Sunday, November 14, 2010
Too Big to Fail? Let Them Fail
This strange notion that financial institutions or corporations cannot be allowed to fail deserves close scrutiny, especially since we are the ones paying for it. The reason these institutions were failing is that they are dysfunctional, as is our entire current economic system. Throwing money at them does not address the dysfunctions, it preserves them. It's classic throwing good money after bad. We should not be spending a penny to preserve and prolong this economic system, which not only impoverishes the vast majority but makes it impossible to address issues such as global warming. If a bank fails, that need not cause human suffering if the government takes it over and reorganizes it to serve its customers and taxpayers. We live in the era of the death of the market. Markets are dying precisely because they are not free but are instead manipulated by the superwealthy for their own benefit despite the fact that this manipulation is completely destructive. Only by abandoning old shibboleths such as the free market rules, big government is necessarily bad, taxation discourages entrepreneurs can we move forward. The market is not free. The problem with government is not its size but who controls it and in whose interest it operates. Taxes on the very rich will not stifle growth but will allow a government that represents its citizens to finance green technology, education, renewal of infrastructure, single payer health care, and many other things we desperately need. Some will say that this sounds like socialism. So what? Capitalism increasingly sounds like death and destruction for the human species.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
The Next War in the Middle East
I have a friend in Beirut who reports to me on what al-Jazeerah and the Lebanese and Israeli media are reporting. Also, I heard a recent interview with Robert Fisk which says essentially the same thing. Israel is planning a new war against Lebanon and perhaps also Syria and Hamas at the same time in the coming months. I have heard December 2010 and January 2011 mentioned.
I have not noticed any coverage of this pending conflagration mentioned in the major media. Here is how I see the dangers. Israel was unable to defeat Hezbolleh in 2006 and Hamas in 2009, though tremendous loss of life and damage to buildings and infrastructure occurred in both invasions. Hezbolleh is certainly stronger now militarily than it was in 2006; reports say that Hezbolleh can launch 1,000 rockets a day for 6 months. Hezbolleh's leader, who is noted for doing what he says he will do, has said that if Israel destroys a building in Lebanon, he will destroy a building in Israel. If Israel destroys a town, he will destroy a town. Note also that Syria has Scud missiles.
Therefore, in such a war, Israel will face far more substantial deaths and damage than in any previous war. Israel cannot win such a war. The irony is that the insane leaders of Israel know all this, but they are planning to go ahead anyway.
A war along these lines will cause tremendous human suffering and is to be avoided for that reason alone. However, there is a greater risk. What will the US government do when Israel suffers tremendously damaging attacks? Since the US public is not being prepared in advance for the likelihood of this war, there exists the possibility that the Obama administration, already stretched to the limit by the unsuccessful wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, would nevertheless commit troops and other military resources to intervene on Israel's behalf saying there is no time for lengthy discussion. How would Iran react to that?
This scenario promises to up the ante considerably both now and in the future. Anger at the US government would likely escalate considerably with many unforeseen consequences.
The time to discuss this impending danger is now before it happens. Oppose the Israeli war on its neighbors. Oppose any US intervention in such a war.
I have not noticed any coverage of this pending conflagration mentioned in the major media. Here is how I see the dangers. Israel was unable to defeat Hezbolleh in 2006 and Hamas in 2009, though tremendous loss of life and damage to buildings and infrastructure occurred in both invasions. Hezbolleh is certainly stronger now militarily than it was in 2006; reports say that Hezbolleh can launch 1,000 rockets a day for 6 months. Hezbolleh's leader, who is noted for doing what he says he will do, has said that if Israel destroys a building in Lebanon, he will destroy a building in Israel. If Israel destroys a town, he will destroy a town. Note also that Syria has Scud missiles.
Therefore, in such a war, Israel will face far more substantial deaths and damage than in any previous war. Israel cannot win such a war. The irony is that the insane leaders of Israel know all this, but they are planning to go ahead anyway.
A war along these lines will cause tremendous human suffering and is to be avoided for that reason alone. However, there is a greater risk. What will the US government do when Israel suffers tremendously damaging attacks? Since the US public is not being prepared in advance for the likelihood of this war, there exists the possibility that the Obama administration, already stretched to the limit by the unsuccessful wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, would nevertheless commit troops and other military resources to intervene on Israel's behalf saying there is no time for lengthy discussion. How would Iran react to that?
This scenario promises to up the ante considerably both now and in the future. Anger at the US government would likely escalate considerably with many unforeseen consequences.
The time to discuss this impending danger is now before it happens. Oppose the Israeli war on its neighbors. Oppose any US intervention in such a war.
Thursday, October 7, 2010
The Conundrum of Afghanistan
In contemporary Afghanistan, we have a government of religious fanatical warlords fighting the Taliban, which is fueled by a very similar religious fanaticism. No matter who wins, the Afghan people will be ruled by religious fanatics. So, there are two questions. Why is the US government engaged in such a war, especially when it appears that the two groups of religious fanatics are quite capable of uniting? The second question is how did things come to this pass?
Once upon a time, in 1979, Afghanistan had a secular government trying to introduce reforms which would free women from traditional oppression, spread education, etc. That government was far from perfect and probably pursued those objectives in a heavyhanded way which helped unite opposition. Threatened by that opposition, the secular government called on their neighbor, the Soviet Union, to help keep them in power. The Soviet Union came to their aid in an even more heavyhanded manner and found itself in a disastrous war. Meanwhile, the United States armed and trained religious fanatics to fight the government and its Soviet backers.
So, the US government helped eliminate the most prominent secular forces and greatly strengthened the forces of religious fanaticism which became the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and other groups. Then the US government selected a group of warlords and tried to impose them on a population which likely would prefer to live in a secular state, considering that that is who they elected long ago.
If any or all of this strikes you as insane, you are correct. Any serious analysis of the US war in Afghanistan leads to the conclusion that it was irrational to begin it and it is irrational to continue it. Even from the standpoint of US imperial and finance capital objectives, it is a lose-lose situation.
Such a war has a momentum of its own. Once it squanders lives, resources, money on such a misguided venture, a government has to be forced to abandon it. It will never do it simply by coming to its senses. Only a strong peace movement, like the one which helped the Vietnamese end that war, can do that.
Once upon a time, in 1979, Afghanistan had a secular government trying to introduce reforms which would free women from traditional oppression, spread education, etc. That government was far from perfect and probably pursued those objectives in a heavyhanded way which helped unite opposition. Threatened by that opposition, the secular government called on their neighbor, the Soviet Union, to help keep them in power. The Soviet Union came to their aid in an even more heavyhanded manner and found itself in a disastrous war. Meanwhile, the United States armed and trained religious fanatics to fight the government and its Soviet backers.
So, the US government helped eliminate the most prominent secular forces and greatly strengthened the forces of religious fanaticism which became the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and other groups. Then the US government selected a group of warlords and tried to impose them on a population which likely would prefer to live in a secular state, considering that that is who they elected long ago.
If any or all of this strikes you as insane, you are correct. Any serious analysis of the US war in Afghanistan leads to the conclusion that it was irrational to begin it and it is irrational to continue it. Even from the standpoint of US imperial and finance capital objectives, it is a lose-lose situation.
Such a war has a momentum of its own. Once it squanders lives, resources, money on such a misguided venture, a government has to be forced to abandon it. It will never do it simply by coming to its senses. Only a strong peace movement, like the one which helped the Vietnamese end that war, can do that.
Monday, September 20, 2010
On Identity, Ethnicity and Race
I had an angry reaction when I recently found that my profile with my employer showed my race/ethnicity as white; nobody ever consulted me about that. I have pondered the significance of these classifications for many years and would like to sum up my conclusions here. All of us have multiple identities. We have personal identities, the sense of who we are. We may have many social identities based on what other people see and think of us, how they treat us, etc. Some of our identities are objective, such as ethnicity. Others are partially or totally subjective, such as the notion of race.
Let's work our way through these. There is no iota of my personal identity which has any relevance to "White." I do not come from Whiteland nor did I have any ancestors who would have identified themselves as Whites. That was the reason for my anger at being classified as White. I would variously describe myself as a European-American, a descendant of Eastern European Jews (which is my ethnicity, and likely a descendant of inhabitants of the Khazar nation long ago. I do not belong to any race because, as sociologists long ago included, there is no such entity from a scientific point of view. As a species, we are perhaps only 80,000 years old and our DNA has not differentiated into any groups which could be characterized uniquely. Races are arbitrarily defined in societies by those who use them to maintain themselves in power, regardless of whether it was Whites versus Blacks and others in the USA, Whites versus Africans and Asians in South Africa, or Jew versus Palestinians in Palestine. An African-American scholar and friend of mine once observed that it was the English who conceived the idea of a White Race to prevent themselves from becoming a minority in the United States. At first, the Irish and southern Europeans, such as Italians, were not part of the White race, but when their numbers were needed, the notion of race was extended. For Blacks, even one-eighth descent from an African made one Black. Many contemporary African-Americans are descended from marriages with Native Americans, which was largely ignored in the USA race lexicon. South Africa had very complex racial classifications, including White, Coloured, Black, Asian (but not Japanese who were considered White for economic reasons), and fifteen or twenty other categories. There was a board which classified people. Each year they would report on reclassifications in which children of the same parents were often put into different races. However, nobody was ever classified from Black to White or from White to Black. Israel's racial classification system is simpler, though it has problems with non-Jewish Russians and with African dark-skinned Jews who emigrated there. In fact, I argue that there isn't even an Israeli nation since Israeli citizens belong to many nations, including the Palestinian nation. The only way such a nation could begin to come into existence would be for the state of Israel to abandon Zionism and Jewish supremacy and become the state of all its citizens. Personally, I am a USA citizen and thus belong to the USA nation and to no other nation. Dual nationality is certainly possible, for example, for children with parents of different nationalities, but it does not apply to me.
Let us digress for a moment on that topic. When I defined my personal identity, I referred to Eastern European Jews. There were also Jews in Palestine and other Arab countries, including Morocco and Yemen, the Sephardic Jews in Spain, and so forth. Three of my four grandparents spoke Yiddish, which was a Jewish language only spoken in Eastern Europe. The fourth grew up on a farm in what is now Slovakia. She told me that they spoke German at home, but she was also fluent in Hungarian. I had a Morrocan Jewish friend. We realized that we had nothing in common aside from our support for the Palestinians. The only common language we had was English. His ancestors were likely descended from Berbers who converted to Judaism. I won't pursue this in more depth here because I have done so in other blogs. The only point to emphasize is that there is no single identifiable group which could be called the Jewish people. Since that group does not and cannot exist, I do not belong to it. My ancestors most likely were Khazars, whose kingdom converted to Judaism en masse, and then dispersed westward when that kingdom fell. Millions of them ended up in Poland, Ukraine, Russia, and other countries.
Since the USA was and is a racial society, it does divide people into races, but it does not consult us about our identity. Even for the laudable purpose of ameliorating historic discrimination, it classifies us without our participation, as my employer did. While I support that purpose, affirmative action, I do not support the assault on my personal identity which causes me to be classified as White, which is a meaningless category. This becomes embodied in full absurdity by those who declare they are part of a White Nation, which is defined only in hostility to those they despise. There is no such quality as Whiteness, there is no Whiteland, no White language, no White culture, no common trait at all. Those who use the term White are thus propagating, usually unwittingly, the racist structure of white supremacy that the term was invented to promote and preserve. I doubt that the Ku Klux Klan, which hated Jews along with African-Americans, would have classified me as White. I'm not sure why I used the past tense in that sentence since the Klan and their cohorts still exist.
So far, I have been discussing strong and sometimes pernicious characteristics of identity. There are, of course, others. To give one example, I am a musician who primarily plays the banjo. To many of my musical friends and to me, too, being a banjo player is a very visible part of my identity. Yet I know many other people who are not aware of this at all. On my job, I have a particular identity associated with my history there, my known capabilities and expertise, and so forth. The point is that few of us present our entire identities to everyone or even focus on all of our identity all the time. When I am playing the banjo, I am a banjo player. When I am working at my job, that is usually far from my consciousness.
I'm sure I haven't mined every aspect of identity here, but I have addressed some aspects which I think are confused by many people and which muddy our thinking and obstruct us from dealing with the real world.
I want to add a footnote about the Khazars. I just read the Wiki page on Khazars, which disparages the likelihood that most Eastern European Jews were descendants of Khazars. They offer essentially two arguments: the Khazar origin of Eastern European Jews was taken up by anti-Semites and anti-Zionists and DNA studies. The former, obviously, is irrelevant. If we are the descendants of the Khazars, then the use or misuse of that fact by others is not related to the fact of origin. The second, interestingly, is not supported by the studies included on the Wiki page, which only show that European Jews are more genetically similar to other ethnic groups in the Middle East (which you would expect if they fled from the Khazar area adjacent to the Middle East) than they are to their neighbors in Europe. But the real question is this: What happened to millions of Khazari Jews when their kingdom was destroyed and where did the millions of Jews who arrived in Eastern Europe at the same time come from?
As an anti-Zionist, I will also point out that there is no need to refute claims to Palestine based on rule there for a few centuries at most more than two millennia ago. The claim of Palestinians to Palestine is based on their presence there when the Zionist colonization began. That the Palestinians likely include the descendants of the ancient Hebrews among other indigenous peoples there is not a basis for a claim to Palestine, but merely an interesting historical fact which exposes the lie of Zionist "claims." For Zionists, however, to try to try to deny my origin--the origin of Eastern European Jews--as Khazari, is an assault on our identity and a travesty to objective history.
Let's work our way through these. There is no iota of my personal identity which has any relevance to "White." I do not come from Whiteland nor did I have any ancestors who would have identified themselves as Whites. That was the reason for my anger at being classified as White. I would variously describe myself as a European-American, a descendant of Eastern European Jews (which is my ethnicity, and likely a descendant of inhabitants of the Khazar nation long ago. I do not belong to any race because, as sociologists long ago included, there is no such entity from a scientific point of view. As a species, we are perhaps only 80,000 years old and our DNA has not differentiated into any groups which could be characterized uniquely. Races are arbitrarily defined in societies by those who use them to maintain themselves in power, regardless of whether it was Whites versus Blacks and others in the USA, Whites versus Africans and Asians in South Africa, or Jew versus Palestinians in Palestine. An African-American scholar and friend of mine once observed that it was the English who conceived the idea of a White Race to prevent themselves from becoming a minority in the United States. At first, the Irish and southern Europeans, such as Italians, were not part of the White race, but when their numbers were needed, the notion of race was extended. For Blacks, even one-eighth descent from an African made one Black. Many contemporary African-Americans are descended from marriages with Native Americans, which was largely ignored in the USA race lexicon. South Africa had very complex racial classifications, including White, Coloured, Black, Asian (but not Japanese who were considered White for economic reasons), and fifteen or twenty other categories. There was a board which classified people. Each year they would report on reclassifications in which children of the same parents were often put into different races. However, nobody was ever classified from Black to White or from White to Black. Israel's racial classification system is simpler, though it has problems with non-Jewish Russians and with African dark-skinned Jews who emigrated there. In fact, I argue that there isn't even an Israeli nation since Israeli citizens belong to many nations, including the Palestinian nation. The only way such a nation could begin to come into existence would be for the state of Israel to abandon Zionism and Jewish supremacy and become the state of all its citizens. Personally, I am a USA citizen and thus belong to the USA nation and to no other nation. Dual nationality is certainly possible, for example, for children with parents of different nationalities, but it does not apply to me.
Let us digress for a moment on that topic. When I defined my personal identity, I referred to Eastern European Jews. There were also Jews in Palestine and other Arab countries, including Morocco and Yemen, the Sephardic Jews in Spain, and so forth. Three of my four grandparents spoke Yiddish, which was a Jewish language only spoken in Eastern Europe. The fourth grew up on a farm in what is now Slovakia. She told me that they spoke German at home, but she was also fluent in Hungarian. I had a Morrocan Jewish friend. We realized that we had nothing in common aside from our support for the Palestinians. The only common language we had was English. His ancestors were likely descended from Berbers who converted to Judaism. I won't pursue this in more depth here because I have done so in other blogs. The only point to emphasize is that there is no single identifiable group which could be called the Jewish people. Since that group does not and cannot exist, I do not belong to it. My ancestors most likely were Khazars, whose kingdom converted to Judaism en masse, and then dispersed westward when that kingdom fell. Millions of them ended up in Poland, Ukraine, Russia, and other countries.
Since the USA was and is a racial society, it does divide people into races, but it does not consult us about our identity. Even for the laudable purpose of ameliorating historic discrimination, it classifies us without our participation, as my employer did. While I support that purpose, affirmative action, I do not support the assault on my personal identity which causes me to be classified as White, which is a meaningless category. This becomes embodied in full absurdity by those who declare they are part of a White Nation, which is defined only in hostility to those they despise. There is no such quality as Whiteness, there is no Whiteland, no White language, no White culture, no common trait at all. Those who use the term White are thus propagating, usually unwittingly, the racist structure of white supremacy that the term was invented to promote and preserve. I doubt that the Ku Klux Klan, which hated Jews along with African-Americans, would have classified me as White. I'm not sure why I used the past tense in that sentence since the Klan and their cohorts still exist.
So far, I have been discussing strong and sometimes pernicious characteristics of identity. There are, of course, others. To give one example, I am a musician who primarily plays the banjo. To many of my musical friends and to me, too, being a banjo player is a very visible part of my identity. Yet I know many other people who are not aware of this at all. On my job, I have a particular identity associated with my history there, my known capabilities and expertise, and so forth. The point is that few of us present our entire identities to everyone or even focus on all of our identity all the time. When I am playing the banjo, I am a banjo player. When I am working at my job, that is usually far from my consciousness.
I'm sure I haven't mined every aspect of identity here, but I have addressed some aspects which I think are confused by many people and which muddy our thinking and obstruct us from dealing with the real world.
I want to add a footnote about the Khazars. I just read the Wiki page on Khazars, which disparages the likelihood that most Eastern European Jews were descendants of Khazars. They offer essentially two arguments: the Khazar origin of Eastern European Jews was taken up by anti-Semites and anti-Zionists and DNA studies. The former, obviously, is irrelevant. If we are the descendants of the Khazars, then the use or misuse of that fact by others is not related to the fact of origin. The second, interestingly, is not supported by the studies included on the Wiki page, which only show that European Jews are more genetically similar to other ethnic groups in the Middle East (which you would expect if they fled from the Khazar area adjacent to the Middle East) than they are to their neighbors in Europe. But the real question is this: What happened to millions of Khazari Jews when their kingdom was destroyed and where did the millions of Jews who arrived in Eastern Europe at the same time come from?
As an anti-Zionist, I will also point out that there is no need to refute claims to Palestine based on rule there for a few centuries at most more than two millennia ago. The claim of Palestinians to Palestine is based on their presence there when the Zionist colonization began. That the Palestinians likely include the descendants of the ancient Hebrews among other indigenous peoples there is not a basis for a claim to Palestine, but merely an interesting historical fact which exposes the lie of Zionist "claims." For Zionists, however, to try to try to deny my origin--the origin of Eastern European Jews--as Khazari, is an assault on our identity and a travesty to objective history.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Bigotry and the Islamic Center in New York
As others have pointed out, the question is not "why build an Islamic center (it is not a mosque) a few blocks from Ground Zero?" The question is "why so much opposition to this project?" The only and simple answer is pure bigotry. There is no rational reason for opposition, though opponents raise the spectre of offending the survivoring relatives and friends of those kill on September 11, 2001 when the World Trace Center was destroyed in New York. The United States of 2010 is a hotbed of bigotry, whether racial or religious. This brouhaha is a prime example. It seems that bigotry sells well to some voters, so politicians are playing it to the hilt. They know no shame no matter how disgusting their positions are. They characterize the Imam leading this project as extremist, even though he is a leading proponent of interfaith unity and a staunch opponent of terrorism. Personally, I don't like any religions and any religious institutions. But I distinguish between my own personal views and the right of others to have their own. Too bad that the bigoted bombasts are unable to do that, whether on Islamic centers, abortion rights, or gay marriage.
Friday, August 13, 2010
Spinning Obama or Obama is Spinning
Obama's deputy press flack says that leftists won't be satisfied unless we have Canadian style health care and abolish the defense department. Let's deconstruct that.
Of course, Canadian style single payer health care would be wonderful, but is that what we are criticizing Obama about? No, we are criticizing him for abandoning leadership entirely on that and many issues. Did Obama acknowledge that single payer is the only solution which addresses our many health care problems and then make concessions to get a bill which would pass? That is leadership. No, he eliminated single payer and single payer advocates from the discourse at the outset. The result, a health care bill that Rep. John Conyers called "a piece of crap." The health care industry loves it.
Let's ignore the straw man of abolishing the defense department and look at the real issues. Leftists want Obama to get us out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead, he has mired us more deeply in Iraq and is pursuing an insane, psychotic (in the sense that it is totally out of touch with reality) program in Afghanistan.
In fact, on both wars, Obama is continuing Bush's manic policies without significant modifications. Ironically, if the Republicans attack Obama for endangering national security, they will be right since Bush and Reagan were the biggest producers of national insecurity we have yet seen.
Of course, it goes way beyond the two distorted issues Obama's flack raised. Policy toward Israel has not changed one iota. The focus on Iran, which is hardly a credible threat to anyone, is a cruel joke. Obama put finance capital in charge of his economic policies, and the rest of us are paying the price. It really is a case of the same sour wine in new bottles with different labels.
But let's be clear on one point. I am not disappointed. Obama is exactly as awful a president as I predicted he would be, which is why I didn't vote for him. That is my no-spin opinion.
Of course, Canadian style single payer health care would be wonderful, but is that what we are criticizing Obama about? No, we are criticizing him for abandoning leadership entirely on that and many issues. Did Obama acknowledge that single payer is the only solution which addresses our many health care problems and then make concessions to get a bill which would pass? That is leadership. No, he eliminated single payer and single payer advocates from the discourse at the outset. The result, a health care bill that Rep. John Conyers called "a piece of crap." The health care industry loves it.
Let's ignore the straw man of abolishing the defense department and look at the real issues. Leftists want Obama to get us out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead, he has mired us more deeply in Iraq and is pursuing an insane, psychotic (in the sense that it is totally out of touch with reality) program in Afghanistan.
In fact, on both wars, Obama is continuing Bush's manic policies without significant modifications. Ironically, if the Republicans attack Obama for endangering national security, they will be right since Bush and Reagan were the biggest producers of national insecurity we have yet seen.
Of course, it goes way beyond the two distorted issues Obama's flack raised. Policy toward Israel has not changed one iota. The focus on Iran, which is hardly a credible threat to anyone, is a cruel joke. Obama put finance capital in charge of his economic policies, and the rest of us are paying the price. It really is a case of the same sour wine in new bottles with different labels.
But let's be clear on one point. I am not disappointed. Obama is exactly as awful a president as I predicted he would be, which is why I didn't vote for him. That is my no-spin opinion.
Friday, July 30, 2010
The Afghan Leaks
The Obama administration is reacting in a typically and predictably paranoid manner to the leak of tens of thousands of incident reports, which appear to reveal potential war crimes among other things. The point to keep in mind, however, is that the US Afghan war and policy is insane. It is psychotic in the sense that it is totally out of touch with reality. Its stated goals are entirely impossible to achieve. Therefore, a paranoid reaction is to be expected. The real question is how to cure the mentally ill patient, the US government and its allies. If the leak of these documents helps to do that, then it will be an important contribution to peace.
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