is a brilliant general with a big IQ trapped in a hopeless situation from which he has just been liberated. I find it hard to believe he didn't know exactly what he was doing.

When the war ends it will be Obama who lost it, not McChrystal.

Mission accomplished.

Mark my words, someday apologists writing books about "who lost Afghanistan" will say, "if only Obama had kept McChrystal..."

In 2013 President Huckabee will probably make him Chief of Staff.

Or maybe his vice-president.DS

Wile E. Coyote enters into contradiction (beep beep)

“The ultimate reason for all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as opposed to the drive of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as though only the absolute consuming power of society constituted their limit.” [Marx - Capital, Volume III, Chapter 30]

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There are certain ancient temples, where, perhaps once in decades, the sunlight will shine through a tiny, hidden crack in the temple wall and for only a moment illuminate a small, unnoticed, obscure, hieroglyph among thousands... the one that contains the mystery of mysteries... The old chestnut quoted above is like that, for decades and decades it made little sense and now, sweet mystery of life, at last I know the meaning of it all.

It goes like this:

Because of the intense pressure of needing to be "competitive", over the years business has found ways of producing more and more things to sell, using fewer people at home or using "cheaper" people in other countries to produce them. That is why for many years now workers salaries have been more or less stagnant in real terms. This makes it difficult for impoverished people  to purchase all the things that business can produce. This has been "solved" on one hand by more and more "efficiency", technology and cheap foreign labor (thus keeping salaries and prices down) and by lowering interest rates below the rate of inflation, practically begging them to take loans so, in this way, people wouldn't notice that they were poor... almost like giving money away... almost.

Like when Wile E. Coyote, out chasing the roadrunner, runs off a cliff and everything is fine until he looks down and then hoo hooo hooooooooooo thud he crashes to the canyon floor, the lenders got nervous, didn't want to loan any more and wanted their money back, but there actually wasn't any money there when the credit dried up.

Here we see that the "invisible hand" has been working for years and years like a cosmic Bernie Madoff... but unlike in Bernie's case, now the rest of us have to do his time.

But hey, it gets worse.

The Chinese and the Indians are not content with pressing their noses to the candy store window, they want to consume too. Here is my favorite conservative economist Martin Hutchinson on what is coming down the pipe:

I have been predicting for some time now that the inflation-suppressing effect of globalization would soon come to an end, with unpleasant results for all the cheap-money western economies. The decision by the Taiwanese contract manufacturer Foxconn to raise wages in its 300,000-employee Chinese factory by 30%, with an additional 66% to be paid as bonuses based on output, suggests that the cost revolution in outsourcing is now fully upon us. Needless to say, we are wholly unprepared.(...) Food prices in India are currently 16.7% above those of a year ago, while overall wholesale price inflation is rising at 9.6%. Like Chinese, Indian labor costs are outpacing any possible productivity improvements, with wage rises of as much as 20% in urban areas. Not only does this indicate that Indian interest rates need to rise sharply from their current 3.75%, but it also suggests that outsourcers are going to find India as well as China an increasingly expensive place to do business.(...) If the two largest sources of cheap labor that provide manufacturing and service capacity for globalized businesses both have high inflation and there are few alternatives available, then the conclusion is inescapable: cost inflation is about to hit Western economies in a big way.(...) Western sentimentalists are rejoicing currently at the vast improvements in living standards for the Foxconn workforce. They should withhold their joy; the long-term costs of those wage increases will be paid in the West.

So on top of unemployment, stagnant salaries, paying down debt, reassuring the markets and no credit, we are going to have inflation too. The answer to all of this of course is more productivity, more efficiency, not raising salaries, while inflation eats away what little buying power those salaries had.

But, of course if people are out of work and prices are going up, they are not going to be buying much stuff, so a lot of Chinese and Indian factories are going to close

This is what the old guy who opened this rant used to call "contradictions".

The result... Well, many years ago, when I was a little boy, my dad, who though a Brooks Brothers clad executive, was a fanatical Democrat, used to play a practical joke at election time; when he took cabs or went for lunch at expensive restaurants, he would leave really stingy tips with a cheery, "Vote Republican!".

When I was a boy that was a joke...

Nowadays that is probably what the people getting stiffed are going to do... vote Republican.

That is the part old Karl never really got figured out. DS

Oil, Obama and tea... tea everywhere and not a drop to drink

Ruccola

As one should expect from a natural phenomenon, failure is fractal—observable at every scale. The same pattern of maladaptive strategy leading to untimely demise constantly replays itself at the level of viruses and bacteria, and all the way to individual plants and animals, populations, societies, countries and civilizations. Dimitri Orlov

Bogus and misdirected as the Tea Party movement is, in one respect it has an authenticity that the left lacks: it is angry and it's prepared to translate that anger into action. It is marching, recruiting, unseating, replacing. We talk, they act.  George Monbiot - Guardian

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Globalization allows or forces all people to ask themselves, "what benefit do I derive from the state I pay taxes to?"

When we see that the only real power in the world belongs to the "markets", we all wonder what need our particular nation state fulfills that wouldn't be better served by a soccer team.

I repeat, that this is a question that stares everyone in the face today, both left and right, but only the far right seems to be addressing it, all backwards, but addressing it.

As Monbiot says, the Tea Party

(...) voices the resentments of those who sense that they have been shut out of American life. Yet it campaigns for policies that threaten to exclude them further. The Contract from America for which Tea Party members voted demands that the US adopt a single-rate tax system, repeal Obama's healthcare legislation and sustain George Bush's reductions in income tax, capital gains tax and inheritance tax. The beneficiaries of these policies are corporations and the ultra-wealthy. Those who will be hurt by them are angrily converging on state capitals to demand that they are implemented.

So obviously they are thick as a brick, but they are a living example of people who are on their feet, getting well organized around what they believe in and taking it to the streets and the political campaigns.

This a movement. Misguided, manipulated, wrong headed, whatever, but as Woody Allen said, 90 percent of success is just showing up.

So the only ones showing up are the ultra-right.

Let's not put too fine a point on the word ultra-right, let's just loosely define it as some sort of ad-hoc mix of xenophobic, chauvinistic, populist-militaristic idiocy whereby globalization's walking wounded blame their troubles on a variable geometry combination of Islam, homosexuality, abortion, elitism and ruccola, instead of the financial industry (for example).

But funny enough though,  for incipient fascistoids they don't seem to be yearning for some Duce, Caudillo, Fuhrer or The One to lead them passively to the promised land. They are not cutting anybody any slack: pragmatism, charisma and "stories" don't seem to make much of a dent in them, its all program, program and God help the politician that deviates from their orthodoxy.

Why can't the left seem to show such initiative?

George Monbiot has put his finger right on a major problem for the American left or for the left in most developed countries for that matter: the left has become the default wimp option.

This certainly is not a law of nature, they hardly ever came more alpha than Joe Hill,  Che Guevara or Lenin, but in the USA, and most of the rest of the developed world, the left has somehow come to be vaguely represented by ruccola, white wine and librarians. Who knows, perhaps it's something they put in the water or feed to the beef cattle.

But maybe, just maybe the worm is turning, Katrina vanden Heuvel the editor and publisher of the Nation, one of America's leading progressive voices, wrote the following in the Washington Post:

Now, with resistance imperiling the Obama's change agenda, there is an understanding that it is time for progressives to mobilize independently once more. It doesn't matter whether you think Obama has done the best that he can or that he has compromised too easily. What's important is to alter the balance of power. And that means recruiting and mobilizing to unleash new energy into the debate. (...) The tension between Obama and the progressive movement isn't a threat to the president. Rather, it may be needed to save him.

Well, I'm of the opinion that if it will have to threaten him, and threaten him much more than the corporate "constituencies" do in order to "save" him.

Because this is really more about saving his proposed or implied agenda than it is about saving him.

It's about wanting to save what people were wanting to want before they got what they got. DS

Helen Thomas touched the sore point

"Jews know that they can land on their feet in any corner of the world. The real test for us is to make Israel such an attractive place--cutting edge in science, education, culture, quality of life--that even American Jewish young people want to come here. If we cannot do this, even those who were born here will consciously decide to go to other places. This is a real problem." Ehud Barak

A recent survey by the Jerusalem-based Menachem Begin Heritage Center found that 59% of Israelis had approached or intended to approach a foreign embassy to ask for citizenship and a passport.(...) Insofar as Israel is very much a part of the global economy, it is no longer unusual for Israelis to commute to work in Europe and even the United States. A European or American passport renders the commute that much easier. A second-generation Israeli of Polish extraction might want a Polish passport so she can study and work freely throughout the E.U. for a few years. And an Israeli doing business in the Arab world would definitely need a second passport. And then there’s this: Despite the aspirations of Zionism to create a safe haven for the world’s Jews, Israel is hardly the safest place in the world. Can we blame Israeli parents for wanting their children to have another option, an insurance policy, just in case Mahmoud Ahmadinejad makes good on his threats? The Forward

Israel fears the new Turkey, Syria and Iran as much as it fears Russian support for it. A new Middle East is being born - and there seems to be only one place for Israel: isolation. Pepe Escobar - Asia Times

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Helen Thomas the ancient mother superior of White House correspondents was immolated in a firestorm of her own making when she suggested that Israelis get out of the Middle East and return to Poland, Germany and America. I'm sure that one of the reasons the reaction to her off the cuff remarks was so violent was that she touched a nerve. Because as you can see from the quotes of Ehud Barack and The Forward above, quite a few Israelis are prepared and equipped to do just what she said.

Scientists, computer and aerospace engineers and the other practitioners of  the "cutting edge" technologies that make up the backbone of Israel's new information-society prosperity are in great demand in Europe and the USA and can find jobs in those countries at the drop of a hat and all they need to continue working can probably fit onto the hard disk of a laptop computer. Transferring them and their technology from one place to another would only take a matter of days. Overwhelmingly this elite is of European or American origin.

In short, if things got too rough, if the tension built up beyond a certain point the crème de la crème of Israel could be gone in a week... with nice jobs, nice homes and good schools for their children waiting for them wherever they went.

Now, of course, not all Israelis are from Poland, Germany and America, in fact over half of the Jews of Israel are "Mizrahim" or "Oriental" Jews, originally from places like Yemen, Morocco, Iraq, Algeria, Iran, etc. To cut to the chase, they are the poorest people of Israel, the least educated, with the fewest marketable skills, whose countries of origin wouldn't welcome them back, even if there were any jobs to be had in those places.

So even if a full scale war never finally broke out, if the tension became too nerve wracking, too constant, went on too long, Israel could experience a crippling brain drain and  gradually more elite Ashkenazim would take Helen Thomas's advice and then the vast majority of Jews left in Israel would be the less educated oriental Jews or the fundamentalist Ashkenazi Haredim who don't even do military service. Israel would quickly be converted into a poor Middle Eastern country bordering Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt.

The Turks know this and the Israelis know they know it.

My reading of the flotilla crisis is that the Turks are playing mind games with the Israelis in order to dictate the terms for peace in the Middle East.

The Turks are uniquely equipped to do this.

Turkey is a Muslim country, but they have been living peacefully with a large and flourishing Sephardi, Jewish community for 500 years (no "Christian" country can make that statement). The Jews know the Turks very well, and perhaps more importantly the Turks know the Jews well too.

The Turks are one of the oldest and historically most active warrior cultures in the world, who once ruled an immense empire... (we drink coffee thanks to their siege of Vienna in 1683... Cervantes lost the use of his left hand fighting the Turks in the battle of Lepanto). They were in the Korean war and their reputation for sheer stoic toughness and cruel ferocity in battle remained undimmed. They have one of the most powerful armies in the world today.

Nobody in their right mind would want to go to war with Turkey.

My reading is that the Turks, being who they are, and having lived side by side with the Jews for centuries, are much less impressed by Israel's military prowess than the rest of us. They probably think that inside every Moshe Dayan there is a Woody Allen trying to get out and they are playing on the Israeli's "inner Woody Allen".

The Turks have completely changed the game and since they can raise and lower the tension at will, they can and will play on the Israeli's frayed nervous system like a bağlama.

In short, they are "psyching out" the Israelis. They have found the Israeli's spot and are playing on it... the resultant hysteria is proof of this strategy's effectiveness.

If Turkey has decided to become the "play maker" of the Middle East then the eastern Mediterranean and the ME are going to get very complicated for the Israelis and the tension that they will have to endure in dozens of incidents like the flotilla massacre, any one of which could set off a war they might end up losing will be too much for those Israelis whose skills are marketable in Europe or the USA. They will begin to move out.

Unless the Israelis let the Turks dictate the terms of Palestinian statehood, that is probably what will happen.

In the end, Helen Thomas, whose remarks were taken as antisemitic, may simply have predicted the future. DS

Israel: cold Turkey

"Ah" says Mr. Kissinger, "If only the Bible had been written in Uganda. Everyone would be better off." Saul Bellow- "To Jerusalem and Back: a personal account"

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It came to me when rolling this flotilla crisis thing around in my mind, that what we are witnessing at this moment is a rebirth of the old non-aligned nations group, but without the Soviet Union and with Russia as non-aligned too. 

During the Cold War, the United States attacked the non-aligned movement as a tool of Soviet imperialism, but without the Manichean ideological framework of the Cold War, we are simply talking about countries that are grouping together in variable geometry to protect themselves from becoming American vassals.

Turkey is earning its non-aligned cred in this crisis, it is doing to the USA what Tito did to the USSR. If you look at Turkey's geographical and historical position you can see what opportunities await them. They are set to become an extremely powerful geopolitical broker. Turkey's stepping forward to claim a leadership role that everything: location, history and present power entitles them to, changes the whole balance of power in the region. Right now the Turks are mending fences with the Greeks and the Armenians, with Syria, Iraq and Iran, They are a major trading partner with Russia and as founding members of NATO, have troops in Afghanistan. This is very positive for the region as a whole. Positive also for the USA, which is literally aching to devote more of its dwindling power to addressing its innumerable problems at home.  

But not positive for Netanyahu's Israel. Not one bit.

What doesn't fit into the non-aligned script for the Middle East or the Mediterranean, for that matter, is Israel. Jerusalem is beginning to create the same problems for the USA and Europe that N. Korea creates for China and the rest of Asia (enormous pain in the tuchas); with the huge difference that the North Koreans don't have a lobby in Beijing that makes the Chinese Communist Party sit up and beg.

There are two major problems Israel presents at this point, as I see it:

1. It destabilizes the ME, which is a very important place, not only because of the oil, but because it lies between Europe and Asia and within it lies Mecca, the heart and soul of Islam.   Today's communications connects Mecca and the idea of Mecca instantly with the nervous system of a lot of other strategic and sensitive places all over Asia and Africa. The Internet has made Mohamed's dream of the Umma a reality and this means that what happens to the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank instantly complicates otherwise unrelated situations all over the world.   If Israel were located in Africa, as Kissinger would have preferred, and having problems with oil-rich Nigeria, I'm sure we could all live with that... we cannot live with an endless world war with Islam.
2. Israel has way too much power over the US political system and this power is much too blatant and increasingly employed as a blunt instrument. This makes the USA look weak and ineffectual: the tail wags the dog. Allies and enemies both get the impression that anything the USA does or says must first be vetted by Jerusalem. Bad for brand America. Bad for American Jewish people too, as Philip Weiss, M.J. Rosenberg and J-Street are pointing out daily. A serious backlash against the lobby could rend America's social fabric beyond repair.

In my opinion Turkey's moving into its natural role in the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean makes this a whole new ballgame. Israel's position is more precarious now than at any time since the Six Day War. This time the danger is political more than military. It has not one ally in the region where it lives and totally depends on a distant power with grave domestic difficulties that require its entire attention.

The danger in coming months is that Israel may "do a Samson" and pull the roof down on all our heads by striking out in all directions in a desperate attempt to totally rearrange a dynamic that is radically unfavorable to them. DS

Israel's massive flotilla cock-up

(...) I call on the Government of Israel to open the crossings to allow unfettered access for aid to Gaza, and address the serious concerns about the deterioration in the humanitarian and economic situation and about the effect on a generation of young Palestinians‪." William Hague - UK Foreign Secretary statement on Gaza Flotilla

Mossad Chief Meir Dagan said on Tuesday that Israel is progressively becoming a burden on the United States. "Israel is gradually turning from an asset to the United States to a burden," said Dagan, speaking before the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. Dagan said that the U.S. government has recently examined the possibility of coercing a settlement on Israel and the Palestinians, but retreated from the idea after realizing it would not lead to a peace agreement. Haaretz

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If we look at the thing sensu strictu, the ship of a NATO country has been boarded on the high seas by the armed forces of a non-member of NATO and when the occupants of the ship exercised their right of self-defense and tried to repel the boarding party, they were massacred.... This is piracy plain and simple.

In theory the members of NATO should invoke Article Five "an attack on one member is an attack on all the members" and declare war on Israel. Of course that isn't going to happen, but the reasons it isn't going to happen show NATO to be something of a joke. You may remember that the USA fought a war with Great Britain in 1812 over the principal of freedom of the seas. The "Law of the Sea" is the basis of international law.

Aside from all questions of international law, what stands out is how badly done it was. The Israel of Entebbe days seems to have vanished with the hardy kibbutz culture that created it. Bad concept, bad planning, bad execution... like the Cast Lead attack on Gaza, like the last invasion of Lebanon. The enemies of Israel and even its friends are beginning to think Israel can't cut the mustard anymore. That perception is more dangerous for Israel than any Iranian atomic bomb.

If there is anything but simple incompetence and pathological stupidity involved, if there is a "deep game" here, than all I can think of is that this barbaric boutade  is a ploy to humiliate Barack Obama and degrade his attempts to effect some sort of reconciliation between the USA and the Muslim world.

However, you know that finally Obama's response will be mealymouthed, and although there is much criticism of Israel all over the alternative media in the USA, you wont hear any strong criticism of Israel from him, or the US Congress or the mainstream American media either... then the world will know who is boss. That could be the bottom line: Israel still controls the American political-media space.

As of now the Israeli PR response is the classic, "The whole world are hypocrites, Israel is terribly misunderstood, your eye punched my fist", when the problem for Israel is that, daily, Israel is better understood than ever before and the mechanisms that give Israel impunity are clearer every day too. As the head of Mossad says, Israel is getting to be a burden and not an asset for the USA. The question is how long can you keep a lead balloon airborne?

What Israel and friends of Israel should be concerned about is that the number of people in the "west" who are thoroughly sick of Israel is growing exponentially. The problem is that the people now in power in Israel believe that everyone who isn't Jewish, if you only scratch the surface, is a default antisemite anyway and it is naive to try to conform to their hypocritical rules of conduct.

Of course, in the end, this is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Finally, people will have had enough and no matter how much military might or political leverage is employed, universally adverse opinion reaches a tipping point. At that moment things begin to move very quickly and no amount of hasbara will hide the simple reality of an apartheid rogue state, armed with atomic weapons, that has managed to unman the American political class.

In the Gaza flotilla incident we are looking at a "dress rehearsal" of that tipping point... it is now only a matter of time. DS