Politics as we practice it these days - as the Democrats practice it, I should say - is just another form of market-based consumerism. It is trend-focused and desirous most of all of not offending. While the Republicans are masters at creating wedge issues and harnessing hatred in order to govern, the Dems lack the skill to harness the opposite force, compassion and empathy, so they govern without clarity or fervor. In the words of Michael Dukakis, they aspire to “manage.”

This story opened my eyes to our countries treatment of prisoners. Read “Hellhole” in the New Yorker on solitary confinement. Its torture and we know without a doubt why its torture. Yet the number of supermax prisons have grown to a pandamonium since the 1980s. Atul Gawande writes that its a cultural phenomenon that is related to our acceptance of torture and our willingness to discard the Geneva Convention. There’s no doubt it’s also related to our willingness to mistreat foreigners because they are not us. They are the other.

The Corruption of the Cacoon

Now, I am working on the “accountability” project for Link TV, amassing all of the articles and debates on torture, detention and presidential power in a single place to serve as a reference and comprehensive source.

Check it out at: Link TV Accountability

Also, the best piece I’ve seen so far about how Obama’s DoJ is doing much the same as W. is from Gleen Greenwald today.

Obama’s efforts . . .

2/2 Audio: Obama and Rendition

Because of that piece, they sent me to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, one beneath the Supreme Court, to cover a high profile rendition case involving the ACLU’s clients Mohamed and five other victims of rendition and torture and the DOJ defending the private firm Jeppeson Dataplane, a subsidiary of Boeing based in San Jose. On the way into the court room I met a John Schwartz, a reporter from the New York Times. His article appeared on page A12. 

(This story I don’t have the anchor’s intro for. We had aired several things about Obama that night and then the anchor gives background on the case. Mohamed et al vs. Jeppeson Dataplane. Obama says he would end torture.)

2/9 Audio: Jeppeson Case at Ninth Circuit

Yesterday, the assignment editor set up an interview for me (very nice! made my day easy) with the only member of the International Commission on Jurists panel that was not in Europe or traveling.  I have the anchor introducing the story in this audio. When I checked the BBC website, this was one of the top three stories. Cool. Goldman gave me a twenty minute interview–twice what I spend with someone on a regular story with 3 or 4 interviews.

2/16 Audio: ICJ Report on Terrorism Policy

Critiques and criticism are always welcome. If you want more info, email me at jared@jareducation.com.

Ethan, as you will hear, has had a long life at the age of 23. With just over an hour of tape, many of his stories had to get cut even though I was trying to squeeze them all in. He is intelligent and well-read. He could not talk about many of his experiences, especially those in the military. Our facists, make no mistake, don’t want the “public” to know what they have going on in their conquests. We have talked off the microphone in a friendly setting since the interview. From that and trying to edit my tape, I realized in how many ways I am a poor interviewer, at least on this kind of topic. His language and articulation and storytelling are so much fuller when I don’t have him recounting ten years of his life in an hour. Had I slowed the pace and asked the right questions, I would have more vivid tape. All said though, I am satisfied with the project considering it is a first attempt at this kind of work.

I hope he feels I did it justice.

Ethan’s “Lost Home”

More front doors in West Oakland are being boarded up because of the housing crisis. But some housing rights organizations are fighting to keep their communities in tact. This Martin Luther King Holiday, the national reform group ACORN went house to house today educating people about their rights as homeowners and tenants. Jared Marchildon has the story.

Marchildon on Acorn

Story

He also argues for a one-state solution, which I have at times been of mind to think is much better, but that’s for another day.

From the Ashes of Gaza, Tariq Ali.

A much fairer treatment is found here: Hamas compromising, not hell-bent on Israeli destruciton, and here. Dig around on that site, counterpunch.org, for some really-well informed, rational articles, especially in relation to Israel, Hamas and Palestine. Its not the same vinegary spoonful of Zionism cloaked as objectivity found in the mainstream.

Until we speak of an anti-Arabism should we speak so much of anti-Semitism? The Nazis killed millions of Jews, and denying it is a form of politically motivated willful ignorance. But it is also true that the Jews massacre and ethnically cleansed the Palestinians from the “Holy Land.”

Israel, I will also remind you ,aims to create a pure holy land–devoid of brown faces, Arab culture and Islam. Christian Zionists want to see the “unification” or reconstruction of Israel. They have an old testament vision (as do all Zionists) of wiping out their enemies. They see the Jews as “God’s chosen people.”

This rhetoric builds a world-view of Jewish superiority. Hesitate before calling an anti-semite someone who would like to rebuff this superiority complex. On my blog I used the analogy of the US driving the Indians off their territory, killing them when needed and rounding them up, putting them on reservations. I said no one wonders why the Indians attacked US settlers–they were stealing their land. No one blames the Indians either.

Those who are interested in Indian affairs see them as the victims of an imperialistic expansion. There reservations sit atop barren land, castigated from the rest of society.

This sounds like Gaza to me, just a very condensed, messy version of it.

Israel, we can fairly say, has a messianic vision of a holy land–something akin to the US light on-a-hill manifest destiny. That idea is pretty well discredited and we condemn the treatment of the Native population, but we still accept with Israel. Maybe because for them its religious and therefore taboo. Undoubtedly we feel guilty about “showing up too late” to save them from the Holocaust. But, that does not justify what’s going on today, or Israel’s expansion. We are not so intent on rectifying the Armenian Holocaust. We won’t even call it a holocaust, little l, and shrink to the point of calling it a “tragedy.” What happened to the Armenians was no tragedy, but an intentional, racially motivated ethnic cleansing on a grand scale. The same is true of the Jewish Holocaust. The smaller, but also insidious treatment and brutalization and warring of the Palestinians should be offered no more justification.

I don’t advocate for the destruction of Israel, but I tire of hearing that Hamas is a terrorist organization. Before a rational debate can be had on violence and political violence–its origins, its legitimate use, solutions for stopping it–we must expunge this rotten word from the vocabulary. This is a whole other discussion, but it has soiled the grounds for analysis. (Again, read Robert Fisk on this matter)

Zionists, and potentially the mainstream media exemplified here by the New York Times (not that I fault them for featuring this particular journalist, because his first hand knowledge is valuable. I would like to see them feature a viewpoint like I will reference in this piece. This article is more revealing in what the journalist fails to recognize than for what he uncovers–his own preconceptions.) purport Hamas to be so radical that it cannot compromise. It will cease at nothing–given their radical views, they will fight until Israel is destroyed.

This logic leads to the conclusion they must be destroyed for if they are allowed to survive, no many how many concessions they are given, they will use violence of even the most dubious kind–suicide bombing, civilians attacks, ie the weapons of the weak called terrorism–until Israel dies. Read “Jews are annihilated.” The idea of Israeli nationalism is perpetually conflated with Jewishness itself. To destroy the political entity of Israel, now engage in the most unspeakable human rights abuses, is to be anti-Semitic.

Are we dumb enough to believe that this ideology supposedly espoused by Hamas of Israel’s destruction appeared from nowhere? Are we dumb enough to believe that they have no legitimate claim? Or that there only objective is Israel’s destruction?

Jeffery Goldberg rests on these beliefs and his conclusion is mundane. Militarily annihilate Hamas and support Fatah.

Fatah would be that failed, miserable political organization that was repeatedly co-opted by the US and Israel. Beginning with idealistic hopes of rectifying the many injustices Israel inflicted on Palestine it ended with agreeing to the 1993 Oslo accords in which is compromised so much the entire Arab world lost faith in Yasser Arafat. The Palestinians felt betrayed, they had gained nothing and given up a great deal in this “Peace deal” orchestrated by the so-called “International community.”

The same Fatah that failed to provide any services to the Palestinian people should be returned to power, by some magic wand of Israel’s and the “International Community’s” power? Why would he, or they, what to legitimate Fatah? Maybe the answer is that it is weak and cannot lead.

Hamas, as Goldberg notes, is the Palestinean Branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. They grew out of the PLO and Fatah’s failures. They organized schools, the community, health services and the basic necesities denied the Palestinians by Israel, the International Community’s acceptance of Israel’s continual expansion through war (ie annexation), and the US support of Israeli nationalism–Zionism.

Hamas began to provide these essential services and grew militant as it watched the PLO betray the people and fail repeatedly. It set out to right the wrongs of both sides. It became militant because moderation was not working.

And Jeff Goldberg suggests more moderation. I laugh at him bitterly. I do this because for so long moderation has been preached and failed. Not just failed, but produced war. War by both sides. Failed so miserably that Hamas resorts to fires puny home-made rockets into the houses of Israeli settlers on their land. Israel resorts to white phosphorous. Of course their is a power disparity of an incalculable magnitude! This power disparity enerated the conflict and its twisted pathologies.

Less moderation is my line, so you may think I believe Hamas is justified in its “terrorist actions.” I am not so foolish to believe civilian life, or Israeli life, is of less value. It is of equal value to a Palestinians, or my own, but not more. The death toll stands around 1,000. Maybe 1/3 are strictly civilian. Alan Dershowitz is a cold-hearted deutchebag. Hamas is a civilian organization that picked up rocks, small rockets, and small arms for a political reason–to violently advocate for the protection of Palestinian lives. Israel is a political organization that claims a sovereign right to bear nuclear weapons, tanks, chemical weapons, fighter planes, battleship and use them at will.

Now we have journalists, academics, the mainstream media, Fox News, and a whole cacophonous range of Zionist voices legitimizing the following: 1,000 Palestinians dead, some killed in hospitals and schools, houses and civilian building burning with gases that blister and melt the skin. Why? Fewer than 20 Israeli settlers on internationally recognized Palestian land have died by this “terrorist” organization bent on Israel’s destruction.

Are our hearts really so callous and our minds so warped that we cannot recognize the extreme social, military, and economic injustice of this situation. Please, do not speak to me of the Holocaust. I know. I also know about the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948. I also know they live on defacto reservations, much like the Native American. I also know they have been denied land, their supply routes cut off, medical equipment denied them, and an endless litany of offenses. Its depressing to list them. Just naming the offenses becomes a tirade against Israel, but as we know that’s anti-semetic.

I want bombing Palestine to be called anti-Palestinian. I want Allan Dershowitz decried in public as Anti-Arab. I want blockades to be decried as Anit-HUMAN. For that, after all the mess of political name-calling, misappropriated and intentionally manipulated labeling, is the nut of it all.

Hamas, as Dershowitz would lead us to believe, did not orchestrate this grand spectacle of Israeli invasions and destruction to get on CNN. I’m sorry, but that is really dumb.

We are talking about people. It bothers me that the press, even Al Jazeera, feels constrained to distinguish between members of Hamas dead and civilians killed. Dershowitz says they are all terrorists and if they are truly innocent civilians, deserve to be killed because they harbored terrorists or “it’s okay because Israel did its best to not kill them.” Members of Hamas are teachers, nurses, lawyers, politicians and PEOPLE for humanity’s sake.

(Warning: Don’t even dare think “Numbers Game.” The whole damn mess on both sides can be called this trivializing and degrading phrase.)

1,000 to 20. Tanks to rocks. Air to ground missiles filled with white phosphorous to home-made rickety rockets. A state legitimized by the “International Community” to a state struggling for recognition. Jews remembering a Holocaust of 6 million to Palestinians remembering the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands and the brutal displacement of millions. People wealthy enough to build houses on other people’s land to people living in the most densely populated patch of land on earth. People wealthy enough to build and buy destroyers to blockade desperate people–so poor 70% of them are unemployed. People wealthy enough to construct walls, hire and train soldiers and buy vehicles to barricade their lands to people suffocating, not able to visit family on the other side of Israel’s mean constructions. People stealing land and water to people having land and water stolen. Jewish people to Muslim people.

People to people.

Quit reading the WSJ, Alan Dershowitz and the Zionists. Quit using the word terrorist. Start using the word people.

Audio: Labor Models Story

Last Thursday, the SEIU said it would make a decision on local United Health Care West. Based in Oakland, some media have called this union feisty–it is one of the most successful unions in the United States. Why? Mostly because it’s militant. They elected a militant leader Sal Rosselli and they are engaged and active. SEIU president praise Andy Stern has gotten, mostly from the establishment (New York Times, Business, whatever). The fact is he is building a giant union. Historically and presently, big unions tend or maybe by definition are less progressive. They cozy up to business leaders, become passive in their demands and sometimes even grow regressive.

For example, Stern’s SEIU recently intervened in the State of California to prevent UHW-West from making its own set of demands. In Illinois, it was in bed with Rod Blagejovich. A recent bargain in Washington garanteed the vested interests that SEIU could protest but not demand certain things (I don’t remember just what they were, but they were elemental union demands and important to workers) in return for the ability to negociate. In other words, they made concessions, just to negociate.