Human Rights and Media Manipulation

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By Michael Barker

When the twentieth century becomes history it will be seen as distinctive, I believe, for three developments in liberal Western societies: the growth of democracy; the rise of huge concentrations of economic power, known as corporations; and the professionalizing and institutionalizing of propaganda, especially as a means for safe-guarding the power of free-enterprise corporations against democracy.” (Alex Carey, 1987) [1]

Most regular readers of alternative media will be acutely aware of the US government’s antidemocratic history. Indeed, according to William Blum and Dr Danielle Ganser, since 1945 this much neglected history has seen the US government attempt to “overthrow more than 40 foreign governments”, “crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements” and provide support to right-wing terrorist (stay behind) armies in every European country. Unfortunately as most members of the public rely upon the corporate media – for the most part unaware that a useful and democratic alternative media exists – they are for the most part unaware of the extent of this antidemocratic foreign policy (and perhaps more importantly still they are unaware that they can do something to change it).

This is not to say that the journalists within the corporate media suffer from amnesia: indeed, with regard to the coverage of the death of Chile’s former dictator, Augusto Pinochet (in 2006), an exchange between British-based media watchdog, Media Lens, and The Guardian’s (UK) Isabel Hilton, illustrates that, in spite of their reporting, many journalists are well aware of the US’s antidemocratic history. Responding to Hilton’s article recalling Pinochet’s life and death, Media Lens wrote to her, suggesting that the “real shock value” of Pinochet’s rise to power “lies in the fact that the United States organised the coup”. Media Lens challenged Hilton about this, asserting that “not a word in your article even hinted at it. Why not?” Hilton’s full response was:

“There is never room to say everything in a rather short article and I have written about the US role many times. Is it surprising or shocking that the US played a central role? Hardly. The US had played that role in coups all over the sub continent for some time, (for me the worst was the one against Arbenz -- worse for its long term effect) their role in Chile was not surprising for anyone who followed Latin American events, and the shock factor had long since worn off.”

Given her evident knowledge of American history it is strange that regular consumers of British corporate media are still shocked when they first learn of the US’s antidemocratic role in Chile; a subject that recently gained widespread attention in John Pilger’s excellent documentary The War on Democracy. Thus Media Lens replied to Hilton:

“Yes, you know that, but do your readers? In fact journalists generally refer to the US role in Pinochet’s coup in vague terms (as in current reporting) – the details and motives are rarely discussed. As for the wider US pattern of forcibly subordinating people to profit, this is essentially a taboo subject for the media.”

Media Lens received no further response from Hilton.

While Hilton may not be shocked by the antidemocratic nature of the US’s involvement in Chile, I remain shocked by the CIA’s brutal intervention. Moreover, I am equally shocked by the ongoing antidemocratic work of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) – an Orwellian ‘nongovernmental organization’ that was formed in the early 1980s to wage the cultural cold war that was formerly fought by the CIA. William Colby, who directed the CIA from 1973 until 1976, noted that the beauty of the NED’s PR-friendly approach to imperialism is that: “It is not necessary to turn to the covert approach. Many of the programs which… were conducted as covert operations [can now be] conducted quite openly, and consequentially, without controversy.”

Professor William I. Robinson has described this rhetorical shift in US foreign policy – from CIA to NED (and CIA) – in much detail; most notably in his seminal book Promoting Polyarchy (1996). With regard to Chile, Robinson highlights how with NED aid Patricio Aylwin rose to the Chilean presidency in 1990 a fitting reward for an individual who worked with the CIA to play a critical role in facilitating the 1973 military coup. As Robinson observes:

“The Chilean coup was part of a pattern in Latin America of military takeovers in the 1960s and 1970s with U.S. approval and often active assistance, in the face of mass struggles that broke out everywhere against the prevailing social and economic inequalities and highly restricted political systems. But Washington abruptly switched tracks in the mid-1980s and began to ‘promote democracy’ in Latin America and around the world. In Chile, Aylwin and his party once again received U.S. assistance, this time as part of a ‘democracy promotion’ program channelled through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID), which would help Aylwin become president. Ironically, the return to power in 1990 of Aylwin and the party that openly participated in the 1973 military coup was projected around the world as the culmination of a ‘democratic revolution’ sweeping Latin America.”

Understanding this shift of ‘democratic’ aid from the CIA to the NED is critical to understanding the nature of contemporary imperialism, but unfortunately it is a shift that for the most part has remained unchallenged (in both the corporate media and alternative media alike) – for a discussion of The New York Times’ coverage of the NED see here. Consequently it is not surprising that critical attention has not turned to the activities of the NED in China – either in the mainstream or alternative press – despite the fact that in 2006 the NED distributed $5.7 million of grants to China-related groups. This sum is more significant because the NED is active in “over 90 countries” and in 2006 they distributed a total of $94 million to groups all over the world, which means that in 2006 Chinese groups received a massive six percent of their total grants. [2]

In order to begin to remedy this information deficit surrounding the work of the NED in China, this article examines the ‘democratic’ background of one group that obtained excellent access to both the alternative and corporate media, this group is Human Rights in China.

‘Human Rights’ in China

Human Rights in China (HRIC) was founded in 1989, and according to their website they are an “international, Chinese, non-governmental organisation with a mission to promote universally recognised human rights and advance the institutional protection of these rights in the People’s Republic of China (China).” According to the NED’s senior program officer for Asia, Louisa Coan Greve, “Human Rights in China is considered as reliable as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International as a source of accurate human rights information.” Moreover, despite the fact Human Rights in China have received ongoing support from the NED, one of their reports (from 1997) disingenuously notes that their work is “independent of any political groups or governments.” [3]

According to the NED’s project database, Human Rights in China received their first NED grant in 1992 (which was worth $74,000) to “support a Legal Education and Assistance Project that provides legal advice and support for prisoners of conscience and victims of political persecution in China”. [4] This legal project then received a further $120,000 in 1993, and another $155,000 the ensuing year. On top of this $155,000 grant, they obtained an additional $20,000 in 1994 to help them prepare for the UN World Conference on Women which was held in Beijing in September 1995.

In 1995, as a result of Human Rights in China’s “emergency response to the ‘May crackdown’ in Beijing” they received a supplement NED grant worth $10,000 for its Human Rights Education and Assistance Project. They also obtained $25,000 for its Women’s Rights Assessment Project, and a further $140,000 to produce their twice-monthly radio program, and to help them engage “with international NGOs, the media, governments and intergovernmental bodies to maintain pressure on the Chinese government to improve its human rights record.”

Human Rights in China obtained continued NED support in 1996 and 1997, and in 2001 they received a grant to allow them to publish their quarterly journal China Rights Forum and maintain a web site. Since 2000, Human Rights in China have been given a further five NED grants worth a total of $1.8 million – which have increased in size each year (the largest being their most recent $0.5 million grant). [5]

‘Democratic’ Directors

Human Rights in China (HRIC) work appears to be closely related to that undertaken by it’s better known counterpart, Human Rights Watch, as Robert L. Bernstein, the founder and former chair of Human Rights Watch is currently the chair of HRIC’s board of directors (he is also a member of the national council of the ‘democratic’ Human Rights First). Not surprisingly Human Rights Watch and HRIC regularly work together to publish human rights reports, which is fitting as extremely close ties exist between Human Rights Watch and the global democracy manipulators (like the NED).(For further details see, Hijacking Human Rights: A Critical Examination of Human Rights Watch’s Americas Branch and their Links to the ‘Democracy’ Establishment.)

The founder of Human Rights in China, Fu Xinyuan, is Associate Professor of Pathology at Yale University School of Medicine; he also sits on the advisory board of the Israel Science Foundation (which is “Israel’s predominant source of competitive grants funding for basic research”). [6] Ironically, in 2005, The Guardian (UK) reported that foreign grant reviewers were boycotting the Israel Science Foundation due to the Israeli government’s human rights violations.

Since 2002, Human Rights in China’s executive director has been Sharon Hom – an individual who also serves as a member of Human Rights Watch’s Asia Advisory Committee, and is an emerita professor of law at the City University of New York School of Law. Prior to Hom’s appointment to Human Rights in China, the organization’s longstanding executive director – from 1991 to 2002 – was Qiang Xiao, who was formerly the vice-chair of the steering committee of the NED-initiated World Movement for Democracy, and presently acts as the director of the China Internet Project (at the University of California at Berkeley), sits on the board of advisors for the NED-funded International Campaign for Tibet, and is the chief editor of China Digital Times.

The China Digital Times (formerly the China Digital News) at which Qiang Xiao is chief editor, describes itself as a “collaborative news website covering China’s social and political transition and its emerging role in the world.” The project receives funding from the MacArthur Foundation amongst others, and their executive editor, Sophie Beach, was formerly a senior research associate for Asia at the ‘democratic’ Committee to Protect Journalists. In addition, the chair of the China Digital Times advisory board is Orville Schell who is an emeritus board member of Human Rights Watch and a vice chair of their Asia Advisory Committee, is a director of the ‘democratic’ National Committee on United States-China Relations, a member of the core founding group of the Dalai Lama Foundation (a group whose president, Tenzin Tethong, is also the founder of the NED-funded Tibet Fund), and has worked for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia. In 2004 (at least) Schell was a director of Human Rights in China, and he also acts a member of the elite planning group, the Council on Foreign Relations, is the founder of the Pacific News Service, and ironically serves on the advisory board of the Center for Investigative Reporting. Finally, John Gage, another member of China Digital Times’ advisory board with strong ‘democratic’ ties, currently serves on the advisory board of the deceptively named US Institute of Peace (the NED’s sister organization), and is a director of Relief International.

Returning to Human Rights in China, although their website provides no current list of their staff or directors (one is available for 2004, see here), a basic internet search has shown that the following people act as their directors:

· Andrew J. Nathan – who is a trustee of Freedom House, a director of the NED-funded Center for Modern China, a member of the editorial board of the NED’s Journal of Democracy, the former Director of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute where he is presently a faculty member, is a member of Human Right Watch’s Asia Advisory Committee – where he was chair from 1995 to 2000, and is a member of the both the Council on Foreign Relations and the National Committee on United States-China Relations

· R. Scott Greathead – who is also a founder and director of Human Rights First , and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations

· Harold Hongju Koh Koh – who was the assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor during the Clinton administration, and is a director of both the National Democratic Institute (a core NED grantee) and Human Rights First

· Perry Link – who serves on the advisory board of the NED-funded Beijing Spring (see later), is the former chair of the Princeton China Initiative, and is a member of Human Rights Watch’s Asia Advisory Committee

· Hu Ping – who is a former president of the NED-linked Chinese Alliance for Democracy, a “regular commentator for Radio Free Asia”, and has been chief editor of Beijing Spring since 1993

· Nina Rosenwald – who is a trustee of Freedom House, serves on the advisory board of the American Center for Democracy, is a director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations

In addition, former Human Rights in China director Fiona Druckenmiller is a trustee of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and is a former director of Human Rights Watch. Other people involved with Human Rights Watch with ‘democratic’ ties include the chair of their executive committee Liu Qing, who serves on the advisory board of Beijing Spring, is a former editor of the April Fifth Forum, and is “a close ally of Wei Jingsheng” – a Chinese activist who won the NED’s 1998 Democracy Award. As a number of HRIC’s team are linked to Beijing Spring, the following section will introduce their ‘democratic’ work.

Beijing Spring: ‘Democratic’ Media

Beijing Spring is a monthly Chinese-language magazine (sold in and outside of China) that was founded during the Democracy Wall Movement by Wang Dan (who in 1998 received the NED’s 1998 Democracy Award, and since 2002 has been the president of Beijing Spring), Zhou Weimin, and Chen Ziming (who founded the Beijing Social and Economic Sciences Research Institute in 1986, and in 1991 won the Committee to Protect Journalists’ International Press Freedom Award along with his colleague Wang Juntao). [7] According to the NED, the magazine “carries analysis and commentary by authors inside and outside China regarding political developments, social issues, and the prospects for democratization in China”, and since 2001, Beijing Spring has received annual NED aid (in 2006 they received $195,000). [8]

Beijing Spring’s editorial board is home to the following ‘democratically’ linked individuals Wang Dan, Hu Ping, Kuide Chen (who has worked for both the NED-funded Princeton China Initiative, and the NED-funded Center for Modern China), Yu Dahai (who was the founding president of the NED-funded Chinese Economists Society), Zheng Yi, and Beijing Spring manager Xue Wei (who between 1982 and 1993 worked for the Chinese Alliance for Democracy – a group that received a single NED grant in 1992).

Likewise, the members of Beijing Spring’s advisory board exhibit many ‘democratic’ ties and include Perry Link, Andrew J. Nathan, Liu Qing, Fang Lizhi (who, in 1995, was a board member of HRIC, in 2000 was a member of Human Rights Watch’s Academic Freedom Committee, and is a member of the international council of advisors for the International Campaign for Tibet), Su Shaozhi (who is the former chair of the Princeton China Initiative), and Yu Ying-shi (who helped set up the Princeton China Initiative). As a number of people affiliated with Beijing Spring have also been linked to the Princeton China Initiative, this organization will now be briefly examined.

The Princeton China Initiative (the Initiative) was founded in 1989 and closed operations in 2004, and between 1992 and 2005 they received seven grants from the NED to allow exiled Chinese dissidents to publish two monthly newsletters, China Focus (English-language), and The Road (Chinese-language). [9] In 1989 Liu Binyan (deceased December 5, 2006) a key person at the Initiative was “China’s most prominent journalist” and a Neiman fellow at Harvard University, but when he was banned from returning to China that year he helped found and head the Initiative. One important ‘democratically’ linked person who was involved with the Initiative during it’s early years was their managing director Lorraine Spiess. Prior to joining the Initiative, Spiess had been the executive director of the Canada China Business Council, and had “worked on Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) programs to support China’s ongoing economic reforms.” Spiess’ ‘democratic’ links were strengthened when she left the Initiative, as from 1993 to 1995 she was the regional program director for the International Republican Institute (a core NED grantee) during which time she also worked closely with Phyllis Chang, the Ford Foundation’s program officer for Democracy and Rights in Beijing.

What Next?

As noted at the start of this article, the corporate media do not provide an accurate reflection of society, thus it is not surprising that the democracy manipulating nature of Human Rights in China (and Human Rights Watch) remain unmentioned in their coverage. This is because as Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky suggested in their seminal work Manufacturing Consent, the mass media’s primary (usually unstated) goal is to manufacture public consent for elite interests. Bearing this in mind, it is logical – in spite of contrary evidence – that the mass media portrays a NED-funded group as a progressive organization, and that this critique of Human Rights in China will be rendered invisible in the mainstream media. (It probably doesn’t help that even the BBC World Service Trust received a grant from the NED in 2006.) Thus the anti-democratic nature of mainstream media is an obvious impediment to progressive social change: indeed concerned citizens:

“…need to consider whether the same media system that serves to naturalise and legitimise elite decision-making, can really encourage its antithesis, collective grassroots decision-making. It seems an anathema to even consider that by working on the terms set by the mass media, social movements are actually legitimising and tightening its hegemonic power over society, even while it simultaneously acts to de-legitimise or ignore the global justice movement.”

Short of working with others (like Media Lens) to challenge the (il)legitimacy of the mainstream media, another immediate solution to some of the problems identified in this article involves supporting independent investigative journalism by giving money to the alternative media instead of the corporate media. To pay for their valuable services simply click on one of the following links, Centre for Research on Globalization, CounterPunch, Medialens, Monthly Review, Spinwatch, Znet, or alternatively support a local outlet of your choice.

Furthermore, to prevent elite manipulation of human rights and democracy, first and foremost progressive citizens will also have to educate themselves about the work of democracy manipulators (like the NED) a process that has been made easier by the launch of two groups, the International Endowment for Democracy and In the Name of Democracy. However, although it is certainly important to develop a comprehensive understanding of the role of the democracy manipulating establishment in circumscribing progressive social change, people can begin to rectify the democratic dilemma posed by the NED and its supporters by publicly denouncing their activities, and by refusing to work with them in the future. It seems that only then can progressive groups begin considering adopting more participatory funding arrangements that will help to allow them to promote a popular form of democracy that serves people not imperialism. [10]

Michael Barker is a British citizen based in Australia. Most of his other articles can be found here.

Endnotes

[1] To Alex Carey’s prescient analyses of corporate power one might now add how ironically, even democracy itself is now being used as an instrument of propaganda against democracy.

[2] In 1997, Representative Christopher H. Smith, Chairman of the Subcommittee on international Operations and Human Rights observed that: “Of the billions of dollars we spend every year trying to protect and defend freedom around the world, the $30 million we spend on NED is probably the most cost-effective item in the budget. Because NED is small and because it is not a U.S. government agency, it can directly intervene to empower the victims of oppression even as our official foreign relations apparatus is doing its best to get along with the governments that are perpetrating this oppression.”

Of the $5.7 million that the NED gave to China-related groups in 2006, $4.6 million was earmarked for just working in China. The rest of the money was given for work in China (Hong Kong) $0.4 million, China (Tibet) $0.3 million, and China (Xinjiang) $0.4 million.

[3] China: Whose Security? “State Security” in China’s New Criminal Code, April 1997, Vol. 9 (4).

[4] The NED project database lists their grants under three names, “Human Rights in China, Inc.”, “Human Rights in China, Inc. (HRIC)”, and “Human Rights in China”. All forthcoming quotes relating to the NED’s China grants can be found on the NED’s database.

[5] It is also interesting to note that in 1996, the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (the British version of the NED) also provided Human Rights in China with a £13,000 grant to “produce 500 copies of a human rights manual in Chinese to provide basic teaching material on human rights issues.” While in 1994 Human Rights in China received a $20,000 grant from the Canadian version of the NED, Rights and Democracy, to help them publish China Rights Forum.

[6] The Israel Science Foundation has an annual budget of “roughly $60 million” and it funds around “1,300 grants a year, providing 2/3 of all such funds.”

[7] On February 12, 1991, Wang Juntao and Chen Ziming were imprisoned in China: in 1994, both were then released from prison on medical parole, and while Wang moved to America, Chen was rearrested in the following year and only released from house arrest in 2002.

[8] In 2004, their NED grant was used to allow Beijing Spring to “engage in a new initiative to work together with Uyghur democracy activists to increase awareness among Chinese communities, in China and abroad, of the dire restrictions on freedoms in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China.”

[9] In 1996, the NED noted: the Princeton China Initiative’s “English-language monthly, ‘China Focus,’ with an international circulation of 1,500, provides in-depth analysis and insight into underlying trends often not reported in conventional media. It has drawn praise from professional China-watchers for consistently providing essential information about the current, on-the-ground situation within China. The Chinese-language monthly, ‘The Road,’ with a circulation of 3,000, allows readers inside China access to ideas and information otherwise blocked by state censorship.”

[10] To date, the issue of developing sustainable funding (in ways compatible with participatory principles) for progressive social change has not been seriously addressed by progressive activists – a recent exception being INCITE!’s (2007) The Revolution Will Not Be Funded (published by South End Press). For further examples of articles and books that have examined the antidemocratic nature of many ostensibly progressive funding bodies, see my recent article Do Capitalists Fund Revolutions? (Part 1, Part 2).

Weak Economy Slows Cargo, Idles Railcars

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BNSF Railway Co., the nation's top hauler of container rail freight, is parking miles of railcars in Montana and elsewhere because there isn't enough freight to keep them rolling.

Cars that often carry 40-foot containers of goods shipped from Asia stand like an iron fence between the Missouri River and this Montana burg known for world-class fly fishing. They stretch as far as Sandee Cardinal can see when she stands outside her home on the river's west bank between Helena and Great Falls.

"What is that but a symbol of how America is down in the dumps right now?" Cardinal asked as she gazed at the cars that haven't moved for about three months.

The cars parked are the type that haul cargo from ships on the coast to points inland, mainly imported goods — an area that's starting to slow down due to the weak economy. Analysts say transportation usually is among the first sectors to show signs of a downturn in the economy and with Americans feeling pinched — employers eliminated 63,000 jobs last month amid declining consumer confidence — it could be a while before the idle cars move.



"If you take a look at transportation, both trucking and rail, you will see that things started softening last summer," said Arnold Maltz, associate professor of supply-chain management at Arizona State University. "The reason you are seeing all those cars parked is that the consumer economy translates into slower imports."

Texas-based BNSF Railway, a division of Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp., has parked upward of 1,000 cars in Montana alone, spokesman Gus Melonas said. More are parked in other parts of the company's 32,000-mile system, which operates in 28 states and two Canadian provinces.

"There's been a downturn in international business and therefore this equipment is not necessary at this point," Melonas said.

The cars standing between Helena and Great Falls constitute 5 percent of the BNSF fleet, Melonas said. He declined to say what percentage of the fleet is parked elsewhere, citing confidentiality issues.

Seasonal car storage is common, he said, but the number of cars now idle is exceptional.

Most of the parked cars are designed for intermodal transportation, when containers filled with imported goods are taken off vessels at U.S. ports and then transported by train, truck or both to distribution centers around the country.

For the first two months of 2008, the volume of intermodal rail freight in the United States was down 3.4 percent compared to the same period last year, according to the Association of American Railroads, an industry group based in Washington, D.C. Last year, intermodal traffic was flat as railroads began to feel the effects of slowing retail orders and the dollar's decline.

While shipments of store-ready consumer goods such as clothing have dipped, movement of coal, grain and ore have risen, according to the association. The latter are less sensitive to swings in the economy and help balance out the bottom line.

Excluding intermodal traffic, rail freight rose 1.7 percent for the first two months of 2008 compared to the same period a year earlier. Coal was out in front last month with 576,012 carloads, or an increase of 5.7 percent.

"The railroads have actually performed relatively well when you look at their entire portfolio," said transportation analyst Todd Fowler of KeyBanc Capital Markets in Cleveland.

For 2007, BNSF Railway's parent company, Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp., reported about $15.4 billion in total freight revenues, compared to about $14.6 billion the previous year. That growth was carried largely by coal and agricultural segments.

The annual revenue generated from hauling domestic freight was down about 1 percent from 2006, while international traffic was up 2 percent. Meanwhile, coal and agricultural revenue each grew about 12 percent.

Union Pacific Railroad spokesman James Barnes said the Nebraska-based company's intermodal business is "just a little down, but that's not unusual for this time of year." The company's total commodity revenue was $15.5 billion in 2007, compared to about $14.9 billion in 2006. The agricultural segment posted an 8 percent increase over 2006.

Another major rail company, CSX Corp. in Florida, said its car storage is not out of the ordinary. The company's total revenue from surface transportation was up 5 percent, from about $9.6 billion to $10 billion in 2007.

One of the nation's leading trucking companies, Schneider National in Green Bay, Wis., says it believes a freight recession began about 20 months ago, well before signs of a downturn closed in on consumers.

"We have been in a freight recession longer than people have been expressing deep concern about the economy," said Bill Matheson, Schneider's president for intermodal transportation.

Trucking companies are in a unique position. They often compete with railroads for long haul contracts, while also carrying rail freight from the nearest railhead to its final destination.

Schneider is not parking trucks, but neither is it buying new ones to the usual extent, Matheson said.

In Long Beach, Calif., home of the nation's busiest port complex with Los Angeles, the movement of goods has been somewhat stagnant. About 7.3 million containers passed through the Port of Long Beach in 2007, the same as in 2006, port spokesman John Pope said.

"That was a big decline from the growth we'd seen in the past decade or so," Pope said. "Typically, there had been double-digit growth from year to year."

In January, Long Beach posted a decrease of about 12 percent in overall volume compared to January 2007. The situation was less extreme last month, with a 2 percent drop in overall volume compared to a year earlier.

While retailers have imported less goods to be hauled by rail or truck nationwide, exports leaving Long Beach rose as the weak dollar strengthened overseas purchases of U.S. goods, Pope said. Rising export volume — including grain and wheat shipped by rail — helped balance falling container imports for most of last year.

"It's a barometer of the economy," Pope said. "We're going to see the ebb and flow that mirrors what happens in the rest of the nation."

Kosovo/Serbia, Palestine/Israel, Tibet/China

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By Noam Chomsky

A sustainer recently asked Noam the below question on the ZNet chat board, where Noam hosts a forum:

Sustainer: Professor Chomsky, Are there parallels between the situation unfolding in Kosovo/Serbia and the recent history (since 1948) of Palestine/Israel?

Noam Chomsky: I doubt that there is much in the way of useful analogies, in this case. Maybe I’m missing something.

Seems to me there is a much closer analogy between the Palestinian occupied territories and Tibet right now. There are dissimilarities too. Thus, rightly or wrongly, Tibet is internationally recognized (by the US too) as part of China, so what is happening there is internal. In contrast, outside of Israel (and in practice, the US), no one recognizes the OT as part of Israel, and in an authoritative judgment, confirming early Security Council resolutions, the International Court of Justice determined that the Geneva Conventions apply to the OT, so all settlement activity is in violation of international law, as are all measures (like the "separation wall") to protect settlers (the US Justice concurred). However, despite the sharp legal distinction, there are some instructive parallels that can be explored.

Take the recent US-backed Israeli violence in the OT and Chinese violence inTibet. The former is far greater, and the justifications far weaker. Just imagine how the US and Israel would react if Palestinians in illegally annexed East Jerusalem were to burn down a bank and Jewish stores, attack Jews, etc., as in Tibet We can then compare the actual reactions. In the case of US-backed Israeli violence and illegal actions in the OT, overwhelming support for embattled Israel. In the case of Chinese violence in Tibet, much grandstanding, as when Nancy Pelosi -- an enthusiastic supporter of Israeli violence -- declares passionately that if we don’t stand up for Tibet we will lose our "moral authority" (she didn’t explain on what that authority rests).

One can proceed -- that is, if one is interested in truth and justice and immune to shrieks of horror and a deluge of brickbats.

NC

Hawaii's jobless rate continues to increase

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Hawai'i's unemployment rate continued its steady climb in February, hitting its highest level in almost four years.

The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate rose to 3.2 percent in February, up from 3.1 percent in January, the state Department of Labor and Industrial Relations reported yesterday. The February rate was up from 2.4 percent last February and equaled a previous high of 3.2 percent reached in May 2004.

Nonetheless, Hawai'i's rate was among the lowest in the country and was well below the national average of 4.8 percent in February. The national rate was down from 4.9 percent in January.

Hawai'i's rising unemployment rate comes as other indicators point to a slowing economy in Hawai'i and across the nation. The slowdown in Hawai'i, however, is not expected to turn into a recession, which is being forecast for parts of the country.

"Historically, Hawai'i has been able to weather the economic downturns experienced in the Mainland," said Darwin L.D. Ching, director of labor and industrial relations. "As reflected in Hawai'i's low unemployment rates versus the national rates over a considerable stretch of time, the local economy continues to exhibit resiliency, as our economy continues to grow at a moderated pace."

Five states had lower unemployment rates than Hawai'i in January, with South Dakota the lowest at 2.6 percent, followed by Wyoming at 2.7 percent.

Hawai'i's seasonably adjusted labor force in February was 650,300 and was composed of 629,400 employed and 20,900 unemployed. A year earlier, the labor force was 651,200, with 635,400 employed and 15,800 unemployed, the state said.

The largest number of job losses was in the government sector. The state government reported a loss of 500 jobs, predominantly in the Department of Education. Another 200 jobs were lost at the city level and 100 at the federal level, according to the report.

There was also a net loss of 700 jobs in the category of trade, transportation and utilities. The layoffs associated with the removal of an NCL America ship more than offset a gain in jobs from the opening of the Nordstrom store at Ala Moana Center.

The construction sector gained 300 jobs, reversing a loss of 100 jobs in the field in January. Over the past year, the sector has generated 1,800 new jobs, mainly in commercial, industrial and resort construction.

Hiring in the leisure and hospitality sector was unchanged. The government sector posted the largest number of jobs.

• • •

Nixon’s Heir

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By Marie Cocco

WASHINGTON—Some days, there’s just no forgetting that Dick Cheney is still the vice president of the United States. We’ve had a few of these recently, with Cheney traveling to Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East on what might be called a goodwill mission, if the person making the trip were not Dick Cheney.

Many startling comments tumbled from the vice president’s lips. His verbal jousting with ABC’s Martha Raddatz over the recent National Intelligence Estimate conclusion that Iran had stopped trying to build a nuclear weapon around 2003 is one scary discussion. Examining this back-and-forth, you cannot help but conclude that Cheney does not put much stock in the NIE, and considers there to be little, if any, difference between the ongoing Iranian uranium enrichment program and a weapons program. It is all eerily reminiscent of the lack of distinction Cheney made between Saddam Hussein’s regime and the band of Afghanistan-based terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. Of course, Cheney uses the interview to deliver the obligatory shake of his saber in Iran’s direction: “The president has made it clear that our objective is to make certain they do not acquire the capacity to produce nuclear weapons.”

Cheney also declared that it didn’t really matter that two-thirds of Americans think the Iraq war wasn’t worth fighting—“So?” the vice president responded. After all, real leaders in a democracy don’t give a hoot about what the people think and don’t follow those cursed opinion polls. Given a second chance a few days later to elaborate on his point, Cheney likened President Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq with Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon.

It takes one to know one, sort of.

Cheney is the most Nixonian figure in American politics since—well, since Nixon. You could say that he speaks with some authority about that era, marked as it was by abuse of presidential power, an obsession with secrecy and the continuation of a disastrous war in Vietnam that cost thousands of American lives and cleaved the nation into political factions that have never fully reconciled.

But it is not the discredited Nixon administration to which Cheney compares the current Bush tenure. He compares it to the brief presidency of the decent Ford. Cheney, who served as Ford’s White House chief of staff, correctly points out that Ford paid a political price for ignoring public opinion and granting Nixon a pardon for his Watergate crimes in the aftermath of Nixon’s resignation.

“The country was better off for what Gerry Ford did that day. And 30 years later, everybody recognized it,” Cheney told Raddatz. “I have the same strong conviction” that history will assess the Bush decision to invade and occupy Iraq in a similarly favorable light. In 30 years, Cheney said of Bush, “it will be clear that he made the right decisions.”

Some foreign policy scholars already view the Iraq misadventure as the single most costly foreign policy blunder in contemporary American history. Perhaps three decades from now the consensus will be different.

But that is not what strikes hard and deep in the jarring, even contemptible analogy that Cheney makes. The Nixon pardon was an entirely political decision, made for purely political reasons, and which cost Ford nothing but political support. No geopolitical catastrophe was set in motion when Ford decided that in order to govern, he had to remove the stain of Watergate from the front pages and the television screens.

No historical hindsight is needed to see that, unlike in Iraq, no lives were lost or bodies shattered by the Watergate pardon. No families were ruined emotionally and financially. No civilians were forced to flee their own country, or to become refugees within it. No thousands of prisoners were incarcerated without hope of charge or trial, and none were tortured.

Ford unquestionably had the power, as president, to pardon Nixon. No such right exists for Bush’s unconstitutional overreaching in Iraq and in the larger war on terror. No president has the unilateral power to imprison and detain people indefinitely—the Supreme Court already has said so. No president has the authority to conduct warrantless surveillance of Americans engaged in communications with people overseas; there was a law against this very sort of thing when Bush began his surveillance program.

In fact, the only similarity between Nixon’s Watergate era and the present one—a similarity Cheney inadvertently drew too well—is the cynicism and dishonesty at the heart of each.

Returning veterans face mounting joblessness and low wages

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By Alex Lantier

On March 25, the Wall Street Journal published a brief summary of a US Veterans Affairs Department study on discharged veterans’ employment and wage prospects. The report, not yet publicly released and largely blacked out in the broader US media, paints a devastating picture of surging unemployment and low wages for returning veterans.

It found that the percentage of veterans not in the labor force—due to unemployment, having returned to school for further training, or having given up looking for work—had more than doubled between 2000 and 2005, jumping from 10 to 23 percent. Veterans aged 20-24 had an unemployment rate of 12 percent, 50 percent larger than the overall US unemployment rate for adults aged 20-24, which stands at 8 percent. On March 27, the military newspaper Stars and Stripes, writing on the same report, noted that 18 percent of veterans reported being unemployed.

Many employed veterans earn salaries leaving them at constant risk of financial hardship. Twenty-five percent reported earning less than $21,840 a year. Half of those aged 20-24 earned less than $25,000 a year.

The report also exposed one of most commonly promoted claims of military recruiters: that recruits will gain valuable gain job skills for future civilian life. The Journal wrote: “The report found that most of the returning veterans were unable to find civilian jobs that matched their previous military occupations. The only exceptions were the veterans working for private security firms such as Blackwater or in the maintenance and repair fields.”

The Journal added: “The Veterans Affairs Department offers educational-assistance programs for young veterans, but the report said the initiatives had little impact on the employment status or salaries of the former military personnel.”

Several other sources noted difficulties facing veterans in looking for civilian jobs. Military.com, the veterans’ section of the online recruitment web site Monster.com, released a survey of veteran jobseekers and civilian employers in November 2007. The survey found that 81 percent of discharged veterans did not “feel fully prepared for the process of entering the job market,” with 71 percent unsure of how to negotiate salary and benefits and 76 percent reporting “an inability to effectively translate their military skills into civilian terms.”

The way these facts came to public attention—through the leaking of an internal report, which then went broadly ignored in the mainstream press—speaks volumes about the state of American political life and class relations.

As US fatalities reached 4,000 this past week, the death toll in the war and occupation of Iraq received a certain amount of coverage in the print and broadcast media. The number of wounded soldiers, however, is controversial and rarely discussed. And the difficulties facing returning veterans—the lack of jobs, financial insecurity, denial of health care, and homelessness—also receive little press coverage.

The problems of returning veterans are closely tied to the deteriorating situation of the broader American working class. They follow inevitably from the US military’s thrusting often traumatized veterans into a society marked by rising unemployment, deindustrialization, the destruction of high-paying jobs, and increasingly difficult access to health care, education, and housing.

As Ricky Singh of Black Veterans for Social Justice told OneWorld news service in November 2007, “What typically happens to young adults who go into the military at 17 or 18, when they return home, the same kind of economic conditions that forced them towards the military still exist or have gotten worse.”

The career advice offered to veterans in a February 24, 2008, posting on VeteransToday.com provides a revealing picture of the US job market. It notes that in “farming, production, and transportation—you’re looking at slow or negative growth and poor job availability.” Another major sector that VeteransToday.com encourages veterans to consider—construction—is entering recession due to the bursting of the mortgage and real estate bubbles and the crisis on Wall Street.

Observing that the US economy is “becoming more technology-oriented and less dependent on agriculture and manufacturing,” VeteransToday.com recommends the following jobs as “the place to start”: software engineer, veterinarian, financial analyst, dental hygienist, nurse, college professor, doctor, and lawyer. However, the extensive training required for these jobs makes them difficult options for returning veterans, many of whom joined the armed forces upon graduating from high school. The drying up of student loans, amid the general tightening of US credit markets, aggravates the problem.

Among service jobs, VeteransToday.com noted, “Retail sales, wait staff, and cashier jobs are numerous, but each carries a wince-inducing median salary of between $14,000 and $20,000 per year. Customer service offers the fourth most job openings for new workers, with a substantially better median salary of just over $28,000.”

The crisis of veterans’ health care has surfaced several times to the media’s attention, especially after the March 2007 revelation of gross neglect of wounded veterans at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. In November 2007, the Boston Globe reported that, according to estimates by Physicians for Social Responsibility and staff physicians at the Veterans Affairs Department, the total cost of treating veterans would top $650 billion.

Several factors account for this figure. The development of body armor and rapid battlefield medical evacuation has greatly increased the number of severely wounded soldiers who survive their injuries, pushing the wounded-to-killed ratio to over 8 to 1, from 2 to 1 during World War II. The Globe noted that the percentage of amputees was the highest since the US Civil War. Moreover, the percentage of veterans afflicted by post-traumatic stress disorder (shell shock) is currently expected to reach between 30 and 36 percent of a total population of 1.5 million veterans of the current wars—an astounding half a million patients.

Though many wounded and disabled veterans are being denied treatment, the resulting flood of patients is overwhelming the Veterans Affairs Department. According to a January 2008 study by the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America association, the number of outstanding claims by veterans for treatment rose from 254,000 to 378,000 between 2003 and 2006, with the average waiting time before a veteran receives treatment rising to 183 days.

This situation has provoked massive resentment among veterans. It forced the February 28 resignation of Veterans Affairs Undersecretary for Benefits Daniel Cooper, after a video surfaced in which Cooper, a member of the Christian Embassy missionary group, stated that Bible study was more important than his professional duties. In the video, Cooper said: “It’s not really about carving out time, it really is a matter of saying what is important. And since that’s more important than doing the job—the job’s going to be there, whether I’m there or not.”

CBS News reported on the epidemic of veteran suicides on March 20. Citing internal Veterans Affairs reports, CBS found that the number of suicide attempts by recently treated VA patients almost doubled, from 462 in 2000 to 790 in 2007. The total number of VA patients who succeeded in committing suicide was 1,403 in 2001 and 1,784 in 2005.

Large numbers of veterans are homeless. The Department of Veterans Affairs web page states, in its Overview of Homeless: “About 154,000 veterans (male and female) are homeless on any given night and perhaps twice as many experience homelessness at some point during the course of a year. Many other veterans are considered near homeless or at risk because of their poverty, lack of support from family and friends, and dismal living conditions in cheap hotels or in overcrowded or substandard housing.”

The Alliance to End Homelessness, a nonprofit organization quoted by the Boston Globe, gave higher estimates: “194,254 out of 744,313 homeless people on any given night [nationwide] are veterans.” The group had based its calculations on information from the Department of Veterans Affairs and the US Census Bureau.

Global food prices rise and famine increases

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By Barry Mason

The United Nations body World Food Programme (WFP) has warned that the rise in global food prices will reduce its ability to feed hungry and malnourished people.

Speaking last month in Rome, where the WFP is based, WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran said, “Our ability to reach people is going down just as needs go up.... We are seeing a new face of hunger in which people are being priced out of the food market.... Situations that were previously not urgent—they are now.”

In a press release, the WFP gave a new estimate for the funds needed for its work this year at nearly US$3.5 billion, half a billion more than estimated last year. This money is for approved projects to feed 73 million people in 78 countries throughout the world. It notes that this money is for projected feeding schemes and does not include unforeseen emergencies that may arise.

It also notes that the poorest people on earth will have to spend an increasing portion of their meagre income on food. The WFP warns that these people will be forced to buy less food, or less nutritious food, or rely on outside help.

The countries that will be most affected include Zimbabwe, Eritrea, Djibouti, the Gambia, Togo, Chad, Cameroon, Niger and Senegal, all on the African continent. Also affected will be Haiti, Myanmar (Burma), Yemen and Cuba.

The WFP says amongst the factors pushing food increases are rising oil prices and the increase in demand for food, especially meat, in China and India. This increase in demand is a result of the rapid increase in economic power of these countries.

Weather events linked to climate change have also played a part in the rise in prices. The increasing use of crops for biofuels is another factor at work in the market.

Mark Thirlwell, writing in the Financial Times February 26, provided some data on the scale of the threat to food provision. He pointed out that world food prices have risen by 75 percent since the new millennium with a 20 percent increase last year alone. China’s consumption of meat and soybeans has gone up by 40 percent in the last decade as its economy started to soar.

He points out that whilst in the past, increases in food prices have been alleviated by subsequent increases in production, that may not apply this time.

He argues that the rise in oil prices and subsequent spurt in the production of biofuels will have a long-term impact on food supply. Increasingly, crops will be grown to meet the increased demand for biofuel rather than food.

The fact that food costs represent a bigger proportion of the income for the poor in the so-called undeveloped countries will exacerbate their plight. Thirlwell writes: “While the share of food in the consumption basket of a rich country such as the US is relatively low, at about 10 percent, it averages about 30 percent in China and more than 60 percent in sub-Saharan Africa. Those countries that are most vulnerable are the low-income net food importers. Higher food prices add more strain to import bills that have often already been stretched by higher energy prices. Several of the poorest economies fall into this category and are heavily dependent on food aid to meet their needs. But the worldwide volume of such aid has stagnated for the past two decades and, what is worse; the quantity of aid delivered tends to fall as prices rise, given that a large proportion comprises a fixed annual dollar amount.”

He points out that those most at risk will be the urban poor. Whilst in many sub-Saharan Africa countries, a large proportion of the population exist as subsistence farmers, the trend is for the poor to leave the land and head for the burgeoning urban centres.

The drive to switch to crop production for biofuels is having an impact in Africa. Ghana, Benin, Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia and South Africa all have plans to produce crops for biofuel.

A report in the Independent, February 16, explained that a meeting of the African Biodiversity Network had met in South Africa to discuss biofuel production. The article quoted respected Nigerian environmentalist Nnimmo Bassey, who said: “Africa is a wide open continent and the energy industry wants to take advantage... This is a flashback to colonial plantations.”

The article continued; “From the savannahs of West Africa to the rainforests of Congo, the plains of Tanzania and the wilderness of Ethiopia, governments are handing over huge tracts of fertile land to private companies aiming to convert biomass grown on large plantations into liquid fuels for export markets. African leaders like Senegal Abdoulaye Wade are predicting a ‘green revolution’ and looking eagerly to lucrative exports.”

Climate change will also affect crop production in Africa. A recent report from Stanford University predicted a drop of nearly a third in the production of the food staple crop maize as a result of climate change over the next two decades.

A separate study carried out by the Centre for Environmental Economics and Policy in Africa (CEEPA), which is based in South Africa, states Africa will lose around 4 percent of its cropland over the next 30 years and will have lost around 18 percent by the end of the century.

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) has said it will cut the amount of food aid it provides. It blamed the recent sharp increase in commodity prices, which have left it with a US$120 million budget deficit.

Amy Barry, an Oxfam spokesperson on trade, quoted in the Observer on March 2, noted: “More and more people are going to be facing food shortages in the future.... Given what is happening due to rising food prices we need to think about the impact this will have on people [in the developing world] who are spending up to 80% of their incomes on food.”

The impact of the economic crisis of the capitalist system will have a devastating affect on the lives of some of the poorest people in the world.

Presidential candidates speak on housing and credit crises

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By Barry Grey

Clinton, Obama, McCain defer to Wall Street

After months of virtual silence on the collapse of the speculative binge on Wall Street that has plunged the US economy into recession, all three major US presidential candidates delivered speeches this week on the housing and credit crises.

Last week’s failure of Bear Stearns and the government-underwritten buyout of the investment bank by JPMorgan Chase, which evoked widespread comparisons to the financial breakdown that ushered in the Great Depression, was the precipitant factor that obliged Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and Republican John McCain to address the turmoil on Wall Street.

Among the Democratic candidates, in particular, specific electoral calculations also played a role. The next major primary election takes place on April 22 in Pennsylvania, an industrial state that has been devastated by plant closures and badly impacted by the epidemic of home foreclosures. Pennsylvania’s foreclosure rate increased by 19 percent over the past two years, according to RealtyTrac, a company that monitors foreclosures.

That it took a near-meltdown of the US financial system to prod the candidates to address the panic gripping financial markets is itself politically significant. Clive Crook devoted an entire column in the March 24 Financial Times (a British, not American, newspaper) to the reticence of the US presidential contenders. He wrote: “The separation of presidential politics from the troubles assailing the US economy is now verging on the surreal. With banks collapsing, the dollar reeling, the Federal Reserve making up new rules as it goes and observers discussing a new Great Depression, the presidential candidates are still on scripts they wrote a year ago.”

The Democratic Congress has to date held no serious hearings and launched no significant investigations into what is widely acknowledged to be the biggest financial scandal since the Second World War, involving reckless speculation, accounting fraud and predatory lending practices on an unprecedented scale by the country’s biggest commercial and investment banks, mortgage companies, hedge funds and private equity firms. The years of vastly inflated securities prices and outright gambling on unregulated “derivative” markets generated the multi-million and even billion-dollar compensation packages enjoyed by Wall Street CEOs and big investors.

Now, while working class and middle class families across the country face the threat of losing their homes and seeing their life savings destroyed, the Federal Reserve Board is handing out hundreds of billions of dollars in cheap loans to the banks and finance houses, in return for mortgage-backed securities and other dubious assets that cannot be sold on the market. The Bush administration rejects any “bailout” of distressed home owners, while the Democrats propose palliatives that provide no serious answer to the social devastation, and leave Wall Street off the hook.

The speeches given this week by senators Clinton, Obama and McCain all demonstrate, notwithstanding certain policy differences, the subservience of all three candidates and both major parties to the US financial elite.

New York Senator Clinton spoke Monday in Philadelphia and outlined her plan to address the housing and financial crises. Her relationship to Wall Street was perhaps best summed up by her proposal for an Emergency Working Group on Foreclosures, to be headed by “a distinguished non-partisan group of economic leaders like Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, and Paul Volcker.”

Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board during the Bill Clinton administration, is a “free market” advocate of financial deregulation and admirer of Ayn Rand. He fostered the creation of the housing and credit bubbles that have now burst by repeatedly cutting interest rates, and rejected proposals by one of the Fed governors that the US central bank more closely monitor subprime mortgage lenders.

Robert Rubin was CEO of Goldman Sachs, the biggest Wall Street investment bank, before becoming Clinton’s treasury secretary. (He now holds a top management position at Citigroup). Rubin spearheaded the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, a cornerstone of federal banking regulation since its enactment at the height of the Great Depression.

Glass-Steagall established a legal wall between commercial (i.e., depository) banks and investment banks, authorizing the Federal Reserve to regulate and impose capital and liquidity requirements on the commercial banks. Its repeal facilitated many of the speculative practices that contributed to the present financial disaster.

Paul Volcker was appointed chairman of the Federal Reserve by Democratic President Jimmy Carter in 1979 and jacked up interest rates in order to precipitate a severe recession and sharp rise in unemployment. As Fed chairman under Ronald Reagan, he helped preside over a brutal offensive against the working class that took the form of union-busting, cuts in social spending, tax breaks for the wealthy and more sweeping deregulation of big business. These policies set in motion the redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top that continues to the present, and has produced unprecedented levels of social inequality.

Clinton sought to present herself as an advocate for working families, but she was careful not to alienate her Wall Street supporters and campaign contributors. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, she has raised $6.6 million from individual donors and political action committees associated with the securities and investment industry, just a shade less than the $6.7 million raised by Illinois Senator Obama. (McCain, the presumptive Republican candidate, has raised just under $3 million from the financial sector).

“We’ve given Bear Stearns a $30 billion lifeline,” she said. “We’ve given their creditors, their lenders, their customers and those associated with them the same lifeline. We are now lending billions of dollars a day to help Wall Street banks that aren’t regulated, that are not held accountable. How can you tell a family about to lose their home that there’s nothing we can do to help them?”

This attempt at a populist appeal was not a denunciation of the government bailout of the banks. Both her campaign and that of Obama have endorsed the measures taken by the Fed to rescue Wall Street.

It would be generous to even label as “minimal” the actual measures proposed by Clinton. She endorsed proposals being drafted by Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank, the Democratic chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, and Christopher Dodd, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, that would allocate $10 billion to back between $300 billion and $400 billion in government guarantees to encourage mortgage companies and banks to write down the principal on failing subprime mortgages and sell them at auction to other investors, so that the mortgages could be refinanced on less onerous terms.

The overriding aim of this plan is to avert an even deeper financial crisis and prop up the banks by ending the decline in home prices, which is causing mounting bank write-downs of mortgage-backed securities.

Were such a proposal to be enacted—which is unlikely since it is opposed by the Bush administration and most congressional Republicans—it would aid only a fraction of the millions of families facing the prospect of foreclosure. In the first place, it is voluntary, with no compulsion on mortgage lenders. Secondly, many subprime borrowers would not qualify for the program, including those—perhaps as much as a half of the total—who have taken out home equity loans in addition to their mortgages.

It would, moreover, provide an opportunity for banks and investment houses to reap a windfall from the purchase, at a substantial discount, of home loans that would be guaranteed against default by the federal government.

Clinton also suggested that the federal government be prepared to purchase failing subprime loans outright if mere government guarantees did not stem the foreclosure crisis.

Clinton repeated her previous calls for a 90-day moratorium on foreclosures and a five-year freeze on subprime interest rates. She backed Democratic legislation that would allow bankruptcy judges to amend the terms of mortgages, called for a $30 billion package that would provide grants and loans to localities to acquire foreclosed properties, and a $10 billion expansion of the Mortgage Revenue Bond Program.

To gain some perspective on the paltry amounts proposed to address a social crisis enveloping millions of American families, it should be noted that the Fed has already offered close to a trillion dollars in discounted loans to the banks and investment houses, that the US government pays out well over $400 billion a year in interest on the national debt to banks and big investors, and that the Iraq war is costing, according to most estimates, $144 billion annually.

Clinton did not broach the subject of regulatory reform or legal accountability for Wall Street executives.

McCain spoke Tuesday before a group of Hispanic businessmen in Santa Ana, California. He rejected any government intervention to aid distressed homeowners, saying, “It is not the duty of government to bail out and reward those who act irresponsibly, whether they are big banks or small borrowers.”

Upholding the tarnished “free market” mantras of the past several decades, he said the government should intervene “based solely on preventing systemic risk,” and called for even more deregulation of the banking system, advocating the removal of “tax, accounting and regulatory hurdles for banks to raise capital.”

Obama gave a speech Thursday at Cooper Union in Manhattan before a select Wall Street audience. He was warmly introduced by New York Major Michael Bloomberg, a multi-billionaire financial media mogul. The Illinois senator in turn praised Bloomberg for his “extraordinary leadership.” He recognized Paul Volcker, who has endorsed his campaign, and William Donaldson, former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman.

Obama focused his remarks on a call for financial regulatory reform, while taking care to declare his reverence for the American “free market” and declaring, “I do not believe that government should stand in the way of innovation, or turn back the clock to an older era of regulation.”

He called for the Federal Reserve Board to be given regulatory powers to monitor investment banks, now that it has ended the long-standing rule that limited direct Fed lending to commercial banks only. He also advocated more oversight of credit-rating agencies and requiring stronger capital requirements for complex financial instruments like mortgage-backed securities.

Obama’s speech reflected the position of sections of the US financial establishment that consider the existing largely deregulated environment dangerously inadequate to deal with globalized financial markets and the proliferation of entirely unregulated forms of speculation. At the same time, his speech was an implicit attack on the policies of the Bill Clinton administration, which presided over the repeal of Glass-Steagall and encouraged rampant speculation.

On specific measures to address the housing crisis, he largely echoed the proposals of Hillary Clinton, endorsing the Frank-Dodd plan, supporting the ability of bankruptcy judges to alter mortgage terms, calling for $30 billion in aid to financially stressed homeowners, and proposing a $10 billion allocation to help families modify their home loans.

Like Clinton, he invoked the Fed bailout of the banks to turn a populist phase, without actually opposing the massive government aid to Wall Street. “If we can extend a hand to banks on Wall Street, we can extend a hand to Americans who are struggling,” he declared.

At the same time, he joined with McCain in putting much of the onus for the crisis on ordinary working people, declaring that he agreed with McCain that the government should “do nothing to protect borrowers and lenders who’ve made bad decisions or taken on excessive risk.”

The core of his speech was the assertion that the present crisis is the result of excesses and aberrations which “distorted” the “free market that has been the engine of America’s progress.” He put forward the notion of an identity of interests between the financial aristocracy and the American people, saying that Americans must renew “that common interest between Wall Street and Main Street that is the key to our success.”

He demonstrated his own identity of interests with Wall Street by following his speech with a fundraising lunch at the Manhattan offices of Credit Suisse, the multinational investment bank. Seats cost $1,000 to $2,300.

The sieges of Basra and Sadr City: another US war crime in Iraq

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By Bill Van Auken

US fighter planes and helicopter gunships struck the southern Iraqi city of Basra and the teaming slums of Baghdad’s Sadr City with bombs and missiles Friday as the offensive launched by Iraqi puppet troops against the Mahdi Army, the Shia militia loyal to Muqtada al Sadr, faltered badly.

These air attacks, carried out in densely populated cities, represent another war crime in the five-year-old campaign of aggression and colonial-style occupation carried out by Washington in pursuit of US strategic interests in the region.

Fighting raged for a fourth straight day Friday, with US helicopters firing HHellfire missiles into Sadr City, a vast and impoverished area of Baghdad that is home to some 2 million people. US military sources said the attack killed four “terrorists.” Film from the area, however, showed dead and wounded children and there were reports that attacks caused dozens of civilian casualties.

The night before, US and British fighter planes bombed neighborhoods in Basra, the port city in southern Iraq, with a population of 1.5 million.

The US military reported Friday morning that American troops had fought running battles with Iraqi militiamen across six neighborhoods of Baghdad the day before. The Pentagon claimed that US forces killed 42 people in the fighting in the Iraqi capital, labeling all of the dead as “terrorists.”

According to some Iraqi estimates, the dead in Basra alone now number over 400, with hundreds more wounded. Fighting is also raging across much of Iraq, with fierce battles reported in Kut, Hilla, Amara, Kirkuk, and Baquba. US sources put the death toll Friday at 170.

American occupation forces have clearly stepped up their role in the crackdown, as Iraqi puppet forces have failed to achieve their objectives. In Basra, some 30,000 Iraqi troops and police have apparently been unable to wrest control from the Mahdi Army over at least three quarters of the city.

While Maliki had initially given a 72-hour ultimatum for the Sadrists in Basra to lay down their arms, he extended it Friday until April 8. The date coincides with scheduled testimony by Gen. David Petraeus, the US military commander in Iraq, and US Ambassador Ryan Crocker to Congress on proposals for continued troop deployments in the occupied country. The eruption of fighting has already led to speculation that Petraeus and the administration may well call for a suspension of the withdrawals that were to have reduced US forces to 140,000—still above the “pre-surge” levels—by this summer.

In Baghdad, meanwhile, the Washington Post reported: “US forces in armored vehicles battled Mahdi Army fighters Thursday in Sadr City, the vast Shiite stronghold in eastern Baghdad, as an offensive to quell party-backed militias entered its third day. Iraqi army and police units appeared to be largely holding to the outskirts of the area as American troops took the lead in the fighting. “Four US Stryker armored vehicles were seen in Sadr City by a Washington Post correspondent, one of them engaging Mahdi Army militiamen with heavy fire. The din of American weapons, along with the Mahdi Army’s AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades, was heard through much of the day. US helicopters and drones buzzed overhead.”

Baghdad, like Basra before it, has been placed under a 24-hour curfew that began Thursday night and will run at least until Sunday morning. The effect is to turn the city’s streets into a free-fire zone for occupation troops and their Iraqi puppet allies.

Speaking at the White House Friday, President George W. Bush called the bloody clashes a “defining moment in the history of a free Iraq” that demonstrated the Iraqi regime’s commitment to “even-handed justice” and Maliki’s “leadership.”

The American president added: “There’s going to be violence. And that’s sad. But this situation needed to be dealt with, and it’s now being dealt with — just like we’re dealing with the situation up in Mosul.”

Referring to Maliki, Bush declared: “This was his decision. It was his military planning. It was his causing the troops to go from point A to point B. And it’s exactly what a lot of folks here in America were wondering whether or not Iraq would even be able to do in the first place.”

There is no reason to believe the official story coming out of the White House and the Pentagon that the sieges being laid to Basra and Sadr City are the result of some independent decision made by the Maliki regime. Whatever differences may exist over the timing or execution of this operation, it has clearly been carried out to fulfill definite US objectives.

The operation comes barely one week after Vice President Dick Cheney’s surprise visit to Baghdad for talks that centered on provincial elections scheduled for October, the future of Iraq’s oil industry and plans for the continued and long-term occupation of Iraq by US forces.

The bloodbath that is now being carried out is in all likelihood the practical outcome of these discussions.

While claiming that Maliki is upholding the rule of law against “gangs, militias and outlaws,” Washington has deliberately instigated what amounts to a civil war between rival political factions and militias within Iraq’s majority Shia population in order to advance its own predatory interests in the country.

The crackdown has not been launched against militias in general, but at Sadr’s Mahdi Army. Its aim is to severely weaken the Sadrists to the benefit of their political rivals, Maliki’s Dawa party and its principal government ally, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), led by Shia cleric Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, whose own militia, the Badr Brigade, is well represented in the government’s security forces.

In an analysis prepared last November, the International Crisis Group described the conflict between the Shia factions as taking “the form of a class struggle between the Shiite merchant elite of Baghdad and the holy cities, represented by ISCI (as well, religiously, by [Grand Ayatollah] Sistani), and the Shiite urban underclass,” which is the principal base of support for the movement led by Sadr.

The determination to suppress the Sadrist movement is driven in part by the electoral calendar. Those now holding power in the Maliki government—who have little in the way of mass support—fear that the Sadrists could sweep provincial elections set for October.

It is worth recalling that the last major urban siege conducted in Iraq—the razing of the predominantly Sunni city of Fallujah in November of 2004 in which thousands of Iraqi civilians died—was also carried out in preparation for US-organized elections scheduled three months later.

The US interest in this conflict is clear. While the Sadrists have repeatedly demanded the withdrawal of US forces, Maliki’s Dawa Party and the ISCI have made clear that they are prepared to support an indefinite occupation.

While the ISCI supports the carving out of an autonomous Shia region in the south in order to lay hold of the region’s oil wealth—it includes 60 percent of the country’s known reserves—the Sadrists have rejected regionalism in favor of a centralized federal government. To realize their objectives, the ISCI must oust the Sadrists and other rivals from positions of control in Basra and elsewhere.

As the Wall Street Journal reported Friday, “The battle for Basra marks the latest clash over the region’s biggest source of wealth: its oil reserves, comprising 9.5% of the world’s total.”

The Journal reported that during his recent visit, Cheney “held one-on-one meetings with Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish leaders in Iraq to speed passage of a law opening Iraq’s enormous petroleum reserves to more efficient production by global oil companies.”

While the passage of a national law opening Iraq’s oil wealth to foreign exploitation has been held up, the Journal noted, “Kurdish officials in Iraq’s semi-autonomous northern enclave have passed an oil law of their own and are signing deals with foreign firms without waiting for permission from Baghdad.”

Washington may well be seeking to forge similar relations in the south of Iraq, with even larger oil reserves, and would certainly be prepared to spill considerable amounts of blood to secure such a prize.

Those who point to the eruption of violence in Iraq as a manifestation of the “failure of the surge” are missing the point. The Bush administration has deliberately provoked this violence in pursuit of the objective that has driven the Iraq intervention from its outset: the cementing of semi-colonial US control over the country and its oil wealth.

US actions have compelled the Sadrist movement to renounce, at least in practice, the cease-fire that it initiated last August. This began not just with this week’s military offensive, but with a prolonged campaign by US occupation forces, the Maliki government and the Badr Brigade to use the cease-fire as a cover for arresting and killing thousands of Sadrists. It is this campaign that produced the so-called “rogue” elements that have fought back, providing a pretext for intensifying the repression.

These actions, however, have only underscored the failure of five years of American occupation to either install a reliable puppet regime or quell the resistance of the Iraqi people. The US military’s sealing off of Sadr City, the air and ground attacks against the Mahdi Army militia and the imposition of the round-the-clock curfew have all failed to halt the mortar and rocket attacks on the heavily fortified Green Zone, which was hit more than 20 times on Friday, with the US Embassy compound, the United Nations offices and the offices an Iraqi vice president all suffering direct hits.

The principal result of the US strategy is the unleashing of barbarism against millions of people living in two major cities—Baghdad and Basra.

Residents of Basra told the BBC Friday that the level of violence being inflicted on the city is the worst in memory, surpassing even that of the repression carried out by the Iraqi military against the 1991 Shia uprising that followed Iraq’s defeat in the first Persian Gulf War. It should be recalled that one of the pretexts incessantly repeated by the Bush administration for its 2003 invasion was that Saddam Hussein had “killed his own people.” But now, with ample backing from the US military, Washington’s Iraqi puppet Maliki is doing the same thing.

Aside from those killed and wounded, the entire population has been locked in their homes under conditions of rising early summer heat and dwindling water and food supplies. Both electricity and water supplies have been cut off to Basra.

“This is a catastrophe that could lead to a huge problem as we are entering summer and, of course, if it continues like this, it will lead to waterborne diseases including diarrhea,” Mahdi al-Tamimi, head of the Basra’s Human Rights Office told the United Nations news agency, IRIN. “All aspects of life have been paralyzed with the closure of schools, government offices and markets due to clashes that have forced people indoors with not enough food as there was no prior notice for this operation.”

“The humanitarian situation is getting worse by the minute — not the hour or the day — due to clashes taking place in the streets; as a result, the humanitarian effort has been severely hampered and paralyzed,” Salih Hmoud, head of the Iraqi Red Crescent Society’s office in Basra, told IRIN on Thursday.

Lack of clean water has led to outbreaks of diarrhea in Basra. “Some of these people with diarrhea have somehow managed to defy the curfew and reach nearby hospitals on foot but the majority is still in their houses,” said Hmoud. “This is very dangerous because they can die if they are not treated.”

Reporting on Baghdad, Patrick Cockburn of the British Independent noted that Sadr City’s two million residents have been encircled by the US military and ordered to stay indoors. He quoted a Sadr City resident named Mohammed, who said, “We are trapped in our homes with no water or electricity since yesterday. We can’t bathe our children or wash our clothes.” Temperatures in both Baghdad and Basra have risen into the upper 90s (30s Celsius).

Both Maliki (who has vowed to “fight until the end”) and US military sources have indicated that the sieges being waged against Basra and Sadr City have only just begun. The strategy of “clearing” the crowded slum neighborhoods will take many more days if not weeks of combat. It threatens a bloodbath that could easily eclipse the one that was inflicted upon Fallujah more than three years ago.