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On 14 October, President Barack Obama announced he was sending United States special forces troops to Uganda to join the civil war there. In the next few months, US combat troops will be sent to South Sudan, Congo and Central African Republic. They will only “engage” for “self-defence”, says Obama, satirically. With Libya secured, an American invasion of the African continent is under way.

Obama’s decision is described in the press as “highly unusual” and “surprising”, even “weird”. It is none of these things. It is the logic of American foreign policy since 1945. Take Vietnam. The priority was to halt the influence of China, an imperial rival, and “protect” Indonesia, which President Nixon called “the region’s richest hoard of natural resources …the greatest prize”. Vietnam merely got in the way; and the slaughter of more than three million Vietnamese and the devastation and poisoning of their land was the price of America achieving its goal. Like all America’s subsequent invasions, a trail of blood from Latin America to Afghanistan and Iraq, the rationale was usually “self defence” or “humanitarian”, words long emptied of their dictionary meaning.

In Africa, says Obama, the “humanitarian mission” is to assist the government of Uganda defeat the Lord’s resistance Army (LRA), which “has murdered, raped and kidnapped tens of thousands of men, women and children in central Africa”. This is an accurate description of the LRA, evoking multiple atrocities administered by the United States, such as the bloodbath in the 1960s following the CIA-arranged murder of Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese independence leader and first legally elected prime minister, and the CIA coup that installed Mobutu Sese Seko, regarded as Africa’s most venal tyrant.

Obama’s other justification also invites satire. This is the “national security of the United States”. The LRA has been doing its nasty work for 24 years, of minimal interest to the United States. Today, it has few than 400 fighters and has never been weaker. However, US “national security” usually means buying a corrupt and thuggish regime that has something Washington wants. Uganda’s “president-for-life” Yoweri Museveni already receives the larger part of $45 million in US military “aid” – including Obama’s favourite drones. This is his bribe to fight a proxy war against America’s latest phantom Islamic enemy, the rag-tag al Shabaab group based in Somalia. The RTA will play a public relations role, distracting western journalists with its perennial horror stories.

However, the main reason the US is invading Africa is no different from that which ignited the Vietnam war. It is China. In the world of self-serving, institutionalised paranoia that justifies what General David Petraeus, the former US commander and now CIA director, implies is a state of perpetual war, China is replacing al-Qaeda as the official American “threat”. When I interviewed Bryan Whitman, an assistant secretary of defence at the Pentagon last year, I asked him to describe the current danger to America. Struggling visibly, he repeated, “Asymmetric threats … asymmetric threats”. These justify the money-laundering state-sponsored arms conglomerates and the biggest military and war budget in history. With Osama bin Laden airbrushed, China takes the mantle.

Africa is China’s success story. Where the Americans bring drones and destabilisation, the Chinese bring roads, bridges and dams. What they want is resources, especially fossil fuels. With Africa’s greatest oil reserves, Libya under Muammar Gaddafi was one of China’s most important sources of fuel. When the civil war broke out and Nato backed the “rebels” with a fabricated story about Gaddafi planning “genocide” in Benghazi, China evacuated its 30,000 workers in Libya. The subsequent UN security council resolution that allowed the west’s “humanitarian intervention” was explained succinctly in a proposal to the French government by the “rebel” National Transitional Council, disclosed last month in the newspaper Liberation, in which France was offered 35 per cent of Libya’s gross national oil production “in exchange” (the term used) for “total and permanent” French support for the NTC. Running up the Stars and Stripes in “liberated” Tripoli last month, US ambassador Gene Cretz blurted out: “We know that oil is the jewel in the crown of Libyan natural resources!”

The de facto conquest of Libya by the US and its imperial partners heralds a modern version of the “scramble for Africa” at the end of the 19th century.

Like the “victory” in Iraq, journalists have played a critical role in dividing Libyans into worthy and unworthy victims. A recent Guardian front page carried a photograph of a terrified “pro-Gaddafi” fighter and his wild-eyed captors who, says the caption, “celebrate”. According to General Petraeus, there is now a war “of perception … conducted continuously through the news media”.

For more than a decade the US has tried to establish a command on the continent of Africa, AFRICOM, but has been rebuffed by governments, fearful of the regional tensions this would cause. Libya, and now Uganda, South Sudan and Congo, provide the main chance. As WikiLeaks cables and the US National Strategy for Counter-terrorism reveal, American plans for Africa are part of a global design in which 60,000 special forces, including death squads, already operate in 75 countries, soon to be 120. As Dick Cheney pointed out in his 1990s “defence strategy” plan, America simply wishes to rule the world.

That this is now the gift of Barack Obama, the “Son of Africa”, is supremely ironic. Or is it? As Frantz Fanon explained in Black Skin, White Masks, what matters is not so much the colour of your skin as the power you serve and the millions you betray.

By John Pilger

20 October, 2011

Johnpilger.com

John Pilger is an Australian journalist and documentary maker, based in London. He has twice won Britain’s Journalist of the Year Award, and his documentaries have received academy awards in Britain and the US

By definition, capitalism is: An economic system based on private ownership of the means of production (industry, banks, technology), where through the process of market competition, production occurs for private profit — if something cannot be sold for a profit it is not produced.

In practice, private ownership has evolved into giant corporations, which monopolize production, markets, and government via campaign contributions, corporate lobbying (often legalized bribery) and promising politicians a cozy retirement from politics: “working” for corporations as consultants, lobbyists, etc.

There are certain policies that raise profits for corporations in general, including: destroying labor rights and attacking unions (since lower wages equals higher profits), slashing social spending (since corporations paying taxes cuts into their profits), cutting Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security (since corporations help pay for these too, lowering their profits), privatization, lowering corporate taxes, lowering taxes for the wealthy, etc.

These anti-worker, pro-profit policies strongly unite corporations, giving them a powerful organizational tool: corporations (and the wealthy who own them) pool their resources to pursue these policies through buying politicians, think tanks, news media, university donations, etc.

Such demands are obvious, since they effect the vast majority of working people: Good Jobs Now, No Cuts to Social Services, Save Social Security and Medicare, Health care for All, Save Public Education, End the Wars. Pay for these policies by TAXING THE RICH AND CORPORATIONS.

Putting forward a few demands that all working people can unite behind will give the movement a united, strong message, while allowing other demands of working people to find a safe place to express themselves.

By Shamus Cooke

Shamus Cooke is a social service worker, trade unionist and writer for Workers Action (www.workerscompass.org)

In a recent debate Congressman Ron Paul claimed the United States military had troops in 130 countries.  The St. Petersburg Times looked into whether such an outrage could actually be true and was obliged to report that the number was actually 148 countries.  However, if you watch NFL football games, you hear the announcers thank members of the U.S. military for watching from 177 countries.  The proud public claim is worse than the scandalous claim or the “investigative” report.  What gives?

We are supposed to be proud of the U.S. empire but to reject with high dudgeon any accusation of having an empire.  Abroad, this conversation makes even less sense, because those troops and their bases are in everyone’s faces.  I lived near Vicenza, Italy, years ago.  The people tolerated the U.S. Army base.  The addition of a many-times larger one in the same town, now underway, has led to outrage, condemnation, and bitter resentment of being handed second-class citizenship in one’s own country while being asked to show gratitude for it.

As President Obama encircles Russia with missile bases and China with naval bases, the people who live or used to live where the bases are built resent the occupation, just as the people of Iraq and Afghanistan resent the occupation.  A global movement against U.S. military bases is rapidly rising from all corners of the empire.  But so is a movement against the occupation of Der Homeland by an unrepresentative and unrepresenting police state.

Those of us not in the Forbes 400 have been handed second-class citizenship in the place we are supposedly protecting through the occupation of every other place.  A large majority of us want the rich and the corporations taxed heavily, but they are not.  We want the wars ended, the troops brought home, and military spending cut.  None of this happens.  Nor do the outcomes of elections impact the likelihood of any of these things happening.  We want to keep and strengthen Social Security.  We want Medicare protected and expanded to cover us all.  We want rights enlarged for human beings and curtailed for corporations.  We want to cut off the corporate welfare and the bankster bailouts.  We want to invest in infrastructure, green energy, and education.  We want the right to organize and assemble.  And we want a clean system that allows public pressure through ordinary means: publicly funded elections, verifiable vote counting, no gerrymanders, no media and ballot barriers to candidates.  None of this is forthcoming.  We are paying taxation and receiving no representation.

Here’s an “End Empire” agenda:

·      Cut a half a trillion dollars out of the $1.2 trillion national security budget; putting half of it into tax cuts for non-billionaires, and half of it into useful spending on green energy, education, retraining for displaced military-industrial workers, etc.

·      Bring the National Guard home and de-federalize it.

·      Ban the redeployment of personnel currently suffering PTSD.

·      Ban no-bid uncompeted military contracts.

·      Restore Constitutional war powers to the Congress.

·      Create of a public referendum required prior to launching any war.

·      Close the foreign bases.

·      Ban weapons from space.

·      Ban extra-legal prisons.

·      Ban kangaroo military courts outside of our ordinary court system.

·      Restore habeas corpus.

·      Limit military spending to no more than twice that of the next highest spending nation on earth.

·      Ban secret budgets, secret agencies, and secret operations.

·      Ban the launching of drone strikes into foreign nations.

·      Forbid the transfer of students’ information to military recruiters without their permission.

·      Comply with the Kellogg-Briand Pact.

I’ve had people across the political spectrum tell me this all seems reasonable and necessary.  But that doesn’t make it happen.  What could make change possible is the process of reversal now underway through which the occupied are becoming the occupiers.  On Wall Street, protesters of plutocracy are risking their bodies.  Police are assaulting, pepper-spraying, and tasering peaceful demonstrators, as uppercrusters guzzle champagne on balconies, gawking at the spectacle.  But reports are leaking out of police refusing to participate in assaulting people  — people who are acting on behalf of the police as much as anyone else.  If the NYPD finds the decency found by some members of the militaries of Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, the decency to refuse evil orders, the tide will quickly turn.  If they do not, the tide will slowly turn.  But turn it will.

Occupations are now being organized across the country, building up to a massive occupation of Washington, D.C., beginning October 6 th : http://october2011.org

This is how it starts.  There is no other moral option than nonviolent resistance.  There is no other possible outcome than success.  That’s the beauty of ending an empire; victory is guaranteed sooner or later by the inevitability of imperial collapse.  Our task is to speed it along and ease the pain during the process.  The last word goes to U2:

October

And the trees are stripped bare

Of all they wear

What do I care

October

And kingdoms rise

And kingdoms fall

But you go on

David Swanson is the author of “War Is A Lie”

JOIN HIM IN DC OCTOBER 6TH AT http://october2011.org

By David Swanson

27 September, 2011

Warisacrime.org

Tehran would have to be terminally foolish to try to snuff out an ambassador on US soil, author says.

No one ever lost money betting on the dull predictability of the US government. Just as Occupy Wall Street is firing imaginations all across the spectrum – piercing the noxious revolving door between government and casino capitalism – Washington brought us all down to earth, sensationally advertising an Iranian cum Mexican cartel terror plot straight out of The Fast and the Furious movie franchise. The potential victim: Adel al-Jubeir, the ambassador in the US of that lovely counter-revolutionary Mecca, Saudi Arabia.

FBI Director Robert Mueller insisted the Iran-masterminded terror plot “reads like the pages of a Hollywood script”. It does. And quite a sloppy script at that. Fast and Furious duo Paul Walker/Vin Diesel wouldn’t be caught dead near it.

The good guys in this Washington production are the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). In the words of Attorney General Eric Holder, they uncovered “a deadly plot directed by factions of the Iranian government to assassinate a foreign Ambassador on US soil with explosives”.

Holder added that the bombing of the Saudi embassy in Washington was also part of the plan. Subsequent spinning amplified that to planned bombings of the Israeli embassy in Washington, as well as the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Buenos Aires.

The Justice Department has peddled quite a murky story – Operation Red Coalition (no, you can’t make that stuff up) – centred on one Manssor Arbabsiar, a 56-year-old holding both Iranian and US passports and an Iran-based co-conspirator, Gholam Shakuri, an alleged member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s (IRGC) Quds Force.

Arbabsiar allegedly had a series of encounters in Mexico with a DEA mole posing as a Mexican drug cartel heavy weight. The Iranian-American seems to have been convinced that the mole was a member of the hardcore Zetas Mexican cartel, and reportedly bragged he was being “directed by high-ranking members of the Iranian government”, including a cousin who was “a member of the Iranian army but did not wear a uniform”.

On top of it, he told the DEA mole that his Iranian government buddies could come up with “tons of opium” for the Mexican cartel (an Afghan connection, perhaps). Then they discussed a “number of violent missions” complete with Arbabsiar bragging about bombing a packed Washington restaurant used by the Saudi ambassador.

Holder characterised the whole thing as a $1.5m “murder-for-hire” plan. Arbabsiar was arrested only a few days ago, on September 29, at JFK airport in New York. He allegedly confessed, according to the Justice Department. Shakuri for his part is still at large.

Holder was adamant: “The United States is committed to hold Iran accountable for its actions.” Yet he stopped short of stating the plot was approved by the highest levels of the Iranian government. So what next? War? Hold your horses; Washington should first think about asking the Chinese if they’re willing to foot the bill (the answer will be no).

Predictably, the proverbial torrent of US “officials” came out with guns blazing, spinning everything in sight. An alarmed Pentagon will be increasing surveillance over the Quds Force and “Iran’s actions” in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf. Former US ambassadors stated that, “it’s an attack on the United States to attack this ambassador”. Washington is about to impose even more sanctions against Iran; and Washington is urgently taking the matter to the UN Security Council.

What next? An R2P (“responsibility to protect”) resolution ordering NATO to protect every House of Saud minion across the world by bombing Iran into regime change?

Ali Akbar Javanfekr, a spokesman for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, at least introduced a little bit of common sense. “I think the US government is busy fabricating a new scenario and history has shown both the US government and the CIA have a lot of experience in fabricating these scenarios … I think their goal is to reach the American public. They want to take the public’s mind off the serious domestic problems they’re facing these days and scare them with fabricated problems outside the country.” Iran has not even established yet that these two characters are actually Iranian citizens.

The Iranian government – which prides itself on a logical approach to diplomacy – would have to have been inoculated with a terminal Stuxnet-style foolishness virus to behave in such a counterproductive manner, by targeting a high-profile foreign policy adviser to King Abdullah on American soil. The official Iranian news agency IRNA described the plot as “America’s new propaganda scenario” against Iran.

As for the Washington mantra that “Iran has been insinuating itself into many of the struggles in the Middle East”, that’s undiluted Saudi propaganda. In fact it’s the House of Saud who’s been conducting the fierce counter-revolution that has smashed any possibility of an Arab Spring in the Persian Gulf – from the invasion and repression of Bahrain to the rash pre-emption of protests inside Saudi Arabia’s Shia-dominated eastern provinces.

The whole thing smells like a flimsy pretext for a casus belli. The timing of the announcement couldn’t be more suspicious. White House national security advisor Thomas E. Donilon briefed King Abdullah of the plot no less than two weeks ago, in a three-hour meeting in Riyadh. Meanwhile the US government has been carrying not plots, but targeted assassinations of US citizens, as in the Anwar al-Awlaki case.

So why now? Holder is caught in yet another scandal – on whether he told lies regarding Operation Fast and Furious (no, you can’t make this stuff up), a federal gun sting through which scores of US weapons ended up in the hands of – here they come again – Mexican drug cartels.

So how to bury Fast and Furious, the economic abyss, the 10 years of war in Afghanistan, the increasing allure of Occupy Wall Street – not to mention the Saudi role in smashing the spirit of the Arab Spring? By uncovering a good ol’ al-Qaeda style plot on US soil, on top of it conducted by “evil” Iran. Al-Qaeda and Tehran sharing top billing; not even Cheney and Rumsfeld in their heyday could come up with something like this. Long live GWOT (the global war on terror). And long live the neo-con spirit; remember, real men go to Tehran – and the road starts now.

By Pepe Escobar

12 October 2011

Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times. His latest book is named Obama Does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

Now that the CIA’s proxy army has murdered Gadhafi, what next for Libya?

If Washington’s plans succeed, Libya will become another American puppet state. Most of the cities, towns, and infrastructure have been destroyed by air strikes by the air forces of the US and Washington’s NATO puppets. US and European firms will now get juicy contracts, financed by US taxpayers, to rebuild Libya. The new real estate will be carefully allocated to lubricate a new ruling class picked by Washington. This will put Libya firmly under Washington’s thumb.

With Libya conquered, AFRICOM will start on the other African countries where China has energy and mineral investments. Obama has already sent US troops to Central Africa under the guise of defeating the Lord’s Resistance Army, a small insurgency against the ruling dictator-for-life. The Republican Speaker of the House, John Boehner, welcomed the prospect of yet another war by declaring that sending US troops into Central Africa “furthers US national security interests and foreign policy.” Republican Senator James Inhofe added a gallon of moral verbiage about saving “Ugandan children,” a concern the senator did not have for Libya’s children or Palestine’s, Iraq’s, Afghanistan’s and Pakistan’s.

Washington has revived the Great Power Game and is vying with China. Whereas China brings Africa investment and gifts of infrastructure, Washington sends troops, bombs and military bases. Sooner or later Washington’s aggressiveness toward China and Russia is going to explode in our faces.

Where is the money going to come from to finance Washington’s African Empire? Not from Libya’s oil. Big chunks of that have been promised to the French and British for providing cover for Washington’s latest war of naked aggression. Not from tax revenues from a collapsing US economy where unemployment, if measured correctly, is 23 percent.

With Washington’s annual budget deficit as huge as it is, the money can only come from the printing press.

Washington has already run the printing press enough to raise the consumer price index for all urban consumers (CPI-U) to 3.9% for the year (as of the end of September), the consumer price index for urban wage earners and clerical workers (CPI-W) to 4.4% for the year, and the producer price index (PPI) to 6.9% for the year.

As statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) has shown, the official inflation measures are rigged in order to hold down cost of living adjustments to Social Security recipients, thus saving money for Washington’s wars. When measured correctly, the current rate of inflation in the US is 11.5%.

What interest rate can savers get without taking massive risks on Greek bonds? US banks pay less than one-half of one percent on FDIC insured savings deposits. Short-term US government bond funds pay essentially zero.

Thus, according to official US government statistics American savers are losing between 3.9% and 4.4% of their capital yearly. According to John Williams’ estimate of the real rate of inflation, US savers are losing 11.5% of their accumulated savings.

As retired Americans receive no interest on their savings, they are having to spend down their capital. The ability of even the most prudent retirees to survive the negative rate of interest they are receiving and the erosion by inflation of any pensions that they receive will come to an end once their accumulated assets are exhausted.

Except for Washington’s favored mega-rich, the one percent that has captured all of the income gains of recent years, the rest of America has been assigned to the trash can. Nothing whatsoever has been done for them since the financial crisis hit in December 2007. Bush and Obama, Republican and Democrat, have focused on saving the 1 percent while giving the finger to the 99 percent.

Finally, some Americans, though not enough, have caught on to the flag-waving rah-rah “patriotism” that has consigned them to the trash bin of history. They are not going down without a fight and are in the streets. Occupy Wall Street has spread. What will be the fate of this movement?

Will the snow and ice of cold weather end the protests, or send them into public buildings? How long will the local authorities, subservient to Washington as they are, tolerate the obvious signal that the population lacks any confidence whatsoever in the government?

If the protests last, especially if they grow and don’t decline, the authorities will infiltrate the protestors with police provocateurs who will fire on the police. This will be the excuse to shoot down the protestors and to arrest the survivors as “terrorists” or “domestic extremists” and to send them to the $385 million dollar camps built under US government contract by Cheney’s Halliburton.

The Amerikan Police State will have taken its next step into the Amerikan Concentration Camp State.

Meanwhile, lost in their oblivion, conservatives will continue to bemoan the ruination of the country by homosexual marriage, abortion, and “the liberal media.” Liberal organizations committed to civil liberty, such as the ACLU, will continue to rank a woman’s right to an abortion with defense of the US Constitution. Amnesty International will assist Washington in demonizing its next target for military attack while turning a blind eye to the war crimes of President Obama.

When we consider what Israel has got away with, being as it is under Washington’s bought protection–the war crimes, the murders of children, the eviction in total disregard of international law of Palestinians from their ancestral homes, the bulldozing of their houses and uprooting of their olive groves in order to move in fanatical “settlers,” the murderous invasions of Lebanon and Gaza, the wholesale slaughter of civilians–we can only conclude that Washington, Israel’s enabler, can get away with far more.

In the few opening years of the 21st century, Washington has destroyed the US Constitution, the separation of powers, international law, the accountability of government, and has sacrificed every moral principle to achieving hegemony over the world. This ambitious agenda is being attempted while simultaneously Washington removed all regulation over Wall Street, the home of massive greed, permitting Wall Street’s short-term horizon to wreck the US economy, thus destroying the economic basis for Washington’s assault on the world.

Will the US collapse in economic chaos before it rules the world?

By Paul Craig Roberts

21 October, 2011

Countercurrents.org

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was appointed by President Reagan Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury and confirmed by the US Senate. He was Associate Editor and columnist with the Wall Street Journal, and he served on the personal staffs of Representative Jack Kemp and Senator Orrin Hatch. He was staff associate of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, staff associate of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, and Chief Economist, Republican Staff, House Budget Committee. He wrote the Kemp-Roth tax rate reduction bill, and was a leader in the supply-side revolution. He was professor of economics in six universities, and is the author of numerous books and scholarly contributions. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30 occasions.

The recent prisoner swap between the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas and the Israeli government has been hailed and celebrated among Palestinians, Israelis and their friends in various parts of the world. The deal entails the release of more than 1 000 Palestinian prisoners, in different stages, in exchange for the Israeli solider, Gilad Shalit, who was captured by Hamas and two other Palestinian groups in 2006. Toufic Haddad examines what happened, the negotiations that led to this development, and what was achieved, and analyses their significance

If the prisoner exchange deal announced on 11 October 2011 between Hamas and the Israeli government is fully implemented without major hitches, there is little question who ‘won’ this five-year war of wills: the deal will constitute a major victory for Hamas and the resistance-oriented political forces in Palestinian society, while simultaneously representing a significant retreat for Israel and its historical doctrines of forceful coercion and rejectionism vis-à-vis the Palestinian people and their rights.

Make no mistake about it, the tangible accomplishments and historical precedents embodied in this deal rival, if not exceed, other prisoner deals in recent memory. This does not mean that the deal was able to fulfil all expectations placed upon it. Nor does it discount the heavy price Palestinian society and political forces played to realise it. Nor again does it avoid complicated concessions by Hamas in the final conditions placed on the release of some prisoners. All this withstanding, this deal should be recognised as a major Hamas victory; any alternative interpretation of this scorecard misreads the basic balance of forces between Palestinians and their occupier in the context of the struggle to achieve Palestinian rights.

How do we read the ‘Shalit deal’ and assess its achievements, or otherwise, for the Palestinian movement? What are the criteria by which such deals can be judged and analysed in the first place? In order to answer these questions and appreciate more fully the dynamics at play, it is necessary to gain a command of the facts of the deal, from which a firmer assessment can be based.

The facts

Presuming a successful prisoner release takes place based upon the official list of prisoners published by both sides at midnight 16 October 2011, the totality of this deal looks as follows:

In exchange for the release of Israeli army Staff Sergeant Gilad Shalit, who has been held by Hamas since 25 June 2006, Israel will release a total of 1050 prisoners in three stages.

The first stage of the release actually took place in September 2009 when Israel released twenty-three prisoners in exchange for a Hamas-broadcast video indicating a ‘sign of life’ from Shalit. These prisoners included twenty women and three men from the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

The agreed-upon remaining 1027 prisoners are to be released in two stages. The first major stage, scheduled to take place on 18 October 2011, will see Israel release 477 prisoners, including 450 men and twenty-seven women prisoners. These prisoners were the subject of the fiercest negotiations, with each prisoner’s fate discussed via indirect negotiations between the contending parties, beneath Egyptian and previously German mediation.

The second and final stage of the deal will take place in two months, entailing the release of 550 prisoners. These prisoners will be released based on a basic set of criteria agreed upon by Hamas and Israel, with the former asserting some discretion over the selection of names. In other words, Israel cannot just arrest 550 people one day, then release them the next, and say they have fulfilled their obligations.

Prisoners released during the first major stage, and which we are limited to discussing at this time, are subject to certain negotiated conditions:

218 will be released to their homes without any conditions (including 133 to Gaza; sixty-eight to the West Bank; nine to East Jerusalem; seven to inside Israel, including one to the Occupied Golan Heights; and one to Jordan);

204 will be deported, including forty abroad, rumoured to be sent to Turkey, Qatar, Syria and Jordan. Of these, 164 will be taken to Gaza, eighteen of whom will be able to return to their homes in the West Bank within three years;

fifty-five will be released with some form of security arrangement, the nature of which has yet to be fully disclosed. This includes forty-nine to the West Bank and six to Jerusalem.

With this as the basic outline of the agreement, ‘crunching’ the data reveals additional aspects worth highlighting.

‘Quality’ of prisoners

Hamas was remarkably successfully in forcing Israel to release large numbers of prisoners with high prison sentences. In fact, 315 of the 477 prisoners released in the first major round have life sentences (310 men, five women); 144 prisoners have sentences longer than ten years; only nine prisoners have sentences less than ten years; and nine other prisoners have undetermined sentences, be they administrative detainees, or yet to be convicted.

The impressive depth of this deal is best illustrated by adding up the total number of years erased by the deal, at least on paper.

Of the 315 prisoners due to be released who are serving life sentences, a little more than half (163) have multiple life sentences (ranging from two to thirty-six). They total 926 life sentences all together. To get a sense of how much prison time this adds up to, Israeli civilian courts set one ‘life sentence’ at twenty-five years of prison time. Aside from the few cases of Palestinians tried in these courts—generally because they are Israeli citizens—most Palestinian prisoners do not have recourse to this interpretation of ‘life sentence’ because they are tried in military courts where the duration of life sentences is left open ended. If an Israeli civil court understanding for a life sentence (twenty-five years) is nonetheless applied to the number of Palestinians sentenced to life in prison, we arrive at the figure of 23,150 years negated through this deal. It needs to be emphasised that this figure is only for illustrative purposes, as, in any case, a prisoner would not be able to serve more than three of these life sentences (seventy-five years) in a given life time. Moreover, a certain portion of these years has already been served, and cannot hence be ‘erased’.

In addition to those serving life sentences, however, the total number of years of those serving high but non-life prison sentences totals just over 4,585 years.

If both figures are added together, a staggering 27,735 years are technically negated by the deal. All this from less than half the total number of prisoners released (roughly 45 percent).

Period of imprisonment

The Shalit deal sees Palestinian prisoners released from historical periods that date back to before the first intifada, to the most recent period of Palestinian history: forty prisoners were arrested before the first intifada (pre-8 December 1987); 112 were arrested during the first intifada (December 1987 – 13 September 1993); eighty-one were arrested during the ‘Oslo peace process’ years (September 1997 – 28 September 2000); and the remaining 244 are from the second intifada (September 2000 – present).

Political orientation

According to Israeli Prison Services, the political distribution of prisoners to be released is as follows: 307 prisoners are from Hamas, ninety-nine from Fatah, twenty-seven from the Islamic Jihad, and twenty-four from the Popular Front. The remaining prisoners derive from smaller factions (mainly the Democratic Front, the Popular Resistance Committees, and the Popular Front-General Command), or are unaffiliated with any political group.

Demographic distribution

Released prisoners hail from all geographic locations within historic Palestine including 289 from the West Bank, 134 from Gaza, forty-six from East Jerusalem, and eight from Palestinian communities inside Israel, including one from the occupied Golan Heights. Among the West Bankers is one woman who resided in Jordan, and a second who is Ukrainian, but lives in the West Bank.

Analysis: The accomplishments

Passing judgement on the Shalit deal cannot take place from a detached precipice of moral or political purity but, rather, must derive from an appreciation for the basic balance of forces at play between the contending parties and their historical precedents in relations between one another. There are no absolute criteria for judging such matters, with interests and needs within each negotiating party variegated, subject to shifts over time, and difficult to quantify to begin with.

For this reason, it is helpful to begin analysing the Shalit deal by understanding that before Shalit’s capture, Israel refused to recognise Hamas as a legitimate political entity; this non-recognition continued despite the Hamas victory in democratic elections in 2006. Israel subsequently refused all formal interaction with Hamas, encouraging other countries to do the same. Soon after Shalit’s capture, Israel’s Prime Minister’s Bureau reiterated this stance, asserting, ‘There will be no negotiations to release prisoners… The government of Israel will not give in to extortion by the Palestinian Authority and the Hamas government, which are headed by murderous terror organisations. The Palestinian Authority bears full responsibility for the welfare of Gilad Shalit and for returning him to Israel in good condition.’

In this respect, the very sealing of a deal with Hamas was a major Israeli concession. Israel sought every possible way to retrieve Shalit without having to negotiate, but failed. The weeks after the capture of Shalit witnessed more than 400 Palestinians killed in Israel’s ‘Operation Summer Rains’ in a failed effort to retrieve him. Israel’s massive offensive ‘Operation Cast lead’ in December 2008/January 2009, which left 1400 Palestinians dead, also put the recovery of Shalit as a central objective of the mission. The siege of Gaza is still justified as necessary in the context of Shalit’s continued detention.

All of this was part and parcel of a broader Israeli strategy vis-à-vis Palestinians which entailed not only the historic rejection of all Palestinian political rights, but an on-the-ground military doctrine which holds that ‘might makes right’, Israel has a ‘long arm of justice’, and Israel will ‘burn into [Palestinian] consciousness’ their own defeat.

Viewed in this context, Shalit’s capture and detention for five years, and Hamas’ ultimate successful negotiation for a prisoner release are all the more impressive. The deal represents the first time that any Palestinian organisation captured an Israeli soldier in territorial Palestine and was able to translate this capture into a negotiated settlement with the Israeli government. Whether one agrees or disagrees with this as a tactic, there is no question that this series of events represents a significant advance for the armed resistance capabilities of the Palestinian movement, its organisational capabilities, professionalism, secrecy and stamina. No other conclusion is possible in the context of Gaza, where Israel and Egypt control its land passages; Israel controls and constantly monitors the territory via air, satellite and sea, and where electromagnetic airwaves and telecommunication networks are also dominated by Israel. Moreover, Israel also runs a substantial network of Palestinian collaborators throughout the area. These are the known means of Israeli domination over the Gaza Strip’s 360 square kilometres

All these accomplishments relate to the fact that a deal took place, and do not relate to the substantial achievements in the negotiations themselves. But here, too, Hamas forced impressive concessions: it broke Israel’s traditional refusal to release alleged ‘prisoners with blood on their hands’, and it broke Israel’s principled rejection to release prisoners from 1948 Palestine (Palestinians holding Israeli citizenship) as well as those from East Jerusalem. To contextualise the latter two precedents, all previous prisoner releases negotiated with the Palestinian Authority and Hizbullah have failed to break these formerly steadfast Israeli positions.

Aside from setting new precedents in negotiations, Hamas’ selection of prisoners emphasised important political dimensions that must also be seen as important achievements, while rejecting certain Israeli tenets of praxis vis-à-vis the Palestinian people.

The deal’s inclusion of prisoners from throughout geographic Palestine, the Palestinian diaspora, and the occupied Golan Heights represents a conscious effort by Hamas to assert the unity of the Palestinian people and their connectedness to its Arab/ Muslim periphery. The inclusion of prisoners from across the Palestinian political spectrum equally asserts the national, as opposed to factional, accomplishment of the deal. Inclusion of prisoners from the pre-first intifada period to the present also emphasises the cross-generational nature of Palestinian struggle, while implicitly criticising the Oslo ‘peace process’’ failure to release prisoners from these early periods.

Although it is complicated to compare prisoner releases given the shifting nature of interests and needs at given times, suffice it to say that Hamas achieved as much as or more than many of the most well-known prisoner deals carried out with Israel in the past 30 years: the 1985 prisoner exchange between the PFLP-General Command and Israel saw 1150 prisoners exchanged for three live Israeli soldiers; the 2004 Hizbullah-Israel swap saw Israel release 431 Arab and international prisoners and fifty-nine bodies for one live and three dead Israeli military personnel; the 2008 Hizbullah-Israel deal saw the exchange of 204 Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners for two dead Israeli soldiers. All other exchanges were less significant quantitatively and ‘qualitatively’. It might be illustrative to note that Hizbullah’s first successful prisoner exchange with Israel saw the exchange of two Israeli bodies and nineteen South Lebanon Army personnel for 123 bodies and forty-five prisoners. The Shalit deal was Hamas’ first exchange but likely not to be its last.

Criticisms

The Shalit deal is not without its critics from the Palestinian side. They can be grouped into three categories:

Unfulfilled expectations: Hamas and the two other groups which engaged in the capture of Shalit (the Popular Resistance Committees and the Army of Islam) initially demonstrated forms of bombastic euphoria in the wake of their success, which led them to raise the ceiling of expectations within Palestinian society as to what could be achieved from a future prisoner exchange deal. Not only were high political representatives like Fatah’s Marwan Barghouti and PFLP’s Ahmed Sa’adat expected to be on the list, but the total numbers of prisoners demanded was at one stage set at 1400. Moreover, Hamas made claims that all female prisoners would be released (nine appear to be left out), and that all child prisoners would be released (it remains to be seen whether this criteria is met in the deal’s second major stage).

Conditions of release: The high number of deportees (204), be they sent abroad (forty) or to Gaza (164) drew criticism for touching upon a sensitive nerve in Palestinian society. Political exile was consistently practised by Israel throughout the occupied territories since 1967 as a means of punishment, as well as weakening the national movement by detaching it from its organic leadership. That Hamas would agree to forms of total or partial deportation at all, and in such large numbers, opened the movement up to criticism that it was an accomplice to strategic Israeli objectives. Because of the sensitivity of this concern, Hamas emphasised its consultation with prisoners over the issue of deportation, while hinting that all external deportees will be able to return to Gaza, at least, via the territory’s land crossings with Egypt. The issue of whether all prisoners were indeed consulted remains an open question, as it seems likely that some prisoners were consulted, while others were not.

Political timing: Hamas opened itself to additional criticism on two fronts regarding the deal’s timing. Coming scarcely three weeks after PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ bid for Palestinian statehood at the UN, Hamas was criticised, particularly by elements of Fatah, for attempting to steal Abbas’ ‘thunder’. Furthermore, the deal also came on the eleventh day of a major Palestinian hunger strike protesting prison conditions, particularly the policy of sustained solitary confinement (up to eight years and counting in some cases). Critics argue that the prisoner exchange is out of step and poorly coordinated with the hunger strike, while the celebratory atmosphere the prisoner exchange ushers in contradicts the seriousness demanded of the hunger strike. Concerned parties even argue that the poor timing may contribute to endangering some of the hunger strikers’ lives, or breaking the strike early without achieving its demands.

Conclusions and fallout

While the validity of these criticisms will reveal themselves over time, the political fallout of the Shalit deal can already be stated: Hamas and its agenda are unquestionably bolstered by the deal, enabling it to mitigate any popularity gap that might have arisen between the movement and its rival Fatah in the wake of the latter’s UN statehood bid. This is because Hamas will be able to argue that while Fatah makes grandiose speeches at the UN and is welcomed in international fora, its strategy (political negotiations with Israel) failed to ever achieve a substantive prisoner release, and hence Fatah cannot be expected to achieve the far larger goal of statehood. Hamas will argue that despite it pariah status by the Western powers, the movement remained steadfast in its non-recognition of Israel and its resistance-oriented strategy to achieve Palestinian rights, and in the end reaped tangible, political and human rewards of value to the movement and its future.

While debating these issues is indeed important and necessary for the Palestinian movement and its allies, the real political legacy of this deal might be more obvious than this simplified polarity suggests. That is to say that for any political strategy pursued by Palestinians and their allies to succeed, the enormous disparity in the ‘valuation’ between Palestinian and Israeli people and prisoners of war needs to end. That one single Israeli soldier could be negotiated for more than one thousand Palestinians gives pause to question how a situation arose locally and internationally where such disparity of value became possible.

To illustrate this disparity, suffice it to say that twenty-six Palestinian prisoners in the Shalit deal were already in prison before Gilad Shalit was even born, with the longest amongst them—Nael Barghouti–having served thirty-four years in prison. In fact, ten Palestinian prisoners expected to be freed in this deal spent more time in Israeli prison than Nelson Mandela spent on Robben Island, although not one of them is known to non-Arabic-speaking publics. Not one of them—Sami Yunis, Fuad al-Razem, Uthman Musalah, Hasan Salama, Akram Mansour, Fakhri Barghouti, Ibrahim Jaber, Muhammad Abu Hud’a, Nael Barghouti, and Salim Kiyal—is the subject of a Wikipedia entry, for example. In contrast, Gilad Shalit, who has spent five years in captivity, is a household name in many western countries, holds honorary citizenship in three countries, and has Wikipedia pages translated into twenty-three languages. The disparity in perception, organisation and financing between Zionist propaganda and Palestinian organising is obvious, shocking and humbling. This is the legacy of entrenched racism, complicit media practices, sustained dehumanisation campaigns, asymmetrical colonial and global power dynamics, disorganised or incompetent political projects and priorities. Whatever the cause, the disparity must be eradicated, and fast.

Let this prisoner deal light a path to areas of neglected work that need to be focused on in the coming period among Palestinians and their allies in order to ensure that never again will the racism and discrepancy of human value between the colonised and the coloniser be able to prevail for so long.

By Toufic Haddad

October 2011

Source: Afro-Middle East Centre (AMEC)

The Conservative party is effectively the political wing of the City of London. No wonder it can’t lead Britain out of this crisis

This time last year, David Cameron told us the coalition had taken Britain “out of the danger zone”. Yesterday he was reduced to rewriting his conference speech as the evidence piled up that Britain is staring over the precipice.

The latest figures are stark. The British economy has come to a standstill, with zero growth over the last nine months. Even more humiliating for a prime minister who had planned to advise people to pay off their credit cards, household spending has fallen for the fourth quarter in a row.

To encourage people to spend less when demand is already falling was pure folly – and Cameron duly executed another U-turn. But there was no sign of any retreat from the disastrous course that he and George Osborne have set on cuts and austerity.

Instead Cameron again blamed Labour spending for the crisis. But in the nine months before the economy ground to a halt, it grew by nearly 2% on the back of that stimulus. Now that spurt has been choked off, there is no chance of the government hitting its own targets, and borrowing will be higher as a result.

Osborne had strangled recovery before the latest eurozone maelstrom. But that crisis now threatens not only another recession across the continent – but another global financial crash. The banking crisis of 2008 was transformed into a sovereign-debt crisis by state bailouts and the costs of the slump it triggered.

Now that debt crisis – deepened by austerity – is wreaking vengeance on the banks, loaded down with unrepayable loans. Just as Cameron prepared to promise to “lead us out of this mess”, the Franco-Belgian bank Dexia teetered on the brink of collapse.

“Our plan will work”, was all the prime minister offered by way of reassurance yesterday. But that judgment already looks flaky. And most people in Britain aren’t reassured. Nor are Cameron and Osborne’s old friends at the IMF, which yesterday called on countries able to borrow at low interest rates, such as Britain and Germany, to “consider delaying” their cuts programmes.

The IMF has argued Britain could afford to raise its debt by 50% of GDP without triggering a crisis. But the Tory leaders show no signs of budging. Osborne’s “credit-easing” plan to boost bank lending to businesses simply reflects the failure of his Project Merlin to achieve the same thing.

Not even its most enthusiastic advocates imagine such an intervention will turn round the collapse in investment or demand. But still the government shrinks from using its control of two of the biggest banks to boost investment and lending directly.

Osborne instead came up with a new growth plan: make it easier to sack workers, while requiring them to pay £1,000 for an unfair dismissal hearing in an employment tribunal – refundable only if they win the case. There’s no serious evidence that extending the qualifying period to claim unfair dismissal from one to two years will create jobs. But it has the advantage of appealing to the employers’ lobby while giving spurious credence to the idea that Britain’s woefully weak labour protection is in some way holding back recovery.

Signed off by Vince Cable, it also reveals the limits of Liberal Democrat restraints on Thatcherite recidivism. But more than that, it casts some light on the class interests at the heart of this government’s response to the crisis.

Cameron and Osborne’s refusal to change course is partly driven by ideology, of course, and a determination not to weaken in any way the private grip on the major levers of economic life. But there’s something else, more quintessentially Tory, about it.

“If this party is anything, it’s the party of small business and enterprise”, Osborne told the Conservative faithful in Manchester this week. But that’s not the whole picture. As the figures published at the weekend by the Guardian underline, the Tories are first and foremost the party of the City of London and financial engineering. More than half the party’s £12m donations in the last year came from the City and banking. Its most lavish donors were hedge funds, financiers and private equity firms: the very interests which drove the financial sector over a cliff in 2007-8.

Now, the Tories’ intimate links to banking are hardly new – even if the funding grip has tightened. But a government in the hands of what is effectively the political wing of the City of London takes on a more dangerous significance when bankers and financiers are almost universally recognised to have both played the central role in creating this crisis – and in perpetuating it.

It’s not just slashing the rate of corporation tax for banks, or delaying the milk-and-water Vickers bank ringfencing proposals till 2019, or refusing to clamp down on bank bonuses in the teeth of public hostility or vetoing a financial transactions Tobin tax. It’s the refusal to intervene directly in banking and finance to drive recovery that most starkly reveals whose interests the government puts first.

Not that the City grip on the Tory party is much discussed in a corporate-dominated British media. Instead the focus is on Labour’s tightly regulated funding by trade unions, the country’s largest democratic organisations that wield no such power and influence, even on the Labour party.

None of this, of course, has stopped Cameron talking earnestly about being “completely dissatisfied with the banking industry’s behaviour”, or the need to “encourage good business practices”, or his determination to “crack down on tax evasion”. In fact, despite the Tory leaders’ withering dismissal of Ed Miliband’s call last week for a new “economic system”, it’s striking how much they have echoed some of his language.

No doubt they’ve registered the polling that shows most people agree Britain is dominated by “fast-buck capitalists” and “predators, not producers”. The problem for the Tories is that those are also their most enthusiastic supporters and paymasters.

If Miliband really intends to break with the 30-year-old “Thatcher settlement”, one Conservative cabinet minister told me this week, it would be a highly significant political shift. “But I don’t think that’s where the British people are,” he added, “they just want us to sort out the mess of the last five years”. As the crisis deepens, however, it’s becoming ever clearer you can’t do one without the other.

By Seumas Milne

5 October 2011

@ The Guardian

News wires are abuzz with the extraordinary allegation of an Iranian “plot to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador to the US ”.  In yet another bizarre twist,  according to Haaretz ,  a few months ago prior to the “plot”,  Saudi officials told Argentina about a possible plot against Saudi and Israeli embassies in Buenos Aires .  Curious as this seems, there is reason for this new rumor.

As many Iran experts dismiss the possibility of such an act,  the tried and tested method of rendering the most fantastic rumor credible is being applied.  For decades, the  British and later Americans knew well that the best way to give rumors credibility was to ensure that such rumors were repeated by various “friendly” countries.   Propaganda became ‘fact’ if repeated by different countries.   This  method of propaganda was a well-known and well played tactic of the Allies against Germany .

In dealing with Iran , the allegations of a plot take on a new life when repeated by various allies.    In this new scenario, there is an attempt to give these farfetched allegations credibility, not only are the Saudis and Israelis being involved, but also Argentina .    This reference to Argentina is particularly important.

In the past, Iran had been falsely (and without proof)  accused of the 1994 bombing of  the Jewish community center (AMIA) in Buenos Aires , Argentina .    What is revealing about the 1994 bombing and the accusations made against Iran , is the fact that the far more plausible leads were dismissed in order to promote the “ Iran guilty” narrative.

It has been a well-kept secret that an important project being carried out in the Argentine MIA building was a review of previously secret government  files that reportedly reveal how Nazis entered Argentina following World War  II helped by Argentine officials.  Hitler was not without long-term impact in Argentina .  The country’s military regime kept secret camps decorated with swastikas. [1] The review of the files had gone on for  two years, but had not been completed at the time of the bombing.

Speculation centered on the possibility that former Argentine government  and military officials, fearful of exposure, were responsible for the bomb attack.  In this regard, it is hard to dismiss the views of Rabbi Abraham Cooper,  associate director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles .   Cooper suggested that government and military figures may have sought to embarrass the Menem government because of its decision to release the files [2] .  This crucial lead was buried under the rubbles in order to promote the  foreign policy of Israel – demonize Iran .

Given the prior cooperation between the Israelis, the Argentines, and US to  promote a foreign policy agenda rather than establish the truth,  it is not surprising that once again the three players are involved with an additional, important new player – the Saudis.  Given the fact that the Saudis had previously agreement to allow Israel to use their airspace to attack Iran had met with condemnation,  this new “plot” would justify the Saudi decision to help Israel and the US wage yet another war on fellow Moslems.

By Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich

16 October 2011

Countercurrents.org

Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich has a Master’s degree in Public Diplomacy from USC Annenberg and USC School for International Studies, Los Angeles . She is an independent researcher, public speaker, radio commentator, political columnist, and peace activist living in California .

[1] Esther Schrader, President of Argentina Apologizes for Nation’s Role as Haven for Nazis . Los Angeles Times. : Jun 14, 2000.  pg. 16

[2] The Christian Century.  Chicago : Jul 27, 1994.  Vol. 111

Occupy Wall Street, the ongoing demonstration-cum-sleep-in that began a month ago not far from the New York Stock Exchange and has since spread like wildfire to cities around the country, may be a game-changer. If so, it couldn’t be more appropriate or more in the American grain that, when the game changed, Wall Street was directly in the sights of the protesters.

The fact is that the end of the world as we’ve known it has been taking place all around us for some time. Until recently, however, thickets of political verbiage about cutting this and taxing that, about the glories of “job creators” and the need to preserve “the American dream,” have obscured what was hiding in plain sight — that street of streets, known to generations of our ancestors as “the street of torments.”

After an absence of well over half a century, Wall Street is back, center stage, as the preferred American icon of revulsion, a status it held for a fair share of our history. And we can thank a small bunch of campers in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park for hooking us up to a venerable tradition of resistance and rebellion.

The Street of Torments

Peering back at a largely forgotten terrain of struggle against “the Street,” so full of sound and fury signifying quite a lot, it’s astonishing — to a historian of Wall Street, at least — that the present movement didn’t happen sooner. It’s already hard to remember that only weeks ago, three years into the near shutdown of the world financial system and the Great Recession, an eerie unprotesting silence still blanketed the country.

Stories accumulated of Wall Street greed and arrogance, astonishing tales of incompetence and larceny. The economy slowed and stalled. People lost their homes and jobs. Poverty reached record levels. The political system proved as bankrupt as the big banks. Bipartisan consensus emerged — but only around the effort to save “too big to fail” financial goliaths, not the legions of victims their financial wilding had left in its wake.

The political class then prescribed what people already had plenty of: yet another dose of austerity plus a faith-based belief in a “recovery” that, for 99% of Americans, was never much more than an optical illusion. In those years, the hopes of ordinary people for a chance at a decent future withered and bitterness set in.

Strangely, however, popular resistance was hard to find. In the light of American history, this passivity was surpassingly odd. From decades before the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century through the Great Depression, again and again Wall Street found itself in the crosshairs of an outraged citizenry mobilized thanks to political parties, labor unions, or leagues of the unemployed. Such movements were filled with a polyglot mix of middle-class anti-trust reformers, bankrupted small businessmen, dispossessed farmers, tenants and sharecroppers, out-of-work laborers, and so many others.

If Occupy Wall Street signals the end of our own, atypical period of acquiescence, could a return to a version of “class warfare” that would, once upon a time, have been familiar to so many Americans be on the horizon? Finally!

What began as a relatively sparsely attended and impromptu affair has displayed a staying power and magnetic attractiveness that has taken the country, and above all the political class, by surprise. A recent rally of thousands in lower Manhattan, where demonstrators marched from the city’s government center to Zuccotti Park, the location of the “occupiers” encampment, was an extraordinarily diverse gathering by any measure of age, race, or class. Community organizations, housing advocates, environmentalists, and even official delegations of trade unionists not normally at ease hanging out with anarchists and hippies gave the whole affair a social muscularity and reach that was exhilarating to experience.

Diversity, however, can cut both ways. Popular protest, to the degree that there’s been much during the recent past — and mainly over the war in Iraq — has sometimes been criticized for the chaotic way it assembled a grab-bag of issues and enemies, diffuse and without focus. Occupy Wall Street embraces diverse multitudes but this time in the interest of convergence. In its targeting of “the street of torments,” this protean uprising has, in fact, found common ground. To a historian’s ear this echoes loudly.

Karl Marx described high finance as “the Vatican of capitalism,” its diktat to be obeyed without question. We’ve spent a long generation learning not to mention Marx in polite company, and not to use suspect and nasty phrases like “class warfare” or “the reserve army of labor,” among many others.

In times past, however, such phrases and the ideas that went with them struck our forebears as useful, even sometimes as true depictions of reality. They used them regularly, along with words like “plutocracy,” “robber baron,” and “ruling class,” to identify the sources of economic exploitation and inequality that oppressed them, as well as to describe the political disenfranchisement they suffered and the subversion of democracy they experienced.

Never before, however, has “the Vatican of capitalism” captured quite so perfectly the specific nature of the oligarchy that’s run the country for a generation and has now run it into the ground. Even political consultant and pundit James Carville, no Marxist he, confessed as much during the Clinton years when he said the bond market “intimidates everybody.”

Perhaps that era of everyday intimidation is finally ending. Here are some of the signs of it — literally — from that march I attended: “Loan Sharks Ate My World” (illustrated with a reasonable facsimile of the Great White from Jaws), “End the Federal Reserve,” “Wall Street Sold Out, Let’s Not Bail-Out,” “Kill the Over the Counter Derivative Market,” “Wall Street Banks Madoff Well,” “The Middle Class is Too Big To Fail,” “Eat the Rich, Feed the Poor,” “Greed is Killing the Earth.” During the march, a pervasive chant — “We are the 99%” — resoundingly reminded the bond market just how isolated and vulnerable it might become.

And it is in confronting this elemental, determining feature of our society’s predicament, in gathering together all the multifarious manifestations of our general dilemma right there on “the street of torments,” that Occupy Wall Street — even without a program or clear set of demands, as so many observers lament — has achieved a giant leap backward, summoning up a history of opposition we would do well to recall today.

A Century of Our Streets and Wall Street

One young woman at the demonstration held up a corrugated cardboard sign roughly magic-markered with one word written three times: “system,” “system,” “system.” That single word resonates historically, even if it sounds strange to our ears today. The indictment of presumptive elites, especially those housed on Wall Street, the conviction that the system over which they presided must be replaced by something more humane, was a robust feature of our country’s political and cultural life for a long century or more.

When in the years following the American Revolution, Jeffersonian democrats raised alarms about the “moneycrats” and their counterrevolutionary intrigues — they meant Alexander Hamilton and his confederates in particular — they were worried about the installation in the New World of a British system of merchant capitalism that would undo the democratic and egalitarian promise of the Revolution.

When followers of Andrew Jackson inveighed against the Second Bank of the United States — otherwise known as “the Monster Bank” — they were up in arms against what they feared was the systematic monopolizing of financial resources by a politically privileged elite. Just after the Civil War, the Farmer-Labor and Greenback political parties freed themselves of the two-party runaround, determined to mobilize independently to break the stranglehold on credit exercised by the big banks back East.

Later in the nineteenth century, Populists decried the overweening power of the Wall Street “devil fish” (shades of Matt Taibbi’s “giant vampire squid” metaphor for Goldman Sachs). Its tentacles, they insisted, not only reached into every part of the economy, but also corrupted churches, the press, and institutions of higher learning, destroyed the family, and suborned public officials from the president on down. When, during his campaign for the presidency in 1896, the Populist-inspired “boy orator of the Platte” and Democratic Party candidate William Jennings Bryan vowed that mankind would not be “crucified on a cross of gold,” he meant Wall Street and everyone knew it.

Around the turn of the century, the anti-trust movement captured the imagination of small businessmen, consumers, and working people in towns and cities across America. The trust they worried most about was “the Money Trust.” Captained by J.P. Morgan, “the financial Gorgon,” the Money Trust was skewered in court and in print by future Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis, subjected to withering Congressional investigations, excoriated in the exposés of “muckraking” journalists, and depicted by cartoonists as a cabal of prehensile Visigoths in death-heads.

As the twentieth century began, progressive reformers in state houses and city halls, socialists in industrial cities and out on the prairies, strikebound workers from coast to coast, working-class feminists, antiwar activists, and numerous others were still vigorously condemning that same Money Trust for turning the whole country into a closely-held system of financial pillage, labor exploitation, and imperial adventuring abroad. As the movements made clear, everyone but Wall Street was suffering the consequences of a system of proliferating abuses perpetrated by “the Street.”

The tradition the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators have tapped into is a long and vibrant one that culminated during the Great Depression. Then as now, there was no question in the minds of “the 99%” that Wall Street was principally to blame for the country’s crisis (however much that verdict has since been challenged by disputatious academics).

Insurgencies by industrial workers, powerful third-party threats to replace capitalism with something else, rallies and marches of the unemployed, and, yes, occupations, even seizures of private property, foreclosures forestalled by infuriated neighbors, and a pervasive sense that the old order needed burying had their lasting effect. In response, the New Deal attempted to unhorse those President Franklin Roosevelt termed “economic royalists,” who were growing rich off “other people’s money” while the country suffered its worst trauma since the Civil War. “The Street” trembled.

“System, System, System”: It would be foolish to make too much of a raggedy sign — or to leap to conclusions about just how lasting this Occupy Wall Street moment will be and just where (if anywhere) it’s heading. It would be crazily optimistic to proclaim our own pitiful age of acquiescence ended.

Still, it would be equally foolish to dismiss the powerful American tradition the demonstrators of this moment have tapped into. In the past, Wall Street has functioned as an icon of revulsion, inciting anger, stoking up energies, and summoning visions of a new world that might save the New World.

It is poised to play that role again. Remember this: in 1932, three years into the Great Depression, most Americans were more demoralized than mobilized. A few years later, all that had changed as “Our Street, Not Wall Street” came alive. The political class had to scurry to keep up. Occupy Wall Street may indeed prove the opening act in an unfolding drama of renewed resistance and rebellion against “the system.”

Steve Fraser is Editor-at-Large of New Labor Forum, a TomDispatch regular, and co-founder of the American Empire Project (Metropolitan Books)

Four Security Forces Martyrs Laid to Rest Oct 25, 2011

DAMASCUS/ HOMS, (SANA) – Four security forces martyrs on Tuesday were escorted from Tishreen and Homs Military Hospitals to their final resting place in their villages and cities after they were targeted by the armed terrorist groups in Daraa and Homs.

Solemn processions were held for the martyrs as they were carried up on shoulders covered with the national flag and wreaths of laurel and flowers to the Military Band playing the music of the “Martyr” and the “Farewell.”

The Martyrs are:

•           Chief Warrant Officer, Ahmad Ibrahim al-Mohammad from Idleb.

•           Sergeant, Osama Dahi al-Ahmad from Lattakia.

•           Conscript, Ahmad Khalaf al-Dali from Raqqa.

•           Conscript, Jasim Abdul-Rahim Shihada from Raqqa.

Relatives of the martyrs expressed pride in their sons’ martyrdom who sacrificed their lives to defend their homeland in face of all the conspiracies targeting its steadfastness, dignity and pride.

They also called for prosecuting the criminals who are trying to undermine Syria’s security and stability, stressing that these criminals will fail to achieve their goals of undermining Syria’s stability and security.

R. al-Jazaeri /

Al-Shara Offers Condolences at the Funeral of Late Saudi Crown Prince Oct 26, 2011 

RIYADH, (SANA) – Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Emir Sultan bin Abdul-Aziz, First Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Defense and Aviation and Inspector General in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, on Tuesday was escorted to his final resting place in al-Oud Graveyard.

Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud, senior Saudi officials and delegations representing more than 100 Islamic and Arab countries participated in the funeral ceremony.

After performing funeral prayers over the deceased Crown Prince, Vice President Farouk al-Shara, who attended the funeral representing President Bashar al-Assad, offered condolences to King Abdullah over the death of his brother.

Heads of the delegations also offered condolences to King Abdullah and the deceased’s brothers.

The body of the late Crown Prince arrived in Riyadh on Monday after the Saudi Royal Court announced Saturday his death abroad of an illnes.

English Bulletin

Five Terrorists Confess to Smuggling Weapons, Working among Armed Groups and Committing Criminal Acts in Jisr al-Shughour, Lattakia and Abu Kamal Oct 26, 2011

DAMASCUS, (SANA) – Terrorists Ala’a Ahmad Nanna and Walid Ahmad Nanna and confessed to joining armed terrorist groups in attacking the Military Security Detachment in Jisr al-Shughour in the northern province of and killing its personnel, in addition to smuggling firearms and ammo from Turkey.

Terrorist Mouayad Ghannam confessed to participating in smuggling firearms and ammo from Turkey to the Palestinian neighborhood in al-Ramel al-Janoubi in the coastal province of Lattakia, in addition to smuggling large quantities of fuel to Turkey.

The 26-year old terrorist Alaa Nanna, who lives in al-Raml al-Janoubi in Lattakia and works at al-Zain Company for Food Industry, confessed that he and someone called Hazem Faido from Khirbat al-Jouz village transported 50 pump-action shotguns to protesters in Jisr al-Shughour to help launch their attack on the Military Security Detachment there.

Alaa said that he took a gun and participated in opening fire on the detachment with 700 other armed men while a person called Mustafa Baydaq drove a bulldozer to transport barrels full of explosives into the detachment and then detonated them.

Terrorist Alaa confessed to cutting the hand and the leg of an injured soldier with a cleaver before Baydaq shot him dead with a machine gun.

The terrorist added that having had the detachment under their control, Baydaq used the bulldozer to put the dead security members into cars and threw some of them into the Orontes River, while other bodies were thrown in a waste landfill and in an unknown place.

He also confessed to transporting 50 pump-action shotguns to Lattakia City after Hazen smuggled them into Syria from Turkey.

Alaa said that he and the other armed men were shooting at the army personnel from the buildings’ roofs in al-Ramal al-Janoubi. “I shot an army member in his waist. He fell to the ground and I fled.”

In turn, the 32-year old Walid Nanna, Alaa’s brother, who was born in al-Sleibeh neighborhood and also works at al-Zain Company, confessed to participating in transporting pump-action shotguns in bags from the Turkish borders to al-Hamboshiyeh village to be later taken to Lattakia.

For his part, Mouayad Ghannam, who is from Idleb and lives in Lattakia, confessed to participating in smuggling firearms and ammo from Turkey using his microbus, in addition to smuggling large quantities of fuel in plastic containers to Turkey for 25 days in an area called Harf al-Aass.

He said that he smuggled firearms into Syria four times and each time the shipment included 12 pump-action shotguns.

Two terrorists Confess to Working among Armed Groups and Committing Criminal Acts in Abu Kamal City

Jalal-allah al-Moussa and Mahmoud Faiyyad Ghour confessed to participating with armed groups in perpetrating acts of killing, sabotage, arson and plunder in Abu Kamal city in the northeastern province of Deir Ezzor.

Jalal-allah al-Moussa, who sells cigarette packets at the public square in Abu Kamal, related how he participated in the protests in the city in exchange for money, saying that he once received SYP 10000 from some called Saddam al-Jamal in return for his participation.

He admitted dealing with an armed group who one Friday supplied him with weapons “which they might need to protect the protest.”

Al-Moussa added that he took part with the terrorist group’s members in attacking several government buildings in Abu Kamal.

“We set the city’s prison on fire and helped the prisoners out…We also burned the Security Forces center and the police stations and stole all their contents of confiscated stuff and firearms,” the terrorist explained.

He added that the armed group he was part of seized over 82 military firearms and other hunting weapons, released two prisoners and stole drugs from the prison.

“We also stole money from the Region’s Director’s house, incinerated the Court and the Civil Affairs Institution building and threw gas bottles at the Security Forces Center,” al-Moussa confessed.

He added that they also set up roadblocks which were later removed by the army when it entered the city after few days.

The terrorist Mahmoud Faiyyad Ghour from Abu Kamal city, who was released from prison on a general amnesty by President Bashar al-Assad, confessed to working among an armed group and committing criminal acts.

“On my way back home from prison, I was stopped by a guy who gave money for people to go out to the streets. He gave me a sum of money and I went on the protest,” Ghour said.

He admitted that he was part of an armed group of more than 1500 members, with whom he participated in burning the building of the Region’s Leadership Department, stealing cars belonging to the Security and Police Forces and shooting dead an army member in a narrow street who was on duty to protect citizens.

R. Raslan/ H. Said / H. Sabbagh

Health Ministry: Amnesty International’s Allegations on Abuse Practices against Patients at Hospitals False Oct 26, 2011

DAMASCUS, (SANA) – Ministry of Health refuted the allegations of the Amnesty International on patients undergoing abuse practices at the national hospitals in the cities of Homs and Baniyas as “untrue and full of contradictions and fabrications”.

In a statement published on Tuesday, the Ministry confirmed that till date no complaints of any assaults or any form of abuse practices committed by medical cadres or health staff against patients have been reported to the Ministry by any of the patients or of their relatives.

The statement stressed that there are laws and legislations that regulate the performance of medical cadres and preserve the rights of patients at health institutions and hospitals.

The Ministry denounced such allegations “which aim to distort the reputation of the Syrian health sector and create a state of lack of confidence in the national hospitals to serve biased purposes.”

The statement said that the Amnesty International’s report contradicted itself referring to abuses against patients at a private hospital, while at the same time highlighting the people’s fear to go to government hospitals and preferring to go to private hospitals.

The Ministry affirmed the high occupancy rate at the state hospitals, particularly at the emergency departments, noting that no decrease in the number of admitted patients has been reported all over the past period.

It stressed accessibility of high quality emergency medical services to all citizens, military or civilians, and regardless of their belongings.

It added that the medical teams’ mission is limited to diagnosing the cases and providing patients with immediate treatment.

Concluding its statement, the Ministry referred to the huge human and material losses the health sector has suffered due to the attacks launched by the armed terrorist and sabotage groups against doctors and medical cadres while performing their national duty in transporting injured people to hospitals.

It also cited the abduction of doctors and the sabotaging of several health establishments.

The Ministry said these attacks caused the martyrdom and the injury of dozens of high profile doctors and the damage of 60 ambulance cars and some parts of public hospitals which were burned by terrorists.

R. Raslan/H. Said

Danish Media Delegation Inspecting Hama City: Some Channels Broadcast Fabricated News on Syria Oct 26, 2011

HAMA, (SANA) – Members of the Danish media delegation, visiting the city of Hama, said on Tuesday that some channels are broadcasting fabricated news on the situation in the city.

The delegation, which consists of journalists from Danish newspapers and TV, said that they saw with their own eyes that life in the city is normal which is contrary to the reports broadcast by some foreign channels, pointing out that that they listened to some eyewitnesses in the city about the killing and mutilation crimes committed by armed terrorist groups against the army and security members.

For his part, head of the delegation, Mohammad Mahfoud, said the aim of this visit is “inspecting the reality of events and conveying it to the Danish and international public opinion”.

Governor of Hama, Dr. Anas Naem, reviewed the reality of events witnessed in the city and the sabotage acts carried out by armed terrorist groups, explaining to the delegation the role of the misleading channels in helping those groups through broadcasting fabricated news in advance to push the armed terrorists to go to the streets, block the roads and kill soldiers.

The Governor said Syria is an open country which has never disallowed any media means from seeing the truth on ground; however, some TV channels “see only what they want to see”.

F.Allafi/M.Eyon

Dr. Khaddour Recounts Details of His Abduction by Armed Terrorist Group Oct 26, 2011

HOMS, (SANA) – Dean of the Petrochemical Engineering Faculty at al-Baath University, Dr. Mohammad Khaddour recounted the details of his abduction by an armed terrorist group before authorities released him.

“It was 2:14 pm on October, 23rd. I was on my way to collage with my driver and a laboratory technician. The road was blocked by armed men who spread in bystreets. We tried to return but it was impossible since we were surrounded by them. They kidnapped us and took us to unknown place,” said Dr. Khaddour in an interview with the Syrian TV on Tuesday.

“After 40 hours and exactly at 8:30 pm we were released. I don’t know the place where we were seized since the armed men blind-folded us the moment they kidnapped us,” he added.

Dr. Khaddour’s wife expressed gratitude to the authorities and the people of Deir Ba’labeh neighborhood in Homs for their efforts in getting her husband released.

She also expressed appreciation for the army’s sacrifices to defend the homeland, urging the armed terrorist groups to drop weapons so that things can go back to normal.

R. Raslan/ H. Said

Syrian Human Rights Network Calls for Dealing Firmly with Acts of Violence and Kidnapping

Oct 26, 2011

DAMASCUS, (SANA) -Syrian Human Rights Network said that it backs the appeals of some families in regions which still witness acts of violence and kidnapping at the hands of armed terrorist groups that call on the competent authorities to deal firmly with them and deter the terrorists from perpetrating such acts.

“Acts of kidnapping and terrifying citizens are frequently happening in a way that frightens the civilians and families, and this requires work to restore calm in those regions like other Syrian areas,” The Network said in a statement SANA received a copy of.

It added that those who accuse the Army and security personnel of those acts, they are representing an agenda for foreign countries that don’t want Syria live in calm, but in chaos and destruction.

“It is enough for some sides that pretend to talk by the name of human rights, particularly the London-based the Syrian Human Rights Observatory and some external opposition to make themselves as a trumpet and spokesperson for those terrorist groups that devastate Syria, the land of peace,” the Network concluded.

Mazen

Youth Rally in Damascus to Express Support to Reform Program Oct 26, 2011

DAMASCUS, (SANA) – A group of Syrian youths organized a rally on Tuesday evening with the participation of Syria’s Scouts to express support to the comprehensive reform program led by President Bashar al-Assad, rejecting foreign interference in Syria’s internal affairs.

Heading from al-Qassa’ area toward Bab Touma Sqaure in Damascus, the participants chanted slogans greeting the Syrian army and condemning foreign interference in Syria’s affairs and calling the western countries and their misleading media to stop attempts to spread chaos and sow sedition among the Syrians.

They raised national flags and lit candles in honor of the homeland’s military and civilian martyrs.

R. Raslan/ H. Said 

Talks to Establish Syrian-Iraqi Free Trade Zones on the Syrian-Jordanian Zone’s Model

Oct 26, 2011

DARAA, (SANA) – Talks between officials from Syria and Iraq were held on Tuesday to discuss establishing joint Syrian-Iraqi free trade zones.

The discussions took place during a visit to the Syrian-Jordanian Free Trade Zone in Daraa governorate to inspect the work situation at the Zone and make use of its successful experience in attracting capitals.

Director General of the Syrian-Jordanian Free Trade Zone, Hassan Khairat, said the administration briefed the Syrian and Iraqi sides on the work mechanisms, procedures and legislations regulating the work of the companies included in the Zone to help them in establishing joint free trade zones on its model.

For his part, Director of al-Qaem Free Zone in Iraq, Fanar Hamad al-Ma’adidi, said “We are here today to benefit from the work mechanisms and the existing rules at Syrian-Jordanian Zone to lay out the law we are in the process of formulating between Syria and Iraq.”

The Syrian-Iraqi free trade zone to be established sets an example of partnership between the two countries in terms of creating economic blocs able to face potential changes in the economic system and a spring board for transit trade and exportation movement.

The Syrian-Iraqi trade exchange volume exceeded USD 2 billion in 2010 with expectations that it will increase to USD 3 billion this year in light of the agreements signed during the joint ministerial committee meetings last July.

R. Raslan/ H. Said

Source: The Embassy of Syrian Arab Republic in Kuala Lumpur.