October 23, 2011, Issue #171
HUDSON VALLEY ACTIVIST NEWSLETTER
jacdon@earthlink.net, P.O. Box 662, New Paltz, NY 12561
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CONTENTS
1. GET A JOB! GET A JOB!
2. IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, FOR SOME
3. PLANNED PARENTHOOD: 95 YEARS OF PUBLIC SERVICE
4. AFGHAN WAR REMAINS ENDLESS,
WHILE OBAMA'S IRAQ PLAN FAILS
5. AMERICA'S FOUR LONG IMPERIALIST WARS
6. CLIMATE ACTION RALLIES CIRCLE GLOBE
7. PROTESTS CONDEMN AFGHAN WAR
8. FRED SHUTTLESWORTH: FREEDOM FIGHTER
9. CANADIANS ARRESTED IN TAR SANDS PROTEST
10. INTERNATIONAL NEWS IN BRIEF
11. U.S. CONS POOR WORKERS, FAMILIES
12. CAN CAPITALISM HALT CLIMATE CHANGE?
13. CLIMATE CHANGE DRIVES ANIMAL MIGRATIONS
14. AMNESTY BLASTS CLERGY SEXUAL ABUSE
15. BEWARE OF ATTENDING 'WRONG SCHOOL'
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1. GET A JOB! GET A JOB!
By the Activist Newsletter
Some students at the elite Wharton Business School in Philadelphia evidently are unaware that there is massive unemployment in the United States — or perhaps they simply don't care, to the point of derision.
This revelation became clear Oct. 21 when hundreds of "99 Percent" movement participants arrived at the school, which is part of the University of Pennsylvania, after Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) canceled his speech there, apparently to avoid encountering dissidents.
As the protesters entered the Wharton School and chanted about economic justice, a number of students appeared on a balcony above the hall. These students began chanting repeatedly and in unison, "Get a job! Get a job!"
The demonstrators came from groups including Occupy Philly, Americans United for Change, Philadelphia AFL-CIO, Fight for Philly, SEIU PA State Council, Protect Your Care, Keystone Progress, Moveon.org, NCPSSM, Progress Now, and AFSCME
According the reporter Zaid Jilian writing of the incident for Think Progress: "While the students who jeered the protesters certainly do not necessarily represent all Wharton students, it’s important to understand the context of the elite status they likely either come from or graduate into. Wharton graduates much of the nation’s corporate elite, with the median starting salary for an MBA graduate being $145,000 — six times the poverty level for a family of four.
"The school’s Board of Overseers is staffed with multiple Goldman Sachs executives and high-ranking employees of a wide variety of financial firms. Meanwhile, its Graduate Executive Board is staffed with senior employees of Bank of America, Blackstone Financial Management, and PMC Bank. Wharton’s endowment is $888 million, greater than that of many large public universities. Essentially, the students jeering the protesters represented the future financial elite."
Due to the stagnant economy, about 28 million American workers are either jobless or work part time but need full time work. For virtually all of them, getting a job is a constant preoccupation.
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2. IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, FOR SOME
By the Activist Newsletter
The U.S. economy may be stagnant following the Great Recession, and millions of American families are experiencing hardship, but Forbes magazine reported recently that the total wealth of the nation's richest 400 families — all billionaires — jumped 12% this year. The combined assets of the 400 amount to $1.53 trillion. This nearly equals the GDP of Canada.
According to the annual World Wealth Report from Merrill Lynch and Capgemini, the U.S. had 3.1 million millionaires in 2010, up from 2.86 million in 2009. The latest figure tops the pre-crisis peak of 3 million. About 35,400 Americans have wealth of over $50 million.
The Economic Policy Institute revealed recently that only the richest 5% of the American people are getting much richer. The progressive thinktank reported:
"Wealth is now lower for the typical household than it was a generation ago in 1983, while the wealth at the upper end expanded a great deal.... All of the gains in wealth accrued to the upper fifth, with 40.2% percent of the gains going to the upper 1% and 41.5% going to the next wealthiest 4% of households. This translated to gains of $4.5 million per household in the richest 1%, and a gain of roughly $1.2 million per household in the next richest 4%.
"In other words, the richest 5% of households obtained roughly 82% of all the nation’s gains in wealth between 1983 and 2009. The bottom 60% of households actually had less wealth in 2009 than in 1983, meaning they did not participate at all in the growth of wealth over this period."
Meanwhile, the Census Bureau reported Sept. 12 that 2.6 million more Americans became poor last year, meaning 46.2 million people now live below the poverty line in the U.S. This is the highest number in the 52 years that such figures have been published.
The Wall St. Journal wealth blog reported Oct. 19 "that the millionaires and billionaires now control 38.5% of the world’s wealth." According to the latest Global Wealth Report from Credit Suisse, the 29.7 million people in the world with household net worths of $1 million (representing less than 1% of the world’s population) control about $89 trillion of the world’s wealth. That’s up from a share of 35.6% in 2010."
At the same time, according to the UN, over 2.5 billion human beings survive on less than $2 a day. Of this number, about 1.4 billion exist in indescribable poverty on less than $1.25 a day.
The wealth of global millionaires grew 29% last year — about twice as fast as the wealth in the world as a whole. The U.S. has been the largest wealth generator over the past 18 months. There are now 84,700 people in the world worth $50 million or more, 29,000 people world-wide worth $100 million or more, and 2,700 worth $500 million or more.
The enormous disparity in wealth and poverty, and the subsequent misery of billions of people, is the direct product of the global capitalist economic system. Yet, to even identify this obvious cause (much less take political action to change the economic structure of society) is rarely mentioned in America lest it invite unpopularity, censure or state repression. This should provide pause to contemplate the limitations of democracy, as well as those of the capitalist system.
The Occupy Wall Street and 99 Percent movements are taking steps that to an extent challenge this system, and we support them, recognizing there's a long struggle ahead that will form and re-form the tactics and strategy of rebellion until victory.
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3. PLANNED PARENTHOOD: 95 YEARS OF SERVICE
By the Activist Newsletter
Planned Parenthood reached the grand old age of 95 on Oct. 16 — having survived generations of abuse from backward social elements who either opposed sex education, contraception or the right of women to choose abortion, or all three.
To this day reactionary political elements in Congress, inspired by the votes and financing of the religious right, are still attempting to defund and cripple this crucially important organization, and continue to come too close to attaining their objectives. This is despite the fact that much of Planned Parenthood's services consist of routine health care.
On Oct. 13, the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 358, an extreme anti-choice bill, by vote of 251-172. According to NARAL, "the bill would allow a hospital to refuse a woman life-saving, emergency abortion care even if she will die without it. On top of that, it effectively would ban insurance coverage of abortion in state health-insurance exchanges, denying abortion coverage to millions of women."
As the New York Times put it Oct. 15: "Unable to overturn Roe v. Wade, anti-abortion campaigners have worked in recent years within Congress and state legislatures, many of which have become increasingly conservative, to make gaining access to the procedure as difficult as possible. Around the country, state legislatures from Arizona to Kansas have passed sweeping measures this year intended to make it more onerous for Planned Parenthood clinics to stay open."
So we say "happy birthday and a long life" to Planned Parenthood, and a big thanks to Margaret Sanger (1883-1966) — a true hero of our times — who founded what became Planned Parenthood in 1916. This dedicated woman was jailed eight different times for distributing birth control information and for opening the first clinic for birth control (in Brooklyn).
Throughout these 95 years the strongest opponents of Planned Parenthood and its services remain the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church and various fundamentalist Protestant denominations and some other religious sectors, which constitute the movement opposing family planning.
Margaret Sanger minced no words in identifying and castigating the regressive role of religion in attempting to suppress various aspects of birth control for women: "If Christianity turned the clock of general progress back a thousand years," she said, "it turned back the clock two thousand years for women."
— Of the six House members from Hudson Valley Congressional Districts 17 to 22, four opposed anti-choice H.R. 358 and two voted in support. The two are Republican Reps. Nan Hayworth (NY-19 CD) and Christopher Gibson (NY-20 CD).
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4. AFGHAN WAR REMAINS ENDLESS,
WHILE OBAMA'S IRAQ PLAN FAILS
By Jack A. Smith, the Activist Newsletter
The 10th anniversary of Washington's invasion, occupation and seemingly endless war in Afghanistan was observed Oct. 7, but despite President Barack Obama's pledge to terminate the U.S. "combat mission" by the end of 2014, American military involvement will continue many years longer.
The Afghan war is expanding even further, not only with increasing drone attacks in neighboring Pakistani territory but because of U.S. threats to take far greater unilateral military action within Pakistan unless the Islamabad government roots out "extremists" and cracks down harder on cross-border fighters.
Washington's tone was so threatening that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had to assure the Pakistani press Oct. 21 that the U.S. did not plan a ground offensive against Pakistan. The next day, Afghan President Hamid Karzai shocked Washington by declaring "God forbid, If ever there is a war between Pakistan and America, Afghanistan will side with Pakistan.... If Pakistan is attacked and if the people of Pakistan needs Afghanistan’s help, Afghanistan will be there with you.”
At the same time, Washington has just suffered a spectacular setback in Iraq, where the Obama Administration has been applying extraordinary pressure on the Baghdad government for over a year to permit many thousands of U.S. troops to remain indefinitely after all American forces are supposed to withdraw at the end of this year.
President Obama received the rejection from Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki Oct. 21, and promptly issued a public statement intended to completely conceal the fact that a long-sought U.S. goal has just been obliterated, causing considerable disruption to U.S. plans. Obama made a virtue of necessity by stressing that "Today, I can report that, as promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year."
This article will first discuss the situation in Afghanistan after 10 years, then take up the Iraq question and what the U.S. may do to compensate for a humiliating and disruptive rebuff.
The United States is well aware it will never win a decisive victory in Afghanistan. At this point, the Obama Administration is anxious to convert the military stalemate into a form of permanent truce, if only the Taliban were willing to accept what amounts to a power sharing deal that would allow Washington to claim the semblance of success.
In addition President Obama seeks to retain a large post-"withdrawal" military presence throughout the country mainly for these reasons:
• To protect its client regime in Kabul led by President Karzai, as well as Washington's other political an commercial interests in the country, and to maintain a menacing military presence on Iran's eastern border, especially if U.S. troops cannot now remain in Iraq.
• To retain territory in Central Asia for U.S. and NATO military forces positioned close to what Washington perceives to be its two main (though never publicly identified) enemies — China and Russia — at a time when the American government is increasing its political pressure on both countries. Obama is intent upon transforming NATO from a regional into a global adjunct to Washington's quest for retaining and extending world hegemony. NATO's recent victory in Libya is a big advance for U.S. ambitions in Africa, even if the bulk of commercial spoils go to France and England. A permanent NATO presence in Central Asia is a logical next step. In essence, Washington's geopolitical focus is spreading from the Middle East to Central Asia and Africa in the quest for resources, military expansion and unassailable hegemony, especially from the political and economic challenge of rising nations of the global south, primarily China.
There has been an element of public deception about withdrawing U.S. "combat troops" from Iraq and Afghanistan dating from the first Obama election campaign in 2007-8. Combat troops belong to combat brigades. In a variant of bait-and-switch trickery, the White House reported that all combat brigades departed Iraq in August 2010. Technically this is true, because those that did not depart were simply renamed "advise and assist brigades." According to a 2009 Army field manual such brigades are entirely capable, "if necessary," of shifting from "security force assistance" back to combat duties.
In Afghanistan, after the theoretical pullout date, it is probable that many "advise and assist brigades" will remain along with a large complement of elite Joint Special Operations Forces strike teams (SEALs, Green Berets, etc.) and other officially "non-combat" units — from the CIA, drone operators, fighter pilots, government security employees plus "contractor security" personnel, including mercenaries. Thousands of other "non-combat" American soldiers will remain to train the Afghan army.
According to an Oct. 8 Associated Press dispatch, "Senior U.S. officials have spoken of keeping a mix of 10,000 such [special operations-type] forces in Afghanistan, and drawing down to between 20,000 and 30,000 conventional forces to provide logistics and support. But at this point, the figures are as fuzzy as the future strategy." Estimates of how long the Pentagon will remain in Afghanistan range from 2017 to 2024 to "indefinitely."
Obama marked the 10th anniversary with a public statement alleging that "Thanks to the extraordinary service of these [military] Americans, our citizens are safer and our nation is more secure"— the most recent of the continuous praise of war-fighters and the conduct of these unnecessary wars from the White House since the 2001 bombing, invasion and occupation.
Just two days earlier a surprising Pew Social Trend poll of post-9/11 veterans was made public casting doubt about such a characterization. Half the vets said the Afghanistan war wasn't worth fighting in terms of benefits and costs to the U.S. Only 44% thought the Iraq war was worth fighting. One-third opined that both wars were not worth waging. Opposition to the wars has been higher among the U.S. civilian population. But it's unusual in a non-conscript army for its veterans to emerge with such views about the wars they volunteered to fight.
The U.S. and its NATO allies issued an unusually optimistic assessment of the Afghan war on Oct. 15, but it immediately drew widespread skepticism. According to the New York Times the next day, "Despite a sharp increase in assassinations and a continuing flood of civilian casualties, NATO officials said that they had reversed the momentum of the Taliban insurgency as enemy attacks were falling for the first time in years.... [This verdict] runs counter to dimmer appraisals from some Afghan officials and other international agencies, including the United Nations. With the United States preparing to withdraw 10,000 troops by the end of this year and 23,000 more by next October, it raises questions about whether NATO’s claims of success can be sustained."
Less than two weeks earlier German Gen. Harald Kujat, who planned his country's military support mission in Afghanistan, declared that "the mission fulfilled the political aim of showing solidarity with the United States. But if you measure progress against the goal of stabilizing a country and a region, then the mission has failed."
According to Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, the U.S. presence in Afghanistan is a critically important "long term commitment" and "we’re going to be there longer than 2014." He made the disclosure to the Senate Armed Services Committee Sept. 22, a week before he retired. In a statement Oct. 3, the Pentagon's new NATO commander in Afghanistan, Marine Gen. John Allen, declared: "The plan is to win. The plan is to be successful. And so, while some folks might hear that we're departing in 2014... we're actually going to be here for a long time."
Lt. Gen. John Mulholland, departing head of U.S. Army Special Operations Command, told the AP Oct. 8: "We’re moving toward an increased special operations role...,whether it’s counterterrorism-centric, or counterterrorism blended with counterinsurgency." White House National Security Advisor Tom Donilon said in mid-September that by 2014 "the U.S. remaining force will be basically an enduring presence force focused on counterterrorism." Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta strongly supports President Obama's call for an "enduring presence" in Afghanistan beyond 2014.
Former U.S. Afghan commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who was fired last year for his unflattering remarks about Obama Administration officials, said in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations Oct. 6 that after a decade of fighting in Afghanistan the U.S. was only "50% of the way" toward attaining its goals. "We didn’t know enough and we still don’t know enough," he said. "Most of us — me included — had a very superficial understanding of the situation and history, and we had a frighteningly simplistic view of recent history, the last 50 years."
Washington evidently had no idea that one of the poorest and least developed countries in the world — a society of 30 million people where the literacy rate is 28% and life expectancy is just 44 years — would fiercely fight to retain national sovereignty. The Bush Administration, which launched the Afghan war a few weeks after 9/11, evidently ignored the fact that the people of Afghanistan ousted every occupying army from that of Alexander the Great and Genghis Kahn to the British Empire and the USSR.
The U.S. spends on average in excess of $2 billion a week in Afghanistan, not to mention the combined spending of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, but the critical needs of the Afghan people in terms of health, education, welfare and social services after a full decade of military involvement by the world's richest countries remain essentially untended.
For example, 220,000 Afghan children under five — one in five — die every year due to pneumonia, poor nutrition, diarrhea and other preventable diseases, according to the State of the World’s Children report released by the UN Children’s Fund. UNICEF also reports the maternal mortality rate with about 1,600 deaths per every 100,000 live births. Save the Children says this amounts to over 18,000 women a year. It is also reported by the UN that 70% of school-age girls do not attend school for various reasons — conservative parents, lack of security, or fear for their lives. All told, about 92% of the Afghan population does not have access to proper sanitation.
Even after a decade of U.S. combat, the overwhelming majority of the Afghan people still have no clear idea why Washington launched the war. According to the UK's Daily Mail Sept. 9, a new survey by the International Council on Security and Development showed that 92% of 1,000 Afghan men polled had never even heard of the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon — the U.S. pretext for the invasion — and did not know why foreign troops were in the country. (Only men were queried in the poll because many more of them are literate, 43.1% compared to 12.6% of women.)
In another survey, conducted by Germany's Konrad Adenauer Foundation and released Oct. 18, 56% of Afghans view U.S./NATO troops as an occupying force, not allies as Washington prefers. The survey results show that "there appears to be an increasing amount of anxiety and fear rather than hope."
Perhaps the most positive news about Afghanistan — and it is a thunderously mixed "blessing" — is that the agricultural economy boomed last year. But, reports the Oct. 11 Business Insider, it's because "rising opium prices have upped the ante in Afghanistan, and farmers have responded by posting a 61% increase in opium production." Afghani farmers produce 90% of the world's opium, the main ingredient in heroin. Half-hearted U.S.-NATO eradication efforts failed because insufficient attention was devoted to providing economic and agricultural substitutes for the cultivation of opium.
Another outcome of foreign intervention and U.S. training is the boundless brutality and corruption of the Afghan police toward civilians and especially Taliban "suspects." Writing in Antiwar.com John Glaser reported:
"Detainees in Afghan prisons are hung from the ceilings by their wrists, severely beaten with cables and wooden sticks, have their toenails torn off, are treated with electric shock, and even have their genitals twisted until they lose consciousness, according to a study released Oct. 10 by the United Nations. The study, which covered 47 facilities sites in 22 provinces, found 'a compelling pattern and practice of systematic torture and ill-treatment' during interrogation by U.S.-supported Afghan authorities. Both U.S. and NATO military trainers and counterparts have been working closely with these authorities, consistently supervising the detention facilities and funding their operations."
In mid-September Human Rights Watch documented that U.S.-supported anti-Taliban militias are responsible for many human rights abuses that are overlooked by their American overseers. At around the same time the American Open Society Foundations revealed that the Obama Administration has tripled the number of nighttime military raids on civilian homes, which terrorize many families. The report noted that "An estimated 12 to 20 raids now occur per night, resulting in thousands of detentions per year, many of whom are non-combatants." The U.S. military admits that half the arrests are "mistakes."
Meanwhile, it was reported in October that in the first nine months this year U.S.-NATO drones conducted nearly 23,000 surveillance missions in the Afghanistan sky. With nearly 85 flights a day, the Obama Administration has almost doubled the daily amount in the last two years. Hundreds of civilians, including nearly 170 children, have been killed in the Afghan-Pakistan border areas from drone attacks. Miniature killer/surveillance drones — small enough to be carried in backpacks— are soon expected to be distributed to U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
So far the Afghanistan war has taken the lives of some 1,730 American troops and about a thousand from NATO. There are no reliable figures on the number Afghan civilians killed since the beginning of the war. The UN's Assistance Mission to Afghanistan did not start to count such casualties until 2007. According to the Voice of America Oct. 7, "Each year, the civilian death toll has risen, from more than 1,500 dead in 2007 to more than 2,700 in 2010. And in the first half of this year, the U.N. office reported there were 2,400 civilians killed in war-related incidents."
At minimum the war has cost American taxpayers about a half-trillion dollars since 2001. The U.S. will continue to spend billions in the country for many years to come and the final cost — including interest on war debts that will be carried for scores more years — will mount to multi-trillions that future generations will have to pay. At present there are 94,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan plus about 37,000 NATO troops. Another 45,000 well paid "contractors" perform military duties, and many are outright mercenaries.
Washington is presently organizing, arming, training and financing hundreds of thousands of Afghan troops and police forces, and is expected to continue paying some $5 billion a year for this purpose at least until 2025.
The U.S. government has articulated various different objectives for its engagement in Afghanistan over the years. Crushing al-Qaeda and defeating the Taliban have been most often mentioned, but as an Oct. 7 article from the Council on Foreign Relations points out: "The main U.S. goals in Afghanistan remain uncertain. They have meandered from marginalizing the Taliban to state-building, to counterinsurgency, to counterterrorism, to — most recently — reconciliation and negotiation with the Taliban. But the peace talks remain nascent and riddled with setbacks. Karzai suspended the talks after the assassination of Burhanuddin Rabbani, the government's chief negotiator, which the Afghan officials blamed on the Pakistan-based Haqqani network. The group denies it."
There is another incentive for the U.S. to continue fighting in Afghanistan — to eventually convey the impression of victory, a domestic political necessity.
The most compelling reason for the Afghan war is geopolitical, as noted above — finally obtaining a secure military foothold for the U.S. and its NATO accessory in Central Asian backyards of China and Russia. In addition, a presence in Afghanistan places the U.S. in close military proximity to two volatile nuclear powers backed by the U.S. but not completely under its control by any means (Pakistan, India). Also, this fortuitous geography is flanking the extraordinary oil and natural gas wealth of the Caspian Basin and energy-endowed former Soviet Muslim republics such as Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.
In Iraq, the Obama Administration's justification for retaining troops after the end of this year was ostensibly to train the Iraqi military and police forces, but there were other reasons:
• Washington seeks to remain in Iraq to keep an eye on Baghdad because it fears a mutually beneficial alliance may develop between Iraq and neighboring Iran, two Shi'ite societies, weakening American hegemony in the strategically important oil-rich Persian Gulf region and ultimately throughout the Middle East/North Africa.
• The U.S. also seeks to safeguard lucrative economic investments in Iraq, and the huge future profits expected by American corporations, especially in the denationalized petroleum sector. Further, Pentagon and CIA forces were stationed in close proximity to Iran's western border, a strategic position to invade or bring about regime change.
Under other conditions, the U.S. may simply have insisted on retaining its troops regardless of Iraqi misgivings, but the Status of Forces compact governing this matter can only be changed legally by mutual agreement between Washington and Baghdad. The concord was arranged in December 2008 between Prime Minister Maliki and President George W. Bush — not Obama, who now takes credit for ending the Iraq war despite attempting to extend the mission of a large number of U.S. troops.
At first Washington wanted to retain more than 30,000 troops plus a huge diplomatic and contractor presence in Iraq after "complete" withdrawal. Maliki — pushed by many of the country's political factions, including some influenced by Iran's opposition to long-term U.S. occupation — held out for a much smaller number.
Early in October Baghdad decided that 3,000 to 5,000 U.S. troops in a training-only capacity was the most that could be accommodated. In addition, the Iraqis in effect declared a degree of independence from Washington by insisting that remaining American soldiers must be kept on military bases and not be granted legal immunity when in the larger society. Washington, which has troops stationed in countries throughout the world, routinely insists upon legal exemption for its foreign legions as a matter of imperial hubris, and would not compromise.
The White House has indicated that an arrangement may yet be worked out to permit some American trainers and experts to remain, perhaps as civilians or contractors. Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, a staunch opponent of the U.S. occupation, has suggested Iraq should employ trainers for its armed forces from other countries.
Regardless, the White House is increasing the number of State Department employees in Iraq from 8,000 to an almost unbelievable 16,000, mostly stationed at the elephantine new embassy in Baghdad's Green Zone quasi-military enclave, in new American consulates in other cities, and in top "advisory" positions in many of the of the regime's ministries, particularly the oil ministry. Half the State Department personnel, 8,000 people, will handle "security" duties, joined by some 5,000 new private "security contractors."
Thus, at minimum the U.S. will possess 13,000 of its own armed "security" forces, and there's still a possibility Baghdad and Washington will work out an arrangement for adding a limited number of "non-combat" military trainers, openly or by other means.
In his Oct. 21 remarks, Obama sought to transform the total withdrawal he sought to avoid into a simulacrum of triumph for the troops and himself: "The last American soldier will cross the border out of Iraq with their heads held high, proud of their success, and knowing that the American people stand united in our support for our troops.... That is how America's military efforts in Iraq will end."
Heads held high, proud of success — for an unjust, illegal war based on lies that took over a million Iraqi lives and created over 4 million refugees! It has been estimated that the final costs of the Iraq war will be $5 trillion to $7 trillion when the debt and interest are finally paid off decades from now.
If President Obama is reelected— even should the Iraq war actually be over — he will be coordinating U.S. involvement in wars and occupations in Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and now Uganda (where American 100 combat troops have just been inserted), plus various expanding drone campaigns, and such adventures as Washington's support for Israel against the Palestinians and for the Egyptian military regime against popular aspirations for full democracy, followed by the backing of dictatorial regimes in a half-dozen countries, and continual threats against Iran.
Washington's $1.4 trillion annual military and national security expenditures are a major factor behind America's monumental national debt and the cutbacks in social services for the people, but aside from White House rhetoric about reducing redundant Pentagon expenditures, overall war/security budgets are expected to increase over the next several years.
The Bush and Obama Administrations have manipulated realty to convince American public opinion that the Iraq and Afghan wars are ending in U.S. successes. Washington fears the resurrection of the "Vietnam Syndrome" that resulted after the April 1975 U.S. defeat in Indochina. The "syndrome" led to a 15-year disinclination by the American people to support aggressive, large-scale U.S. wars against small, poor countries in the developing third world until the January 1991 Gulf War, part one of the two-part Iraq war that continued in March 2003.
According to an article in the Oct. 9 New York Times titled "The Other War Haunting Obama," author, journalist and Harvard emeritus professor Marvin Kalb wrote: "Ten years after the start of the war in Afghanistan, an odd specter haunts the Obama White House — the specter of Vietnam, a war lost decades before. Like Banquo’s ghost, it hovers over the White House still, an unwelcome memory of where America went wrong, a warning of what may yet go wrong."
This fear of losing another war to a much smaller adversary — and perhaps suffering the one-term fate of President Lyndon Johnson who presided over the Vietnam debacle — evidently was a factor behind President Obama's decision to vastly expand the size of the U.S. military commitment to Afghanistan and why the White House is now planning a long-term troop presence beyond the original pullout date.
Today's combat directly touches the lives of only a small minority Americans — militarily members and families — and much of the majority remains uninformed or misinformed about many of the causes and effects of the Iraq/Afghan adventures. Obama may thus eventually be able to convey the illusion of military success, which will help pave the way for future imperial violence unless the people of the United States wise up and act en masse to prevent future aggressive wars.
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5. AMERICA'S FOUR LONG IMPERIALIST WARS
By the Activist Newsletter
Among the many factors about the Bush-Obama wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that Washington and the commercial mass media tend to conceal is that that they have lasted far longer than the U.S. prefers to acknowledge, and are among America's four longest imperialist wars.
For instance, the Afghan war is said to be 10 years old but it's actually a 24-year conflict if you count the 14 years of phase one of this two-part involvement — 1978-92 — when the U.S. funded, equipped and trained reactionary mujahedeen and warlord forces that fought against a left wing government in Kabul and its Soviet protectors.
This U.S./Saudi Arabian-financed/Pakistan-backed war resulted in the defeat of the Afghan left regime in 1992, years after Soviet forces withdrew. It also led to the creation of al-Qaeda and in propelling the Taliban to power in 1995, leading to phase two when the Bush Administration invaded Afghanistan following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center instead of relying on international police action to dismantle the small terror network.
In addition to destroying the left regime, the fundamentalist forces and their U.S./Saudi backers also crushed its extensive reforms to end extreme female subjugation in Afghanistan. One of the Bush Administration's justifications for bombing and invading the country in 2001 was to "liberate" Afghan women from male domination — but 10 years later the situation remains dreadful.
The concurrent Iraq war is considered to be eight years and seven months old but has been going on for almost 21 years. It began when the U.S. launched the Persian Gulf war in January 1991 to punish Iraqi President Saddam Hussain for invading Kuwait, a tiny, neighboring oil-rich monarchy. Kuwait was part of Iraq's Basra province until it after World War I when British imperialism turned it into a colony, now independent. Iraq never accepted the colonial maneuver, and in 2000 tried to get it back — a disastrous move based on Hussain's belief that Washington, which supported his earlier war against Iran, would at ignore Baghdad's Kuwait adventure.
The Gulf War lasted only 42 days, during which the U.S. Air Force conducted 110,000 bombing and strafing attacks. The bombers destroyed most of Iraq's civilian infrastructure — from water, electrical and gas lines, to housing, factories, schools, and hospitals. About 125,000 Iraqi troops and 100,000 civilians were killed. U.S. forces suffered 113 soldiers killed in action, plus 35 from "friendly fire."
But the war didn't end with Iraq's defeat. The U.S. and Britain enforced killer sanctions and a no-fly zone, backed up with frequent bombings, for over a dozen years until sanctions ended with the Bush Administration invasion of March 19, 2003. According to the UN over a million Iraqi's died from 1991 to 2003 — half of them young children — from hunger, disease and exposure due to the sanctions.
At least another million Iraqi's died as a result of the invasion and occupation from March 2003 to today, and over four million are refugees in Iraq or nearby countries, out of a population of 25 million. Washington to this day depicts the Iraqi people as pleased and even happy that the U.S. invaded and rid the country of President Hussein — after a 21-year toll of two million dead and terrible destruction.
Officially, the Vietnam war lasted almost nine years (1964-1973), but it continued for 21 years (1954-1975). The U.S. supported the restoration of French colonial control of Vietnam and all of Indochina after the defeat of Japanese imperialism in 1945 that had earlier displaced French rule. By 1954, Washington officially acknowledged there were 352 Americans in Vietnam in the Military Assistance Advisory group supporting the French against liberation forces led by the Vietnamese Communist Party. The liberators defeated the French army at the historic battle of Dien Bien Phu that same year. When Paris withdraw all remaining French troops in April 1956, according to John Prados in "Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable war, 1945-1975" (2009), "their departure made America South Vietnam's big brother," i.e., overlord and military protector against the popular forces in the U.S-dominated southern half of the country.
By June 1962, 9,700 U.S. "military advisers" plus a large number of CIA agents were training and fighting to support the corrupt U.S.-backed right wing South Vietnamese government, at which time President Kennedy's Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara, announced that "every quantitative measure shows that we're wining the war." By April 1969, when the number of U.S. troops attained their apogee — 543,482 — Washington was obviously losing. American troops pulled out in 1973 — the alternative was crushing defeat and political catastrophe — although the CIA and military personnel remained in U.S.-South Vietnamese territory assisting the conservative government in Saigon until April 1975 when the entire country was liberated. The U.S. lost 58,000 soldiers. Millions of Vietnamese civilians and soldiers were killed.
American history books suggest the U.S. aggressive war against the Philippines (that is, the Philippine War of Independence from Spain and ultimately from the clutches of racist, imperial America) lasted three years (1899-1902) but it actually took Washington 14 years to smash the impendence movement and colonize the region, at a cost of a million Filipino lives. Washington "granted" independence to the Philippines after World War II. Thanks to the U.S. government/mass media miseducation system, most Americans today have no knowledge of this entire incident, any more than they truly comprehend most of Washington's imperialist wars, from the attack on Mexico in 1848 and resulting land-grab to the 2011 U.S./NATO war for regime change in Libya.
There are many paradoxes to America's 24-year engagement in Afghanistan aside from it having given rise to al-Qaeda and what ultimately metamorphosed into the self-defeating folly known as the Bush-Obama "war on terrorism." Perhaps the most interesting irony stemmed from President Jimmy Carter's decision to support the fundamentalist forces in the late 1970s after the left government in Kabul began implementing progressive reforms. The purpose of the secret U.S. support was to induce Moscow to send in troops to protect its neighboring friendly government.
Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, finally acknowledged Washington's deed 20 years later in a 1998 interview in the French periodical Le Nouvel Observateur. Questioned about Washington’s intervention. He declared:
"According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahidin [the collective name of the Muslim fighters] began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan.... But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 [nearly six months before the Soviet intervention], that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. On that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention....We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would."
Asked if he had any regrets about denying Moscow’s assertion that it had intervened to save the Kabul government against a U.S.-sponsored war, the former national security adviser responded: "Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap — and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: Now we have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war."
Had Washington not supported the fundamentalist forces for decades, the Kabul government may have been able to hold its own without requesting Soviet intervention. This could have meant no eventual Taliban takeover, and perhaps no al-Qaeda and no 9/11.
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6. CLIMATE ACTION RALLIES CIRCLE GLOBE
By Environmental News Service
More than 2,000 "Moving Planet" clean-energy demonstrations took place today around the world last month — in all 50 U.S. states and in 175 countries.
"The planet has been stuck for too long with governments doing nothing about the biggest problem we've ever faced," said Bill McKibben, founder of the nonprofit 350.org, the international climate campaign coordinating the Sept. 24 demonstrations.
The campaign is named after the safe upper concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, 350 parts per million. Right now, the atmosphere contains 392 ppm of the greenhouse gas.
"This is the day when people will get the Earth moving, rolling towards the solutions we need," McKibben said.
In the United States, there are more than 700 events in all 50 states. Highlights include a 2,000 person bike ride from Boulder to Denver, Colorado; a 5,000 person rally in Seattle with Mayor Mike McGinn; a massive bicycle parade in San Francisco; and a rally at the United Nations General Assembly in New York.
At the UN rally, speakers included Vice President Mohammed Waheed Hassan of the Maldives, a Pacific island nation at risk of becoming uninhabitable due to coastal erosion and sea level rise. Also on the podium at the UN's Dag Hammarskjold Plaza was NASA climate scientist Dr. James Hansen, Laura Flanders of GritTV, and a delegation of indigenous leaders from across the United States.
In Boston, 3,000 people marched and rally at Columbus Waterfront Park.
In Chicago, 500 people protested at a coal plant in Downtown Chicago with Greenpeace Executive Director Kumi Naidoo, who said: "Moving Planet, is a global expression of unity, urgency and purpose to show political and business leaders they need to move from rhetoric to action. Today, we're beginning to move in the right direction."
In Colorado, some 3,000 cyclists rode their bikes from Boulder to Denver, protesting coal plants along the way.
In Minneapolis, 2,000 people rode their bikes to Minneapolis State Capitol to call for clean-energy legislation.
In San Francisco, 5,000 people took to the streets to ride bikes and march to City Hall to hear from McKibben and from Sierra Club Executive Director Mike Brune.
"People in record numbers are waking up to the fact that since too few of our elected leaders in Congress are actually leading, we're going to have to," McKibben said. "The truth is, we've got lots of work to do to solve the climate crisis: big polluters are doing everything in their power to delay real climate action, and they are spending huge amounts of money to distort the truth and block progress. But this weekend's events can show the world that a vibrant movement is coming to life - and that people everywhere are ready to do whatever it takes to move the world beyond fossil fuels."
International events included a march through downtown Cairo, Egypt; a 500 person cycle rally in Delhi, India; the formation of a giant, human bicycle in London, and on the Pacific island of Tuvalu disaster drills and swimming lessons.
From Sydney, Australia, Blair Palese tweets, "More than 200 on Bondi Beach in Sydney flying kites that said "Yes Price Pollution!" As the nation waits for a Parliamentary vote on an emissions trading scheme, 43 events around Australia showed large-scale public support for action!"
Photos from the day's events were displayed on a giant screen outside the United Nations General Assembly in New York City, reminding leaders the world expects progress at climate negotiations in South Africa this November-December and the Rio+20 Earth Summit next June.
— To view some extraordinary photos from Sept. 24, go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/350org/sets/72157627713917562/detail/. They give a real sense of the breadth of this movement.
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7. PROTESTS CONDEMN AFGHAN WAR
By the Activist Newsletter
Demonstrations, "die-ins," marches and occupations took place across the U.S. Oct. 7 and 8 marking the 10th anniversary of the Afghanistan war. Occupy Wall St. contingents participated in a number of the actions. The ANSWER Coalition initiated many of the events. Here are six brief reports:
In SAN FRANCISCO, 800 protesters gathered in a spirited opening rally at the Federal Building featuring speakers from several groups including Chito Cuellar, head of the Hotel Division of UNITE HERE! Local 2, and Steve Patt, National Committee to Free the Cuban Five. Demonstrators took to the streets with such chants as "Occupation is a crime from Iraq to Palestine! " and "Money for jobs and education, not for war and occupation! " At Powell and Market Sts., protesters engaged in a "die-in" symbolizing the human cost of this needless war.
The march continued to the Grand Hyatt in solidarity with the picketing hotel workers who have been struggling for a contract, chanting, "We’re gonna boycott! We’re gonna shut it down! San Francisco is a union town! " A rally followed, then the marchers headed to the Financial District for a final rally that drew nearly 2,000 people, according to ANSWER organizers.
In WASHINGTON, D.C., Saturday, Oct. 8, a series of marches protested war and militarism through tourist-filled downtown areas. The nation's capital is the venue of the Stop the Machine coalition, which began a long-term occupation of Freedom Plaza Oct 6, and the Occupy DC encampment at McPherson Sq. Both groups participated in the demonstrations.
The largest march began at McPherson Sq., that included participants from the occupation the Wisconsin state capitol building earlier this year, and members of the antiwar veterans group March Forward!, among others, who hiked to Freedom Plaza to pick up other protesters.
The march of about 2,000 passed through a busy downtown to positive receptions from workers and tourists on its way to the National Air and Space Museum. They had planned to enter the museum to protest an exhibit about the unmanned aerial drone attack vehicles that currently terrorize the peoples of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and elsewhere.
Upon reaching the museum, security guards attacked the front of the march with pepper spray. This led to an impromptu occupation of the museum entrance, which forced its closure for two hours. A second march of combined Stop the Machine and Occupy DC members took a circular route to a brief really outside the White House in order to pass through busy neighborhoods, where they received further encouraging responses.
Albuquerque, Oct. 8: Over 300 protesters gathered in front of the University of New Mexico bookstore in Albuquerque for a march and rally to protest the 10th anniversary of the war in Afghanistan, and to demand an end to corporate greed and corruption. The protest was called by the Albuquerque Coalition Against the Wars, which included ANSWER, Stop the War Machine and Vets for Peace. The militant demonstration was also supported and attended by scores of participants of Occupy Albuquerque, part of the national movement.
Chicago, Oct. 8: Occupy Chicago protesters joined a mass march on the 10th anniversary of the Afghan war. In total, 2,000 people participated in a day of opposition to Wall Street’s wars. Among the popular chants were "People over Profits, Troops Out Now!" and "How Do We Get Our Jobs Back: Tax, Tax, Tax the Rich! " The march was popular with onlookers, especially on State St., a working-class shopping area. When marchers starting chanting "Off the sidewalk and into the streets, " more than a few people joined the march.
Los Angeles, Oct. 7: Some 400 people gathered to condemn the Afghan war, organized by the ANSWER Coalition. The crowd was multinational and young with some members of Occupy LA joining the action, connecting the wars abroad to Wall Street profits at home. Speakers included Jim Lafferty, director of the National Lawyers Guild, and Blase Bonpane from the Office of the Americas. Protesters held a "die-in" at the peak of the demonstration to symbolize the massive loss of life in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Syracuse, N.Y., Oct. 8: Over 100 people here solidarity with the local Occupy Wall Street movement calling for an end to economic inequality, corporate greed and U.S. occupations overseas. The protesters, including a ANSWER contingent, marched through downtown, passing towering bank buildings and boarded-up businesses. The group loudly proclaimed, "We are the 99 percent, " as many passing cars honked in support. The march ended with a rally at the Occupy Syracuse encampment at Perseverance Park.
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8. FRED SHUTTLESWORTH: FREEDOM FIGHTER
By Eugene Puryear, Liberation News
Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, stalwart civil rights movement leader, died Oct. 5 at the age of 89. Shuttlesworth rose to prominence by continuing civil rights activity in Alabama following the 1956 banning of the NAACP by state officials.
Present at virtually every major event in Alabama civil rights history of the 1950s and 1960s, Shuttlesworth gained broad respect for his willingness to brave the gravest of consequences with no regard to his own life. Most noted for his role in Birmingham’s 1963 "Children’s Crusade," Shuttlesworth was an important supporter of the Freedom Rides. He also accompanied Autherine Lucy as she enrolled as the first Black student at the University of Alabama in 1956.
A two-time victim of bombings and numerous beatings, Shuttlesworth once survived a bomb attack in which six sticks of dynamite were used. When he attempted to enroll his daughters at an all-white school, he was beaten multiple times with chains and brass knuckles, and by his own account was "almost at death’s door. " On the militant, aggressive edge of the non-violent section of the movement, Rev. Shuttlesworth sought to inspire bold action, which also gave him a reputation as a sometime abrasive ally.
Rev. Shuttlesworth was born in the Alabama backwoods in 1922 to a family that made a living sharecropping and bootlegging. In 1940, he was convicted of running a still and received two years probation. Throughout the 1940s, he moved around the state working as a truck driver and cement worker. Towards the end of the decade, he settled into full-time preaching, got married and built his own home out of scrap. By 1953, Shuttlesworth was pastor at Birmingham’s Bethel Baptist church, and an active member of the state’s NAACP.
In 1956, however, the NAACP was effectively banned in Alabama and wound down operations. Already frustrated by organizational obstacles in the NAACP, Shuttlesworth seized the opportunity to fill the void in Alabama with a new civil rights organization, the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Later in the decade, he was central to the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Stressing the need for mass action, Shuttlesworth fearlessly engaged in actions of small groups and sometimes of just himself, looking to inspire others..
Shuttlesworth was often at odds with the urban Black elites who had made their own accommodation with Jim Crow. He and other civil rights leaders devoted to mass action to smash segregation had to look to the broad mass of working-class and poor Blacks and grade-school youth, buoyed by college crusaders. The domestic workers, the sharecroppers and the high school students who filled jails — these were the backbone of the Alabama struggle in the early 1960s.
Shuttlesworth’s centrality to the Birmingham movement made him a crucial ally of the Freedom Riders in 1961. The Freedom Rides electrified the nation as groups of students braved threats and violence to test court rulings on desegregation in interstate travel. On Mothers Day, May 14, the Freedom Riders arrived in Birmingham. For weeks prior, Shuttlesworth had warned of a Klan ambush, the threat of which was an open secret in the city.
Birmingham was known at that time as a seat of Jim Crow terrorism, with one of the South’s most vicious law enforcement officials, Eugene "Bull" Connor. Connor had begun his career breaking strikes and hounding communists in 1930s Birmingham, and was a zealous opponent of civil rights activity. Connor and the Klan were determined to stop the Freedom Rides in Birmingham, so Connor promised the KKK 15 minutes of complete freedom to attack the Freedom Riders in the bus terminal.
Once the melee began, Shuttlesworth’s home became an impromptu mobilization center that people at the bus station called for help; it was where reinforcements were dispatched and where protesters who escaped the violence sought shelter. Organizers from Shuttlesworth’s ACMHR rescued Freedom Riders trapped in and near the bus terminal. Shuttlesworth went on helping coordinate logistics with student leaders in Nashville as well as getting arrested himself in a struggle that kept the Freedom Rides going.
Shuttlesworth is most associated with his role in the events around the "Children’s Crusade" of 1963. With his developed network in the city, Shuttlesworth joined with Martin Luther King Jr. to turn Birmingham into a watershed moment for the movement. In his words, "We were trying to launch a systematic, wholehearted battle against segregation, which would set the pace for the nation. "
However, the movement was slow to pick up momentum, with almost uniform opposition from the urban Black elites, optimistic that the triumph of white liberals in recent elections would usher in an era of slow and steady desegregation. Students from elementary to high school, not content to wait and skeptical of promises from politicians, became increasingly involved in the movement. They filled jails to their capacity and scandalized the world as pictures of dogs and fire hoses being unleashed on children filtered out through the media.
While leading one protest, Shuttlesworth was hit in the chest and taken away in an ambulance. Upon hearing that news, Bull Connor publicly remarked that he wished Shuttlesworth had been taken away in a hearse. It was Connor, however, who was carted off as the Birmingham movement broke down the wall of segregation and electrified the civil rights movement, injecting the issue into the center of the nation's consciousness.
Rev. Shuttlesworth remained involved in civil rights issues, including a failed attempt at reinvigorating the SCLC, basing himself out of Cincinnati. Unfortunately, in 2004 he lent his name to an effort to block a gay rights ordinance. He died in Birmingham, where he had relocated following a stroke in 2008, leaving behind a legacy with much to admire and emulate.
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9. CANADIANS ARRESTED IN TAR SANDS PROTEST
By the Activist Newsletter
OTTAWA — About 200 people were arrested at Parliament Hill Sept. 26 as they attempted to stage a sit-in in the House of Commons to protest drilling for "dirty" oil in tar sands.
Protestors were blocked from entering by fenced barricades and over 50 RCMP officers.
Most were released with a trespassing violation. It was the largest climate-related civil disobedience action in Canadian history. It took place as hundreds of supporters participated in a solidarity rally that continued throughout the day.
The action was a follow up to two-weeks of protests outside the White House that resulted in the arrest of 1,252 people in late August/early September.
"Today’s protest was a turning point when people in Canada from coast to coast to coast stood together against the tar sands and for a clean energy future that promotes climate justice," said Keith Stewart of Greenpeace Canada who was arrested on the Hill.
"The movement against the tar sands and [conservative Prime Minister Stephen] Harper’s reckless agenda will continue to grow as long as our government ignores its responsibilities to protect our environment and our communities and continues to be the mouthpiece for the destructive tar sands industry."
"The action on parliament hill was a true blue and green event, " said Maude Barlow with the Council of Canadians. "Today, labor, environmental and Indigenous leaders stood together to push this government to turn away from the tar sands and towards a green energy future."
Those arrested included Barlow, David Coles (Energy and Paperworkers Union), Tony Clarke (Polaris Institute), Keith Stewart (Greenpeace) and George Poitras (former Chief of the Mikisew Cree).
"What we saw today is that concern about the impact the tar sands is having on land, air, water and communities spans generations, cultures and social backgrounds," said Clayton Thomas Mueller with the Indigenous Environmental Network. "Native communities should not be sacrifice zones. The people of Fort Chipewyan deserve justice and we deserve a future that prioritizes the health of our environment and all our communities."
The principal point of the rally and civil disobedience was to urge Harper to turn away from a destructive tar sands industry and start building a green energy future that promotes climate justice, respects Indigenous rights and prioritizes the health of the environment and communities.
Harper's Conservative Party government lashed out at the demonstrators and critics of its environment record as "extremists who want to kill Canadian jobs."
If approved this year by the Obama administration — and it appears to be headed in that direction — the multi-billion dollar Keystone XL project, proposed by Alberta-based TransCanada, would provide a new 1,860 mile route for about 700,000 barrels of oil per day from Alberta's tar stands to 15 refineries on the Gulf Coast of Texas.
The province of Alberta and Canadian government officials have touted the project for its economic benefits, including thousands of new jobs in both countries, but environmental groups have turned the project into a debate over expansion in the tar sands sector — which requires large amounts of water, land and energy to extract synthetic oil from Alberta and Saskatchewan's northern bitumen deposits.
—Information from Council of Canadians, Montreal Gazette, other sources.
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10. INTERNATIONAL NEWS IN BRIEF
By the Activist Newsletter
•• MORE U.S. WEAPONS FOR DICTATORSHIP — The Obama Administration has finalized the sale of $53 million worth of weapons and military equipment to the dictatorship in Bahrain, despite months of widespread human rights abuses against peaceful protesters, it was reported Oct. 18. The package includes armored vehicles, high-tech TOW and bunker buster missiles, anti-tank rocket launchers, and tens of millions of dollars of spare parts and military communications equipment.
The Pentagon has long cut deals with Bahrain in weaponry, recently sending dozens of American tanks, armored personnel carriers, helicopter gunships, thousands of .38 caliber pistols and millions of rounds of ammunition, from .50 caliber rounds used in sniper rifles and machine guns to bullets for handguns.
The Sunni monarchy in Bahrain has committed serious crimes against the majority Shi'ite population , including harsh violence on demonstrating civilians, mass detentions, torturing prisoners, targeting medical professionals for treating injured protesters, cracking down on freedom of the press, and more. Washington has supplied the dictatorship with over $92 million in aid since President Obama took office, with another $26.2 million slated for next year. (Information from Antiwar.com.)
•• AMERICAN TROOPS IN UGANDA — President Obama announced Oct. 14 he is sending about 100 U.S. combat troops to Africa to hunt down and fight the leaders of the Christian rebel militant group the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in and around Uganda. He said the troops would "provide assistance to regional forces that are working toward the removal of Joseph Kony [head of the LRA] from the battlefield.”
The president aside “I believe that deploying these U.S. armed forces furthers U.S. national security interests and foreign policy and will be a significant contribution toward counter-LRA efforts in central Africa,” He did not explain why a rebel group in Uganda is a concern for U.S. national security.
Obama’s claim that the LRA is a legitimate national security concern is presumably supposed to simply be accepted without any evidence or explanation; truth by presidential decree. But it is also notable how quickly and easily, in disregard for the Constitutional requirements, the President can send American troops to far off places without Congressional approval. (From Antiwar.com.)
•• GUERRILLA ATTACK IN COLOMBIA — The leftist Colombian guerrilla organization FARC attacked a government military unit Oct. 21, killing 10 soldiers and wounding six near the Pacific port of Tumaco. According to AP, "Despite major security gains against rebels over the past decade, they retain the ability to mount hit-and-run attacks, in large part due to Colombia’s rugged mountains and thick jungles.... Several hundred security force members are killed annually" in the decades-long struggle waged by FARC, which stands for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.
•• SOUTH CHINA SEA DISPUTE EASES — China and Vietnam have signed an agreement to manage a sometimes bitter dispute over the South China Sea. The deal outlines a series of measures, including a hotline to deal with emergencies and a provision for authorities from both countries to meet twice a year.
This agreement comes after months of tension over who has sovereignty over this contentious body of water. Ships from the two counties clashed a few months ago - and there were anti-China demonstrations in Hanoi.
The South China Sea potentially holds vast oil and gas reserves, and is an important shipping route. Any final agreement on maritime borders should be based on international law, the deal says - and be acceptable to both sides. (From BBC, Oct. 12.)
•• ARTCIC ICE IS MELTING FAST— There is probably less ice floating on the Arctic Ocean now than at any time since a particularly warm period 8,000 years ago, soon after the last ice age. The underlying cause is believed by all but a handful of climatologists to be global warming brought about by greenhouse-gas emissions. Yet the rate the ice is vanishing confounds these climatologists’ models. These predict that if the level of carbon dioxide, methane and so on in the atmosphere continues to rise, then the Arctic Ocean will be free of floating summer ice by the end of the century. At current rates of shrinkage, by contrast, this looks likely to happen some time between 2020 and 2050. (From The Economist, Sept. 23.)
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11. U.S. CONS POOR WORKERS, FAMILIES
By the Activist Newsletter
Washington's methods of measuring both the minimum wage and the poverty line are way out of date in each case, to the detriment of tens of millions of American workers and poor families.
"The current value of the minimum wage is well below its historic peak in the late 1960s," according to the Economic Policy Institute on the basis of the inflation-adjusted value of the minimum wage since 1960: "When adjusted for inflation, the minimum wage was worth $8.54 per hour in 1968, compared to the current minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. (New York State's minimum wage is more than 21% below its peak value in 1970, which was $9.23 in today’s dollars.) Based on a typical, 2,000-hour work year, the 1968 inflation-adjusted minimum wage would equate to an annual salary of $17,080 per year, versus $14,500 for today’s minimum wage."
In reality the minimum wage is woefully substandard, and 67% of the American people — according to Public Religion Research Institute's respected American Values Survey last November — support an increase to $10 an hour. But an increase won't happen anytime soon, even though it would act as a substantial stimulus to the depressed U.S. economy. It took over 10 years achieve the last boost to $7.25. Many congressional Republicans oppose any increase and some such as the Tea Party's Rep. Michele Bachmann and libertarian Rep. Ron Paul, both of whom seek the GOP presidential nomination, want to abolish the minimum wage altogether.
Washington probably skews poverty statistics even more than the minimum. Here's how it's done, according to the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP), a leading public policy center dedicated to promoting the well-being of low-income families and children:
"According to the federal poverty guidelines, the poverty level is $22,050 for a family of four, $18,310 for a family of three, $14,570 for two and $10,830 for one. The poverty guidelines are used to determine eligibility for public programs.
"The current poverty measure was established in the 1960s and is now widely acknowledged to be outdated. It was based on research indicating that families spent about one-third of their incomes on food — the official poverty level was set by multiplying food costs by three. Since then, the same figures have been updated annually for inflation but have otherwise remained unchanged.
"Yet food now comprises only one-seventh of an average family’s expenses, while the costs of housing, child care, health care, and transportation have grown disproportionately. Most analysts agree that today’s poverty thresholds are too low. And although there is no consensus about what constitutes a minimum but decent standard of living in the U.S., research consistently shows that, on average, families need an income of about twice the federal poverty level to meet their most basic needs.
"Failure to update the federal poverty level for changes in the cost of living means that people who are considered poor today by the official standard are worse off relative to everyone else than people considered poor when the poverty measure was established. The current federal poverty measure equals about 29% of median household income, whereas in the 1960s, the poverty level was nearly 50% of the median.
"The European Union and most advanced industrialized countries measure poverty quite differently from the U.S. Rather than setting minimum income thresholds below which individuals and families are considered to be poor, other countries measure economic disadvantage relative to the citizenry as a whole, for example, having income below 50%."
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12. CAN CAPITALISM HALT CLIMATE CHANGE?
[John Bellamy Foster, the author of several important books and numerous articles on ecology and the editor of Monthly Review magazine, was interviewed recently by Peter Boyle for Australia's Green Left Weekly newspaper about the impact of the global financial crisis on capitalism’s response to climate change. Here are excerpts from his reply. See links below for his writings.]
By John Bellamy Foster
The global financial crisis has now turned into a global stagnation that is affecting the economies of the triad (the United States, Europe and Japan) and much of the rest of the world. Under these circumstances, the capitalist system is unlikely to respond to climate change at all. As in every economic crisis, there will be a tendency toward increased environmental deregulation, not environmental regulation.
The only good news from an environmental standpoint is that the slowdown in economic growth diminishes the rate of impact on the environment. Nevertheless, to the extent that public attention is diverted from climate change as an issue, necessary actions are not taken while the overall problem gets worse.
The truth is that the capitalist system is unable to respond to climate change: either in periods of prosperity or stagnation, and in the latter case everything but the latest stock quotes and profit figures recede into the background.
The deficit reduction drive [in the U.S.] will pull the economy down further. At the same time it means that the state cannot be a force for carrying out the kinds of changes that would help the environment.
For example, the budget deal reportedly slashed $1.5 billion dollars from Obama’s high speed train project (designed to reduce dependence on cars). Since this was the only really important positive climate change measure that the Obama Administration put through the slashing of it is quite symbolic....
In terms of the wider population in the United States, I would say that the primary issue in the country is jobs, and climate change is a political non-issue, so that while [climate] denialism is considered a political asset on the right, liberals see no percentages in pursuing the matter and are inclined to downplay it, except when directly addressing environmentalist audiences.
The Obama administration of course has no policy at all to speak of with respect to climate change and now seldom mentions it at all. More important for Obama is expanding energy sources: oil from deep sea drilling, coal, nuclear, shale oil, etc, as a means of leveraging economic growth, and, more immediately, gaining corporate backing.
In other words, the situation in the United States seems to confirm that there is no hope to be found at present anywhere in the system where climate change is concerned.
Environmentally, the entire planet is threatened on an ever increasing scale, while planetary systems have proven themselves to be vulnerable in ways that we previously failed to appreciate. At one time, we could afford to ignore what humanity could do to the Earth in a mere 12 months. Those days are now gone. Changes that previously defined geological history are now occurring on the level of decades.
The further we go down the path of "business as usual" the greater the social and ecological revolution we will need to pull the planet out of this impending disaster.
— Of Foster's multitude of writings on the question of capitalism and ecology, we found his two recent books the most useful: "The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet" and the just published "What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know about Capitalism." Information at http://monthlyreview.org/press/.
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13. CLIMATE CHANGE DRIVES ANIMAL MIGRATIONS
By the Activist Newsletter from various sources
Global warming is causing animals and plants to migrate further up mountains and away from the equator in attempts to avoid the higher temperatures associated with climate change, scientists have found in an exhaustive survey of nearly 1,400 species.
Commenting editorially on the survey Sept. 27, the New York Times declared: "A rapid reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is tragically unlikely. We are holding the future of every species on this planet — including ourselves — hostage."
The rate of movement is on average up to three times faster than previously expected for species migrating towards the poles and about twice as fast for organisms that are migrating further up the sides of mountains, according to I-Ching Chen, a researcher at Taiwan's Academia Sinica and the study's lead author.
A major review of the distribution of animals and plants, published in the journal Science in mid-August, found wide variations between individual species but taken as a group there appears to be unequivocal evidence that climate change is the cause of the mass movement, said Professor Chris Thomas of the University of York.
"Species of animals and plants have been moving their distributions away from the equator and towards the poles much faster than previously realized, he said. "In fact species are moving northward in the northern hemisphere and southward in the southern hemisphere on average at a rate of about 11 miles per decade.... This has been going on for the last 40 years and is set to continue for at least the rest of the century.
"It's just a phenomenal rate of movement of the whole of biological life away from the equator towards the poles. How do we know it's related to climate change? Well partly because there is no other reasonable explanation for why everything should be moving to higher elevations and to higher latitudes, but also because we find the rate of movement is greater in the regions that have experienced the most warming," Professor Thomas explained.
The migration isn't universal, said Chris Thomas, a biologist at Britain's University of York and the project's leader. About a quarter of the roughly 1,500 species examined in the study moved toward warmer latitudes, in some cases due to the loss of habitat or man-made obstacles such as belts of farmland that prevented them from following other animal life north.
One of the faster moving species is the British spider silometopus, Thomas said. In 25 years, the small spider has moved its home range more than 200 miles north, averaging 8 miles a year, he said.
Stanford University biologist Terry Root, who wasn't part of this study but praised it as clever and conservative, points to another species, the American pika, a rabbitlike creature that has been studied in Yellowstone National Park for more than a century. The pika didn't go higher than 7,800 feet in 1900, but in 2004 they were seen at 9,500 feet, she said.
— Information, from The Independent, AP, CNN and the New York Times.
—————————
14. AMNESTY BLASTS CLERGY SEXUAL ABUSE
By the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR)
NEW YORK — Amnesty International Ireland’s release Sept. 26 of a major human rights report on clergy sexual abuse marks another important step in the journey towards holding Vatican officials accountable for the systematic and widespread concealing of rape and child sex crimes throughout the world.
Indeed, as Amnesty makes clear in more than 400 pages of documentation, the abuse of children "included acts that amounted to torture and inhuman and degrading treatment." The Amnesty International report, titled "In Plain Sight: Responding to the Ferns, Ryan, Murphy and Cloyne Reports," includes a summary of four previous investigations into abuse by clergy in Ireland.
These reports were included in the CCR’s Sept. 13 International Criminal Court filing against the Pope and top Vatican officials, seeking accountability for clergy sexual abuse. The CCR submitted 22,000 pages of evidence and says "the ICC filing is only a small fraction of the evidence already available."
According to Colm O’Gorman, executive director of Amnesty International Ireland, "The abuse of tens of thousands of Irish children is perhaps the greatest human rights failure in the history of the state. Much of the abuse described in the Ryan Report meets the legal definition of torture under international human rights law."
The report makes clear what happens when governmental authorities cede their responsibility to respect, protect and fulfill the rights of vulnerable children and adults to a church that can’t be trusted with it, or with their children.
—————————
15. BEWARE OF ATTENDING 'WRONG SCHOOL'
By Rania Khalek
Kindergartener A.J. Paches was kicked out of Brookside Elementary School earlier this year because his homeless mother used a friend's address to register him in the wealthy district of Norwalk, Connecticut. After expelling A.J., Norwalk authorities charged his mother with first-degree larceny for enrolling her son under a false address, a felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison.
Sadly, A.J.'s story is not unique. He is one of several low-income students whose parents use the residence of a relative or friend to provide their children with educational opportunities that are severely lacking in poor districts. In the recession era of budget deficits and cuts to public education, wealthy school districts are cracking down hard on these families, going to extreme lengths to identify the kids and prosecute the parents.
One popular method is to offer bounties to tipsters who report students who turn out to be illegally enrolled. As of 2008, the Bayonne Board of Education in New Jersey offers a $100 bounty for tips about students suspected of lying about their residency. In the middle-class suburban enclave of Clifton, New Jersey, the bounty is set at $300 for informants who correctly report a boundary hopper. According to the New York Times, the district immediately follows up with a visit by an "attendance officer " to the suspected students home.
In anticipation of the growing demand for residence verification, private companies like VerifyResidence.com and LiarCatchers.com are offering their investigative services aimed directly at public school districts. According to its Web site, VerifyResidence.com not only offers residence audits, but also surveillance stakeouts by investigators using "the latest in covert video technology and digital photographic equipment to photograph, videotape, and document subject activity when logistically possible. "
Perhaps more shocking than the invasive surveillance techniques schools are using to identify these students, are the punishments they dish out to parents.
Take the case of Kelley Williams-Bolar, an African-American single mother living in the housing projects of Akron, Ohio. She made national headlines in January when she was convicted on two felony counts of tampering with court records and sentenced to 10 days in jail with three years probation for illegally enrolling her kids in the predominately white and higher-quality school district next door.
Fearing for the safety of her two daughters in the Akron school district, Williams-Bolar used her father’s address in the nearby suburban district of Copley-Fairlawn to enroll her children in what she believed was a better performing and safer school environment. In handing down what many considered a harsh sentence, Judge Patricia Cosgrove specifically noted that the court was making an example out of Williams-Bolar "so that others who think they might defraud the school system perhaps will think twice. "
Williams-Bolar had been working as a teacher’s aide in the Akron city school district while taking night classes to earn a teaching degree. Two felony convictions would likely have jeopardized a future teaching career. Fortunately, Ohio Governor John Kasich intervened by reducing her charges to misdemeanors, calling it "a second chance " rather than a pass. However, other parents facing similar circumstances haven’t been as lucky.
In April, the Stamford Advocate, a local Connecticut paper, reported that 33-year-old Tanya McDowell, a homeless single mother from Bridgeport, Connecticut, was arrested for registering her 5-year-old son for kindergarten in the affluent school district of Norwalk by using the address of her son’s after-school babysitter, Ana Rebecca Marquez. McDowell is currently facing up to 20 years in prison for first-degree larceny and conspiracy to commit first-degree larceny along with a $15,000 fine, which is supposedly to reimburse Norwalk for the cost of educating her son.
Regarding McDowell’s charges, Norwalk Mayor Richard Moccia said, "This now sends a message to other parents that may have been living in other towns and registering their kids with phony addresses," suggesting that the reason for the prosecution has more to do with making an example out of McDowell than seeking restitution or justice.
In the meantime, McDowell’s son, now 6, is staying with his grandmother while his mother is in jail awaiting trial. McDowell is receiving support from both the NAACP and the Connecticut Parents Union (CTPU), an education advocacy group.
Gwendolyn Samuel, founder of CTPU, told me that Ana Marquez, the babysitter who allowed McDowell to use her address, "got hit the hardest." After the Norwalk Housing Authority evicted Marquez for fraud, her two young children, ages 4 and 6, were removed from her custody by the Department of Children and Family Services for a week. The family was then left homeless, shuffling from shelter to shelter for months. Meanwhile, the housing authority seized Marquez’s household belongings, which it has yet to return.
Due to the trauma endured by Marquez and her small children, who are now living with relatives in Florida, the CTPU has filed a lawsuit against the Norwalk Housing Authority on their behalf. Samuel is adamant about assisting Marquez in seeking damages from the housing authority for their reckless handling of her case....
CTPU has also been working to pass a legislative amendment that would prohibit the arrest of parents who lie about where they live to provide their children with a better education.
The striking disparities in school quality between rich and poor neighborhoods aren’t exactly a secret. Any person who has stepped foot inside a wealthy suburban public school and an inner city public school would have to be blind not to recognize the differences in class and race. But for those who haven’t seen it for themselves, the willingness of parents to risk breaking the law to send their kids to better schools should serve as a window into the inequalities that permeate the American public school system. Hiring detectives to videotape kids at the bus stop and throwing parents in jail is not going to change that.
— Rania Khalek is an associate writer for AlterNet, where this article appeared Oct. 19.
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
10-04-11 Activist Calendar
HUDSON VALLEY ACTIVIST CALENDAR
Oct. 4, 2011, Issue #669
Send event announcements to jacdon@earthlink.net
———————————————————————
Dedicated to Helping Build Activist
Movements in the Hudson Valley
———————————————————————
THE WALL STREET OCCUPATIONS
"Occupy Wall Street" demonstrations are breaking out in many U.S. cities following the example set by the occupation of Liberty Square (Zuccotti Park) in New York City that began last month and is still going strong. The big Washington action — months in preparation — will begin on Thursday, Oct. 6 (see below).
On Oct. 5 there will be a solidarity march in New York City sponsored by a number of labor and community groups — see below, including buses from Albany, Highland and Rock Tavern — in support of Occupy Wall Street.
Two events earlier this year — the uprisings in the Arab countries, combined with the right wing attack on the union movement and public sector workers in Wisconsin and the dramatic fight-back by workers and community people — have inspired anti-establishment activism throughout the United States, which contributed to the current demonstrations.
The are many issues behind the various Occupy Wall Street protests. In general the actions are the product of several decades of increasing right wing domination of the American political system, stagnant wages and incomes for the working class and lower middle class, burgeoning poverty, historic economic inequality and the dissipation of the so-called "American Dream" (i.e., possible upward mobility and at least superficial equality).
These social deficits have been exacerbated by the Great Recession, extreme unemployment and underemployment, and the reluctance of the two ruling parties to take the steps necessary to alleviate the increasing immiseration of America's working families. Meanwhile, an enormously wealthy but small minority whistles an idle tune as it inventories the daily-expanding assets of the upper class, much to the justified irritation of public sentiment. And lurking in the background are two potentially toxic realities: the precarious position of U.S. and European capitalism, combined with Washington's declining global hegemony, a volatile mixture which may provoke greater international instability and wars.
It is too early to predict whether the Wall Street Occupations have staying power, or what such power might amount to politically, not least because of the presently decentralized and often explicitly "leaderless" nature of some of the protests. At the least they will shake things up even more, a most positive development. At best, given the immense contradictions within American society today, the growing oppositional force may become a step toward the rebuilding of a needed mass left political movement in our country.
———————————————————————
Wednesday, Oct. 5, NEW YORK CITY: A labor and community movement-sponsored march and rally in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators will take place this afternoon. The legal march will leave from City Hall Park (250 Broadway in Manhattan) at 4:30 p.m. heading for Liberty Square/Zuccotti Park (Liberty St. and Broadway), three blocks north of Wall St. A rally and other events will take place at the park until 7 p.m. The march is sponsored by about 35 labor and liberal organizations, including: TWU Local 100, SEIU 1199, CWA 1109, RWDSU, Communications Workers of America, United Auto Workers, United Federation of Teaches, CUNY Professional Staff Congress, National Nurses United, Writers Guild East, CWA Local 1180, Working Families Party, Coalition for the Homeless, NYC Coalition for Educational Justice, New Deal for New York Campaign, National People's Action, Labor-Religion Coalition (NYS), Citizen Action of NY, MoveOn.org, Common Cause NY, 350.org.
Information, http://occupywallst.org/, https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=282473051782707.
Wednesday, Oct. 5, HIGHLAND to NYC: There will be bus available to bring some Mid-Hudson activists to the Occupy Wall Street solidarity march. It will be leaving from the park and ride in Highland (Rt. 9W and Rt. 299) sponsored by the Labor Religion Coalition. Arrive at the park and ride no later than 12:15 p.m. The requested cost is $20 a seat (though it's a sliding scale downward or upward, depending on what you can pay). Sandwiches will be provided but bring snacks, etc. If you wish to take this bus, call Move-On's Dan Vollweiler at (518) 334-6928 to let him know you want a seat, since they may be scarce. The march is intended as a show of support, not an act of civil disobedience. The event lasts from 4:30-7 p.m. The bus will leave by 8 p.m.
Wednesday, Oct. 5, ALBANY to NYC: The bus making a pickup in Highland (above) originates from the Capital District, leaving at 11 a.m. from NYSUT headquarters, 800 Troy-Schenectady Rd., Latham. For seating arrangements, contact Sara Niccoli, Labor-Religion Coalition, saran@labor-religion.org, (646) 229-1091.
Wednesday, Oct. 5, ROCK TAVERN to NYC: A Teamster union bus from Orange County bringing labor and community supporters to the New York City solidarity march will depart at 1 p.m. from Local 44515, Stone Castle Rd. RSVP: Sandy Shaddock at( 845) 567-7760 to reserve a seat as seating is limited.
Wednesday, Oct. 5, NEW PALTZ. ALBANY and NEW YORK STATE: State University of New York students from several locations, joined by students from some City University of New York campuses, are planning a statewide walkout/teach-in today in opposition to increased tuition and fees, and cutbacks in services and staff. They are part of a new organization titled New York Students Rising. SUNY New Paltz students will leave classes noon-3 p.m., meeting in front of the Humanities Bldg. Information, http://www.nystudentsrising/.
Wednesday, Oct. 5, ALBANY: A documentary titled "Budrus: It Takes a Village to Unite the Most Divided People on Earth" will be screened 6:30-8:30 p.m at Albany Public Library, Pine Hills Branch, 517 Western Ave. The film focuses on a Palestinian town threatened by the Separation Barrier wall. A discussion will follow this free public event. Information, http://palestinianrightscommittee.org, zalatwi@hotmail.com, (518) 465-5425.
Thursday, Oct. 6, WASHINGTON: "Stop the Machine! Create a New World!" is the call to a mass nonviolent action beginning today at Freedom Plaza (13th St. and Pennsylvania Ave. NW) and continuing for as long as activists are willing to sustain the protest — days, weeks or much longer. Some will offer civil disobedience, others will not. People are attending from throughout the U.S. We're told dozens of activists from the Hudson Valley will take part.
• Politically, the specific demands upon the U.S. government are: "Tax the rich and corporations; End the wars, bring the troops home, cut military spending; Protect the social safety net, strengthen Social Security and improved Medicare for all; End corporate welfare for oil companies and other big business interests; Transition to a clean energy economy, reverse environmental degradation; Protect worker rights including collective bargaining, create jobs and raise wages; Get money out of politics."
•This action is being organized by the October 2011 Coalition, composed of "groups who advocate for peace and social, economic and environmental justice, in a sustained occupation and nonviolent resistance to Stop the Machine! Create a New World! What is the machine? Corporatism and militarism. What new world is possible? One in which people's needs are more important than corporate profits, in which we unite our struggles for jobs, education, housing, healthcare and human rights in which we are freed to implement solutions for a peaceful, just and sustainable world." A great many details are available at the coalition's website, http://www.October2011.org, from a schedule of events to FAQs, information about sleeping arrangements, transportation and much more. Information, info@october2011.org.
• ANSWER and other groups are taking part in a rally at the Federal Building in San Francisco Oct. 6 in solidarity with the start of the Oct. 6 “Stop the Machine” action in Washington.
Thursday, Oct. 6, WOODSTOCK: "The Power of Water in N.Y. — Transition to Preparedness" is the title of a "panel discussion to help communities move toward preparedness and a sustainable, water-secure future." This free public event, sponsored by Transition Woodstock, will be held 7:30-9:30 p.m., at the Reform Church, 16 Tinker St. Panelists include Mary McNamara, Lower Esopus Watershed Partnership; Wolf Bravo, founder, Sustainable Urubamba; Russel Urban-Mead, hydrogeologist. Information, Vickie Anne O'Dougherty, (845) 679-2135.
Thursday, Oct. 6, ALBANY: The State Assembly Environmental Conservation committee holds a public hearing on hydraulic fracturing at 9:30 a.m. in the Legislative Office Building's Harrison Room. The meeting is expected to attract an audience opposed to "fracking," the dangerous method employed to extract natural gas from Marcellus Shale deposits in New York State. A number of anti-fracking groups are expected to attend the hearing. FrackAction is organizing a bus from NYC. We understand carpool information from the Mid-Hudson Valley is available from joanwalker@gmail.com.
Friday, Oct. 7, SEVERAL CITIES: The Bush Administration launched its unjust invasion and occupation of Afghanistan exactly 10 years ago today. The ANSWER Coalition has organized a number of demonstrations demanding an immediate end to U.S. aggression, which has been widened by the Obama Administration, in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and elsewhere. ANSWER is also organizing for UNAC's Oct. 15 protests in several cities.
Friday, Oct. 7, MILLBROOK: Economist, Pavan Sukhdev will speak about the green economy at the Cary Institute, 2801 Sharon Tpk. (Rt 44) at 11 a.m. Sukhdev, former head of the United Nations Environment Program, is the lead author of the report, "Towards a Green Economy." He will explore how the greening of economies is an engine for growth, a source of employment, and a means of alleviating poverty. Free and public. Information, (845) 677-7600, ext. 121, freemanp@caryinstitute.org.
Friday, Oct. 7, NEW PALTZ (SUNY campus): This is Local Food Week — Farmfest — in New Paltz Village. Free food and live music will available for all at the Old Main Quad, 1-5 p.m. (Campus map: http://www.newpaltz.edu/map/.) There's also fundraising and an art raffle for the local Gardens for Nutrition and New Paltz Flood Aid. Information, farmfestnp@gmail.com, http://www.npfarmfest.blogspot.com/.
Saturday, Oct. 8, NEW YORK CITY: "Indian Point is Old, Dangerous, and Unnecessary — Tell Cuomo to Shut it Down Now!" is the slogan of a 12-2 p.m. rally outside Gov. Cuomo's office, 633 Third Ave. and 41st St. in Manhattan. Indian Point, of course, is the Hudson Valley's very own nuclear power facility, in close enough proximity to New York City to the south and the Mid-Hudson region to the north to cause a calamity should it ever melt down. (It's situated on the Hudson River shore near Peekskill — and two earthquake fault lines!) Speakers include radio host Gary Null and author Chris Williams. Sponsored by The Progressive Radio Network, Indian Point Safe energy Coalition and Stop Indian Point Now. Information, http://progressiveradionetwork.com.
Thursday, Oct. 13, TROY: To commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Patriot Act, ACLU President Susan N. Herman will speak about the negative impact on civil liberties of this Bush Administration initiative, now carried forward by the Obama Administration. The venue is the Sanctuary for Independent Media, 3361 6th Ave. (at 101st St.), beginning at 7 p.m. A $10/$5 donation is requested. Information, (518) 272-2390, info@MediaSanctuary.org, http://www.MediaSanctuary.org.
Saturday, Oct. 15, ALBANY: There will be a peace march and rally to mark the 10th anniversary of the unjust U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and drone attacks in adjacent western Pakistan. There will be speakers, live music. Peace and justice organizations are welcome to table at this event, which will be held 12 noon-2 p.m. in Townsend Park — the triangle where Central Ave. converges with Washington Ave. adjacent to Henry Johnson Blvd. (across from the Social
Justice Center). The sponsor is Bethlehem Neighbors for Peace. Information, (518) 439-1968, http://www.bethlehemforpeace.org.
Saturday, Oct. 15, WASHINGTON: A Rally and March for Jobs and Justice, backed by labor, religious, community, and civil rights groups begins at 11 a.m. the Sylvan Theatre at 15th and Independence, followed by a march to the just-opening Martin Luther King Jr. Monument. The event has been initiated by the National Action Network, led by Rev. Al Sharpton, and co-sponsored by Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, and Lee Saunders, secretary treasurer of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. The march to the King Memorial — at Ohio Drive SW and West Basin Drive SW —will begin round 1 p.m. Speakers include Weingarten, Sharpton, and radio personality Tom Joyner. Several unions are helping organize this event, including the New York State United Teachers, which is organizing buses leaving from many of the union’s 16 regional offices very early Saturday morning.
Saturday, Oct. 15, KINDERHOOK: A 1 p.m. union-backed "Rally for American Jobs" is scheduled outside Rep. Chris Gibson's office, 2 Hudson St., demanding that he vote for President Obama's American Jobs Act. Information, esoto@hvalf.org, (845) 567-7760,
http://www.hvalf.org.
Sunday, Oct. 16, MILLBROOK: Since the Hudson Valley is one of the most Lyme disease-prone areas of the U.S. this educational hike in the woods may be of interest to a number of readers: The Cary Institute’s Dr. Rick Ostfeld and his research team will discuss how the interactions among acorns, mice, deer, and ticks influence the risk of Lyme disease. This free public 1 p.m. event begins at the Cary East (Gifford House) parking area, 2917 Sharon Turnpike (Rt. 44). Ostfeld has spent more than 20 years studying the ecology of Lyme disease. He will share his insights with participants through a series of informative outdoor stations. Learn the major players in the Lyme disease story as well as research techniques. Participants should bring drinking water and wear socks, sturdy shoes, and long pants. In the event of heavy rain, the program will be cancelled. Reservations are requested. Register on line at http://ecologyoflymedisease.eventbrite.com.
Sunday, Oct. 16, WASHINGTON: A 313-mile "Right to Know" march that began from the Brooklyn, N.Y., Flatbush Food Co-op Oct. 1 will arrive here today on World Food Day as part of a campaign demanding the labeling of genetically engineered food. The event will culminate in a 2 p.m. rally at Lafayette Park, across from the White House, that will "last into the evening with amazing musicians and speakers." Marchers are conducting meetings at natural food stores and co-ops during their journey. According to the organizers: "Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) endanger our health, the environment, and our farmer’s livelihoods. For too long, biotechnology companies like Monsanto have lobbied against labeling products containing their patented plants — plants which are specially designed to be sprayed with cancer-causing weed-killers, and plants which produce pesticides in every one of their cells." Information about GMOs, the march and how to take part, http://right2knowmarch.org.
Monday, Oct. 17, NEW PALTZ (SUNY campus): Kristin Kimball, author of "The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love," will offer a free public lecture 7 p.m. in the Coykendall Science Building Auditorium. She will be speaking along with her husband, farmer Mark Kimball, a central character in her autobiographical book, which chronicles Kristin Kimball’s transition from a Harvard-educated New York City journalist to a partner in an ambitious sustainable agriculture experiment. The event is sponsored by the SUNY New Paltz Environmental Task Force, the Department of English, the Department of Sociology, and the Environmental Studies Program, with the support of the Provost’s Office and Campus Auxiliary Services. Information, (845) 257-3447.
Friday, Oct. 21, TRENTON, N.J.: Opponents of hydraulic fracturing are planning to protest here today at the Delaware River Basin Commission's special meeting to vote on opening the Delaware River Watershed to fracking. The commission is gathering to “consider adoption of the regulations” to lift the current moratorium on high-volume hydraulic fracturing for methane gas in the Delaware River Basin. The regulations would cover natural gas drilling at an estimated 22,000 gas wells in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey and Delaware on land that drains into the Delaware River, which provides drinking water to 15 million people in the four states, including Philadelphia. The Delaware Riverkeeper Network and Protecting Our Waters are encouraging activists to attend 10 a.m.-12 noon meeting the Patriot's Theater, 1 Memorial Drive. A bus will bring people from Philadelphia. According to Josh Fox, the director of "Gasland," the recent documentary that exposed the grave dangers of fracking for natural gas, "If they are going to start drilling, we're going to shut them down." He spoke at an anti-fracking rally last month that drew over a thousand demonstrators in Philadelphia. Information, http://protectingourwaters.wordpress.com/.
Saturday, Oct. 22, ESOPUS: Scenic Hudson reports: "Due to recent storm surges and years of wear and tear, we’re beginning to lose the Hudson River shoreline along Esopus Meadows Preserve. Help us save this fragile, ecologically important land the natural way — by planting trees whose strong roots will prevent erosion" — 10 a.m.-1 p.m. at Esopus Meadows Preserve, River Rd. Volunteers are asked to "Wear long pants and sturdy closed-toed shoes or hiking boots. Bring plenty of water, bug spray and gloves, if you have them. We’ll furnish all tools and the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation will supply 100 trees. Minors must be accompanied by an adult. Information, including meeting place, Hudson Parks event coordinator Anthony Coneski, aconeski@scenichudson.org, (845) 473-4440, ext. 273, http://www.scenichudson.org/parks/esopusmeadows.
Thursday, Oct. 27, PURCHASE (Manhattanville College campus): Police reform, racial profiling and the controversial practice of stop-and-frisk will be the topics of this year's Annual Henry Schwarzschild Memorial Lecture at Reid Castle, 2900 Purchase St. The featured speaker is Robert Gangi, senior policy advocate for the Urban Justice Center and former executive director of the Correctional Association of New York who has fought throughout his career for the humane treatment of prisoners and the protection of their rights. Gangi is currently leading the Police Reform Organizing Project (PROP), a new initiative of the Urban Justice Center. This free public event is sponsored by The New York Civil Liberties Union and the Connie Hogarth Center for Social Action. Information, (914) 997-7479, lberns@nyclu.org.
(end)
Oct. 4, 2011, Issue #669
Send event announcements to jacdon@earthlink.net
———————————————————————
Dedicated to Helping Build Activist
Movements in the Hudson Valley
———————————————————————
THE WALL STREET OCCUPATIONS
"Occupy Wall Street" demonstrations are breaking out in many U.S. cities following the example set by the occupation of Liberty Square (Zuccotti Park) in New York City that began last month and is still going strong. The big Washington action — months in preparation — will begin on Thursday, Oct. 6 (see below).
On Oct. 5 there will be a solidarity march in New York City sponsored by a number of labor and community groups — see below, including buses from Albany, Highland and Rock Tavern — in support of Occupy Wall Street.
Two events earlier this year — the uprisings in the Arab countries, combined with the right wing attack on the union movement and public sector workers in Wisconsin and the dramatic fight-back by workers and community people — have inspired anti-establishment activism throughout the United States, which contributed to the current demonstrations.
The are many issues behind the various Occupy Wall Street protests. In general the actions are the product of several decades of increasing right wing domination of the American political system, stagnant wages and incomes for the working class and lower middle class, burgeoning poverty, historic economic inequality and the dissipation of the so-called "American Dream" (i.e., possible upward mobility and at least superficial equality).
These social deficits have been exacerbated by the Great Recession, extreme unemployment and underemployment, and the reluctance of the two ruling parties to take the steps necessary to alleviate the increasing immiseration of America's working families. Meanwhile, an enormously wealthy but small minority whistles an idle tune as it inventories the daily-expanding assets of the upper class, much to the justified irritation of public sentiment. And lurking in the background are two potentially toxic realities: the precarious position of U.S. and European capitalism, combined with Washington's declining global hegemony, a volatile mixture which may provoke greater international instability and wars.
It is too early to predict whether the Wall Street Occupations have staying power, or what such power might amount to politically, not least because of the presently decentralized and often explicitly "leaderless" nature of some of the protests. At the least they will shake things up even more, a most positive development. At best, given the immense contradictions within American society today, the growing oppositional force may become a step toward the rebuilding of a needed mass left political movement in our country.
———————————————————————
ACTIVIST EVENTS
Wednesday, Oct. 5, NEW YORK CITY: A labor and community movement-sponsored march and rally in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators will take place this afternoon. The legal march will leave from City Hall Park (250 Broadway in Manhattan) at 4:30 p.m. heading for Liberty Square/Zuccotti Park (Liberty St. and Broadway), three blocks north of Wall St. A rally and other events will take place at the park until 7 p.m. The march is sponsored by about 35 labor and liberal organizations, including: TWU Local 100, SEIU 1199, CWA 1109, RWDSU, Communications Workers of America, United Auto Workers, United Federation of Teaches, CUNY Professional Staff Congress, National Nurses United, Writers Guild East, CWA Local 1180, Working Families Party, Coalition for the Homeless, NYC Coalition for Educational Justice, New Deal for New York Campaign, National People's Action, Labor-Religion Coalition (NYS), Citizen Action of NY, MoveOn.org, Common Cause NY, 350.org.
Information, http://occupywallst.org/, https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=282473051782707.
Wednesday, Oct. 5, HIGHLAND to NYC: There will be bus available to bring some Mid-Hudson activists to the Occupy Wall Street solidarity march. It will be leaving from the park and ride in Highland (Rt. 9W and Rt. 299) sponsored by the Labor Religion Coalition. Arrive at the park and ride no later than 12:15 p.m. The requested cost is $20 a seat (though it's a sliding scale downward or upward, depending on what you can pay). Sandwiches will be provided but bring snacks, etc. If you wish to take this bus, call Move-On's Dan Vollweiler at (518) 334-6928 to let him know you want a seat, since they may be scarce. The march is intended as a show of support, not an act of civil disobedience. The event lasts from 4:30-7 p.m. The bus will leave by 8 p.m.
Wednesday, Oct. 5, ALBANY to NYC: The bus making a pickup in Highland (above) originates from the Capital District, leaving at 11 a.m. from NYSUT headquarters, 800 Troy-Schenectady Rd., Latham. For seating arrangements, contact Sara Niccoli, Labor-Religion Coalition, saran@labor-religion.org, (646) 229-1091.
Wednesday, Oct. 5, ROCK TAVERN to NYC: A Teamster union bus from Orange County bringing labor and community supporters to the New York City solidarity march will depart at 1 p.m. from Local 44515, Stone Castle Rd. RSVP: Sandy Shaddock at( 845) 567-7760 to reserve a seat as seating is limited.
Wednesday, Oct. 5, NEW PALTZ. ALBANY and NEW YORK STATE: State University of New York students from several locations, joined by students from some City University of New York campuses, are planning a statewide walkout/teach-in today in opposition to increased tuition and fees, and cutbacks in services and staff. They are part of a new organization titled New York Students Rising. SUNY New Paltz students will leave classes noon-3 p.m., meeting in front of the Humanities Bldg. Information, http://www.nystudentsrising/.
Wednesday, Oct. 5, ALBANY: A documentary titled "Budrus: It Takes a Village to Unite the Most Divided People on Earth" will be screened 6:30-8:30 p.m at Albany Public Library, Pine Hills Branch, 517 Western Ave. The film focuses on a Palestinian town threatened by the Separation Barrier wall. A discussion will follow this free public event. Information, http://palestinianrightscommittee.org, zalatwi@hotmail.com, (518) 465-5425.
Thursday, Oct. 6, WASHINGTON: "Stop the Machine! Create a New World!" is the call to a mass nonviolent action beginning today at Freedom Plaza (13th St. and Pennsylvania Ave. NW) and continuing for as long as activists are willing to sustain the protest — days, weeks or much longer. Some will offer civil disobedience, others will not. People are attending from throughout the U.S. We're told dozens of activists from the Hudson Valley will take part.
• Politically, the specific demands upon the U.S. government are: "Tax the rich and corporations; End the wars, bring the troops home, cut military spending; Protect the social safety net, strengthen Social Security and improved Medicare for all; End corporate welfare for oil companies and other big business interests; Transition to a clean energy economy, reverse environmental degradation; Protect worker rights including collective bargaining, create jobs and raise wages; Get money out of politics."
•This action is being organized by the October 2011 Coalition, composed of "groups who advocate for peace and social, economic and environmental justice, in a sustained occupation and nonviolent resistance to Stop the Machine! Create a New World! What is the machine? Corporatism and militarism. What new world is possible? One in which people's needs are more important than corporate profits, in which we unite our struggles for jobs, education, housing, healthcare and human rights in which we are freed to implement solutions for a peaceful, just and sustainable world." A great many details are available at the coalition's website, http://www.October2011.org, from a schedule of events to FAQs, information about sleeping arrangements, transportation and much more. Information, info@october2011.org.
• ANSWER and other groups are taking part in a rally at the Federal Building in San Francisco Oct. 6 in solidarity with the start of the Oct. 6 “Stop the Machine” action in Washington.
Thursday, Oct. 6, WOODSTOCK: "The Power of Water in N.Y. — Transition to Preparedness" is the title of a "panel discussion to help communities move toward preparedness and a sustainable, water-secure future." This free public event, sponsored by Transition Woodstock, will be held 7:30-9:30 p.m., at the Reform Church, 16 Tinker St. Panelists include Mary McNamara, Lower Esopus Watershed Partnership; Wolf Bravo, founder, Sustainable Urubamba; Russel Urban-Mead, hydrogeologist. Information, Vickie Anne O'Dougherty, (845) 679-2135.
Thursday, Oct. 6, ALBANY: The State Assembly Environmental Conservation committee holds a public hearing on hydraulic fracturing at 9:30 a.m. in the Legislative Office Building's Harrison Room. The meeting is expected to attract an audience opposed to "fracking," the dangerous method employed to extract natural gas from Marcellus Shale deposits in New York State. A number of anti-fracking groups are expected to attend the hearing. FrackAction is organizing a bus from NYC. We understand carpool information from the Mid-Hudson Valley is available from joanwalker@gmail.com.
Friday, Oct. 7, SEVERAL CITIES: The Bush Administration launched its unjust invasion and occupation of Afghanistan exactly 10 years ago today. The ANSWER Coalition has organized a number of demonstrations demanding an immediate end to U.S. aggression, which has been widened by the Obama Administration, in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and elsewhere. ANSWER is also organizing for UNAC's Oct. 15 protests in several cities.
Friday, Oct. 7, MILLBROOK: Economist, Pavan Sukhdev will speak about the green economy at the Cary Institute, 2801 Sharon Tpk. (Rt 44) at 11 a.m. Sukhdev, former head of the United Nations Environment Program, is the lead author of the report, "Towards a Green Economy." He will explore how the greening of economies is an engine for growth, a source of employment, and a means of alleviating poverty. Free and public. Information, (845) 677-7600, ext. 121, freemanp@caryinstitute.org.
Friday, Oct. 7, NEW PALTZ (SUNY campus): This is Local Food Week — Farmfest — in New Paltz Village. Free food and live music will available for all at the Old Main Quad, 1-5 p.m. (Campus map: http://www.newpaltz.edu/map/.) There's also fundraising and an art raffle for the local Gardens for Nutrition and New Paltz Flood Aid. Information, farmfestnp@gmail.com, http://www.npfarmfest.blogspot.com/.
Saturday, Oct. 8, NEW YORK CITY: "Indian Point is Old, Dangerous, and Unnecessary — Tell Cuomo to Shut it Down Now!" is the slogan of a 12-2 p.m. rally outside Gov. Cuomo's office, 633 Third Ave. and 41st St. in Manhattan. Indian Point, of course, is the Hudson Valley's very own nuclear power facility, in close enough proximity to New York City to the south and the Mid-Hudson region to the north to cause a calamity should it ever melt down. (It's situated on the Hudson River shore near Peekskill — and two earthquake fault lines!) Speakers include radio host Gary Null and author Chris Williams. Sponsored by The Progressive Radio Network, Indian Point Safe energy Coalition and Stop Indian Point Now. Information, http://progressiveradionetwork.com.
Thursday, Oct. 13, TROY: To commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Patriot Act, ACLU President Susan N. Herman will speak about the negative impact on civil liberties of this Bush Administration initiative, now carried forward by the Obama Administration. The venue is the Sanctuary for Independent Media, 3361 6th Ave. (at 101st St.), beginning at 7 p.m. A $10/$5 donation is requested. Information, (518) 272-2390, info@MediaSanctuary.org, http://www.MediaSanctuary.org.
Saturday, Oct. 15, ALBANY: There will be a peace march and rally to mark the 10th anniversary of the unjust U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and drone attacks in adjacent western Pakistan. There will be speakers, live music. Peace and justice organizations are welcome to table at this event, which will be held 12 noon-2 p.m. in Townsend Park — the triangle where Central Ave. converges with Washington Ave. adjacent to Henry Johnson Blvd. (across from the Social
Justice Center). The sponsor is Bethlehem Neighbors for Peace. Information, (518) 439-1968, http://www.bethlehemforpeace.org.
Saturday, Oct. 15, WASHINGTON: A Rally and March for Jobs and Justice, backed by labor, religious, community, and civil rights groups begins at 11 a.m. the Sylvan Theatre at 15th and Independence, followed by a march to the just-opening Martin Luther King Jr. Monument. The event has been initiated by the National Action Network, led by Rev. Al Sharpton, and co-sponsored by Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, and Lee Saunders, secretary treasurer of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. The march to the King Memorial — at Ohio Drive SW and West Basin Drive SW —will begin round 1 p.m. Speakers include Weingarten, Sharpton, and radio personality Tom Joyner. Several unions are helping organize this event, including the New York State United Teachers, which is organizing buses leaving from many of the union’s 16 regional offices very early Saturday morning.
Saturday, Oct. 15, KINDERHOOK: A 1 p.m. union-backed "Rally for American Jobs" is scheduled outside Rep. Chris Gibson's office, 2 Hudson St., demanding that he vote for President Obama's American Jobs Act. Information, esoto@hvalf.org, (845) 567-7760,
http://www.hvalf.org.
Sunday, Oct. 16, MILLBROOK: Since the Hudson Valley is one of the most Lyme disease-prone areas of the U.S. this educational hike in the woods may be of interest to a number of readers: The Cary Institute’s Dr. Rick Ostfeld and his research team will discuss how the interactions among acorns, mice, deer, and ticks influence the risk of Lyme disease. This free public 1 p.m. event begins at the Cary East (Gifford House) parking area, 2917 Sharon Turnpike (Rt. 44). Ostfeld has spent more than 20 years studying the ecology of Lyme disease. He will share his insights with participants through a series of informative outdoor stations. Learn the major players in the Lyme disease story as well as research techniques. Participants should bring drinking water and wear socks, sturdy shoes, and long pants. In the event of heavy rain, the program will be cancelled. Reservations are requested. Register on line at http://ecologyoflymedisease.eventbrite.com.
Sunday, Oct. 16, WASHINGTON: A 313-mile "Right to Know" march that began from the Brooklyn, N.Y., Flatbush Food Co-op Oct. 1 will arrive here today on World Food Day as part of a campaign demanding the labeling of genetically engineered food. The event will culminate in a 2 p.m. rally at Lafayette Park, across from the White House, that will "last into the evening with amazing musicians and speakers." Marchers are conducting meetings at natural food stores and co-ops during their journey. According to the organizers: "Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) endanger our health, the environment, and our farmer’s livelihoods. For too long, biotechnology companies like Monsanto have lobbied against labeling products containing their patented plants — plants which are specially designed to be sprayed with cancer-causing weed-killers, and plants which produce pesticides in every one of their cells." Information about GMOs, the march and how to take part, http://right2knowmarch.org.
Monday, Oct. 17, NEW PALTZ (SUNY campus): Kristin Kimball, author of "The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love," will offer a free public lecture 7 p.m. in the Coykendall Science Building Auditorium. She will be speaking along with her husband, farmer Mark Kimball, a central character in her autobiographical book, which chronicles Kristin Kimball’s transition from a Harvard-educated New York City journalist to a partner in an ambitious sustainable agriculture experiment. The event is sponsored by the SUNY New Paltz Environmental Task Force, the Department of English, the Department of Sociology, and the Environmental Studies Program, with the support of the Provost’s Office and Campus Auxiliary Services. Information, (845) 257-3447.
Friday, Oct. 21, TRENTON, N.J.: Opponents of hydraulic fracturing are planning to protest here today at the Delaware River Basin Commission's special meeting to vote on opening the Delaware River Watershed to fracking. The commission is gathering to “consider adoption of the regulations” to lift the current moratorium on high-volume hydraulic fracturing for methane gas in the Delaware River Basin. The regulations would cover natural gas drilling at an estimated 22,000 gas wells in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey and Delaware on land that drains into the Delaware River, which provides drinking water to 15 million people in the four states, including Philadelphia. The Delaware Riverkeeper Network and Protecting Our Waters are encouraging activists to attend 10 a.m.-12 noon meeting the Patriot's Theater, 1 Memorial Drive. A bus will bring people from Philadelphia. According to Josh Fox, the director of "Gasland," the recent documentary that exposed the grave dangers of fracking for natural gas, "If they are going to start drilling, we're going to shut them down." He spoke at an anti-fracking rally last month that drew over a thousand demonstrators in Philadelphia. Information, http://protectingourwaters.wordpress.com/.
Saturday, Oct. 22, ESOPUS: Scenic Hudson reports: "Due to recent storm surges and years of wear and tear, we’re beginning to lose the Hudson River shoreline along Esopus Meadows Preserve. Help us save this fragile, ecologically important land the natural way — by planting trees whose strong roots will prevent erosion" — 10 a.m.-1 p.m. at Esopus Meadows Preserve, River Rd. Volunteers are asked to "Wear long pants and sturdy closed-toed shoes or hiking boots. Bring plenty of water, bug spray and gloves, if you have them. We’ll furnish all tools and the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation will supply 100 trees. Minors must be accompanied by an adult. Information, including meeting place, Hudson Parks event coordinator Anthony Coneski, aconeski@scenichudson.org, (845) 473-4440, ext. 273, http://www.scenichudson.org/parks/esopusmeadows.
Thursday, Oct. 27, PURCHASE (Manhattanville College campus): Police reform, racial profiling and the controversial practice of stop-and-frisk will be the topics of this year's Annual Henry Schwarzschild Memorial Lecture at Reid Castle, 2900 Purchase St. The featured speaker is Robert Gangi, senior policy advocate for the Urban Justice Center and former executive director of the Correctional Association of New York who has fought throughout his career for the humane treatment of prisoners and the protection of their rights. Gangi is currently leading the Police Reform Organizing Project (PROP), a new initiative of the Urban Justice Center. This free public event is sponsored by The New York Civil Liberties Union and the Connie Hogarth Center for Social Action. Information, (914) 997-7479, lberns@nyclu.org.
(end)
Saturday, September 24, 2011
09-24-11 Activist Newsletter
September 24, 2011, Issue #170
HUDSON VALLEY ACTIVIST NEWSLETTER
jacdon@earthlink.net, P.O. Box 662, New Paltz, NY 12561
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CONTENTS
1. U.S.-ISRAELI RHETORIC AND REALITY
2. MAHMOUD ABBAS's GAMBLE
3. POTENTIAL PROBLEMS FOR PALESTINIANS
4. RIGHTISTS CRASH RALLY FOR PALESTINE
5. "WE WILL CONTINUE TO SPEAK OUT"
6. PALESTINIANS SUBMIT BID FOR STATEHOOD
7. NETANYAHU CONDEMNS STATEHOOD BID
8. HAMAS OPPOSED PA's UN EFFORT
9. OBAMA: ISRAEL BOND UNBREAKABLE
10. SENATE THREATENS TO CUT PALESTINIAN AID
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1. U.S.-ISRAELI RHETORIC AND REALITY
By the Activist Newsletter
President Barack Obama repeatedly claims to be an advocate of a Palestinian state. But behind his verbiage is total acquiescence to the stalling and intransigence of the right/far right government of Israel.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also alleges he supports the aspirations of the Palestinian people for statehood but continues to illegally occupy their already vastly reduced territory, expand Jewish settlements in the West Bank and in Jerusalem, and conduct a quasi-siege of Gaza, making progress impossible.
Traditionally, both the U.S. Senate and House have seemed even more pro-Zionist than the White House, judging by huge majority votes in Congress over the years, though Obama's opportunist and humiliating capitulation to Netanyahu at the UN Sept. 21 has closed the gap.
TV news broadcasts of the meeting between the two leaders after the Sept. 23 speeches — seated side-by-side as they congratulated each other for a job well done — conveyed the impression that Netanyahu was the boss and Obama the reverential employee, basking in his superior's praise. It was little enough price to pay, evidently, to obtain the Israeli leader's blessing as an election year looms.
The majority of American Jews and the majority of Israeli Jews support the creation of a Palestinian state, despite a certain confusion and unease caused by their recalcitrant governments. Their political leaders project similar avowals but with obvious insincerity, judging by their actions as opposed to their talk.
According to a Sept. 20 U.S. public opinion poll by the Pew Research center, 42% of the American people believe Washington should recognize a Palestinian State, 26% oppose recognition, and the remaining 32% don't know what they think. In terms of political allegiance, 54% of Democrats support two states, 14% oppose; 27% of Republicans support, 38% oppose; 45% of independents support, 28% oppose.
We assume most of the tens of millions of Christian fundamentalists in the U.S. are among those who oppose a Palestinian state since the anticipated return of Jesus to terra firma is supposed to depend on Jewish retention of the entire historic biblical region. They constitute a powerful voting bloc in support of Israel.
The U.S. government overwhelmingly backs everything Israel does, sends it billions of dollars every year in subsidies, provides total political support in the UN and elsewhere and seeks to overthrow or destroy countries that Israel prefers to think of as enemies, such Iraq, and now Iran.
The PA move has not been without criticism from some forces within the pro-Palestine movement. Hamas, which rules in Gaza, opposed going to the UN, as did a number of critics of the present leadership of the Palestine Authority and of Fatah, the leading organization within the West Bank government.
Washington has been stringing the colonized and oppressed Palestinians along for many years, and in our view it was good to see PA President Mahmoud Abbas stand firm at least on this issue, bringing the matter to the international forefront. Hopefully the Palestinian people will be emboldened to go beyond Abbas and his unelected, U.S.-backed Prime Minister Salam Fayyad in future years, because there are many issues that must be resolved, including the right of return.
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2. MAHMOUD ABBAS's GAMBLE
{Editor's Note: We are circulating the following Sept. 24 article because the author, Uri Avnery, the leader of Gush Shalom (the Israeli Peace Bloc), makes a good case against the U.S.-Israeli response to the Palestinian effort to secure UN recognition as an independent state. At the same time, since it's not mentioned in the article, the Palestinian Authority led by Mahmoud Abbas remains captive to considerable U.S. influence and its leadership is due for change. Also, in our view, it's mistaken to suggest Washington "helped the Libyans" by bombing them. But on the question of going to the UN this week we think Avnery hit the target.]
By Uri Avnery
A wonderful speech. A beautiful speech. The language expressive and elegant. The arguments clear and convincing. The delivery flawless.
A work of art. The art of hypocrisy. Almost every statement in the passage concerning the Israeli-Palestinian issue was a lie. A blatant lie: the speaker knew it was a lie, and so did the audience. It was Obama at his best, Obama at his worst.
Being a moral person, he must have felt the urge to vomit. Being a pragmatic person, he knew that he had to do it, if he wanted to be re-elected. In essence, he sold the fundamental national interests of the United States of America for the chance of a second term. Not very nice, but that’s politics, OK?
It may be superfluous — almost insulting to the reader — to point out the mendacious details of this rhetorical edifice. Obama treated the two sides as if they were equal in strength — Israelis and Palestinians, Palestinians and Israelis.
But of the two, it is the Israelis — only they — who suffer and have suffered. Persecution. Exile. Holocaust. An Israeli child threatened by rockets. Surrounded by the hatred of Arab children. So sad.
No Occupation. No settlements. No June 1967 borders. No Naqba. No Palestinian children killed or frightened. It’s the straight right-wing Israeli propaganda line, pure and simple — the terminology, the historical narrative, the argumentation. The music.
The Palestinians, of course, should have a state of their own. Sure, sure. But they must not be pushy. They must not embarrass the U.S. They must not come to the UN. They must sit with the Israelis, like reasonable people, and work it out with them. The reasonable sheep must sit down with the reasonable wolf and decide what to have for dinner. Foreigners should not interfere.
Obama gave full service. A lady who provides this kind of service generally gets paid in advance. Obama got paid immediately afterwards, within the hour. Netanyahu sat down with him in front of the cameras and gave him enough quotable professions of love and gratitude to last for several election campaigns.
The tragic hero of this affair is Mahmoud Abbas. A tragic hero, but a hero nonetheless. Many people may be surprised by this sudden emergence of Abbas as a daring player for high stakes, ready to confront the mighty U.S. If Ariel Sharon were to wake up for a moment from his years-long coma, he would faint with amazement. It was he who called Mahmoud Abbas “a plucked chicken.”
Yet for the last few days, Abbas was the center of global attention. World leaders conferred about how to handle him, senior diplomats were eager to convince him of this or that course of action, commentators were guessing what he would do next. His speech before the UN General Assembly was treated as an event of consequence. Not bad for a chicken, even for one with a full set of feathers....
The world is treating him with newfound respect. Nearing the end of his career, he made the big gamble. But was it wise? Courageous, yes. Daring, yes. But wise? My answer is: Yes, it was.
Abbas has placed the quest for Palestinian freedom squarely on the international table. For more than a week, Palestine has been the center of international attention. Scores of international figures, including the leader of the world’s only superpower, have been busy with Palestine.
For a national movement, that is of the utmost importance. Cynics may ask: “So what did they gain from it?” But cynics are fools. A liberation movement gains from the very fact that the world pays attention, that the media grapple with the problem, that people of conscience all over the world are aroused. It strengthens morale at home and brings the struggle a step nearer its goal.
Oppression shuns the limelight. Occupation, settlements, ethnic cleansing thrive in the shadows. It is the oppressed who need the light of day. Abbas’ move provided it, at least for the time being.
Barack Obama's miserable performance was a nail in the coffin of America’s status as a superpower. In a way, it was a crime against the United States.
The Arab Spring may have been a last chance for the U.S. to recover its standing in the Middle East. After some hesitation, Obama realized that. He called on Mubarak to go, helped the Libyans against their tyrant, made some noises about Bashar al-Assad. He knows that he has to regain the respect of the Arab masses if he wants to recover some stature in the region, and by extension throughout the world.
Now he has blown it, perhaps forever. No self-respecting Arab will forgive him for plunging his knife into the back of the helpless Palestinians. All the credit the U.S. has tried to gain in the last months in the Arab and the wider Muslim world has been blown away with one puff. All for reelection.
It was also a crime against Israel. Israel needs peace. Israel needs to live side by side with the Palestinian people, within the Arab world. Israel cannot rely forever on the unconditional support of the declining United States. Obama knows this full well. He knows what is good for Israel, even if Netanyahu doesn’t. Yet he has handed the keys of the car to the drunken driver.
The State of Palestine will come into being. This week it was already clear that this is unavoidable. Obama will be forgotten, as will Netanyahu, Lieberman and the whole bunch. Mahmoud Abbas – Abu Mazen, as the Palestinians call him – will be remembered. The “plucked chicken” is soaring into the sky.
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3. POTENTIAL PROBLEMS FOR PALESTINIANS
[Following is an excerpt of a longer article published Sept. 16, a week before the UN confrontation, by The Middle East Report (link at bottom). This selection deals with cautions regarding the Palestinian Authority (PA) strategy.]
By The Middle East Report
.... Some form of enhanced UN recognition could offer Abbas and the PA external legitimacy and their own sense of hope against daunting odds. But the UN initiative, whatever shape it takes, could also be empty symbolism or, worse, a seal of approval on creeping apartheid if it is only an isolated tactic. Caution is warranted in two respects.
The UN maneuver has potential to break the U.S. stranglehold on Israel-Palestine diplomacy only if Abbas and his confreres take additional steps toward a comprehensive strategy of internationalization. First on such an agenda would be revival of efforts to unify the PA and Palestinian national movement, from which Abbas has retreated over the summer, and insistence that Israel and the U.S. lift the Gaza blockade, which Abbas’ wing of the PA has of course championed as a means of defeating its rival Hamas. Steps two and three would be resuscitation of the Goldstone report and pursuit of the 2004 International Court of Justice opinion against Israel’s separation wall. But given the doldrums of reconciliation talks, and the dearth of other signs of strategic thinking in Ramallah, there is reason to fear that Abbas will pocket the coming U.S. veto and desist, hoping that the ensuing hubbub itself will prod the U.S. and Israel back to the negotiating table. It is almost surely a vain hope, and in any case, renewed bilateral parleys under unilateral U.S. tutelage can lead only to reinforcement of the Oslo paradigm and further dispossession of the Palestinians.
What media outlets are dubbing the “showdown” at the UN also comes at a juncture of eroded U.S. hegemony. Its economy teetering on the brink of double-dip recession, its overseas wars unending and its historical coddling of dictators laid bare, the U.S. is in no position to tell the Palestinians what to do, particularly since Washington will not rein in its Israeli ally. If the Sept. 16 Washington Post is correct, the Obama administration failed even to extract a non-apology apology, one devoid of assumption of guilt, from Israel for its May 2010 raid on the Gaza aid flotilla. The White House had thought such an Israeli statement would diffuse international anger over the impending veto. If U.S. weakness made the UN gambit possible for the Palestinians, it also makes the U.S. a highly questionable patron going forward. It is the paradox of global affairs in miniature: Washington’s clout is hollow, yet there is nothing to replace it, so it lives on as simulacrum.
Whether now or in 25 years’ time, no force but the Palestinian people is likely to tear down the walls and redress the systemic wrongs in the lands between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. It is the Palestinian people’s struggle, ultimately, and not the ventures of quasi-governments, that the world supports. The PA sectors loyal to Abbas and the West Bank chief administrator, Salam Fayyad, will not mount or harness a genuine popular movement to challenge the status quo; by the logic of Oslo, they cannot. Perhaps the groundswell, whether it is an uprising or a campaign of mass civil disobedience or something not yet imagined, must come from sources that, as in Tunisia and Egypt before January, are largely unknown today. But the Palestinians have striven heroically, for decades before the 2011 Arab awakening, for justice and freedom. Their two Intifadas have cost them dearly. If liberation is to transpire, the onus is upon outside backers of Palestinian rights — in the Arab world, the West and elsewhere — to develop new means of solidarity and, in particular, new ways of holding Israel accountable to the international law it has flouted for so long.
—Full article: http://www.merip.org/mero/mero091611
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4. RIGHTISTS CRASH RALLY FOR PALESTINE
[The following article is from the daily Israeli newspaper Haaretz Sept. 22.]
A rally organized by leftist intellectuals in support of a Palestinian state yesterday descended into a verbal free-for-all after a group of right-wing activists gate-crashed the demonstration in Tel Aviv.
Among the organizers and left-wing participants were 17 Israel Prize laureates, looking to pressure Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to embark on a diplomatic initiative, ahead of the expected declaration of a Palestinian state within 1967 borders at the U.N. General Assembly in September.
The protesters' declaration declared: "We, the undersigned, call upon any person seeking peace and liberty and upon all nations to join us in welcoming the Palestinian Declaration of Independence and support the efforts of the citizens of the two states to maintain peaceful relations on the basis of secure borders and good neighborliness."
While the ceremony was underway with a "declaration of independence from occupation" being read, right-wing activists shouted "fifth column" and "traitors" at the demonstrators....
The declaration, which was read on Rothschild Boulevard outside Independence Hall, was couched in phrases recalling Israel's Declaration of Dependence, which David Ben-Gurion read in the same hall on May 14, 1948.
"We have gathered here on this 21st day of September to welcome the expected declaration of independence of the Palestinian state, the state bordering on Israel according to the borders of our independence, which were created with the end of the War of Independence in 1949, known as the 1967 borders," proclaimed the declaration.
Other participants were author Sami Michael, playwright Yehoshua Sobol, filmmaker Ari Fogel, and Professor Zeev Sternhell. Later, in a televised debate on Channel 2, Ben-Gurion's grandson, Dr. Yariv Ben-Eliezer, lashed out at Sternhell, asking: "Who do you think you are? My grandfather's vision has been turned into a gimmick."
"There is intentional symbolism in it," Sternhell responded. "We are raising the Declaration of Independence to a higher level."
The incident spurred various responses. Deputy Foreign Minister Daniel Ayalon said: "Such actions only drive the chance for peace, reconciliation and the establishment of a Palestinian state farther away. They create false hope among the Palestinians that they can establish a state unilaterally without negotiations with Israel."
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5. WE WILL CONTINUE TO SPEAK OUT
[The following communication is from one of a number of U.S. Jewish organizations that support the Palestinian effort to seek statehood from the UN.]
By Jewish Voice for Peace
Today, Sept. 23, President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority presented a bid for the state of Palestine, based on the 1967 borders, to be considered by the Security Council for full membership in the United Nations.
Shortly afterward, he addressed the General Assembly, where he reviewed, from the 1948 Nakba until today, the multitude of ways in which Israel has suppressed Palestinians’ rights. While the question remains if the UN statehood bid adequately addresses the larger issue of Palestinian rights, Abbas’ address importantly gave voice to the Palestinian struggle for self-determination. While there is no uniform support for this UN bid, today was undoubtedly a historic and moving day. After over 63 years struggling for global recognition, it was moving to see the countries of the world represented in the UN general assembly give President Abbas a rousing standing ovation.
Not so for Prime Minister Netanyahu, who spoke shortly after Abbas. Netanyahu responded to the Palestinian leader with diversion and doublespeak instead of honest engagement, and peace slogans couched in hostility, aggression, and denial of Palestinian claims — a continuation of the standard Israeli tactic. We know from history that this empty rhetoric has been used by the Israeli government for decades and will only mean further pain and oppression for Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and all over the world.
As a Jewish-American organization, we believe it is important to remain focused on our primary responsibility: having an impact on U.S. policy. As such, we will continue to speak out strongly against the U.S. using its veto power in the Security Council to reject this bid for statehood.
We know now that President Obama will not do the right thing. Speaking at the UN on Wednesday, Obama lauded the Arab Spring — but rejected the Palestinian Autumn. The president retreated from his earlier positions that demanded Israeli accountability for its military occupation, and he did not acknowledge the ongoing role of the U.S. in maintaining that imbalance through its extraordinary economic, military, and diplomatic support for Israel, even when its actions violate international law, human rights, and U.S. policy. And he didn’t acknowledge that 20 years of the “peace process” has brought only a more entrenched occupation. Instead, Obama merely said that both sides should “sit down together, to listen to each other, and to understand each other’s hopes and fears.”
While this week has not been an easy one, we at JVP actually feel a redoubled assurance in the promise of our strategy to change the dynamics on display at the United Nations. We know now, more than ever, that the President or Congress will not change on their own. The array of power and money is simply too strong — for now. We know, as with the examples of the civil rights movement and the anti-apartheid movement, to name just two, that it is movements like ours that force our governments to change their policies. It was the steadfastness, the creativity, the demonstrations, the local organizing, and the BDS (boycotts, divestment and sanctions) tactics that helped these movements and so many others for social justice eventually succeed. So we’ll let the politicians play their games, and meanwhile, our work will continue.
— http://jewishvoiceforpeace.org/
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6. PALESTINIANS SUBMIT BID FOR STATEHOOD
By Lesley Clark
UNITED NATIONS (McClatchy Newspapers, Sept. 23) — Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas today formally requested full U.N. membership for an independent Palestinian state, bucking staunch U.S. opposition in the hope of redefining the long-running conflict with Israel.
Abbas submitted the application to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon prior to addressing the annual gathering of world leaders at the General Assembly, where he delivered an impassioned call for an end to "63 years of suffering" under Israeli occupation of lands that the Palestinians see as part of their future state.
Accusing the Israeli government of undermining the peace process by erecting Jewish settlements in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, which Palestinians claim as their capital, Abbas complained of "armed settler militias" who he said wage "frequent attacks against our people, targeting their homes, schools, universities, mosques, fields." He insisted that the bid for statehood wasn't "aimed at isolating Israel or de-legitimizing it; rather we want to gain legitimacy for the cause of the people of Palestine.
"We only aim to de-legitimize the settlement activities, the occupation and apartheid and the logic of ruthless force," he said, adding, "We believe that all the countries of the world stand with us in this regard."
Still, he offered an olive branch, saying he was interested in making peace with the Israelis, "instead of policies of occupation, settlement, war and eliminating the other."
At the end of his speech, Abbas, an avuncular man with silver hair and glasses, held up a copy of the application and received a loud ovation from a packed chamber of delegates. The Palestinian statehood bid has dominated the General Assembly meeting, and Abbas' speech was interrupted numerous times for applause — a stark contrast to President Barack Obama's relatively coolly greeted remarks Sept. 21.
Later, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu criticized the U.N., saying his nation never gets a fair shake. He insisted that Israel wants peace with the Palestinians, but accused them of opposing negotiations. He also warned against the threat of militant Islamists.
"The truth is that Israel wants peace. the truth is that I want peace," Netanyahu said. "The truth is that in the Middle East peace must be anchored in security. So far the Palestinians have refused to negotiate. The Palestinians want a state without peace...and you shouldn't let that happen."
The United States has pledged to block the Palestinians' statehood bid with the veto it wields as a permanent Security Council member, and was reportedly lobbying fellow council members to delay a decision on the application. The Obama administration said that granting Palestinian statehood was premature and would jeopardize efforts to restart long-stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, which it has said is the only route to a durable peace.
"When the speeches end today, we must all recognize that the only way to create a state is through direct negotiations. No shortcuts," the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, said on Twitter.
Abbas had pledged for years to take this bid to the UN, and he drew a direct line between the pro-democracy ferment roiling the Arab world and the Palestinians' desire for independence.
"At a time when Arab peoples affirm their quest for democracy in the Arab Spring, the time has come also for the Palestinian spring, the time for independence," he said, to loud applause.
He accused the Israelis of repeatedly blocking serious negotiations, saying that "efforts at peace were repeatedly smashed against a rock." He called on the Security Council to approve the application immediately.
"This is a moment of truth; our people are waiting to hear the answer of the world," he said.
"Will it allow Israel to occupy us forever, and will it allow Israel to remain a state above the law and accountability?"
As Abbas spoke, large crowds gathered in Ramallah in the Palestinian territory of the West Bank, waving the Palestinian flag, and television images showed some women weeping. Near the West Bank town of Qusra, clashes between West Bank villagers and Israeli settlers turned deadly when Israeli soldiers shot and killed a Palestinian man, according to witness accounts.
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7. NETANYAHU CONDEMNS STATEHOOD BID
By Jason Ditz
(Antiwar.com, Sept. 23) — Speaking to the United Nations General Assembly today, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu loudly condemned the notion of an independent Palestinian state being recognized by the international body, saying that the Palestinians would have to reach a final peace deal with Israel, something which isn’t even being discussed by the two sides, before independence could even be considered.
As usual this included a number of demands from Netanyahu that the Palestinians would have to accept as a condition for ending the occupation, including recognizing Israel as “the Jewish state.”
The Palestinian Authority submitted its proposal for recognition to the United Nations Security Council today, just over a year after the last direct talks with the Israeli government, and are believed to have a strong majority in the general assembly, as well as a likely majority in the security council. President Obama has vowed to veto Palestinian independence on Israel’s behalf.
Perhaps the most unusual comment from Netanyahu, however, was that Israel would never accept an independent state in Gaza, saying that Israel would only accept an independent Palestine within a portion of the West Bank. Though Netanyahu’s Likud Party were loudly in opposition to withdrawing settlers from the tiny Gaza Strip, it is unclear what Israel plans to do with the strip in the event the PA ever got an independent state in the small portion of the West Bank which doesn’t contain settlements.
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8. HAMAS OPPOSED PA's UN EFFORT
JERUSALEM (Jerusalem Post, Sept. 24) — Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh yesterday criticized the Palestinian Authority's statehood petition at the United Nations, saying that the Palestinian people should not have "to beg for a state."
Speaking after Friday prayers at a mosque in Gaza City, Haniyeh said that "liberation" of Palestinian land must come first, and then the "state," Hamas-affiliated Al Resalah reported.
"We have reservations about the United Nations because we feel the institution is controlled by the Americans and others," Haniyeh continued. "The political orientation of the United Nations is not beneficial."
Haniyeh's comments underlined tensions between Hamas and Fatah over the PLO's statehood bid at the UN, and came just before PA President Mahmoud Abbas presented a request to the UN to be accepted as a full member.
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9. OBAMA: ISRAEL BOND UNBREAKABLE
By Yitzhak Benhorin
NEW YORK (Israel News, Sept. 23)— A day after he made what is being called his "Zionist speech" at the UN General Assembly in New York, President Barack Obama was back in the White House where he held a conference call with over 900 orthodox, conservative and reform rabbis from throughout the U.S. ahead of the Jewish new year.
During the 30 minute call, Obama assured the rabbis that the U.S.-Israel alliance was stronger than ever before. "Prime Minister Netanyahu knows he can count on the United States," Obama told the rabbis. "We will not abandon the pursuit of a just and lasting peace that will end the conflict."
He then noted that "the bonds between the U.S. and Israel are unbreakable and the commitment of the security of Israel is ironclad. Since coming into office, I haven't just talked the talk, we've walked the walk."
Obama also spoke about the recent events in Egypt and the Middle East uprisings and noted that the progress towards peace with the Palestinians could cool down the region.
"The most important thing we can do to stabilize the strategic situation for Israel is if we can actually resolve the Palestinian-Israeli crisis because that's what feeds so much of the tumult in Egypt. That's what I think has created the deep tension between Turkey and Israel and Turkey has historically been a friend and ally of Israel's. That's why we think direct negotiations are so critical."
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10. SENATE THREATENS TO CUT PALESTINIAN AID
(Washington Post, Sept. 21) — The Senate Appropriations Committee today raised the stakes for the Palestinians’ bid for U.N. membership by threatening to cut off U.S. economic aid and close the Palestinians’ office in Washington.
“We want to let them know, you do that at your own detriment,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said of the Palestinian effort. “It is not a wise thing to do. It will not advance peace.”
The House appropriations subcommittee on foreign operations has already passed a bill that would end U.S. economic aid to the Palestinian Authority if they pursued U.N. recognition, strengthening the likelihood of a cutoff.
The United States is the second-biggest foreign donor to the Palestinians after the Europeans, and the loss of the funding could severely affect the Palestinian Authority, which relies on $1 billion in foreign aid to help pay its bills and spur the economy of the occupied West Bank. The Congressional bills would leave in place the $100 million annual U.S. contribution to train Palestinian security forces.
Graham’s amendment would require the secretary of state to inform Congress on what actions lawmakers could take regarding the Palestinians’ status in the United States -- “especially about the closing of its office”-- if they sought U.N. membership as a state.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) argued for a delay in voting on the measure, saying that it was a “very sensitive time” and that adopting the amendment could upset negotiations to put off a vote on the Palestinian membership bid. But the measure passed on a voice vote.
Despite the strong statements about ending aid, no action is expected for months on a cutoff of funds, since the House and Senate bills will eventually have be reconciled and may be bundled into a bigger spending bill to be passed later this year.
(end)
HUDSON VALLEY ACTIVIST NEWSLETTER
jacdon@earthlink.net, P.O. Box 662, New Paltz, NY 12561
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CONTENTS
1. U.S.-ISRAELI RHETORIC AND REALITY
2. MAHMOUD ABBAS's GAMBLE
3. POTENTIAL PROBLEMS FOR PALESTINIANS
4. RIGHTISTS CRASH RALLY FOR PALESTINE
5. "WE WILL CONTINUE TO SPEAK OUT"
6. PALESTINIANS SUBMIT BID FOR STATEHOOD
7. NETANYAHU CONDEMNS STATEHOOD BID
8. HAMAS OPPOSED PA's UN EFFORT
9. OBAMA: ISRAEL BOND UNBREAKABLE
10. SENATE THREATENS TO CUT PALESTINIAN AID
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1. U.S.-ISRAELI RHETORIC AND REALITY
By the Activist Newsletter
President Barack Obama repeatedly claims to be an advocate of a Palestinian state. But behind his verbiage is total acquiescence to the stalling and intransigence of the right/far right government of Israel.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also alleges he supports the aspirations of the Palestinian people for statehood but continues to illegally occupy their already vastly reduced territory, expand Jewish settlements in the West Bank and in Jerusalem, and conduct a quasi-siege of Gaza, making progress impossible.
Traditionally, both the U.S. Senate and House have seemed even more pro-Zionist than the White House, judging by huge majority votes in Congress over the years, though Obama's opportunist and humiliating capitulation to Netanyahu at the UN Sept. 21 has closed the gap.
TV news broadcasts of the meeting between the two leaders after the Sept. 23 speeches — seated side-by-side as they congratulated each other for a job well done — conveyed the impression that Netanyahu was the boss and Obama the reverential employee, basking in his superior's praise. It was little enough price to pay, evidently, to obtain the Israeli leader's blessing as an election year looms.
The majority of American Jews and the majority of Israeli Jews support the creation of a Palestinian state, despite a certain confusion and unease caused by their recalcitrant governments. Their political leaders project similar avowals but with obvious insincerity, judging by their actions as opposed to their talk.
According to a Sept. 20 U.S. public opinion poll by the Pew Research center, 42% of the American people believe Washington should recognize a Palestinian State, 26% oppose recognition, and the remaining 32% don't know what they think. In terms of political allegiance, 54% of Democrats support two states, 14% oppose; 27% of Republicans support, 38% oppose; 45% of independents support, 28% oppose.
We assume most of the tens of millions of Christian fundamentalists in the U.S. are among those who oppose a Palestinian state since the anticipated return of Jesus to terra firma is supposed to depend on Jewish retention of the entire historic biblical region. They constitute a powerful voting bloc in support of Israel.
The U.S. government overwhelmingly backs everything Israel does, sends it billions of dollars every year in subsidies, provides total political support in the UN and elsewhere and seeks to overthrow or destroy countries that Israel prefers to think of as enemies, such Iraq, and now Iran.
The PA move has not been without criticism from some forces within the pro-Palestine movement. Hamas, which rules in Gaza, opposed going to the UN, as did a number of critics of the present leadership of the Palestine Authority and of Fatah, the leading organization within the West Bank government.
Washington has been stringing the colonized and oppressed Palestinians along for many years, and in our view it was good to see PA President Mahmoud Abbas stand firm at least on this issue, bringing the matter to the international forefront. Hopefully the Palestinian people will be emboldened to go beyond Abbas and his unelected, U.S.-backed Prime Minister Salam Fayyad in future years, because there are many issues that must be resolved, including the right of return.
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2. MAHMOUD ABBAS's GAMBLE
{Editor's Note: We are circulating the following Sept. 24 article because the author, Uri Avnery, the leader of Gush Shalom (the Israeli Peace Bloc), makes a good case against the U.S.-Israeli response to the Palestinian effort to secure UN recognition as an independent state. At the same time, since it's not mentioned in the article, the Palestinian Authority led by Mahmoud Abbas remains captive to considerable U.S. influence and its leadership is due for change. Also, in our view, it's mistaken to suggest Washington "helped the Libyans" by bombing them. But on the question of going to the UN this week we think Avnery hit the target.]
By Uri Avnery
A wonderful speech. A beautiful speech. The language expressive and elegant. The arguments clear and convincing. The delivery flawless.
A work of art. The art of hypocrisy. Almost every statement in the passage concerning the Israeli-Palestinian issue was a lie. A blatant lie: the speaker knew it was a lie, and so did the audience. It was Obama at his best, Obama at his worst.
Being a moral person, he must have felt the urge to vomit. Being a pragmatic person, he knew that he had to do it, if he wanted to be re-elected. In essence, he sold the fundamental national interests of the United States of America for the chance of a second term. Not very nice, but that’s politics, OK?
It may be superfluous — almost insulting to the reader — to point out the mendacious details of this rhetorical edifice. Obama treated the two sides as if they were equal in strength — Israelis and Palestinians, Palestinians and Israelis.
But of the two, it is the Israelis — only they — who suffer and have suffered. Persecution. Exile. Holocaust. An Israeli child threatened by rockets. Surrounded by the hatred of Arab children. So sad.
No Occupation. No settlements. No June 1967 borders. No Naqba. No Palestinian children killed or frightened. It’s the straight right-wing Israeli propaganda line, pure and simple — the terminology, the historical narrative, the argumentation. The music.
The Palestinians, of course, should have a state of their own. Sure, sure. But they must not be pushy. They must not embarrass the U.S. They must not come to the UN. They must sit with the Israelis, like reasonable people, and work it out with them. The reasonable sheep must sit down with the reasonable wolf and decide what to have for dinner. Foreigners should not interfere.
Obama gave full service. A lady who provides this kind of service generally gets paid in advance. Obama got paid immediately afterwards, within the hour. Netanyahu sat down with him in front of the cameras and gave him enough quotable professions of love and gratitude to last for several election campaigns.
The tragic hero of this affair is Mahmoud Abbas. A tragic hero, but a hero nonetheless. Many people may be surprised by this sudden emergence of Abbas as a daring player for high stakes, ready to confront the mighty U.S. If Ariel Sharon were to wake up for a moment from his years-long coma, he would faint with amazement. It was he who called Mahmoud Abbas “a plucked chicken.”
Yet for the last few days, Abbas was the center of global attention. World leaders conferred about how to handle him, senior diplomats were eager to convince him of this or that course of action, commentators were guessing what he would do next. His speech before the UN General Assembly was treated as an event of consequence. Not bad for a chicken, even for one with a full set of feathers....
The world is treating him with newfound respect. Nearing the end of his career, he made the big gamble. But was it wise? Courageous, yes. Daring, yes. But wise? My answer is: Yes, it was.
Abbas has placed the quest for Palestinian freedom squarely on the international table. For more than a week, Palestine has been the center of international attention. Scores of international figures, including the leader of the world’s only superpower, have been busy with Palestine.
For a national movement, that is of the utmost importance. Cynics may ask: “So what did they gain from it?” But cynics are fools. A liberation movement gains from the very fact that the world pays attention, that the media grapple with the problem, that people of conscience all over the world are aroused. It strengthens morale at home and brings the struggle a step nearer its goal.
Oppression shuns the limelight. Occupation, settlements, ethnic cleansing thrive in the shadows. It is the oppressed who need the light of day. Abbas’ move provided it, at least for the time being.
Barack Obama's miserable performance was a nail in the coffin of America’s status as a superpower. In a way, it was a crime against the United States.
The Arab Spring may have been a last chance for the U.S. to recover its standing in the Middle East. After some hesitation, Obama realized that. He called on Mubarak to go, helped the Libyans against their tyrant, made some noises about Bashar al-Assad. He knows that he has to regain the respect of the Arab masses if he wants to recover some stature in the region, and by extension throughout the world.
Now he has blown it, perhaps forever. No self-respecting Arab will forgive him for plunging his knife into the back of the helpless Palestinians. All the credit the U.S. has tried to gain in the last months in the Arab and the wider Muslim world has been blown away with one puff. All for reelection.
It was also a crime against Israel. Israel needs peace. Israel needs to live side by side with the Palestinian people, within the Arab world. Israel cannot rely forever on the unconditional support of the declining United States. Obama knows this full well. He knows what is good for Israel, even if Netanyahu doesn’t. Yet he has handed the keys of the car to the drunken driver.
The State of Palestine will come into being. This week it was already clear that this is unavoidable. Obama will be forgotten, as will Netanyahu, Lieberman and the whole bunch. Mahmoud Abbas – Abu Mazen, as the Palestinians call him – will be remembered. The “plucked chicken” is soaring into the sky.
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3. POTENTIAL PROBLEMS FOR PALESTINIANS
[Following is an excerpt of a longer article published Sept. 16, a week before the UN confrontation, by The Middle East Report (link at bottom). This selection deals with cautions regarding the Palestinian Authority (PA) strategy.]
By The Middle East Report
.... Some form of enhanced UN recognition could offer Abbas and the PA external legitimacy and their own sense of hope against daunting odds. But the UN initiative, whatever shape it takes, could also be empty symbolism or, worse, a seal of approval on creeping apartheid if it is only an isolated tactic. Caution is warranted in two respects.
The UN maneuver has potential to break the U.S. stranglehold on Israel-Palestine diplomacy only if Abbas and his confreres take additional steps toward a comprehensive strategy of internationalization. First on such an agenda would be revival of efforts to unify the PA and Palestinian national movement, from which Abbas has retreated over the summer, and insistence that Israel and the U.S. lift the Gaza blockade, which Abbas’ wing of the PA has of course championed as a means of defeating its rival Hamas. Steps two and three would be resuscitation of the Goldstone report and pursuit of the 2004 International Court of Justice opinion against Israel’s separation wall. But given the doldrums of reconciliation talks, and the dearth of other signs of strategic thinking in Ramallah, there is reason to fear that Abbas will pocket the coming U.S. veto and desist, hoping that the ensuing hubbub itself will prod the U.S. and Israel back to the negotiating table. It is almost surely a vain hope, and in any case, renewed bilateral parleys under unilateral U.S. tutelage can lead only to reinforcement of the Oslo paradigm and further dispossession of the Palestinians.
What media outlets are dubbing the “showdown” at the UN also comes at a juncture of eroded U.S. hegemony. Its economy teetering on the brink of double-dip recession, its overseas wars unending and its historical coddling of dictators laid bare, the U.S. is in no position to tell the Palestinians what to do, particularly since Washington will not rein in its Israeli ally. If the Sept. 16 Washington Post is correct, the Obama administration failed even to extract a non-apology apology, one devoid of assumption of guilt, from Israel for its May 2010 raid on the Gaza aid flotilla. The White House had thought such an Israeli statement would diffuse international anger over the impending veto. If U.S. weakness made the UN gambit possible for the Palestinians, it also makes the U.S. a highly questionable patron going forward. It is the paradox of global affairs in miniature: Washington’s clout is hollow, yet there is nothing to replace it, so it lives on as simulacrum.
Whether now or in 25 years’ time, no force but the Palestinian people is likely to tear down the walls and redress the systemic wrongs in the lands between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. It is the Palestinian people’s struggle, ultimately, and not the ventures of quasi-governments, that the world supports. The PA sectors loyal to Abbas and the West Bank chief administrator, Salam Fayyad, will not mount or harness a genuine popular movement to challenge the status quo; by the logic of Oslo, they cannot. Perhaps the groundswell, whether it is an uprising or a campaign of mass civil disobedience or something not yet imagined, must come from sources that, as in Tunisia and Egypt before January, are largely unknown today. But the Palestinians have striven heroically, for decades before the 2011 Arab awakening, for justice and freedom. Their two Intifadas have cost them dearly. If liberation is to transpire, the onus is upon outside backers of Palestinian rights — in the Arab world, the West and elsewhere — to develop new means of solidarity and, in particular, new ways of holding Israel accountable to the international law it has flouted for so long.
—Full article: http://www.merip.org/mero/mero091611
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4. RIGHTISTS CRASH RALLY FOR PALESTINE
[The following article is from the daily Israeli newspaper Haaretz Sept. 22.]
A rally organized by leftist intellectuals in support of a Palestinian state yesterday descended into a verbal free-for-all after a group of right-wing activists gate-crashed the demonstration in Tel Aviv.
Among the organizers and left-wing participants were 17 Israel Prize laureates, looking to pressure Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to embark on a diplomatic initiative, ahead of the expected declaration of a Palestinian state within 1967 borders at the U.N. General Assembly in September.
The protesters' declaration declared: "We, the undersigned, call upon any person seeking peace and liberty and upon all nations to join us in welcoming the Palestinian Declaration of Independence and support the efforts of the citizens of the two states to maintain peaceful relations on the basis of secure borders and good neighborliness."
While the ceremony was underway with a "declaration of independence from occupation" being read, right-wing activists shouted "fifth column" and "traitors" at the demonstrators....
The declaration, which was read on Rothschild Boulevard outside Independence Hall, was couched in phrases recalling Israel's Declaration of Dependence, which David Ben-Gurion read in the same hall on May 14, 1948.
"We have gathered here on this 21st day of September to welcome the expected declaration of independence of the Palestinian state, the state bordering on Israel according to the borders of our independence, which were created with the end of the War of Independence in 1949, known as the 1967 borders," proclaimed the declaration.
Other participants were author Sami Michael, playwright Yehoshua Sobol, filmmaker Ari Fogel, and Professor Zeev Sternhell. Later, in a televised debate on Channel 2, Ben-Gurion's grandson, Dr. Yariv Ben-Eliezer, lashed out at Sternhell, asking: "Who do you think you are? My grandfather's vision has been turned into a gimmick."
"There is intentional symbolism in it," Sternhell responded. "We are raising the Declaration of Independence to a higher level."
The incident spurred various responses. Deputy Foreign Minister Daniel Ayalon said: "Such actions only drive the chance for peace, reconciliation and the establishment of a Palestinian state farther away. They create false hope among the Palestinians that they can establish a state unilaterally without negotiations with Israel."
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5. WE WILL CONTINUE TO SPEAK OUT
[The following communication is from one of a number of U.S. Jewish organizations that support the Palestinian effort to seek statehood from the UN.]
By Jewish Voice for Peace
Today, Sept. 23, President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority presented a bid for the state of Palestine, based on the 1967 borders, to be considered by the Security Council for full membership in the United Nations.
Shortly afterward, he addressed the General Assembly, where he reviewed, from the 1948 Nakba until today, the multitude of ways in which Israel has suppressed Palestinians’ rights. While the question remains if the UN statehood bid adequately addresses the larger issue of Palestinian rights, Abbas’ address importantly gave voice to the Palestinian struggle for self-determination. While there is no uniform support for this UN bid, today was undoubtedly a historic and moving day. After over 63 years struggling for global recognition, it was moving to see the countries of the world represented in the UN general assembly give President Abbas a rousing standing ovation.
Not so for Prime Minister Netanyahu, who spoke shortly after Abbas. Netanyahu responded to the Palestinian leader with diversion and doublespeak instead of honest engagement, and peace slogans couched in hostility, aggression, and denial of Palestinian claims — a continuation of the standard Israeli tactic. We know from history that this empty rhetoric has been used by the Israeli government for decades and will only mean further pain and oppression for Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and all over the world.
As a Jewish-American organization, we believe it is important to remain focused on our primary responsibility: having an impact on U.S. policy. As such, we will continue to speak out strongly against the U.S. using its veto power in the Security Council to reject this bid for statehood.
We know now that President Obama will not do the right thing. Speaking at the UN on Wednesday, Obama lauded the Arab Spring — but rejected the Palestinian Autumn. The president retreated from his earlier positions that demanded Israeli accountability for its military occupation, and he did not acknowledge the ongoing role of the U.S. in maintaining that imbalance through its extraordinary economic, military, and diplomatic support for Israel, even when its actions violate international law, human rights, and U.S. policy. And he didn’t acknowledge that 20 years of the “peace process” has brought only a more entrenched occupation. Instead, Obama merely said that both sides should “sit down together, to listen to each other, and to understand each other’s hopes and fears.”
While this week has not been an easy one, we at JVP actually feel a redoubled assurance in the promise of our strategy to change the dynamics on display at the United Nations. We know now, more than ever, that the President or Congress will not change on their own. The array of power and money is simply too strong — for now. We know, as with the examples of the civil rights movement and the anti-apartheid movement, to name just two, that it is movements like ours that force our governments to change their policies. It was the steadfastness, the creativity, the demonstrations, the local organizing, and the BDS (boycotts, divestment and sanctions) tactics that helped these movements and so many others for social justice eventually succeed. So we’ll let the politicians play their games, and meanwhile, our work will continue.
— http://jewishvoiceforpeace.org/
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6. PALESTINIANS SUBMIT BID FOR STATEHOOD
By Lesley Clark
UNITED NATIONS (McClatchy Newspapers, Sept. 23) — Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas today formally requested full U.N. membership for an independent Palestinian state, bucking staunch U.S. opposition in the hope of redefining the long-running conflict with Israel.
Abbas submitted the application to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon prior to addressing the annual gathering of world leaders at the General Assembly, where he delivered an impassioned call for an end to "63 years of suffering" under Israeli occupation of lands that the Palestinians see as part of their future state.
Accusing the Israeli government of undermining the peace process by erecting Jewish settlements in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, which Palestinians claim as their capital, Abbas complained of "armed settler militias" who he said wage "frequent attacks against our people, targeting their homes, schools, universities, mosques, fields." He insisted that the bid for statehood wasn't "aimed at isolating Israel or de-legitimizing it; rather we want to gain legitimacy for the cause of the people of Palestine.
"We only aim to de-legitimize the settlement activities, the occupation and apartheid and the logic of ruthless force," he said, adding, "We believe that all the countries of the world stand with us in this regard."
Still, he offered an olive branch, saying he was interested in making peace with the Israelis, "instead of policies of occupation, settlement, war and eliminating the other."
At the end of his speech, Abbas, an avuncular man with silver hair and glasses, held up a copy of the application and received a loud ovation from a packed chamber of delegates. The Palestinian statehood bid has dominated the General Assembly meeting, and Abbas' speech was interrupted numerous times for applause — a stark contrast to President Barack Obama's relatively coolly greeted remarks Sept. 21.
Later, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu criticized the U.N., saying his nation never gets a fair shake. He insisted that Israel wants peace with the Palestinians, but accused them of opposing negotiations. He also warned against the threat of militant Islamists.
"The truth is that Israel wants peace. the truth is that I want peace," Netanyahu said. "The truth is that in the Middle East peace must be anchored in security. So far the Palestinians have refused to negotiate. The Palestinians want a state without peace...and you shouldn't let that happen."
The United States has pledged to block the Palestinians' statehood bid with the veto it wields as a permanent Security Council member, and was reportedly lobbying fellow council members to delay a decision on the application. The Obama administration said that granting Palestinian statehood was premature and would jeopardize efforts to restart long-stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, which it has said is the only route to a durable peace.
"When the speeches end today, we must all recognize that the only way to create a state is through direct negotiations. No shortcuts," the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, said on Twitter.
Abbas had pledged for years to take this bid to the UN, and he drew a direct line between the pro-democracy ferment roiling the Arab world and the Palestinians' desire for independence.
"At a time when Arab peoples affirm their quest for democracy in the Arab Spring, the time has come also for the Palestinian spring, the time for independence," he said, to loud applause.
He accused the Israelis of repeatedly blocking serious negotiations, saying that "efforts at peace were repeatedly smashed against a rock." He called on the Security Council to approve the application immediately.
"This is a moment of truth; our people are waiting to hear the answer of the world," he said.
"Will it allow Israel to occupy us forever, and will it allow Israel to remain a state above the law and accountability?"
As Abbas spoke, large crowds gathered in Ramallah in the Palestinian territory of the West Bank, waving the Palestinian flag, and television images showed some women weeping. Near the West Bank town of Qusra, clashes between West Bank villagers and Israeli settlers turned deadly when Israeli soldiers shot and killed a Palestinian man, according to witness accounts.
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7. NETANYAHU CONDEMNS STATEHOOD BID
By Jason Ditz
(Antiwar.com, Sept. 23) — Speaking to the United Nations General Assembly today, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu loudly condemned the notion of an independent Palestinian state being recognized by the international body, saying that the Palestinians would have to reach a final peace deal with Israel, something which isn’t even being discussed by the two sides, before independence could even be considered.
As usual this included a number of demands from Netanyahu that the Palestinians would have to accept as a condition for ending the occupation, including recognizing Israel as “the Jewish state.”
The Palestinian Authority submitted its proposal for recognition to the United Nations Security Council today, just over a year after the last direct talks with the Israeli government, and are believed to have a strong majority in the general assembly, as well as a likely majority in the security council. President Obama has vowed to veto Palestinian independence on Israel’s behalf.
Perhaps the most unusual comment from Netanyahu, however, was that Israel would never accept an independent state in Gaza, saying that Israel would only accept an independent Palestine within a portion of the West Bank. Though Netanyahu’s Likud Party were loudly in opposition to withdrawing settlers from the tiny Gaza Strip, it is unclear what Israel plans to do with the strip in the event the PA ever got an independent state in the small portion of the West Bank which doesn’t contain settlements.
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8. HAMAS OPPOSED PA's UN EFFORT
JERUSALEM (Jerusalem Post, Sept. 24) — Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh yesterday criticized the Palestinian Authority's statehood petition at the United Nations, saying that the Palestinian people should not have "to beg for a state."
Speaking after Friday prayers at a mosque in Gaza City, Haniyeh said that "liberation" of Palestinian land must come first, and then the "state," Hamas-affiliated Al Resalah reported.
"We have reservations about the United Nations because we feel the institution is controlled by the Americans and others," Haniyeh continued. "The political orientation of the United Nations is not beneficial."
Haniyeh's comments underlined tensions between Hamas and Fatah over the PLO's statehood bid at the UN, and came just before PA President Mahmoud Abbas presented a request to the UN to be accepted as a full member.
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9. OBAMA: ISRAEL BOND UNBREAKABLE
By Yitzhak Benhorin
NEW YORK (Israel News, Sept. 23)— A day after he made what is being called his "Zionist speech" at the UN General Assembly in New York, President Barack Obama was back in the White House where he held a conference call with over 900 orthodox, conservative and reform rabbis from throughout the U.S. ahead of the Jewish new year.
During the 30 minute call, Obama assured the rabbis that the U.S.-Israel alliance was stronger than ever before. "Prime Minister Netanyahu knows he can count on the United States," Obama told the rabbis. "We will not abandon the pursuit of a just and lasting peace that will end the conflict."
He then noted that "the bonds between the U.S. and Israel are unbreakable and the commitment of the security of Israel is ironclad. Since coming into office, I haven't just talked the talk, we've walked the walk."
Obama also spoke about the recent events in Egypt and the Middle East uprisings and noted that the progress towards peace with the Palestinians could cool down the region.
"The most important thing we can do to stabilize the strategic situation for Israel is if we can actually resolve the Palestinian-Israeli crisis because that's what feeds so much of the tumult in Egypt. That's what I think has created the deep tension between Turkey and Israel and Turkey has historically been a friend and ally of Israel's. That's why we think direct negotiations are so critical."
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10. SENATE THREATENS TO CUT PALESTINIAN AID
(Washington Post, Sept. 21) — The Senate Appropriations Committee today raised the stakes for the Palestinians’ bid for U.N. membership by threatening to cut off U.S. economic aid and close the Palestinians’ office in Washington.
“We want to let them know, you do that at your own detriment,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said of the Palestinian effort. “It is not a wise thing to do. It will not advance peace.”
The House appropriations subcommittee on foreign operations has already passed a bill that would end U.S. economic aid to the Palestinian Authority if they pursued U.N. recognition, strengthening the likelihood of a cutoff.
The United States is the second-biggest foreign donor to the Palestinians after the Europeans, and the loss of the funding could severely affect the Palestinian Authority, which relies on $1 billion in foreign aid to help pay its bills and spur the economy of the occupied West Bank. The Congressional bills would leave in place the $100 million annual U.S. contribution to train Palestinian security forces.
Graham’s amendment would require the secretary of state to inform Congress on what actions lawmakers could take regarding the Palestinians’ status in the United States -- “especially about the closing of its office”-- if they sought U.N. membership as a state.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) argued for a delay in voting on the measure, saying that it was a “very sensitive time” and that adopting the amendment could upset negotiations to put off a vote on the Palestinian membership bid. But the measure passed on a voice vote.
Despite the strong statements about ending aid, no action is expected for months on a cutoff of funds, since the House and Senate bills will eventually have be reconciled and may be bundled into a bigger spending bill to be passed later this year.
(end)
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
09-22-12 Activist Calendar
HUDSON VALLEY ACTIVIST CALENDAR
September 21, 2011, Issue #668
Send event announcements to jacdon@earthlink.net
———————————————————————
Dedicated to Helping Build Activist
Movements in the Hudson Valley
———————————————————————
Editor's Note:
Today (Sept. 21), as we write the Activist Calendar, is the UN-declared International Day of Peace — an observance approved by the General Assembly in 1981. Events marking the occasion have taken place in many locations around the globe. Unfortunately, the United Nations has been virtually impotent when it comes to stopping aggression by big powers. Indeed, it has been complicit in the regime-change bombings by NATO in Libya, as it also has in the U.S. government's continuing imperial misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the drone attacks in western Pakistan and elsewhere.
So as we observe World Peace Day let's remember that good intentions not accompanied by corrective actions are fruitless or worse. If governments cannot act to bring about peace it's up to the people to do so by their activism. With this thought in mind we resume publication of the Activist Calendar after an unavoidable interruption of a few months.
———————————————————————
ACTIVEST EVENTS
Thursday, Sept. 22, NEW YORK CITY: The movement to "Occupy Wall Street" in Manhattan, ala Tahrir Square, may continue into the weekend and perhaps beyond, and spread to other cities as well. Reports of participation vary considerably. It's said that a total of about a thousand to several thousand demonstrators have taken part in the protest over the past several days, with relatively few arrests. Police have tried to contain the protest to Liberty Park on Broadway, two blocks north of Wall St. and about four blocks south of City Hall, where many participants remain overnight, but actions take place outside as well. According to the organizers, "Occupy Wall Street is a leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%. The original call for this occupation was published by Adbusters in July; since then, many individuals across the country have stepped up to organize this event, such as the people of the NYC General Assembly and U.S. Day of Rage ." We're told reinforcements are always welcome for a couple of hours, overnight or days. Information, https://occupywallst.org/.
Friday, Sept. 23, POUGHKEEPSIE: "A Green New Deal" rally for green energy and economy will take place 4:30 p.m. in front of the Dutchess County Office Building, 22 Market St. sponsored by the Real Majority Project. Information, (845) 876-2488 joeltyner@earthlink.net.
Saturday, Sept. 24, WORLDWIDE and LOCAL: Rallies in support of a clean, safe environment will be taking place today in well over a thousand locations in 170 countries, titled Moving Planet — "a day to put our demands for climate action into motion by marching, biking, skating, etc., calling for the world to go beyond fossil fuels." Bill McKibben's group 350.org is the principal organizer. In addition to the following three actions, check out http://www.moving-planet.org/ for other actions, about the day and other information. Additional information, http://www.350.org/.
Saturday, Sept 24, NEW PALTZ: Moving Green Day (as it's called here) will be observed 11 a.m.-2 p.m. at the Water St. Market, on Main St. near the Wallkill bridge, and 1-4 p.m. at Hasbrouck Park just southwest of the SUNY campus near Village Hall. We're told there will be "games, music, bikes, and more, plus a huge group photo shoot at 3:50 p.m." The sponsors are New Paltz Climate Action Coalition and New Paltz GreenWorks.
Saturday, Sept. 24, ALBANY: Moving Planet Day in the state capital will consist of a bicycle ride and environmental rally. Starting at 11 a.m., bicyclists from the capital region will assemble at Capitol Park West and ride to Henry Johnson Blvd. and Rt. 9 where, at 11:45 a.m., they will meet up with a contingent from Glens Falls and ride back to Capitol Park West for a rally with music and speakers. The rally will include the cyclists, as well as pedestrians, skateboarders, transit riders and other citizens. The event is sponsored by Capital Region 350 Climate Action. Information, (518) 466-9339, markalban1@earthlink.net.
Saturday, Sept. 24, POUGHKEEPSIE and HIGHLAND: The Cornell Cooperative Extension of Dutchess and Ulster Counties and local partners support a "Get Moving Hudson Valley" 350.org event at the Walkway over the Hudson Park, or anywhere on the local trail system. Adults, youth, families, and community groups are encouraged to "Go for a Walk or Ride, Just don't Drive" to raise energy and climate change awareness. CCE and local partners will provide information on sustainable transportation, walkable and bikeable communities, local trails, alternative energy and energy conservation, climate change impacts in New York, and ways for citizens to get involved, at the Poughkeepsie and Highland entrances of the Walkway over the Hudson Park from 9 a.m.-3 p.m. Join the Dutchess County 4-H Outdoor Education Club for Free children's activities: a coloring station and a chance to ride the CCE energy bike. Join us at 11 a.m. in the middle of the Walkway over the Hudson Bridge for a brief press conference and photo opportunity. Information, (845) 677-8223 or http://www.ccedutchess.org/.
Saturday, Sept. 24, PURCHASE (Manhattanville College campus): Celebrate the public reopening of the Connie Hogarth Center for Social Action at the center's 9th annual peace concert featuring a number of musical artists. It will be held outdoors at the mini-quad on campus 2-5 p.m. Information, (914) 323-7156.
Saturday, Sept. 24, ALBANY: A free pubic documentary about striking miners — "Locked Out" — will be screened at 7:30 p.m. at First Unitarian Universalist Society of Albany, 405 Washington Ave., sponsored by Solidarity Committee of the Capital District, Bethlehem Neighbors for Peace, and Upper Hudson Peace Action. The film focuses on California miners and the Rio Tinto Group, the third largest mining company in the world. The bosses threatened to lock the miners out of work unless they accepted cutbacks in a new contract. In January 2010, the workers voted unanimously to reject the company's offer, and were locked out the following day. In the ensuing 107-day struggle, the workers of the International Longshore & Warehouse Union defeated the multinational corporation. According to the filmmakers, "Their story provides an inspiring example of union resistance to today's corporate and government attack upon workers' rights." Information, (518) 426-0883, dbull34@verizon.net.
Saturday, Sept. 24, KINGSTON: Ulster County Democrats and liberal support groups are holding a political rally 1-4 p.m. in Waterfront Park at Broadway and West Strand (near the Rondout Landing Dock and Mariner's Harbor). The theme is "United we win." Featured speakers include: Rep. Maurice Hinchey, District Attorney candidate Jon Sennett, Ulster County Comptroller Elliott Auerbach, Area Labor Federation representative Beth Soto, Ellenville NAACP's Maude Bruce, Ruth Molloy of Medicare for All, and Rosalyn Cherry of Citizens Against Fracking, among others. Among the sponsors are the Ulster County Democratic Committee, Ulster County Democratic Women, Working Families Party, Hudson Valley Area Labor Federation, Organizing for America, and Hudson Valley for Obama 2012. Information, (646) 279-3179, lin@hudsonvalleyprogressives.org.
Sunday, Sept. 25, PLEASANTVILLE: "The Big Uneasy," a film about why New Orleans flooded, and why it could happen in other cities across America, will be screened at 6 p.m., followed by an appearance by director Harry Shearer and then talks by two WESPAC members about their group's activities. The venue is Jacob Burns Film Center, 364 Manville Rd., (914) 747-5555. About the film, http://thebiguneasy.com/. Tickets and Theater information, http://www.burnsfilmcenter.org/films/film-series/detail/43757.
Sunday, Sept. 25, SARATOGA SPRINGS: A peace fair will be held 12 noon-4 p.m. at 24 Circular St., Presbyterian-New England Congregational Church. There will be some 50 exhibitors, several musical groups and various activities for children and adults. Admission free, rain or shine. Sponsored by the Congregational Church, the Saratoga Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, the Saratoga Peace Alliance and Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Saratoga Springs. Information, (518) 584-6091, http://www.peace-ing.org.
Sunday, Sept. 25, ALBANY: "The Future of Our Healthcare: Medicare for All vs. a Private Insurance Based System" is the topic of 2-4:30 p.m. address by Dr. David Ansell, a Chicago-based physician and health activist, and author of "County: Life, Death and Politics at Chicago's Public Hospital." He will speak about his experiences with our private insurance based health system, its shortcomings in delivering adequate healthcare to all, and his thoughts about solutions. A panel discussion will follow to address the current status of healthcare reform in Massachusetts, Vermont and New York State. This free public event takes place at First Unitarian Universalist Society of Albany, 405 Washington Ave. The sponsors include Capital District Alliance for Universal Healthcare, Single Payer New York, Physicians for a National Health Program Capital District Chapter, Troy Area Labor Council, Capital District Area Labor Federation, League of Women Voters of Saratoga County, NY StateWide Senior Action Council, Social Responsibilities Council of FUUSA, and the New York State Nurses Association. Information,( 518) 482-0420.
Tuesday, Sept. 27, RHINEBECK: A free screening of the Academy Award winning Best Documentary "Inside Job" begins at 6:30 p.m. at Town Hall, 80 East Market St. We're told the film provides a comprehensive analysis of the global financial crisis of 2008, which at a cost over $20 trillion, caused millions of people to lose their jobs and homes in the worst recession since the Great Depression, and nearly resulted in a global financial collapse." The sponsors are Dutchess Peace and the Real Majority Project. Information, http://www.dutchesspeace.org, joeltyner@earthlink.net.
Saturday, Oct. 1, NEW YORK CITY and ELSEWHERE: Rallies will take place in several states today demanding "Clean, Safe, Nuclear-Free Energy." In this flagship New York City event of The Coalition Against Nukes, Dr. Helen Caldicott will be the keynote speaker at the rally at Pier 95 and the Hudson River Park (55th St. and 12th Ave.). Also speaking 12 noon-3:30 p.m. will be John Hall, Brent Blackwelder, Alice Slater, Harvey Wasserman, Kevin Kamps, and Karl Grossman, among others. According to the organizers: "An earthquake just caused two reactors in Virginia's North Anna plant to shut down and 12 others reported 'unusual events.' Indian Point in the Hudson Valley is near two faults in a densely-populated area. The unfolding tragedy in Fukushima, Japan must be our wake up call. Stand with the people of Japan and say 'not here.'" Sponsored by: Friends of the Earth, Sierra Club NYC, NYPIRG, Clearwater, Ralph Nader, Helen Caldicott, Beyond Nuclear, IPSEC, Shut Down Indian Point Now, Westchester Citizens Awareness Network, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, ECOFEST, Rock the Reactors, Time's Up. Information, NYCRally@CoalitionAgainstNukes.org, http://www.CoalitionAgainstNukes.org.
Saturday, Oct. 1 to Saturday Oct. 8, WORLDWIDE: The International Week of Protest to Stop the Militarization of Space begins today. Actions are taking place in 32 different parts of the world, including 14 venues in the United States, from a nuclear missile site in California, to Shriever Air Force Base in Colorado, the Strategic Command at Offut AFB in Nebraska, the Lockheed Martin weapons corporation in Pennsylvania, and Fort Mead in Maryland to name a few. The worldwide event is sponsored by the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, with co-sponsors Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (UK), Swedish Peace Council, Drone Campaign Network (UK), United Against Drones (U.S.), and Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. The main website is http://www.space4peace.org. Information, (207) 443-9502.
Wednesday, Oct. 5, LOCAL and NEW YORK STATE: State University of New York students from Albany, Buffalo, Binghamton, New Paltz and Stony Brook, joined by students from some City University of New York campuses are planning a statewide walkout/teach-in today in opposition to increased tuition and fees, and cutbacks in services and staff. They are part of a new organization titled New York Students Rising. Information, http://nystudentsrising/.
Thursday, Oct. 6, WASHINGTON: "Stop the Machine! Create a New World!" is the call to a mass nonviolent action beginning today at Freedom Plaza (13th St. and Pennsylvania Ave. NW) and continuing for as long as activists are willing to sustain the protest — days, weeks or much longer. Some will offer civil disobedience, others will not. People are attending from throughout the U.S. We're told dozens of people from the Hudson Valley will take part. Politically, the specific demands upon the U.S. government are: "Tax the rich and corporations; End the wars, bring the troops home, cut military spending; Protect the social safety net, strengthen Social Security and improved Medicare for all; End corporate welfare for oil companies and other big business interests; Transition to a clean energy economy, reverse environmental degradation; Protect worker rights including collective bargaining, create jobs and raise wages; Get money out of politics." This action is being organized by the October 2011 Coalition, composed of "groups who advocate for peace and social, economic and environmental justice, in a sustained occupation and nonviolent resistance to Stop the Machine! Create a New World! What is the machine? Corporatism and militarism. What new world is possible? One in which people's needs are more important than corporate profits, in which we unite our struggles for jobs, education, housing, healthcare and human rights in which we are freed to implement solutions for a peaceful, just and sustainable world." A great many details are available at the coalition's website, http://www.October2011.org, from a schedule of events to FAQs, information about sleeping arrangements, transportation and much more. Information, info@october2011.org.
Friday, Oct. 7, SEVERAL CITIES: The Bush Administration launched its unjust invasion and occupation of Afghanistan exactly 10 years ago today. The ANSWER Coalition has organized a number of demonstrations demanding an immediate end to U.S. aggression, which has been widened by the Obama Administration, in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and elsewhere. ANSWER is also organizing for UNAC's Oct. 15 protests in several cities.
Thursday, Oct. 13, WOODSTOCK: Middle East Crisis Response, a group of Hudson Valley residents joined in protest against policies of Israel and the United States, will hold its meeting tonight at the Woodstock Public Library, 5 Library Lane. Information, (845) 876-7906.
Saturday, Oct. 15, SEVERAL CITIES: Local Protests will take place in a dozen or so U.S. cities today to demand the immediate withdrawal of American troops, contractors and bases from Afghanistan and Iraq, an end to the war on Libya and Pakistan, a halt to Washington's aid to Israel, an end to threats against Iran and "Money for jobs and education, not for war and incarceration." The sponsor is United National Antiwar Coalition.
Saturday, Oct. 15, ALBANY: There will be a peace march and rally to mark the 10th anniversary of the unjust U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and drone attacks in adjacent western Pakistan. There will be speakers and live music. Peace and justice organizations are welcome to table at this event, which will be held 12 noon-2 p.m. in Townsend Park — the triangle where Central Ave. converges with Washington Ave. adjacent to Henry Johnson Blvd. (across from the Social
Justice Center). The sponsor is Bethlehem Neighbors for Peace. Information, (518) 439-1968, http://www.bethlehemforpeace.org.
Monday, Oct. 17, NEW PALTZ (SUNY campus): Kristin Kimball, author of "The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love," will offer a free public lecture 7 p.m. in the Coykendall Science Building Auditorium. She will be speaking along with her husband, farmer Mark Kimball, a central character in her autobiographical book, which chronicles Kristin Kimball’s transition from a Harvard-educated New York City journalist to a partner in an ambitious sustainable agriculture experiment. The event is sponsored by the SUNY New Paltz Environmental Task Force, the Department of English, the Department of Sociology, and the Environmental Studies Program, with the support of the Provost’s Office and Campus Auxiliary Services. Information, (845) 257-3447.
(end)
September 21, 2011, Issue #668
Send event announcements to jacdon@earthlink.net
———————————————————————
Dedicated to Helping Build Activist
Movements in the Hudson Valley
———————————————————————
Editor's Note:
Today (Sept. 21), as we write the Activist Calendar, is the UN-declared International Day of Peace — an observance approved by the General Assembly in 1981. Events marking the occasion have taken place in many locations around the globe. Unfortunately, the United Nations has been virtually impotent when it comes to stopping aggression by big powers. Indeed, it has been complicit in the regime-change bombings by NATO in Libya, as it also has in the U.S. government's continuing imperial misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the drone attacks in western Pakistan and elsewhere.
So as we observe World Peace Day let's remember that good intentions not accompanied by corrective actions are fruitless or worse. If governments cannot act to bring about peace it's up to the people to do so by their activism. With this thought in mind we resume publication of the Activist Calendar after an unavoidable interruption of a few months.
———————————————————————
ACTIVEST EVENTS
Thursday, Sept. 22, NEW YORK CITY: The movement to "Occupy Wall Street" in Manhattan, ala Tahrir Square, may continue into the weekend and perhaps beyond, and spread to other cities as well. Reports of participation vary considerably. It's said that a total of about a thousand to several thousand demonstrators have taken part in the protest over the past several days, with relatively few arrests. Police have tried to contain the protest to Liberty Park on Broadway, two blocks north of Wall St. and about four blocks south of City Hall, where many participants remain overnight, but actions take place outside as well. According to the organizers, "Occupy Wall Street is a leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%. The original call for this occupation was published by Adbusters in July; since then, many individuals across the country have stepped up to organize this event, such as the people of the NYC General Assembly and U.S. Day of Rage ." We're told reinforcements are always welcome for a couple of hours, overnight or days. Information, https://occupywallst.org/.
Friday, Sept. 23, POUGHKEEPSIE: "A Green New Deal" rally for green energy and economy will take place 4:30 p.m. in front of the Dutchess County Office Building, 22 Market St. sponsored by the Real Majority Project. Information, (845) 876-2488 joeltyner@earthlink.net.
Saturday, Sept. 24, WORLDWIDE and LOCAL: Rallies in support of a clean, safe environment will be taking place today in well over a thousand locations in 170 countries, titled Moving Planet — "a day to put our demands for climate action into motion by marching, biking, skating, etc., calling for the world to go beyond fossil fuels." Bill McKibben's group 350.org is the principal organizer. In addition to the following three actions, check out http://www.moving-planet.org/ for other actions, about the day and other information. Additional information, http://www.350.org/.
Saturday, Sept 24, NEW PALTZ: Moving Green Day (as it's called here) will be observed 11 a.m.-2 p.m. at the Water St. Market, on Main St. near the Wallkill bridge, and 1-4 p.m. at Hasbrouck Park just southwest of the SUNY campus near Village Hall. We're told there will be "games, music, bikes, and more, plus a huge group photo shoot at 3:50 p.m." The sponsors are New Paltz Climate Action Coalition and New Paltz GreenWorks.
Saturday, Sept. 24, ALBANY: Moving Planet Day in the state capital will consist of a bicycle ride and environmental rally. Starting at 11 a.m., bicyclists from the capital region will assemble at Capitol Park West and ride to Henry Johnson Blvd. and Rt. 9 where, at 11:45 a.m., they will meet up with a contingent from Glens Falls and ride back to Capitol Park West for a rally with music and speakers. The rally will include the cyclists, as well as pedestrians, skateboarders, transit riders and other citizens. The event is sponsored by Capital Region 350 Climate Action. Information, (518) 466-9339, markalban1@earthlink.net.
Saturday, Sept. 24, POUGHKEEPSIE and HIGHLAND: The Cornell Cooperative Extension of Dutchess and Ulster Counties and local partners support a "Get Moving Hudson Valley" 350.org event at the Walkway over the Hudson Park, or anywhere on the local trail system. Adults, youth, families, and community groups are encouraged to "Go for a Walk or Ride, Just don't Drive" to raise energy and climate change awareness. CCE and local partners will provide information on sustainable transportation, walkable and bikeable communities, local trails, alternative energy and energy conservation, climate change impacts in New York, and ways for citizens to get involved, at the Poughkeepsie and Highland entrances of the Walkway over the Hudson Park from 9 a.m.-3 p.m. Join the Dutchess County 4-H Outdoor Education Club for Free children's activities: a coloring station and a chance to ride the CCE energy bike. Join us at 11 a.m. in the middle of the Walkway over the Hudson Bridge for a brief press conference and photo opportunity. Information, (845) 677-8223 or http://www.ccedutchess.org/.
Saturday, Sept. 24, PURCHASE (Manhattanville College campus): Celebrate the public reopening of the Connie Hogarth Center for Social Action at the center's 9th annual peace concert featuring a number of musical artists. It will be held outdoors at the mini-quad on campus 2-5 p.m. Information, (914) 323-7156.
Saturday, Sept. 24, ALBANY: A free pubic documentary about striking miners — "Locked Out" — will be screened at 7:30 p.m. at First Unitarian Universalist Society of Albany, 405 Washington Ave., sponsored by Solidarity Committee of the Capital District, Bethlehem Neighbors for Peace, and Upper Hudson Peace Action. The film focuses on California miners and the Rio Tinto Group, the third largest mining company in the world. The bosses threatened to lock the miners out of work unless they accepted cutbacks in a new contract. In January 2010, the workers voted unanimously to reject the company's offer, and were locked out the following day. In the ensuing 107-day struggle, the workers of the International Longshore & Warehouse Union defeated the multinational corporation. According to the filmmakers, "Their story provides an inspiring example of union resistance to today's corporate and government attack upon workers' rights." Information, (518) 426-0883, dbull34@verizon.net.
Saturday, Sept. 24, KINGSTON: Ulster County Democrats and liberal support groups are holding a political rally 1-4 p.m. in Waterfront Park at Broadway and West Strand (near the Rondout Landing Dock and Mariner's Harbor). The theme is "United we win." Featured speakers include: Rep. Maurice Hinchey, District Attorney candidate Jon Sennett, Ulster County Comptroller Elliott Auerbach, Area Labor Federation representative Beth Soto, Ellenville NAACP's Maude Bruce, Ruth Molloy of Medicare for All, and Rosalyn Cherry of Citizens Against Fracking, among others. Among the sponsors are the Ulster County Democratic Committee, Ulster County Democratic Women, Working Families Party, Hudson Valley Area Labor Federation, Organizing for America, and Hudson Valley for Obama 2012. Information, (646) 279-3179, lin@hudsonvalleyprogressives.org.
Sunday, Sept. 25, PLEASANTVILLE: "The Big Uneasy," a film about why New Orleans flooded, and why it could happen in other cities across America, will be screened at 6 p.m., followed by an appearance by director Harry Shearer and then talks by two WESPAC members about their group's activities. The venue is Jacob Burns Film Center, 364 Manville Rd., (914) 747-5555. About the film, http://thebiguneasy.com/. Tickets and Theater information, http://www.burnsfilmcenter.org/films/film-series/detail/43757.
Sunday, Sept. 25, SARATOGA SPRINGS: A peace fair will be held 12 noon-4 p.m. at 24 Circular St., Presbyterian-New England Congregational Church. There will be some 50 exhibitors, several musical groups and various activities for children and adults. Admission free, rain or shine. Sponsored by the Congregational Church, the Saratoga Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, the Saratoga Peace Alliance and Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Saratoga Springs. Information, (518) 584-6091, http://www.peace-ing.org.
Sunday, Sept. 25, ALBANY: "The Future of Our Healthcare: Medicare for All vs. a Private Insurance Based System" is the topic of 2-4:30 p.m. address by Dr. David Ansell, a Chicago-based physician and health activist, and author of "County: Life, Death and Politics at Chicago's Public Hospital." He will speak about his experiences with our private insurance based health system, its shortcomings in delivering adequate healthcare to all, and his thoughts about solutions. A panel discussion will follow to address the current status of healthcare reform in Massachusetts, Vermont and New York State. This free public event takes place at First Unitarian Universalist Society of Albany, 405 Washington Ave. The sponsors include Capital District Alliance for Universal Healthcare, Single Payer New York, Physicians for a National Health Program Capital District Chapter, Troy Area Labor Council, Capital District Area Labor Federation, League of Women Voters of Saratoga County, NY StateWide Senior Action Council, Social Responsibilities Council of FUUSA, and the New York State Nurses Association. Information,( 518) 482-0420.
Tuesday, Sept. 27, RHINEBECK: A free screening of the Academy Award winning Best Documentary "Inside Job" begins at 6:30 p.m. at Town Hall, 80 East Market St. We're told the film provides a comprehensive analysis of the global financial crisis of 2008, which at a cost over $20 trillion, caused millions of people to lose their jobs and homes in the worst recession since the Great Depression, and nearly resulted in a global financial collapse." The sponsors are Dutchess Peace and the Real Majority Project. Information, http://www.dutchesspeace.org, joeltyner@earthlink.net.
Saturday, Oct. 1, NEW YORK CITY and ELSEWHERE: Rallies will take place in several states today demanding "Clean, Safe, Nuclear-Free Energy." In this flagship New York City event of The Coalition Against Nukes, Dr. Helen Caldicott will be the keynote speaker at the rally at Pier 95 and the Hudson River Park (55th St. and 12th Ave.). Also speaking 12 noon-3:30 p.m. will be John Hall, Brent Blackwelder, Alice Slater, Harvey Wasserman, Kevin Kamps, and Karl Grossman, among others. According to the organizers: "An earthquake just caused two reactors in Virginia's North Anna plant to shut down and 12 others reported 'unusual events.' Indian Point in the Hudson Valley is near two faults in a densely-populated area. The unfolding tragedy in Fukushima, Japan must be our wake up call. Stand with the people of Japan and say 'not here.'" Sponsored by: Friends of the Earth, Sierra Club NYC, NYPIRG, Clearwater, Ralph Nader, Helen Caldicott, Beyond Nuclear, IPSEC, Shut Down Indian Point Now, Westchester Citizens Awareness Network, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, ECOFEST, Rock the Reactors, Time's Up. Information, NYCRally@CoalitionAgainstNukes.org, http://www.CoalitionAgainstNukes.org.
Saturday, Oct. 1 to Saturday Oct. 8, WORLDWIDE: The International Week of Protest to Stop the Militarization of Space begins today. Actions are taking place in 32 different parts of the world, including 14 venues in the United States, from a nuclear missile site in California, to Shriever Air Force Base in Colorado, the Strategic Command at Offut AFB in Nebraska, the Lockheed Martin weapons corporation in Pennsylvania, and Fort Mead in Maryland to name a few. The worldwide event is sponsored by the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, with co-sponsors Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (UK), Swedish Peace Council, Drone Campaign Network (UK), United Against Drones (U.S.), and Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. The main website is http://www.space4peace.org. Information, (207) 443-9502.
Wednesday, Oct. 5, LOCAL and NEW YORK STATE: State University of New York students from Albany, Buffalo, Binghamton, New Paltz and Stony Brook, joined by students from some City University of New York campuses are planning a statewide walkout/teach-in today in opposition to increased tuition and fees, and cutbacks in services and staff. They are part of a new organization titled New York Students Rising. Information, http://nystudentsrising/.
Thursday, Oct. 6, WASHINGTON: "Stop the Machine! Create a New World!" is the call to a mass nonviolent action beginning today at Freedom Plaza (13th St. and Pennsylvania Ave. NW) and continuing for as long as activists are willing to sustain the protest — days, weeks or much longer. Some will offer civil disobedience, others will not. People are attending from throughout the U.S. We're told dozens of people from the Hudson Valley will take part. Politically, the specific demands upon the U.S. government are: "Tax the rich and corporations; End the wars, bring the troops home, cut military spending; Protect the social safety net, strengthen Social Security and improved Medicare for all; End corporate welfare for oil companies and other big business interests; Transition to a clean energy economy, reverse environmental degradation; Protect worker rights including collective bargaining, create jobs and raise wages; Get money out of politics." This action is being organized by the October 2011 Coalition, composed of "groups who advocate for peace and social, economic and environmental justice, in a sustained occupation and nonviolent resistance to Stop the Machine! Create a New World! What is the machine? Corporatism and militarism. What new world is possible? One in which people's needs are more important than corporate profits, in which we unite our struggles for jobs, education, housing, healthcare and human rights in which we are freed to implement solutions for a peaceful, just and sustainable world." A great many details are available at the coalition's website, http://www.October2011.org, from a schedule of events to FAQs, information about sleeping arrangements, transportation and much more. Information, info@october2011.org.
Friday, Oct. 7, SEVERAL CITIES: The Bush Administration launched its unjust invasion and occupation of Afghanistan exactly 10 years ago today. The ANSWER Coalition has organized a number of demonstrations demanding an immediate end to U.S. aggression, which has been widened by the Obama Administration, in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and elsewhere. ANSWER is also organizing for UNAC's Oct. 15 protests in several cities.
Thursday, Oct. 13, WOODSTOCK: Middle East Crisis Response, a group of Hudson Valley residents joined in protest against policies of Israel and the United States, will hold its meeting tonight at the Woodstock Public Library, 5 Library Lane. Information, (845) 876-7906.
Saturday, Oct. 15, SEVERAL CITIES: Local Protests will take place in a dozen or so U.S. cities today to demand the immediate withdrawal of American troops, contractors and bases from Afghanistan and Iraq, an end to the war on Libya and Pakistan, a halt to Washington's aid to Israel, an end to threats against Iran and "Money for jobs and education, not for war and incarceration." The sponsor is United National Antiwar Coalition.
Saturday, Oct. 15, ALBANY: There will be a peace march and rally to mark the 10th anniversary of the unjust U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and drone attacks in adjacent western Pakistan. There will be speakers and live music. Peace and justice organizations are welcome to table at this event, which will be held 12 noon-2 p.m. in Townsend Park — the triangle where Central Ave. converges with Washington Ave. adjacent to Henry Johnson Blvd. (across from the Social
Justice Center). The sponsor is Bethlehem Neighbors for Peace. Information, (518) 439-1968, http://www.bethlehemforpeace.org.
Monday, Oct. 17, NEW PALTZ (SUNY campus): Kristin Kimball, author of "The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love," will offer a free public lecture 7 p.m. in the Coykendall Science Building Auditorium. She will be speaking along with her husband, farmer Mark Kimball, a central character in her autobiographical book, which chronicles Kristin Kimball’s transition from a Harvard-educated New York City journalist to a partner in an ambitious sustainable agriculture experiment. The event is sponsored by the SUNY New Paltz Environmental Task Force, the Department of English, the Department of Sociology, and the Environmental Studies Program, with the support of the Provost’s Office and Campus Auxiliary Services. Information, (845) 257-3447.
(end)
Sunday, September 18, 2011
09-18-11 Israel-Palestine Crisis Mounts
THREE CRITICAL VIEWS
OF ISRAEL-PALESTINE CRISIS
The Obama Administration, after making extreme efforts to convince the Palestinian Authority to forego seeking UN recognition as an independent state later this week, will veto any such motion when it comes before the Security Council, despite overwhelming support for the Palestinians among the majority of countries in the General Assembly. An exacerbation of the Middle East political crisis is obviously brewing.
The Israeli left and peace movement supports the existence of an independent Palestinian state. On Sept. 14, the Palestinian-Israeli Peace NGO Forum — a coalition uniting over 100 Israeli peace and justice organizations — published a list of 50 reasons for Israel to support a Palestinian state. (Text at http://www.peacengo.org/.)
Following are three articles that shed a progressive light on the situation. The first piece is by veteran Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery, the leader of Gush Shalom (the Peace Bloc). The second is an analysis of Israeli's precarious position vis-a-vie its two important and now-former tacit allies — Egypt and Turkey — at a time when Turkish President Erdogan is visiting Cairo and working toward increasing Ankara's influence in the Arab world. Third is an analysis by progressive author and columnist Gideon Levy published in the Israel newspaper Haaretz.
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1. SAD AND HAPPY
By Uri Avnery
Gush Shalom, Sept. 17
“WILL THIS be the happiest day of your life?” a local interviewer asked me, referring to the approaching recognition of the State of Palestine by the UN.
I was taken by surprise. “Why would that be?” I asked.
“Well, for 62 years you have advocated the establishment of a Palestinian state next to Israel, and here it comes!”
“If I were a Palestinian, I would probably be happy,” I said, “But as an Israeli, I am rather sad.”
LET ME explain. I came out of the 1948 war with four solid convictions:
• There exists a Palestinian people, though the name Palestine had been wiped off the map.
• It is with this Palestinian people that we must make peace.
• Peace will be impossible unless the Palestinians are allowed to set up their state next to Israel.
• Without peace, Israel will not be the model state we had been dreaming about in the trenches, but something very different.
While recovering from my wounds and still in uniform, I met with several young people, Arabs and Jews, to plot our course. We were very optimistic. Now everything seemed possible.
What we were thinking about was a great act of fraternization. Jews and Arabs had fought each other valiantly, each fighting for what they considered their national rights. Now the time had come to reach out for peace.
The idea of peace between two gallant fighters after the battle is as old as Semitic culture. In the epic written more than 3000 years ago, Gilgamesh, king of Uruk (in today’s Iraq) fights against the wild Enkidu, his equal in strength and courage, and after the epic fight they become blood brothers.
We had fought hard and had won. The Palestinians had lost everything. The part of Palestine that had been allotted by the UN to their state had been gobbled up by Israel, Jordan and Egypt, leaving nothing for them. Half the Palestinian people had been driven from their homes and become refugees.
That was the time, we thought, for the victor to stun the world with an act of magnanimity and wisdom, offering to help the Palestinians to set up their state in return for peace. Thus we could forge a friendship that would last for generations.
18 years later I brought this vision up again in similar circumstances. We had won a stunning victory against the Arab armies in the Six-Day war, the Middle East was in a state of shock. An Israeli offer to the Palestinians to establish their state would have electrified the region.
I AM telling this story in order to make one point: when the “Two-State Solution” was conceived for the first time after 1948, it was as an idea of reconciliation, fraternization and mutual respect.
We envisaged two states living closely together, with borders open to the free movement of people and goods. Jerusalem, the joint capital, would symbolize the spirit of the historic change. Palestine would become the bridge between the new Israel and the Arab world, united for the common good. We spoke of a “Semitic Union” long before the European Union became a reality.
When the Two-State Solution made its extraordinary march from the vision of a handful of outsiders (or crazies) to a world-wide consensus, it was this context in which it was viewed. Not a plot against Israel, but the only viable basis for real peace.
This vision was firmly rejected by David Ben-Gurion, then the undisputed leader of Israel. He was busy distributing new Jewish immigrants across the vast areas expropriated from the Arabs, and he did not believe in peace with the Arabs anyhow. He set the course that successive Israeli governments, including the present one, have followed ever since.
On the Arab side, there was always support for this vision. Already at the Lausanne Conference in 1949, an unofficial Palestinian delegation appeared and secretly offered to start direct negotiations, but they were roughly rebuffed by the Israeli delegate, Eliyahu Sasson, on direct orders from Ben-Gurion (as I heard from him later).
Yasser Arafat told me several times – from 1982 to his death in 2004 – that he would support a “Benelux” solution (on the model of the union between Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxemburg), which would include Israel, Palestine and Jordan (“and perhaps Lebanon too, why not?”)
PEOPLE SPEAK about all the opportunities for peace missed by Israel throughout the years. That is nonsense: you can miss opportunities on the way to a goal that you desire, but not on the way to something you abhor.
Ben-Gurion saw an independent Palestinian state as a mortal danger to Israel. So he made a secret deal with King Abdullah I, dividing between them the territory allocated by the UN partition plan to the Arab Palestinian state. All Ben-Gurion's successors inherited the same dogma: that a Palestinian state would be a terrible danger. Therefore they opted for the so-called "Jordanian option" – keeping what is left of Palestine under the heel of the Jordanian monarch, who is no Palestinian (nor even Jordanian — his family came from Mecca).
This week, the present Jordanian ruler, Abdullah II, flew into a rage when told that yet another Israeli former general, Uzi Dayan, had again proposed turning Jordan into Palestine, with the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as “provinces” of the Hashemite kingdom. This Dayan is, unlike his late cousin, Moshe, a pompous fool, but even a speech by such a person infuriates the king, who is mortally afraid of an influx of Palestinians driven from the West Bank into Jordan.
Three days ago, Binyamin Netanyahu told Cathy Ashton, the pathetic “foreign secretary” of the European Union, that he would agree to anything short of Palestinian statehood. That may sound strange, in view of the “historic” speech he made less than two years ago, in which he expressed his support for the Two-State Solution. (Perhaps he was thinking of the State of Israel and the State of the Settlers.)
In the few remaining weeks before the UN vote, our government will fight tooth and nail against a Palestinian state, supported by the full might of the US. This week Hillary Clinton trumped even her own rhetorical record when she announced that the US supports the Two-State Solution and therefore opposes any UN vote recognizing a Palestinian state.
APART FROM the dire threats of what will happen after the UN vote for a Palestinian state, Israeli and American leaders assure us that such a vote will make no difference at all. If so, why fight it?
Of course it will make a difference. The occupation will go on, but it will be the occupation of one state by another. In history, symbols count. The fact that the vast majority of the world’s nations will have recognized the State of Palestine will be another step towards gaining freedom for Palestine.
What will happen the day after? Our army has already announced that it has finished preparations for huge Palestinian demonstrations that will attack the settlements. The settlers will be called upon to mobilize their “quick-reaction teams” to confront the demonstrators, thus fulfilling the prophecies of a “bloodbath”. After that the army will move in, pulling many battalions of regular troops from other tasks and calling up reserve units.
A few weeks ago I pointed to ominous signs that sharpshooters would be employed to turn peaceful demonstrations into something very different, as happened during the second intifada. This week this was officially confirmed: sharpshooters will be employed to defend the settlements.
All this amounts to a war plan for the settlements. To put it simply: a war to decide whether the West Bank belongs to the Palestinians or the settlers.
In an almost comical turn of events, the army is also providing means of crowd dispersal to the Palestinian security forces trained by the Americans. The occupation authorities expect these Palestinian forces to protect the settlements against their compatriots. Since these are the armed forces of the future Palestinian state, which is opposed by Israel, it all sounds a bit bewildering.
According to the army, the Palestinians will get rubber-coated bullets and tear gas, but not the “Skunk”.
The Skunk is a device that produces an unbearable stench which attaches itself to the peaceful demonstrators and will not leave them for a long time. I am afraid that when this chapter comes to an end, the stench will attach itself to our side, and that we shall not get rid of it for a long time indeed.
LET’S GIVE free rein to our imagination for just one minute.
Imagine that in the coming UN debate something incredible happens: the Israeli delegate declares that after due consideration Israel has decided to vote for recognition of the state of Palestine.
The assembly would gape in disbelief. After a moment of silence, wild applause would break out. The world would be electrified. For days, the world media would speak of nothing else.
The minute of imagination has passed. Back to reality. Back to the Skunk.
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2. TURKEY TAKES OVER THE ARAB SPRING
By Pepe Escobar,
Asia Times Sept. 15
Finally. Crystal clear. Someone finally said it — what the whole world, except Washington and Tel Aviv, knows in its collective heart; the recognition of a Palestinian state is "not an option but an obligation."
It did wonders that the man who said it was Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in Cairo, at the Arab League, in front of all Arab foreign ministers and with virtually the whole Arab world glued to satellite networks scrutinizing his every word.
The current Erdogan Arab Spring tour — as it was billed by the Turkish press — comprising Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, has already rocketed him to the status of a geopolitical cross between U2's Bono and Barcelona's superstar Argentine footballer Lionel Messi.
Erdogan received a rock/soccer star welcome at Cairo's airport — complete with "Hero Erdogan" banners brandished by the Muslim Brotherhood. He even addressed the crowd in Arabic (from "Greetings to the Egyptian youth and people, how are you?" to "Peace be upon you").
Erdogan repeatedly stressed, "Egypt and Turkey are hand-in-hand." But it's the subtext that is even more incendiary. While Israel's former good friends Egypt and Turkey are now hand-in-hand, Israel is left isolated facing a wall. There could not be a more earth-shattering development in the Levant — unheard of since the Camp David peace accords between Israel and Egypt in 1978.
Erdogan's tour is a realpolitik master class. He's positioning Turkey as the forefront supporter of the Palestinian cause. He's also positioning Turkey at the core of the Arab Spring — as a supporter and as an inspirational model, even though there have been no full-fledged revolutions so far. He's emphasizing solid Turkish-Arab unity — for instance planning a strategic cooperation council between Egypt and Turkey.
Plus the whole thing makes good business sense. Erdogan's caravan includes six ministers and nearly 200 Turkish businessmen bent on investing heavily all across northern Africa. In Egypt, they may not match the billions of dollars already committed by the House of Saud to the military junta led by Air Marshall Mohammed Tantawi. But in 2010, Turkish trade with the Middle East and North Africa was already at $30 billion, representing 27% of Turkish exports. Over 250 Turkish companies have already invested $1.5 billion in Egypt.
Crucially, Erdogan told Egyptian TV channel Dream, "Do not be wary of secularism. I hope there will be a secular state in Egypt." Erdogan was subtly referring to Turkey's secular constitution; and at the same time he was very careful to remind Egyptians that secularism is compatible with Islam.
The current Turkish model is enormously popular among the Egyptian street, featuring a moderate Islamic party (the Justice and Development Party — AKP) in power; a secular constitution; the military — albeit strong — back in the barracks; and an ongoing economic boom (Turkey was the world's fastest growing economy in the first half of 2011).
This model is not exactly what the regressive House of Saud wants. They would prefer a heavily Islamist government controlled by the most conservative factions of the Muslim Brotherhood. Worse; as far as Libya is concerned, the House of Saud would love to have a friendly emirate, or at least a government peppered with Islamic fundamentalists.
Erdogan also stressed that the "aggressiveness" of Israel "threatens the future of the Israeli people". That's music for the Arab street. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas met Erdogan in Cairo — and confirmed he'll go ahead with Palestine's bid to be fully recognized as a state by the United Nations Security Council later this month.
Palestine will definitely be accepted as a non-voting state by the UN General Assembly floor. The problem is the extremely non-representative Security Council — which sanctions full UN membership with state voting rights. It's a done deal that Washington will veto it. The fractured European Union (EU), true to its character, still has not decided on a unified vote. There's a strong possibility Britain and France will also veto the Palestinian bid at the Security Council.
Yet even with the consolation price of "only" becoming a non-voting state, Palestine strikes a moral victory — aligned with world public opinion. Moreover, Palestine can become a member of the International Criminal Curt and sue the hell out of Israel over its serial violations of international law.
Turkey's game goes way beyond "neo-Ottomanism" — or nostalgia to revive the superpower days of the 16th and 17th centuries. It's a natural development of Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu's policy of "zero problems with our neighbors" — moving to forge deeper bonds with most of these neighbors, and consolidating what Davutoglu himself defines as Turkey's strategic destiny (see Turkey: the sultans of swing Asia Times Online, April 7, 2011).
Turkey, for some years now, had decisively abandoned an isolationist brand of Turkish nationalism. The country seems to have finally surmounted the trauma associated to its dream of joining the EU; for all practical purposes the dream was shattered by France and Germany.
As for the Israeli-Turkey alliance, in fact it kept the Arab world at bay and confined Turkey to a passive role of
ineffective outsider in the Middle East. Not anymore. Erdogan can now afford to send multiple simultaneous messages to Israel, the US, the EU, assorted Arab leaders and most of all the Arab street.
Davutoglu has been relatively magnanimous towards Israel, saying it is "out of touch with the region and unable to perceive the changes taking place, which makes it impossible for the country to have healthy relations with its neighbors".
What he could have added is with "friends" like that — Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister, former Moldova bouncer Avigdor Lieberman as foreign minister, rabid settlers dictating policy — Israel does not need enemies; or rather fabricates enemies en masse. It is the Israeli government itself that accelerated Turkey's rapprochement with Egypt — which is leaving Israel totally isolated.
The touch of genius in the whole process is that Erdogan represents a democracy in a Muslim majority country strongly supporting both the Palestinians and the real pro-democrats in the Arab Spring. This provides a direct connection between the Palestinian tragedy and the spirit of the Arab Spring (which has nothing to do, it must be stressed, with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) bombing Libya or a military junta running Egypt).
It will be crucial to watch Erdogan's Islam-rooted AKP's follow-up. It's virtually certain that in the next Egyptian elections the Muslim Brotherhood will come out swinging. It's also virtually certain the Brotherhood will press for a minimalist relationship with Israel, including a full revision of the Camp David accords. In theory, Turkey would be fully behind it.
Then there's the Libya front. In his first public address in Tripoli, the chairman of the dodgy Transitional National Council (TNC), Mustafa Abdel Jailil, stressed Islamic sharia law would be the main source of legislation. But he crucially added, "We will not accept any extremist ideology, on the right or the left. We are a Muslim people, for a moderate Islam."
There's no evidence yet the TNC will be even able to hold the country together, not to mention promote "moderate Islam". The (foreign) vultures continue circling. NATO's secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, has been warning that Libya is in danger of falling into the hands of Islamic extremists who would "try to exploit" the current power vacuum. It's unclear what role Turkey — a key NATO member — would have inside a NATO fully implanted in Libya.
And all this while the Persian Gulf petro-monarchies — horrified by the Arab Spring — have proposed $2 billion in annual direct aid to Jordan so it will become part of the GCC, the Gulf Cooperation Council, also known as the Gulf Counter-revolutionary Club. As a monarchical club, the GCC wants Jordan and Morocco as new members. The icing on the cake, though, would be a monarchical Libya.
On a parallel track, the counter-revolutionaries have been forced by Turkey to step up — at least verbally — their support for Palestine. Even Jordan's King Abdullah, staunch US ally and Israel's only "friend" left in the Middle East, has claimed that "the future Palestine are stronger than Israel is today".
Well, Israel did look for it — after the invasion of Lebanon in 2006, the massacre in Gaza in 2008 and the attack on the Turkish flotilla in 2010. In terms of world public opinion, Israel is toast — and even the Arab counter-revolution had to notice.
That includes the House of Saud. None other than former Saudi intelligence supremo Prince Turki al-Faisal wrote a New York Times op-ed piece stating outright, "Saudi leaders would be forced by domestic and regional pressures to adopt a far more independent and assertive foreign policy" if the US vetoes the Palestinian bid at the Security Council.
Prince Turki also stressed that everything must evolve around a two-state solution based on the pre-1967 borders, which every grain of sand in the Sinai knows Israel will never accept.
In the event of a US veto, Prince Turki threatened Saudi Arabia would be "opposing the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in Iraq" and would "part ways with Washington in Afghanistan and Yemen as well".
Now imagine the House of Saud lavishly funding a double guerrilla war all across the Pentagon's "arc of instability" — Sunnis against Shi'ites in Iraq plus the already turbocharged Taliban in Afghanistan — while lobbying for an Islamist government in both Egypt and Turkey; and this while Egypt and Turkey for their part fully collide with an isolated and angry Israel. Now that's what the "birth pangs of the new Middle East" are all about.
— Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His latest book is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).
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WHAT WILL WE SAY?
By Gideon Levy
Haaretz Op Ed: Sept. 15, 2011
What will we tell the world next week, at the UN? What could we say? Whether in the General Assembly or the Security Council, we will be exposed in all our nakedness: Israel does not want a Palestinian state. Period. And it doesn't have a single persuasive argument against the establishment and the international recognition of such a state.
So what will we say, that we're opposed? Four prime ministers, Benjamin Netanyahu among them, have said that they're in favor, that it must be accomplished through negotiations, so why haven't we done it yet? Is our argument that we object to it's being a unilateral measure? What's more unilateral than the settlements that we insist on continuing to build [for 44 years]? Or perhaps we will say that the route to a Palestinian state runs through Ramallah and Jerusalem, not New York, a la the U.S. secretary of state. The State of Israel itself was created, in part, in the United Nations.
Next week will be Israel's moment of truth, or more precisely the moment in which its deception will be revealed. Be it the president, the prime minister or the ambassador to the UN, even the greatest of public speakers will be incapable of standing before the representatives of the nations of the world and explaining Israeli logic; none of the three will be able to convince them that there is any merit to Israel's position.
Thirty-two years ago, Israel signed a peace agreement with Egypt in which it undertook "to recognize the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people" and to establish an autonomous authority in the West Bank and Gaza Strip within five years. Nothing happened.
Eighteen years ago the prime minister of Israel signed the Oslo Accords, in which Israel undertook to conduct talks in order to achieve a final-status agreement with the Palestinians, including the core issues, within five years. That, too, did not occur. Most of the provisions of the agreement have foundered since then — in the majority of cases because of Israel. What will Israel's advocate at the UN say about this?
For years, Israel claimed that Yasser Arafat was the sole obstacle to peace with the Palestinians. Arafat died — and once again nothing happened. Israel claimed that if only the terror were to stop, a solution would appear. The terror stopped — and nothing. Israel's excuses became increasingly empty and the naked truth was increasingly exposed. Israel does not want to reach a peace arrangement that would involve the establishment of a Palestinian state. This can no longer be covered up in the UN. And what did Netanyahu's Israel expect the Palestinians to do in this case — another round of photo ops, like the ones with Ehud Barak, Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni that led nowhere?
The truth is that the Palestinians have just three options, not four: to surrender unconditionally and go on living under Israeli occupation for another 42 years at least; to launch a third Intifada; or to mobilize the world on their behalf. They picked the third option, the lesser of all evils even from Israel's perspective. What could Israel say about this — that it's a unilateral step, as it and the United States have said? But it didn't agree to stop construction in the settlements, the mother of all unilateral steps. What did the Palestinians have left? The international arena. And if that won't save them, then another popular uprising in the territories.
The Palestinians in the West Bank, 3.5 million today, will not live without civil rights for another 42 years. We might as well get used to the fact that the world won't stand for it. Can Netanyahu or Shimon Peres explain why the Palestinians do not deserve their own state? Do they have even the slightest of arguments? Nothing. And why not now? We have already seen, especially of late, that time only reduces the possible alternatives in the region. So even that weak excuse is dead.
Yesterday, a coalition of Israeli peace organizations published a list of 50 reasons for Israel to support a Palestinian state. Assuming that you only accept five of them, isn't that enough? What exactly is the alternative, now that the heavens are closing in around us? Can anyone, can Peres or Netanyahu, seriously contend that the regional hostility toward us would not have lessened had the occupation already ended and a Palestinian state been established?
The truths are so basic, so banal, that it hurts even to repeat them. But, unfortunately, they're the only ones we have. And so, a simple question to whoever will be representing us at the UN next week: Why not, for heaven's sake? Why "no" once again? And to what will we say "yes"?
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OF ISRAEL-PALESTINE CRISIS
The Obama Administration, after making extreme efforts to convince the Palestinian Authority to forego seeking UN recognition as an independent state later this week, will veto any such motion when it comes before the Security Council, despite overwhelming support for the Palestinians among the majority of countries in the General Assembly. An exacerbation of the Middle East political crisis is obviously brewing.
The Israeli left and peace movement supports the existence of an independent Palestinian state. On Sept. 14, the Palestinian-Israeli Peace NGO Forum — a coalition uniting over 100 Israeli peace and justice organizations — published a list of 50 reasons for Israel to support a Palestinian state. (Text at http://www.peacengo.org/.)
Following are three articles that shed a progressive light on the situation. The first piece is by veteran Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery, the leader of Gush Shalom (the Peace Bloc). The second is an analysis of Israeli's precarious position vis-a-vie its two important and now-former tacit allies — Egypt and Turkey — at a time when Turkish President Erdogan is visiting Cairo and working toward increasing Ankara's influence in the Arab world. Third is an analysis by progressive author and columnist Gideon Levy published in the Israel newspaper Haaretz.
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1. SAD AND HAPPY
By Uri Avnery
Gush Shalom, Sept. 17
“WILL THIS be the happiest day of your life?” a local interviewer asked me, referring to the approaching recognition of the State of Palestine by the UN.
I was taken by surprise. “Why would that be?” I asked.
“Well, for 62 years you have advocated the establishment of a Palestinian state next to Israel, and here it comes!”
“If I were a Palestinian, I would probably be happy,” I said, “But as an Israeli, I am rather sad.”
LET ME explain. I came out of the 1948 war with four solid convictions:
• There exists a Palestinian people, though the name Palestine had been wiped off the map.
• It is with this Palestinian people that we must make peace.
• Peace will be impossible unless the Palestinians are allowed to set up their state next to Israel.
• Without peace, Israel will not be the model state we had been dreaming about in the trenches, but something very different.
While recovering from my wounds and still in uniform, I met with several young people, Arabs and Jews, to plot our course. We were very optimistic. Now everything seemed possible.
What we were thinking about was a great act of fraternization. Jews and Arabs had fought each other valiantly, each fighting for what they considered their national rights. Now the time had come to reach out for peace.
The idea of peace between two gallant fighters after the battle is as old as Semitic culture. In the epic written more than 3000 years ago, Gilgamesh, king of Uruk (in today’s Iraq) fights against the wild Enkidu, his equal in strength and courage, and after the epic fight they become blood brothers.
We had fought hard and had won. The Palestinians had lost everything. The part of Palestine that had been allotted by the UN to their state had been gobbled up by Israel, Jordan and Egypt, leaving nothing for them. Half the Palestinian people had been driven from their homes and become refugees.
That was the time, we thought, for the victor to stun the world with an act of magnanimity and wisdom, offering to help the Palestinians to set up their state in return for peace. Thus we could forge a friendship that would last for generations.
18 years later I brought this vision up again in similar circumstances. We had won a stunning victory against the Arab armies in the Six-Day war, the Middle East was in a state of shock. An Israeli offer to the Palestinians to establish their state would have electrified the region.
I AM telling this story in order to make one point: when the “Two-State Solution” was conceived for the first time after 1948, it was as an idea of reconciliation, fraternization and mutual respect.
We envisaged two states living closely together, with borders open to the free movement of people and goods. Jerusalem, the joint capital, would symbolize the spirit of the historic change. Palestine would become the bridge between the new Israel and the Arab world, united for the common good. We spoke of a “Semitic Union” long before the European Union became a reality.
When the Two-State Solution made its extraordinary march from the vision of a handful of outsiders (or crazies) to a world-wide consensus, it was this context in which it was viewed. Not a plot against Israel, but the only viable basis for real peace.
This vision was firmly rejected by David Ben-Gurion, then the undisputed leader of Israel. He was busy distributing new Jewish immigrants across the vast areas expropriated from the Arabs, and he did not believe in peace with the Arabs anyhow. He set the course that successive Israeli governments, including the present one, have followed ever since.
On the Arab side, there was always support for this vision. Already at the Lausanne Conference in 1949, an unofficial Palestinian delegation appeared and secretly offered to start direct negotiations, but they were roughly rebuffed by the Israeli delegate, Eliyahu Sasson, on direct orders from Ben-Gurion (as I heard from him later).
Yasser Arafat told me several times – from 1982 to his death in 2004 – that he would support a “Benelux” solution (on the model of the union between Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxemburg), which would include Israel, Palestine and Jordan (“and perhaps Lebanon too, why not?”)
PEOPLE SPEAK about all the opportunities for peace missed by Israel throughout the years. That is nonsense: you can miss opportunities on the way to a goal that you desire, but not on the way to something you abhor.
Ben-Gurion saw an independent Palestinian state as a mortal danger to Israel. So he made a secret deal with King Abdullah I, dividing between them the territory allocated by the UN partition plan to the Arab Palestinian state. All Ben-Gurion's successors inherited the same dogma: that a Palestinian state would be a terrible danger. Therefore they opted for the so-called "Jordanian option" – keeping what is left of Palestine under the heel of the Jordanian monarch, who is no Palestinian (nor even Jordanian — his family came from Mecca).
This week, the present Jordanian ruler, Abdullah II, flew into a rage when told that yet another Israeli former general, Uzi Dayan, had again proposed turning Jordan into Palestine, with the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as “provinces” of the Hashemite kingdom. This Dayan is, unlike his late cousin, Moshe, a pompous fool, but even a speech by such a person infuriates the king, who is mortally afraid of an influx of Palestinians driven from the West Bank into Jordan.
Three days ago, Binyamin Netanyahu told Cathy Ashton, the pathetic “foreign secretary” of the European Union, that he would agree to anything short of Palestinian statehood. That may sound strange, in view of the “historic” speech he made less than two years ago, in which he expressed his support for the Two-State Solution. (Perhaps he was thinking of the State of Israel and the State of the Settlers.)
In the few remaining weeks before the UN vote, our government will fight tooth and nail against a Palestinian state, supported by the full might of the US. This week Hillary Clinton trumped even her own rhetorical record when she announced that the US supports the Two-State Solution and therefore opposes any UN vote recognizing a Palestinian state.
APART FROM the dire threats of what will happen after the UN vote for a Palestinian state, Israeli and American leaders assure us that such a vote will make no difference at all. If so, why fight it?
Of course it will make a difference. The occupation will go on, but it will be the occupation of one state by another. In history, symbols count. The fact that the vast majority of the world’s nations will have recognized the State of Palestine will be another step towards gaining freedom for Palestine.
What will happen the day after? Our army has already announced that it has finished preparations for huge Palestinian demonstrations that will attack the settlements. The settlers will be called upon to mobilize their “quick-reaction teams” to confront the demonstrators, thus fulfilling the prophecies of a “bloodbath”. After that the army will move in, pulling many battalions of regular troops from other tasks and calling up reserve units.
A few weeks ago I pointed to ominous signs that sharpshooters would be employed to turn peaceful demonstrations into something very different, as happened during the second intifada. This week this was officially confirmed: sharpshooters will be employed to defend the settlements.
All this amounts to a war plan for the settlements. To put it simply: a war to decide whether the West Bank belongs to the Palestinians or the settlers.
In an almost comical turn of events, the army is also providing means of crowd dispersal to the Palestinian security forces trained by the Americans. The occupation authorities expect these Palestinian forces to protect the settlements against their compatriots. Since these are the armed forces of the future Palestinian state, which is opposed by Israel, it all sounds a bit bewildering.
According to the army, the Palestinians will get rubber-coated bullets and tear gas, but not the “Skunk”.
The Skunk is a device that produces an unbearable stench which attaches itself to the peaceful demonstrators and will not leave them for a long time. I am afraid that when this chapter comes to an end, the stench will attach itself to our side, and that we shall not get rid of it for a long time indeed.
LET’S GIVE free rein to our imagination for just one minute.
Imagine that in the coming UN debate something incredible happens: the Israeli delegate declares that after due consideration Israel has decided to vote for recognition of the state of Palestine.
The assembly would gape in disbelief. After a moment of silence, wild applause would break out. The world would be electrified. For days, the world media would speak of nothing else.
The minute of imagination has passed. Back to reality. Back to the Skunk.
———————————
2. TURKEY TAKES OVER THE ARAB SPRING
By Pepe Escobar,
Asia Times Sept. 15
Finally. Crystal clear. Someone finally said it — what the whole world, except Washington and Tel Aviv, knows in its collective heart; the recognition of a Palestinian state is "not an option but an obligation."
It did wonders that the man who said it was Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in Cairo, at the Arab League, in front of all Arab foreign ministers and with virtually the whole Arab world glued to satellite networks scrutinizing his every word.
The current Erdogan Arab Spring tour — as it was billed by the Turkish press — comprising Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, has already rocketed him to the status of a geopolitical cross between U2's Bono and Barcelona's superstar Argentine footballer Lionel Messi.
Erdogan received a rock/soccer star welcome at Cairo's airport — complete with "Hero Erdogan" banners brandished by the Muslim Brotherhood. He even addressed the crowd in Arabic (from "Greetings to the Egyptian youth and people, how are you?" to "Peace be upon you").
Erdogan repeatedly stressed, "Egypt and Turkey are hand-in-hand." But it's the subtext that is even more incendiary. While Israel's former good friends Egypt and Turkey are now hand-in-hand, Israel is left isolated facing a wall. There could not be a more earth-shattering development in the Levant — unheard of since the Camp David peace accords between Israel and Egypt in 1978.
Erdogan's tour is a realpolitik master class. He's positioning Turkey as the forefront supporter of the Palestinian cause. He's also positioning Turkey at the core of the Arab Spring — as a supporter and as an inspirational model, even though there have been no full-fledged revolutions so far. He's emphasizing solid Turkish-Arab unity — for instance planning a strategic cooperation council between Egypt and Turkey.
Plus the whole thing makes good business sense. Erdogan's caravan includes six ministers and nearly 200 Turkish businessmen bent on investing heavily all across northern Africa. In Egypt, they may not match the billions of dollars already committed by the House of Saud to the military junta led by Air Marshall Mohammed Tantawi. But in 2010, Turkish trade with the Middle East and North Africa was already at $30 billion, representing 27% of Turkish exports. Over 250 Turkish companies have already invested $1.5 billion in Egypt.
Crucially, Erdogan told Egyptian TV channel Dream, "Do not be wary of secularism. I hope there will be a secular state in Egypt." Erdogan was subtly referring to Turkey's secular constitution; and at the same time he was very careful to remind Egyptians that secularism is compatible with Islam.
The current Turkish model is enormously popular among the Egyptian street, featuring a moderate Islamic party (the Justice and Development Party — AKP) in power; a secular constitution; the military — albeit strong — back in the barracks; and an ongoing economic boom (Turkey was the world's fastest growing economy in the first half of 2011).
This model is not exactly what the regressive House of Saud wants. They would prefer a heavily Islamist government controlled by the most conservative factions of the Muslim Brotherhood. Worse; as far as Libya is concerned, the House of Saud would love to have a friendly emirate, or at least a government peppered with Islamic fundamentalists.
Erdogan also stressed that the "aggressiveness" of Israel "threatens the future of the Israeli people". That's music for the Arab street. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas met Erdogan in Cairo — and confirmed he'll go ahead with Palestine's bid to be fully recognized as a state by the United Nations Security Council later this month.
Palestine will definitely be accepted as a non-voting state by the UN General Assembly floor. The problem is the extremely non-representative Security Council — which sanctions full UN membership with state voting rights. It's a done deal that Washington will veto it. The fractured European Union (EU), true to its character, still has not decided on a unified vote. There's a strong possibility Britain and France will also veto the Palestinian bid at the Security Council.
Yet even with the consolation price of "only" becoming a non-voting state, Palestine strikes a moral victory — aligned with world public opinion. Moreover, Palestine can become a member of the International Criminal Curt and sue the hell out of Israel over its serial violations of international law.
Turkey's game goes way beyond "neo-Ottomanism" — or nostalgia to revive the superpower days of the 16th and 17th centuries. It's a natural development of Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu's policy of "zero problems with our neighbors" — moving to forge deeper bonds with most of these neighbors, and consolidating what Davutoglu himself defines as Turkey's strategic destiny (see Turkey: the sultans of swing Asia Times Online, April 7, 2011).
Turkey, for some years now, had decisively abandoned an isolationist brand of Turkish nationalism. The country seems to have finally surmounted the trauma associated to its dream of joining the EU; for all practical purposes the dream was shattered by France and Germany.
As for the Israeli-Turkey alliance, in fact it kept the Arab world at bay and confined Turkey to a passive role of
ineffective outsider in the Middle East. Not anymore. Erdogan can now afford to send multiple simultaneous messages to Israel, the US, the EU, assorted Arab leaders and most of all the Arab street.
Davutoglu has been relatively magnanimous towards Israel, saying it is "out of touch with the region and unable to perceive the changes taking place, which makes it impossible for the country to have healthy relations with its neighbors".
What he could have added is with "friends" like that — Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister, former Moldova bouncer Avigdor Lieberman as foreign minister, rabid settlers dictating policy — Israel does not need enemies; or rather fabricates enemies en masse. It is the Israeli government itself that accelerated Turkey's rapprochement with Egypt — which is leaving Israel totally isolated.
The touch of genius in the whole process is that Erdogan represents a democracy in a Muslim majority country strongly supporting both the Palestinians and the real pro-democrats in the Arab Spring. This provides a direct connection between the Palestinian tragedy and the spirit of the Arab Spring (which has nothing to do, it must be stressed, with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) bombing Libya or a military junta running Egypt).
It will be crucial to watch Erdogan's Islam-rooted AKP's follow-up. It's virtually certain that in the next Egyptian elections the Muslim Brotherhood will come out swinging. It's also virtually certain the Brotherhood will press for a minimalist relationship with Israel, including a full revision of the Camp David accords. In theory, Turkey would be fully behind it.
Then there's the Libya front. In his first public address in Tripoli, the chairman of the dodgy Transitional National Council (TNC), Mustafa Abdel Jailil, stressed Islamic sharia law would be the main source of legislation. But he crucially added, "We will not accept any extremist ideology, on the right or the left. We are a Muslim people, for a moderate Islam."
There's no evidence yet the TNC will be even able to hold the country together, not to mention promote "moderate Islam". The (foreign) vultures continue circling. NATO's secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, has been warning that Libya is in danger of falling into the hands of Islamic extremists who would "try to exploit" the current power vacuum. It's unclear what role Turkey — a key NATO member — would have inside a NATO fully implanted in Libya.
And all this while the Persian Gulf petro-monarchies — horrified by the Arab Spring — have proposed $2 billion in annual direct aid to Jordan so it will become part of the GCC, the Gulf Cooperation Council, also known as the Gulf Counter-revolutionary Club. As a monarchical club, the GCC wants Jordan and Morocco as new members. The icing on the cake, though, would be a monarchical Libya.
On a parallel track, the counter-revolutionaries have been forced by Turkey to step up — at least verbally — their support for Palestine. Even Jordan's King Abdullah, staunch US ally and Israel's only "friend" left in the Middle East, has claimed that "the future Palestine are stronger than Israel is today".
Well, Israel did look for it — after the invasion of Lebanon in 2006, the massacre in Gaza in 2008 and the attack on the Turkish flotilla in 2010. In terms of world public opinion, Israel is toast — and even the Arab counter-revolution had to notice.
That includes the House of Saud. None other than former Saudi intelligence supremo Prince Turki al-Faisal wrote a New York Times op-ed piece stating outright, "Saudi leaders would be forced by domestic and regional pressures to adopt a far more independent and assertive foreign policy" if the US vetoes the Palestinian bid at the Security Council.
Prince Turki also stressed that everything must evolve around a two-state solution based on the pre-1967 borders, which every grain of sand in the Sinai knows Israel will never accept.
In the event of a US veto, Prince Turki threatened Saudi Arabia would be "opposing the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in Iraq" and would "part ways with Washington in Afghanistan and Yemen as well".
Now imagine the House of Saud lavishly funding a double guerrilla war all across the Pentagon's "arc of instability" — Sunnis against Shi'ites in Iraq plus the already turbocharged Taliban in Afghanistan — while lobbying for an Islamist government in both Egypt and Turkey; and this while Egypt and Turkey for their part fully collide with an isolated and angry Israel. Now that's what the "birth pangs of the new Middle East" are all about.
— Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His latest book is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).
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WHAT WILL WE SAY?
By Gideon Levy
Haaretz Op Ed: Sept. 15, 2011
What will we tell the world next week, at the UN? What could we say? Whether in the General Assembly or the Security Council, we will be exposed in all our nakedness: Israel does not want a Palestinian state. Period. And it doesn't have a single persuasive argument against the establishment and the international recognition of such a state.
So what will we say, that we're opposed? Four prime ministers, Benjamin Netanyahu among them, have said that they're in favor, that it must be accomplished through negotiations, so why haven't we done it yet? Is our argument that we object to it's being a unilateral measure? What's more unilateral than the settlements that we insist on continuing to build [for 44 years]? Or perhaps we will say that the route to a Palestinian state runs through Ramallah and Jerusalem, not New York, a la the U.S. secretary of state. The State of Israel itself was created, in part, in the United Nations.
Next week will be Israel's moment of truth, or more precisely the moment in which its deception will be revealed. Be it the president, the prime minister or the ambassador to the UN, even the greatest of public speakers will be incapable of standing before the representatives of the nations of the world and explaining Israeli logic; none of the three will be able to convince them that there is any merit to Israel's position.
Thirty-two years ago, Israel signed a peace agreement with Egypt in which it undertook "to recognize the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people" and to establish an autonomous authority in the West Bank and Gaza Strip within five years. Nothing happened.
Eighteen years ago the prime minister of Israel signed the Oslo Accords, in which Israel undertook to conduct talks in order to achieve a final-status agreement with the Palestinians, including the core issues, within five years. That, too, did not occur. Most of the provisions of the agreement have foundered since then — in the majority of cases because of Israel. What will Israel's advocate at the UN say about this?
For years, Israel claimed that Yasser Arafat was the sole obstacle to peace with the Palestinians. Arafat died — and once again nothing happened. Israel claimed that if only the terror were to stop, a solution would appear. The terror stopped — and nothing. Israel's excuses became increasingly empty and the naked truth was increasingly exposed. Israel does not want to reach a peace arrangement that would involve the establishment of a Palestinian state. This can no longer be covered up in the UN. And what did Netanyahu's Israel expect the Palestinians to do in this case — another round of photo ops, like the ones with Ehud Barak, Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni that led nowhere?
The truth is that the Palestinians have just three options, not four: to surrender unconditionally and go on living under Israeli occupation for another 42 years at least; to launch a third Intifada; or to mobilize the world on their behalf. They picked the third option, the lesser of all evils even from Israel's perspective. What could Israel say about this — that it's a unilateral step, as it and the United States have said? But it didn't agree to stop construction in the settlements, the mother of all unilateral steps. What did the Palestinians have left? The international arena. And if that won't save them, then another popular uprising in the territories.
The Palestinians in the West Bank, 3.5 million today, will not live without civil rights for another 42 years. We might as well get used to the fact that the world won't stand for it. Can Netanyahu or Shimon Peres explain why the Palestinians do not deserve their own state? Do they have even the slightest of arguments? Nothing. And why not now? We have already seen, especially of late, that time only reduces the possible alternatives in the region. So even that weak excuse is dead.
Yesterday, a coalition of Israeli peace organizations published a list of 50 reasons for Israel to support a Palestinian state. Assuming that you only accept five of them, isn't that enough? What exactly is the alternative, now that the heavens are closing in around us? Can anyone, can Peres or Netanyahu, seriously contend that the regional hostility toward us would not have lessened had the occupation already ended and a Palestinian state been established?
The truths are so basic, so banal, that it hurts even to repeat them. But, unfortunately, they're the only ones we have. And so, a simple question to whoever will be representing us at the UN next week: Why not, for heaven's sake? Why "no" once again? And to what will we say "yes"?
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