The Biden and Clinton Mutinies

CounterPunch, July 31, 2009

The Biden and Clinton Mutinies

By Alexander Cockburn

Time bombs tossed seemingly casually in the past month by his vice president and his secretary of state disclose president Obama, in the dawn of his first term, already the target of carefully meditated onslaughts by senior members of his own cabinet.

At the superficial level Obama is presiding over an undisciplined administration; on a more realistic and sinister construction, he is facing mutiny, publicly conducted by two people who only a year ago were claiming that their qualifications to be in the Oval Office were far superior to those of the junior senator from Illinois .

The great danger to Obama posed by Biden’s and Clinton’s “time bombs” (a precisely correct description if we call them political, not diplomatic time bombs) is not international confusion and ridicule over what precisely are the US government’s policies, but a direct onslaught on his presidency by a domestic Israeli lobby that is so out of control that it renders ridiculous Obama’s puny attempt to stop settlements–or to curb Israeli aggression in any other way.

Take Joe Biden. Three weeks ago he gave Israel the green light to bomb Iran, only to be swiftly corrected by his boss. At the time it seemed yet another,somewhat comical mile marker in a lifetime of gaffes, perpetrated in the cause of self-promotion and personal political advantage.

But Biden’s subsequent activities invite a darker construction. In the immediate aftermath of Obama’s Moscow visit, the air still soft with honeyed words about a new era of trust and cooperation, Biden headed for Ukraine and Georgia, harshly ridiculing Russia as an economic basket case with no future. In Tbilisi he told the Georgian parliament that the U.S. would continue helping Georgia “to modernize” its military and that Washington “fully supports” Georgia’s aspiration to join NATO and would help Tbilisi meet the alliance’s standards. This elicited a furious reaction from Moscow, pledging sanctions against any power rearming Georgia.

Georgia could play a vital, enabling role, in the event that Israel decides to attack Iran’s nuclear complex. The flight path from Israel to Iran is diplomatically and geographically challenging. On the other hand, Georgia is perfectly situated as the take-off point for any such raid. Israel has been heavily involved in supplying and training Georgia’s armed forces. President Saakashvili has boasted that his Defense Minister, Davit Kezerashvili and also Temur Yakobashvili , the minister responsible for negotiations over South Ossetia, lived in Israel before moving to Georgia, adding “Both war and peace are in the hands of Israeli Jews.”

On the heels of Biden’s shameless pandering in Tbilisi, Secretary of State Clinton took herself off to Thailand for an international confab with Asian leaders and let drop to a tv chat show that “a nuclear Iran could be contained by a U.S. ‘defense umbrella,’” actually a nuclear defense umbrella for Israel and for Egypt and Saudi Arabia too.

The Israel lobby has been promoting the idea of a US “nuclear umbrella” for some years, with one of its leading exponents being Dennis Ross, now in charge of Middle Eastern policy at Obama’s National Security Council. In her campaign last year Clinton flourished the notion as an example of the sort of policy initiative that set her apart from that novice in foreign affairs, Barack Obama.

From any rational point of view the “nuclear umbrella” is an awful idea, redolent with all the gimcrack theology of the high cold war era, about “first strike”, “second strike”, “stable deterrence” ,“controlled escalation” and “mutual assured destruction”, used to sell US escalations in nuclear arms production, from Kennedy and the late Robert McNamara(“the Missile Gap”) to Reagan (“Star Wars”).

Indeed, as one Pentagon veteran remarked to me earlier this week, “the Administration’s whole nuclear stance is turning into a cheesy rerun of the Cold War and Mutually Assured Destruction, all based on a horrible exaggeration of one or two Iranian nuclear bombs that the Persians may be too incompetent to build and most certainly are too incompetent to deliver.”

The Biden and Clinton “foreign” policy is: 1) to recreate the same old Cold War (with a new appendage, the US versus Iran nuclear confrontation) for the same old reasons: to pump up domestic defense spending; and 2) to continue sixty years of supporting Israeli imperialism for the same reasons that every president from Harry to Dubya (perhaps barring Ike) did so: to corner Israel lobby money and votes. Regarding the latter, Obama did the same by grabbing the Chicago-based Crown and Pritzker family money very early in his campaign and by making Rahm Emanuel his very first appointment (the two are hardly unrelated).

So right from the start Obama was already an Israel lobby fellow traveler. The Mitchell appointment and the toothless blather about settlements were simply cosmetic, bones tossed to the increasing proportion of the American electorate that’s grossed out by the ethnic cleansing of the Arabs from the Holy Land. Obama does have a coherent strategy: keep the defense money flowing and increasing, but without making so much noise as the older generation did about ancient Cold War enemies (e.g. Russia and Cuba). The F-22 — to date, the one and only presidential issue on which he’s shown any toughness at all — is in no sense a departure from keeping the money flowing, since he is indeed increasing the defense budget, in part by using the F-22 cancellation to push spending on the even worse F-35 and to hide his acquiescence to all the other pork in the Congressional defense budget.

The window for any new president to impose a decisive change in foreign policy comes in the first three months, before opposition has time to solidify. Obama squandered that opportunity, stocking his foreign policy team with tarnished players such as Ross. As the calculated indiscretions of Biden and Clinton suggest, not to mention the arrogance of Netanyahu and his political associates, the window of opportunity has closed.

Would it have been that hard to signal a change in course? Not really. Obama could have excited the world by renouncing the Bush administration’s assertion, in the “National Defense Strategy of the United States” of 2002 — preserved in its essence in ensuing years — of the right and intention of the United States to preëmptively attack any country “at the time, place, and in the manner of our choosing.” As William Polk, the State Department’s middle east advisor in the Kennedy era, wrote last year: “As long as this remains a valid statement of American policy, the Iranian government would be foolish not to seek a nuclear weapon.”

But Obama, surrounded with Clinton-era veterans of NATO expansionism and, as his Accra speech indicated, hobbled with an impeccably conventional view of how the world works, is rapidly being overwhelmed by the press of events. He’s bailed out the banks. He’s transferred war from Iraq to Afghanistan. The big lobbies know they have him on the run.

Hence Biden and Clinton’s mutinies, conducted on behalf of the Israel lobby and designed to seize administration policy as Obama’s popularity weakens. When the results of the latest Rasmussen presidential poll were published, showing Obama’s declining numbers, there were news reports of cheering in Tel Aviv. And remember two useful guiding principles: first, it is impossible to overestimate the vanity of politicians, particularly of Joe Biden. Maybe he secretly entertains some mad notion of challenging Obama in 2012, propelled by Israel Lobby money withheld from Obama. Maybe Bill is reminding HRC that he reached the White House in 1992 partly because the Israel lobby turned against George Bush Sr. Second principle: there is no such thing as foreign policy, neither in democratic governments nor in dictatorships. As Thalheimer’s Law* decrees. All policy is domestic.

Racist, Anti-Immigrant Web Posts Traced to Homeland Security

July 25, 2009

Racist Web Posts Traced to Homeland Security

By KIRK SEMPLE

After federal border agents detained several Mexican immigrants in western New York in June, an article about the incident in a local newspaper drew an onslaught of vitriolic postings on its Web site. Some were racist. Others attacked farmers in the region, an apple-growing area east of Rochester, accusing them of harboring illegal workers. Still others made personal attacks about the reporter who wrote the article.

Most of the posts were made anonymously. But in reviewing the logs of its Internet server, the paper, The Wayne County Star in Wolcott, traced three of them to Internet protocol addresses at the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees border protection.

Homeland Security started an investigation into the posts this month, according to the reporter, Louise Hoffman-Broach, and Richard M. Healy, the Wayne County district attorney. A spokeswoman for the federal agency’s inspector general said she could neither confirm nor deny an investigation; department rules prohibit the use of office equipment for the personal transmission of material that could offend fellow employees or the public.

Coming on the eve of the apple harvest season, the Web posts and the investigation — first reported this week on The Star’s Web site — have ratcheted up longstanding tensions in Wayne County, where farmers and laborers have accused immigration officials of using heavy-handed tactics like racial profiling and arbitrary or unjustified detentions.

Such tactics, the farmers say, have scared Hispanic farmworkers from the region just as growers are preparing for the harvest.

Representative Dan Maffei, who represents the area in Congress, said the allegations of overaggressive immigration enforcement, coming from a wide range of constituents, were “of extreme concern.”

“I’m investigating these reports to make sure that people’s rights aren’t being harmed and that the economy of Wayne County is not being harmed,” said Mr. Maffei, a Democrat.

A. J. Price, a regional spokesman for United States Customs and Border Protection, defended the work of the area’s officers. “We are constantly criticized for doing our job, and that’s just part of our job,” Mr. Price said.

Local officials and residents say that beginning about 2006, federal officials stepped up their enforcement of immigration laws in western New York.

Farmers and other residents said the push created a climate of fear in communities whose economies depend on migrant laborers, many of them illegal immigrants.

The Obama administration has moved to a less confrontational policy at work sites, focusing on employers. But Customs and Border Protection, which does not conduct work-site inspections, had not changed its strategy in New York, Mr. Price said.

The latest flare-up began with a boat trip on June 12. A local farmer, Robert Norris, decided to take a Mexican employee and relatives of another worker for a spin on Lake Ontario, Ms. Hoffman-Broach said.

Federal agents stopped the boat because it had too many people on board, Mr. Price said. When some of the passengers were unable to produce documentation proving they were citizens or legal immigrants, he said, they were detained. All but one was eventually released, The Star reported.

The article about the arrests, posted on June 16, led to a torrent of angry Web postings. One, sent from a fake e-mail address, said, “watcha doing to mi wifey, no checky her papeles. she no legal, but she havey benifit card.”

A response, which carried a Homeland Security Internet protocol address, read: “That sounds like my boyfriend. Leave him alones and get your own. My boyfriend works sometimes but he is really good at getting FREE benefits from the Federal and State government.”

Another post, apparently sent from a separate computer linked to Homeland Security, read in part: “These farmers have a problem because the gravy train that they were riding for soooooo long is being brought to light.”

The newspaper removed the posts. It also reported that it had discovered others, dating to last year, that appeared to have come from computers affiliated with Homeland Security.

Re. Gates and Crowley: Police are trained to oppress by race and class

Sgt. Crowley says racism had nothing to do with it; he was just doing what he was trained to do. Sgt. Crowley’s fellow officers, some of whom are black, as well as the Superintendent of Cambridge police, agreed with Sgt. Crowley. Sgt. Crowley said he had nothing to apologize for. He was simply doing what police are trained to do. You know what? Sgt. Crowley is right. And that is exactly the problem with the police in the United States.  The police in our society are trained to enforce law and order. The order is inequality, based on extremely unequal private property ownership.

John Spritzler, July 25, 2009

The White Cop and the Black Professor

White police Sgt. James Crowley insists that he did nothing wrong in arresting and handcuffing black Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in his home last week on the charge of disturbing the peace.

Despite the fact that Professor Gates had shown Sgt. Crowley identification and Sgt. Crowley knew the professor was the legal occupant of the home he was in, Sgt. Crowley claims that his police training taught him that when the professor allegedly directed angry and disrespectful language towards him it became necessary to arrest and handcuff the professor. Sgt. Crowley says racism had nothing to do with it; he was just doing what he was trained to do. Sgt. Crowley’s fellow officers, some of whom are black, as well as the Superintendent of Cambridge police, agreed with Sgt. Crowley. Sgt. Crowley said he had nothing to apologize for. He was simply doing what police are trained to do.

You know what? Sgt. Crowley is right. And that is exactly the problem with the police in the United States.

Police are trained to act as authoritarian thugs when they are dealing with people who are not obviously of, or loyal to, the very wealthy elite who rule the nation. Let us give Sgt. Crowley the benefit of the doubt about how Professor Gates behaved. Let us dismiss the professor’s claim that he was respectful and that he merely asked if he was being treated the way he was because he was a black man in America, and let us dismiss his claim that he simply asked for Sgt. Crowley’s name and badge number. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that Sgt. Crowley’s account is true–that the professor spoke loudly and angrily and disrespectfully towards Sgt. Crowley. A non-authoritarian, non-thuggish police officer would have ignored that behavior, and just left the scene after determining that no law was being broken. The professor was not disturbing anybody’s peace* except perhaps Sgt. Crowley’s, and the solution was to just say goodbye and leave. But that is not what Sgt. Crowley was trained to do.

The police in our society are trained to enforce law and order. The order is inequality, based on extremely unequal private property ownership. A few people own billions of dollars of property, most do not even own their own home free and clear, and many own nothing but debt. Class conflict is largely over the question of whether our society should be based on equality or inequality in property ownership, and hence in social status. When people at the bottom do anything that seriously threatens the inequality of the status quo, like carry out a labor strike that actually aims to shut down production, or wage a general strike that threatens to become a revolution as happened in Seattle in 1919, or even just exercise the right to bear arms while being black, the police are called in to suppress it, often with ruthless violence.

Public police departments, historically, were created to suppress workers’ strikes; they are publicly funded versions of the private security goon squads that employers initially relied upon for this purpose. The FBI, for example, is actually a spinoff of the notoriously brutal strike-breaking private Pinkerton National Detective Agency.

The police are trained to enforce law and order in an unjust and unequal society, and a big part of doing this requires that they make ordinary people obey them out of fear. Everybody knows that if you are stopped by a policeman while driving your car, you risk being handcuffed and jailed, if not shot, if you are anything less than absolutely deferential to the police officer. Parents, especially the poorest, know they must teach their children this survival lesson. When I was collecting signatures for a ballot question at a shopping mall, which I have a constitutional right to do despite it being private property, the police ordered me to leave. When I told the police I had a right to be there, they refused to listen. They were arrogant and thuggish. When I tilted my head to read the sideways badge number of the policeman, he said, “What are you looking at?” in a threatening manner and told me to leave or he’d arrest me. This is how they are trained to behave towards both white people (like me) and black people.

WHAT ABOUT RACE?

What about it? Even if the police treated whites and blacks exactly the same way, they would still be authoritarian thugs enforcing class inequality. That’s their job. And that’s the problem.

President Obama knows that police departments play the same role in society that he, himself, is playing–they defend class inequality and they serve the very wealthy at the top of society. Obama’s invitation to Sgt. Crowley to join him and Professor Gates over a beer in the White House is meant to make it clear to the American people that, despite occasional “incidents” that may require smoothing ruffled feathers, police departments in the United States are to be accorded respect and deference. President Obama is not part of the solution; he is part of the problem.

—————-

* If the charge was actually “disorderly conduct” the point remains the same: it is as absurd to arrest somebody for disorderly conduct inside his own home as to arrest somebody for indecent exposure inside his own bathroom.

California Democrats toss poor, elderly, disabled, and working class overboard

“This is absolutely parallel to the fascism of Europe during the 1930s, in it’s broad attack on the elderly, disabled and poor, who are being scapegoated just as the Jews of Europe were in the 30s. They are turning citizens into aliens, and are trying to turn the elderly and disabled into criminals. I can bear witness to the damage being done to people in my generation, by the horrific effects of the budget cuts taking place,” said Walden, “and I further believe that we have become living targets of a fascist state. As witness to recent events, I am convinced that we are on the road to fascism.”

Indybay Media, July 25, 2009

Democrats sell out California’s poor, elderly, and disabled in budget deal

by Lynda Carson of Tenants Rule

California’s phony bleeding heart liberal democrats have just helped to pass a republican budget deal that shreds California’s safety net, by cutting $15.5 billion from the states service sector to partially close a $26.3 billion funding shortfall in state revenues.

Among other things, the democrats supported a $1.3 billion cut to MediCal, a $2.8 billion cut to the state wide university school system, and a $6 billion cut to California’s K-12 schools. The democratic leadership also supported the republicans push to slash the children’s health insurance program known as Healthy Families, In-Home Supportive Services and the CalWORKs program by cutting $878 million or more in coming months.

Rather than raising taxes on the rich and the major corporations that fail to pay their fair share of the tax burden in California, the democrats chose to side with the republicans and two bit actor ‘Schwarzenegger’ turned governor, in stealing precious resources meant to assist students, children, the sick, disabled, elderly, poor and the working middle class.

Meanwhile, Congresswoman Barbara Lee and other phony liberals continue to remain silent about the budget cutting process taking place in Sacramento, while the true extent of the attacks on the poor, elderly and disabled reaches new heights of deception and depravity.

During recent weeks, numerous calls made to Congresswoman Lee’s office inquiring as to why the powerful congresswoman remains silent about the attack on California’s safety net, have resulted in nothing more than a “BIG NO COMMENT,” coming from her staffers in Washington, including her local spokesperson Ricky Graham, in Oakland. “California’s budget crisis is a state issue, not a federal issue, and therefore Congresswoman Lee has no comment,” said Graham.

Considering that Congresswoman Lee represents millions of people in the great state of California, Ricky Graham’s statement was totally lacking in credibility and humanity.

As California’s democratic leadership including Assembly Speaker Karen Bass and Pro Tem Darrel Steinberg along with a total of 18 democrat sell-outs who supported the republican’s attack on the safety net try to conceal how much damage they have wrought upon the general public, hundreds of thousands of Californians will be hit hard in future months by the budget deal that protects the interests of the mighty rich, as it crushes the lives and interests of the working class poor.

Making matters worse for the elderly, disabled and poor, the democratic leadership granted extreme new powers to the republican minority by agreeing to proposals that do major damage to COLA’s (cost of living increases) for those in CalWORK’s, SSP and other areas of the states safety net, by requiring that any new COLAs for the people in those programs, must be approved by a two-thirds vote in future budget proposals.

At a small July 22, rally in front of Oakland City Hall, Eleanor Walden and her daughter Nasira, publicly spoke out against the republican budget cutting proposals along with Zachary Norris of ‘Books Not Bars’, and Kevin D. Shields the ‘DSRP Coordinator’ for the Disabled Students Program at the University of California, in Berkeley.

“The thought of the democrats siding with the republicans in the fascist proposals being passed to make the elderly and disabled get finger printed because of their participation in the ‘In-Home Supportive Services Program’, is enough to make my blood boil,” said Eleanor Walden, a Berkeley scholar of 20th century American history and folklore.

“This is absolutely parallel to the fascism of Europe during the 1930s, in it’s broad attack on the elderly, disabled and poor, who are being scapegoated just as the Jews of Europe were in the 30s. They are turning citizens into aliens, and are trying to turn the elderly and disabled into criminals. I can bear witness to the damage being done to people in my generation, by the horrific effects of the budget cuts taking place,” said Walden, “and I further believe that we have become living targets of a fascist state. As witness to recent events, I am convinced that we are on the road to fascism.”

Kevin Shields the DSRP Coordinator for disabled students said, “By cutting the social services desperately needed by the disabled and elderly, you create a whole new class of citizens who become angry, frustrated and disillusioned about the system that was meant to assist them in their time of need.”

Lydia Gans of Food Not Bombs said, “We already are seeing a huge increase in the homeless and hungry, due to the effects of a bad economy during our feeding times at People’s Park. The non profits who usually help out are losing funding and donations, and this latest round of budget cutting proposals will increase the level of homelessness and hunger all across the state. What should be happening, is that everyone affected by the budget cuts should be in the streets of Sacramento and cities across the state to protest against the inhumanity and catastrophic effects that are taking place in everyday peoples lives.”

As being proposed by state law makers, theres an additional $8 million in funding to be slashed from the budget for state parks, on top of the $226 million in cuts to IHSS, plus $528 million from CalWORKS, including $124 million in cuts from the Healthy Families program that will negatively affect 930,000 low-income children.

SSI/SSP recipients have already taken a huge 6.4% cut from the state assistance program since February 2009, including the suspension of their cost of living increases that were promised to be payed back, after being grabbed by the governor. It will be nearly impossible to restore the cost of living increases now that the democrats gave new sweeping powers to the republicans who are demanding a two-thirds majority vote to allow a cost of living adjustment to occur in future months and years.

As the democrats try to conceal and deceive the public about the true extent of damage they have done to California’s safety net by siding with the republicans in the vicious attack on children, the disabled, elderly and working class poor, additional budget cuts are expected as the governor prepares to use the line item veto during the next few days to slash another $1.1 billion dollars from the budget, in an attempt to balance the budget on the backs of the poor.

A press conference and rally for the ‘People’s Budget Fix’, calling for criminal justice reforms that will increase public safety, protect the social safety net and save the state billions, will take place on July 30, between 11am – 12pm, at the Elihu M. Harris State Building, 1515 Clay St, Oakland, near the 12th St, BART Station.

Contact Jennifer Kim; Jennifer [at] ellabakercenter.org or (510) 285-8234 for more details about the July 30 rally.

How Healthy is Healthy San Francisco?

SF Bay Guardian, Wednesday, July 22, 2009

How healthy is Healthy SF?

The program is a pioneering effort — but will budget cuts damage it?

BY WENDI JONASSEN

San Francisco is getting national attention for its attempt at universal health care. President Obama even applauded the city’s efforts in a speech: “Instead of just talking about health care, [San Francisco has been] ensuring that those in need receive it.”

But Healthy San Francisco — a pioneering effort to do at the municipal level what the federal and state governments won’t — is running into some troubling problems, made worse by Mayor Gavin Newsom’s budget cuts.

The program was initiated by Tom Ammiano, now a state assembly member, with backing from organized labor. Ammiano’s goal was to provide easy access to affordable health care for all of S.F.’s 60,000 uninsured. A local version of a single-payer program, he argued, could provide accessible primary and preventative care, alleviating the need for indigent patients to use the overcrowded and expensive San Francisco General Hospital emergency room as their primary medical provider.

Healthy San Francisco was launched on July 2, 2007, at two Chinatown clinics. It has grown dramatically, and now provides services to more than 34,000 residents at 27 clinics.

Although Newsom sat on the sidelines while Ammiano pushed the legislation, the mayor has now unashamedly claimed the program as his own to promote his gubernatorial campaign. On his Web site he boldly declares that “he’s created the only universal health care program in the country” — with no mention of Ammiano.

The $200 million-a-year program is partially funded by an employer-mandate requiring businesses with more than 20 employees either to provide health insurance or pay a fee to the city. The fees are broken down according to the size of the business; as of January 2009, employers pay between $1.23–$1.85 for every hour an employee works.

Like any traditional health insurance program, Healthy SF has annual fees and point-of-service charges paid by participants. The remainder of the program is funded through state grants.

Opposition to HSF surfaced immediately. The Golden Gate Restaurant Association sued the city even before the program started, alleging that the employer-spending mandate is a violation of federal law.

Kevin Westlye, the association’s executive director, claims his beef is not with the health care system, just with the employer mandate. He suggested that the city raise its sales tax to pay for the program — or that the financial burden should fall on the backs of the billionaires that run privatized health care and pharmaceutical companies.

But the city has only a limited ability to raise taxes, and any tax hike would require voter approval. The employer mandates and fees were much more politically feasible.

Deputy City Attorney Vince Chhabria, who is representing the city on the case, argues, “It is difficult to imagine, in these budget times, that San Francisco could provide universal coverage without employer health care spending requirements.”

Federal courts sided with the GGRA initially, but the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed that the employer-spending mandate was legal. The GGRA appealed to the United States Supreme Court; the court will announce Oct. 5 whether it will hear the case.

That’s not the only litigation facing HSF. A group of low-income residents are suing the city, saying that the system’s annual fees and co-pays are too high. The program’s fees are scaled to the federal poverty level, which is currently set at an annual income of $10,830. A single person making between 101 percent and 200 percent of the federal poverty level — that is, between about $11,000 and $20,000 a year — pays $180 a year for HSF membership. People earning between $40,000 and $50,000 pay $1,350 a year.

There are also co-pays of $10 for medical visits and $5 to $25 for prescriptions — again, typical of health insurance plans.

Bay Area Legal Aid and the Western Center on Law and Poverty are representing three San Francisco residents who say those fees violate federal and state mandates, which stipulate that the city must provide free health care to those who can’t afford to pay. Healthy San Francisco is only one element of the lawsuit; it also claims that San Francisco General Hospital charges low-income people too much and that the city’s medical bills and collection practices aren’t fair.

One of the plaintiffs is Robyn Paige, a San Francisco resident with spine, foot, and hip injuries. Paige contends that she can’t afford the co-payments on her multiple medications each month and must either go without pain medication or borrow money. Lisa Qare, 21-year-old resident with MS, had to wait three weeks for medication for an eye condition that developed as a result of her condition.

A $10 co-pay may not seem like much, but when a patient needs several doctor visits a month and must pay $5 to $25 each for multiple prescriptions, it adds up. “As a result,” Michael Keys, a Bay Area Legal Aid lawyer, told us, “those who can’t afford the charges are falling into medical debt or skipping services or medication.”

And, not surprisingly, the cash-strapped city is having trouble finding enough staff and facilities to meet all the needs. Nancy Keiler, a Mission District resident and HSF participant, complains that clinic visits are too short, and that “the doctor is too hurried and has too many patients.” (That’s a common complaint about private health plans, as well.) After waiting three hours, another HSF participant had to leave without her prescription to get back to work on time.

The long lines and waits will only get worse in the face of budget cuts. Pink slips were already handed out to several hundred San Francisco health care workers and 1,000 more may be laid off this fall.

Robert Haaland, who works with the Service Employees International Union Local 1021, told us the staffing cuts will make the situation much worse. Martha Hawthorne, a public-health nurse, said she thinks that there won’t be enough providers to provide good care — and that many health care workers losing their jobs will have to enroll in HSF themselves, putting even more strain on the system.

Ammiano, the author of the plan, is concerned too. “I’m very worried about it,” he said. “It seems to me now that if there’s this budget pain, there will be impacts to San Francisco.”

Nathan Ballard, the mayor’s press secretary, tersely denied that HSF will feel any budget pain. Asked about critics’ allegations, he said, “They’re wrong. We are going to expand Healthy SF this year.”

Earlier this month, insurance giant Kaiser Permanente joined HSF — meaning that the health care giant will now participate as a provider in the program. Haaland voiced concern about that move, calling it “privatizing through the back door.”

Mitch Katz, the city’s public health director, agrees there are flaws to the system, but defends its success. “It is by no means a perfect program,” he said, “but we’ve made a big impact.” With national health care costs rising three times faster than wages (some believe that health care costs are rising five times faster than wages) the nation is starting to seriously talk about overhauling the entire system. San Francisco is being considered as a model for national health care reform.

Labor leaders have lauded the basic formula of HSF and pushed for the federal reforms to use it as a model. As San Francisco Labor Council executive director Tim Paulson said in a prepared statement, “In San Francisco we demonstrated that legislation providing public health access and corporate participation creates a real path to universal health care coverage.”

Research assistance by Gabrielle Poccia

The Public Option: Bait and Switch

Bait and Switch

by Kip Sullivan

The people who brought us the “public option” began their campaign promising one thing but now promote something entirely different. To make matters worse, they have not told the public they have backpedalled. The campaign for the “public option” resembles the classic bait-and-switch scam: tell your customers you’ve got one thing for sale when in fact you’re selling something very different.

When the “public option” campaign began, its leaders promoted a huge “Medicare-like” program that would enroll about 130 million people. Such a program would dwarf even Medicare, which, with its 45 million enrollees, is the nation’s largest health insurer, public or private. But today “public option” advocates sing the praises of tiny “public options” contained in congressional legislation sponsored by leading Democrats that bear no resemblance to the original model.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the “public options” described in the Democrats’ legislation might enroll 10 million people and will have virtually no effect on health care costs, which means the “public options” cannot, by themselves, have any effect on the number of uninsured. But the leaders of the “public option” movement haven’t told the public they have abandoned their original vision. It’s high time they did.

The bait

“Public option” refers to a proposal, as Timothy Noah put it, “dreamed up” by Jacob Hacker when Hacker was still a graduate student working on a degree in political science. In two papers, one published in 2001 and the second in 2007, Hacker, now a professor of political science at Berkeley, proposed that Congress create an enormous “Medicare-like” program that would sell health insurance to the non-elderly in competition with the 1,000 to 1,500 health insurance companies that sell insurance today.

Hacker claimed the program, which he called “Medicare Plus” in 2001 and “Health Care for America Plan” in 2007, would enjoy the advantages that make Medicare so efficient – large size, low provider payment rates and low overhead. (Medicare is the nation’s largest health insurance program, public or private. It pays doctors and hospitals about 20 percent less than the insurance industry does, and its administrative costs account for only 2 percent of its expenditures compared with 20 percent for the insurance industry.)

Hacker predicted that his proposed public program would so closely resemble Medicare that it would be able to set its premiums far below those of other insurance companies and enroll at least half the non-elderly population. These predictions were confirmed by the Lewin Group, a very mainstream consulting firm. In its report on Hacker’s 2001 paper, Lewin concluded Hacker’s “Medicare Plus” program would enroll 113 million people (46 percent of the non-elderly) and cut the number of uninsured to 5 million. In its report on Hacker’s 2007 paper, Lewin concluded Hacker’s “Health Care for America Plan” would enroll 129 million people (50 percent of the nonelderly population) and cut the uninsured to 2 million.

Until last year, Hacker and his allies were not the least bit shy about highlighting the enormous size of Hacker’s proposed public program. For example, in his 2001 paper Hacker stated:

[A]pproximately 50 to 70 percent of the non-elderly population would be enrolled in Medicare Plus…. Put more simply, the plan would be very large…. [C]ritics will resurface whatever the size of the public plan. But this is an area where an intuitive and widely held notion – that displacement of employment-based coverage should be avoided at all costs – is fundamentally at odds with good public policy. A large public plan should be embraced, not avoided. It is, in fact, key to fulfilling the goals of this proposal. (page 17)

In his 2007 paper, Hacker stated:

For millions of Americans who are now uninsured or lack … affordable work place coverage, the Health Care for America Plan would be an extremely attractive option. Through it, roughly half of non-elderly Americans would have access to a good public insurance plan…. A single national insurance pool covering nearly half the population would create huge administrative efficiencies. (page 5)

Hacker’s papers and the Lewin Group’s analyses of them have been cited by numerous “public option” advocates. For example, when Hacker released his 2007 paper, Campaign for America’s Future (CAF) published a press release praising it and drawing attention to the large size of Hacker’s proposed public program. The release, entitled “Activists and experts hail Health Care for America plan,” stated:

Detailed micro-simulation estimates suggest that roughly half of non-elderly Americans would remain in workplace health insurance, with the other half enrolled in Health Care for America…. A single national insurance pool covering nearly half the population would create huge administrative efficiencies…. Because Medicare and Health Care for America would bargain jointly for lower prices …, they would have enormous combined leverage to hold down costs.

When the Lewin Group released its 2008 analysis of Hacker’s 2007 paper, CAF’s Roger Hickey wrote in the Huffington Post, “efficiencies achievable … through Hacker’s public health insurance program” would save so much money that the US could “cover everyone” for no more than we spend now.

The switch

Now let’s compare the “single national health insurance pool covering nearly half the population” that Hacker and other “public option” advocates enthusiastically championed with the “public option” proposed by Democrats in Congress, and then let’s inquire what Hacker and company said about it.

As readers of this blog no doubt know, the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, and three House committee chairman working jointly, published draft health care “reform” bills in June. (The third committee with bill-writing authority, the Senate Finance Committee, has yet to produce a bill.) According to the Congressional Budget Office, the “public option” proposed in the House “tri-committee” bill might insure 10 million people and would leave 16 to 17 million people uninsured. The “public option” proposed by the Senate HELP committee, again according to the Congressional Budget Office, is unlikely to insure anyone and would hence leave 33 to 34 million uninsured. The CBO said its estimate of 10 million for the House bill was highly uncertain, which is not surprising given how vaguely the House legislation describes the “public option.”

Here is what the CBO had to say about the HELP committee bill:

The new draft also includes provisions regarding a “public plan,” but those provisions did not have a substantial effect on the cost or enrollment projections, largely because the public plan would pay providers of health care at rates comparable to privately negotiated rates – and thus was not projected to have premiums lower than those charged by private insurance plans. (page 3)

Obviously the “public option” in the Senate HELP committee bill (zero enrollees; 17 million people left uninsured) and the “public option” in the House bill (10 million enrollees (maybe!); 34 million people left uninsured) are a far cry from the “public option” originally proposed by Professor Hacker (129 million enrollees; 2 million people left uninsured). Have we heard the Democrats in Congress who drafted these provisions utter a word about how different their “public options” are from the large Medicare-like program that Hacker proposed and his allies publicized? What have Professor Hacker and his allies had to say?

In public comments about the Democrats’ “public option” provisions, the leading lights of the “public option” movement imply that Hacker’s model is what Congress is debating.

Sometimes they come right out and praise the Democrats’ version as “robust” and “strong.” But I cannot find a single example of a a statement by a “public option” advocate warning the public of the vast difference between Hacker’s original elephantine, “Medicare-like” program and the Democrats’ mouse version.

For example, on June 23, Hacker testified before the House Education and Labor Committee that “the draft legislation prepared by [the] special tri-committee promises enormous progress.” He went on to enumerate all the benefits of a “public option.” Yet the House tri-committee proposal bore no resemblance to the public plan he described in his papers and that the Lewin Group analyzed. Later, when Kaiser Health News asked Hacker in a July 6 interview why “your signature idea – a public plan – has become central to the health care reform debate,” Hacker again praised his “public plan” proposal and offered no hint that the “public option” so “central to the debate” was very different from the one he originally proposed.

Ditto for Hacker’s allies. Representatives of Health Care for America Now (HCAN), the organization most responsible for popularizing the “public option,” repeatedly describe the House and Senate HELP committee bills as “strong” or “robust,” always without any justification for this claim, and have repeatedly failed to warn the public that the “public options” they promote today are mere shadows of the “public options” they endorsed in the past. On July 15, the day the HELP committee passed its bill, Jason Rosenbaum blogged for HCAN:

The Senate HELP Committee has just referred a bill to the floor of the Senate with a strong public option.

Searching the websites of the organizations that serve on HCAN’s steering committee – AFSCME, Democracy for America, Moveon.org and SEIU, for example – one will find not a shred of information that would help the reader comprehend how small and ineffective the “public options” proposed in the Democrats’ bills are, nor how different these are from the one Hacker originally proposed. Yet these groups continue to urge their members and the public to “tell Congress to support a public option.”

Hacker’s original model compared with the Democrats’ mouse model

It has become fashionable among advocates of a “public option” to trash the expertise and the motives of the Congressional Budget Office. But the CBO’s characterization of the “public option” proposed in the Democrats’ legislation is entirely reasonable. This becomes apparent the moment we compare Hacker’s blueprint for his original “Medicare Plus” and “Health Care for America” programs with the “blueprints” (if tabula rasas can be called “blueprints”) contained in the Senate HELP Committee and House bills.

Hacker’s papers laid out these five criteria that he and the Lewin Group said were critical to the success of the “public option”:

• The PO had to be pre-populated with tens of millions of people, that is, it had to begin like Medicare did representing a large pool of people the day it commenced operations (Hacker proposed shifting all or most uninsured people as well as Medicaid and SCHIP enrollees into his public program);

• Subsidies to individuals to buy insurance would be substantial, and only PO enrollees could get subsidies (people who chose to buy insurance from insurance companies could not get subsidies);

• The PO and its subsidies had to be available to all nonelderly Americans (not just the uninsured and employees of small employers);

• The PO had to be given authority to use Medicare’s provider reimbursement rates; and

• The insurance industry had to be required to offer the same minimum level of benefits the PO had to offer.

Hacker predicted, and both of the Lewin Group reports concluded, that if these specifications were met Hacker’s plan would enjoy all three of Medicare’s advantages – it would be huge, it would have low overhead costs, and it would pay providers less than the insurance industry did. As a result, the “public option” would be able to set its premiums below those of the insurance industry and seize nearly half the non-elderly market from the insurance industry. According to the Lewin Group’s 2008 report, Hacker’s version of the “public option” would, as of 2007:

• Enroll 129 million enrollees (or 50 percent of the non-elderly);
• Have overhead costs equal to 3 percent of expenditures;
• Pay hospitals 26 percent less and doctors 17 percent less than the insurance industry (but these discounts would be offset to some degree by increases in payments to providers treating former Medicaid enrollees); and,
• Set its premiums 23 below those of the average insurance company.

I question some of Hacker’s and the Lewin Group’s assumptions, including their assumption that any public program that has to sell health insurance in competition with insurance companies could keep its overhead costs anywhere near those of Medicare (Medicare is a single-payer program that has no competition), especially during the early years when the public program will be scrambling to sign up enrollees. A public program will have to hire a sales force and advertise. It will have to open offices. It will have to negotiate rates, and perhaps contracts, with thousands of hospitals and hundreds of thousands of clinics, chemical treatment facilities, rehab units, home health agencies, etc. Or it will have to contract with someone to do all that. But I have little doubt that if a public program were to open with a large enough customer base, and it had the advantage of a law requiring that only its customers receive substantial subsidies, it could do what the Lewin Group said it could do.

Now let us compare Hacker’s original model with the mousey “public options” proposed by the Senate HELP Committee and the House. Of Hacker’s five criteria, only one is met by these bills! Both proposals require the insurance industry to cover the same benefits the “public option” must cover. None of the other four criteria are met. The “public option” is not pre-populated, the subsidies to employers and to individuals go to the “public option” and the insurance industry, employees of large employers cannot buy insurance from the “public option” in the first few years after the plan opens for business and maybe never (that decision will be made by whoever is President around 2015), and the “public option” is not authorized to use Medicare’s provider payment rates. (The House bill comes the closest to authorizing use of Medicare’s rates; it authorizes Medicare’s rates plus 5 percent).

Is it any wonder the CBO concluded the Democrats’ “public option” will be a tiny little creature incapable of doing much of anything? More curious is that CBO gave the House “public option” any credit at all (you will recall CBO said it would enroll maybe 10 million people). The CBO should have asked, Can the “public option” – as presented in either bill – survive?

Put yourself in the “public option” director’s shoes

To see why the “public option” proposed by congressional Democrats remains at great risk of stillbirth, let’s engage in a frustrating thought experiment. Let’s imagine Congress has enacted the House version (it is not quite as weak as the HELP Committee model and thus gives us the greatest opportunity in our thought experiment to imagine a scenario in which the “public option” actually survives its start-up phase). Let us imagine furthermore that you have been foolish enough to apply for the job of executive director of the new “public option,” and the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (the federal agency within which the program will be housed) decided to hire you. It’s your first day on the job.

You know the House bill did not create a ready-made pool of enrollees for you to work with the way the 1965 Medicare law created a ready-made pool of seniors prior to the day Medicare commenced operations. You realize, in other words, that you represent not a single soul, much less tens of millions of enrollees. You will have to build a pool of enrollees from scratch. You also know the House bill authorized some start-up money for you, so you’ll be able to hire some staff, including sales people if you choose. You can also open offices around the country, and advertise if you think it necessary. But you know you can’t pay out too much money getting the “public option” started because the House bill requires that you pay back whatever start-up costs you incur within ten years. In other words, you may hire enough people and open enough offices and buy enough advertising to create a critical mass of enrollees nationwide, but you must do it quickly so that your start-up costs don’t sink the “public option” during its first decade.

The only other feature in the House bill that appears to give you any advantage over the insurance industry is the provision requiring you to use Medicare’s rates plus 5 percent, which essentially means you are authorized to pay providers 15 percent less than the insurance industry pays on average. But the House bill also says providers are free to refuse to participate in the plan you run.

So what do you do? Let’s say you open offices in dozens or hundreds of cities, you hire a sales force to fan out across the country to sign up customers, you advertise on radio and TV to get potential customers (employers and individuals) to call your new sales force to inquire about the new “public option” insurance policy. What happens when potential customers ask your salespeople two obvious questions: what will the premium be and which doctors they can see? What do your employees say? They can’t say anything. They haven’t talked to any clinics or hospitals about participating at the 15-percent-below-industry-average payment rate, so they have no idea which providers if any will agree to participate. They also have no idea what the “public option” premium will be because they don’t know whether providers will accept the low rates the plan is authorized to pay. And they have no idea about several other factors that will affect the premiums, including how much overhead the “public option” will rack up before it reaches a state of viability, or who the “public option” will be insuring – healthy people, sick people, or people of average health status.

So, let’s say you redeploy your sales force. Now instead of talking to potential customers, you direct them to focus on providers first. But when your salespeople call on doctors and hospital administrators and ask them if they’ll agree to take enrollees at below-average payment rates, providers ask how many people the “public option” will enroll in their area. Providers explain to your salespeople that they are already giving huge discounts, some as high as 30 to 40 percent off their customary charge, to the largest insurers in their area and they are not eager to do that for the “public option” unless the plan will have such a large share of the market in their area that it will deliver many patients to them. If the “public option” cannot do that, providers tell your salespeople, they will not agree to accept below-average payment rates.

In other words, you find that the “public option” is at the mercy of the private insurance market, not the other way around.

This thought experiment illustrates for you the mind-numbing chicken-and-egg problem created by any “public option” project that does not meet Hacker’s criteria, most notably, the criterion requiring pre-population of the “public option.” If the pre-population criterion isn’t met, the poor chump who has to create the “public option” is essentially being asked to solve a problem that is as difficult as describing the sound of one hand clapping. You need both hands to clap.

How did the mouse replace the elephant?

How did the “Medicare Plus” proposal of 2001 (when Hacker first proposed it) get transformed into the tiny “public options” contained in the Democrats’ 2009 legislation? The answer is that somewhere along the line it became obvious that the Hacker model was too difficult to enact and had to be stripped down to something more mouse-like in order to pass. Did the leading “public option” advocates realize this early in the campaign? Or midway through the campaign when the insurance industry began to attack the “public option”? Or late in the campaign when they found it difficult to persuade members of Congress to support Hacker’s original model? Whatever the answer, will they find it in their hearts to tell their followers their original strategy was wrong?

I suspect the answer is different for different actors within the “public option” movement. Hacker surely knew what was in his original proposal and surely knows now that the Democrats’ bills don’t reflect his original proposal. Hacker and others familiar with his original proposal were probably betrayed by the process. As the “public option” concept became famous and edged its way toward the centers of power, they couldn’t find the courage to resist the transformation of the original proposal into the mouse model.

For other actors within the “public option” movement, ignorance of Hacker’s original proposal and of health policy in general may have led them to rely on more knowledgeable leaders in the movement. Their error, in other words, was to trust the wrong people and, as the “public option” came under attack, to cave in to group think. This error was facilitated by the “public option” movement’s decision to avoid mentioning any details of the “public option” whenever possible.

What next?

Those of us in the American single-payer movement must continue to educate Congress and the public on the need for a single-payer system. We must also convince advocates of the “public option” that they have made two serious mistakes and, if they learn quickly from these mistakes, that real reform is still possible.

The first mistake was to think that a “public option” that merely took over a large chunk of the non-elderly market (as opposed to one that took over the entire market) could substantially reduce health care costs and thereby make universal coverage politically feasible. Any proposal that leaves in place a multiple-payer system — even a multiple-payer system with a large government-run program in the middle of it — is going to save very little money. Even if Hacker’s original Health Care for America Plan had taken over half the non-elderly market and then reached homeostasis (something Hacker swore up and down it would do), the savings would have been relatively small. The reason for that is twofold. First, any insurance program, public or private, that has to compete with other insurers is going to have overhead costs substantially higher than Medicare’s. (It is precisely because Medicare is a single-payer program that its overhead costs are low.) Second, the multiple-payer system Hacker would leave in place would continue to impose unnecessarily large overhead costs on providers.

The second mistake the “public option” movement made was to think the insurance industry and the right wing would treat a “public option” more gently than a single-payer. Conservatives have a long history of treating small incremental proposals such as “comparative effectiveness research” as the equivalent of “a government takeover of the health care system.” It should have been no surprise to anyone that conservatives would shriek “socialism!” at the sight of the “public option,” even the mouse model proposed by the Democrats.

The bait-and-switch strategy adopted by the “public option” movement has put the Democrats in a terrible quandary. Seduced by the false advertising about the potency of the “public option” to lower costs, Democrats have raised public expectations for reform to unprecedented levels. Failing to meet those expectations during the 2009 session of Congress, which is inevitable if the Democrats continue to promote legislation like the bills released in June, is going to have unpleasant consequences. Is there no way out of this quandary?

Conventional wisdom holds that if the Democrats don’t pass a health care reform bill by December, they will have to wait till 2013 to try again. But if the “public option” movement were to join forces with the single-payer movement, the two movements could prove the conventional wisdom wrong. This won’t happen, obviously, if the “public option” movement fails to perceive the reasons it failed.

It is conceivable the “public option” movement could decide the bait-and-switch strategy was wrong and that their only error was not to stick with Hacker’s original model. It should be obvious now that that would also be a tactical blunder. We have plenty of evidence now that conservatives will react to the mousey version of the “public option” as if it were “a stalking horse for single-payer.” We can predict with complete certainty they will treat Hacker’s original version as something even closer to single-payer. If a proposal is going to be abused as if it were single-payer, why not actually propose a single-payer? At least then, when a particular session of Congress comes and goes and we haven’t enacted a single-payer system, we will have educated the public about the benefits of a single-payer and have further strengthened the single-payer movement.

To sum up, “public option” advocates must choose between continuing to promote the “public option” and seeing their hopes for cost containment and universal coverage go up in smoke for another four years, and throwing their considerable influence behind single-payer legislation. At this late date in the 2009 session, it is unlikely that a single-payer bill could be passed even if unity within the universal coverage movement could be achieved. But if the “public option” wing and the single-payer wing join together to demand that Congress enact a single-payer system, December 2009 need not constitute a deadline.

Kip Sullivan belongs to the steering committee of the Minnesota chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program.

John Pilger: Empire, Obama and the Last Taboo

johnpilger.com July 9, 2009

Adapted from an address, Empire, Obama and the Last Taboo, given by John Pilger at Socialism 2009 in San Francisco on 4th July

Barack Obama is the embodiment of this “ism”. From his early political days, Obama’s unerring theme has been not “change”, the slogan of his presidential campaign, but America’s right to rule and order the world. Of the United States, he says, “we lead the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good… We must lead by building a 21st-century military to ensure the security of our people and advance the security of all people.” And: “At moments of great peril in the past century our leaders ensured that America, by deed and by example, led and lifted the world, that we stood and fought for the freedoms sought by billions of people beyond their borders.”

Mourn on the fourth of July In an essay for the New Statesman, John Pilger argues that while liberals now celebrate America’s return to its “moral ideals”, they are silent on a venerable taboo. This is the true role of Americanism: an ideology distinguished by its myths and the denial that it exists. President Obama is its embodiment. The monsoon had woven thick skeins of mist over the central highlands of Vietnam. I was a young war correspondent, bivouacked in the village of Tuylon with a unit of US marines whose orders were to win hearts and minds. “We are here not to kill,” said the sergeant, “we are here to impart the American Way of Liberty as stated in the Pacification Handbook. This is designed to win the hearts and minds of folks, as stated on page 86.” Page 86 was headed WHAM. The sergeant’s unit was called a combined action company, which meant, he explained, “we attack these folks on Mondays and we win their hearts and minds on Tuesdays”. He was joking, though not quite. Standing in a jeep on the edge of a paddy, he had announced through a loudhailer: “Come on out, everybody. We got rice and candy and toothbrushes to give you.” Silence. Not a shadow moved. “Now listen, either you gooks come on out from wherever you are, or we’re going to come right in there and get you!” The people of Tuylon finally came out and stood in line to receive packets of Uncle Ben’s Long Grain Rice, Hershey bars, party balloons and several thousand toothbrushes. Three portable, battery-operated, yellow flush lavatories were kept for the colonel’s arrival. And when the colonel arrived that evening, the district chief was summoned and the yellow flush lavatories were unveiled. “Mr District Chief and all you folks out there,” said the colonel, “what these gifts represent is more than the sum of their parts. They carry the spirit of America. Ladies and gentlemen, there’s no place on earth like America. It’s a guiding light for me, and for you. You see, back home, we count ourselves as real lucky having the greatest democracy the world has ever known, and we want you good folks to share in our good fortune.” Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and Davy Crockett got a mention. “Beacon” was a favourite, and as he evoked John Winthrop’s “city upon a hill”, the marines clapped, and the children clapped, understanding not a word. It was a lesson in what historians call “exceptionalism”, the notion that the United States has the divine right to bring what it describes as liberty and democracy to the rest of humanity. That this merely disguised a system of domination, which Martin Luther King described, shortly before his assassination, as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world”, was unspeakable. As the great people’s historian Howard Zinn has pointed out, Winthrop’s much-quoted description of the 17th-century Massachusetts Bay Colony as a “city upon a hill”, a place of unlimited goodness and nobility, was rarely set against the violence of the first settlers, for whom burning alive some 400 Pequot Indians was a “triumphant joy”. The countless massacres that followed, wrote Zinn, were justified by “the idea that American expansion is divinely ordained”. Not long ago, I visited the American Museum of History, part of the celebrated Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. One of the popular exhibitions was “The Price of Freedom: Americans at War”. It was holiday time and lines of people, including many children, shuffled reverentially through a Santa’s grotto of war and conquest where messages about their nation’s “great mission” were dispensed. These ­included tributes to the “exceptional Americans [who] saved a million lives” in Vietnam, where they were “determined to stop communist expansion”. In Iraq, other true hearts ­“employed air strikes of unprecedented precision”. What was shocking was not so much the revisionist description of two of the epic crimes of modern times as the sheer scale of omission. “History without memory,” declared Time magazine at the end of the 20th century, “confines Americans to a sort of eternal present.. They are especially weak in remembering what they did to other people, as opposed to what they did for them.” Ironically, it was Henry Luce, founder of Time, who in 1941 divined the “American century” as an American social, political and cultural “victory” over humanity and the right “to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit”. None of this is to suggest that vainglory is exclusive to the United States. The British presented their often violent domination of much of the world as the natural progress of Christian gentlemen selflessly civilising the natives, and present-day TV historians perpetuate the myths. The French still celebrate their bloody “civilising mission”. Prior to the Second World War, “imperialist” was an honoured political badge in Europe, while in the US an “age of innocence” was preferred. America was different from the Old World, said its mythologists. America was the Land of Liberty, uninterested in conquest. But what of George Washington’s call for a “rising empire” and James Madison’s “laying the foundation of a great empire”? What of slavery, the theft of Texas from Mexico, the bloody subjugation of central America, Cuba and the Philippines? An ordained national memory consigned these to the historical margins and “imperialism” was all but discredited in the United States, especially after Adolf Hitler and the fascists, with their ideas of racial and cultural superiority, had left a legacy of guilt by association. The Nazis, after all, had been proud imperialists, too, and Germany was also “exceptional”. The idea of imperialism, the word itself, was all but expunged from the American lexicon, “on the grounds that it falsely attributed immoral motives to western foreign policy”, argued one historian. Those who persisted in using it were “disreputable purveyors of agitprop” and were “inspired by the communist doctrine”, or they were “Negro intellectuals who had grievances of their own against white capitalism”. Meanwhile, the “city on the hill” remained a beacon of rapaciousness as US capital set about realising Luce’s dream and recolonising the European empires in the postwar years. This was “the march of free enterprise”. In truth, it was driven by a subsidised production boom in a country unravaged by war: a sort of socialism for the great corporations, or state capitalism, which left half the world’s wealth in American hands. The cornerstone of this new imperialism was laid in 1944 at a conference of the western allies at Bretton Woods in New Hampshire. Described as “negotiations about economic stability”, the conference marked America’s conquest of most of the world. What the American elite demanded, wrote Frederic F Clairmont in The Rise and Fall of Economic Liberalism, “was not allies but unctuous client states. What Bretton Woods bequeathed to the world was a lethal totalitarian blueprint for the carve-up of world markets.” The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Asian Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and the African Development Bank were established in effect as arms of the US Treasury and would design and police the new order. The US military and its clients would guard the doors of these “international” institutions, and an “invisible government” of media would secure the myths, said Edward Bernays. Bernays, described as the father of the media age, was the nephew of Sigmund Freud. “Propaganda,” he wrote, “got to be a bad word because of the Germans… so what I did was to try and find other words [such as] Public Relations.” Bernays used Freud’s theories about control of the subconscious to promote a “mass culture” designed to promote fear of official enemies and servility to consumerism. It was Bernays who, on behalf of the tobacco industry, campaigned for American women to take up smoking as an act of feminist liberation, calling cigarettes “torches of freedom”; and it was his notion of disinformation that was deployed in overthrowing governments, such as Guatemala’s democracy in 1954. Above all, the goal was to distract and deter the social democratic impulses of working people. Big business was elevated from its public reputation as a kind of mafia to that of a patriotic force. “Free enterprise” became a divinity. “By the early 1950s,” wrote Noam Chomsky, “20 million people a week were watching business-sponsored films. The entertainment industry was enlisted to the cause, portraying unions as the enemy, the outsider disrupting the ‘harmony’ of the ‘American way of life’… Every aspect of social life was targeted and permeated schools and universities, churches, even recreational programmes. By 1954, business propaganda in public schools reached half the amount spent on textbooks.” The new “ism” was Americanism, an ideology whose distinction is its denial that it is an ideology. Recently, I saw the 1957 musical Silk Stockings, starring Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse. Between the scenes of wonderful dancing to a score by Cole Porter was a series of loyalty statements that the colonel in Vietnam might well have written. I had forgotten how crude and pervasive the propaganda was; the Soviets could never compete. An oath of loyalty to all things American became an ideological commitment to the leviathan of business: from the business of armaments and war (which consumes 42 cents in every tax dollar today) to the business of food, known as “agripower” (which receives $157bn a year in government subsidies). Barack Obama is the embodiment of this “ism”. From his early political days, Obama’s unerring theme has been not “change”, the slogan of his presidential campaign, but America’s right to rule and order the world. Of the United States, he says, “we lead the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good… We must lead by building a 21st-century military to ensure the security of our people and advance the security of all people.” And: “At moments of great peril in the past century our leaders ensured that America, by deed and by example, led and lifted the world, that we stood and fought for the freedoms sought by billions of people beyond their borders.” Since 1945, by deed and by example, the US has overthrown 50 governments, including democracies, crushed some 30 liberation movements and supported tyrannies from Egypt to Guatemala (see William Blum’s histories). Bombing is apple pie. Having stacked his government with warmongers, Wall Street cronies and polluters from the Bush and Clinton eras, the 45th president is merely upholding tradition. The hearts and minds farce I witnessed in Vietnam is today repeated in villages in Afghanistan and, by proxy, Pakistan, which are Obama’s wars. In his acceptance speech for the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature, Harold Pinter noted that “everyone knew that terrible crimes had been committed by the Soviet Union in the postwar period, but “US crimes in the same period have been only superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all”. It is as if “It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening, it wasn’t happening… You have to hand it to America… masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.” As Obama has sent drones to kill (since January) some 700 civilians, distinguished liberals have rejoiced that America is once again a “nation of moral ideals”, as Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times. In Britain, the elite has long seen in exceptional America an enduring place for British “influence”, albeit as servitor or puppet. The pop historian Tristram Hunt says America under Obama is a land “where miracles happen”. Justin Webb, until recently the BBC’s man in Washington, refers adoringly, rather like the colonel in Vietnam, to the “city on the hill”. Behind this façade of “intensification of feeling and degradation of significance” (Walter Lippmann), ordinary Americans are stirring perhaps as never before, as if abandoning the deity of the “American Dream” that prosperity is a guarantee with hard work and thrift.. Millions of angry emails from ordinary people have flooded Washington, expressing an outrage that the novelty of Obama has not calmed. On the contrary, those whose jobs have vanished and whose homes are repossessed see the new president rewarding crooked banks and an obese military, essentially protecting George W Bush’s turf. My guess is that a populism will emerge in the next few years, igniting a powerful force that lies beneath America’s surface and which has a proud past. It cannot be predicted which way it will go. However, from such an authentic grass-roots Americanism came women’s suffrage, the eight-hour day, graduated income tax and public ownership. In the late 19th century, the populists were betrayed by leaders who urged them to compromise and merge with the Democratic Party. In the Obama era, the familiarity of this resonates. What is most extraordinary about the United States today is the rejection and defiance, in so many attitudes, of the all-pervasive historical and contemporary propaganda of the “invisible government”. Credible polls have long confirmed that more than two-thirds of Americans hold progressive views. A majority want the government to care for those who cannot care for themselves. They would pay higher taxes to guarantee health care for everyone. They want complete nuclear disarmament; 72 per cent want the US to end its colonial wars; and so on. They are informed, subversive, even “anti-American”. I once asked a friend, the great American war correspondent and humanitarian Martha Gellhorn, to explain the term to me. “I’ll tell you what ‘anti-American’ is,” she said. “It’s what governments and their vested interests call those who honour America by objecting to war and the theft of resources and believing in all of humanity. There are millions of these anti-Americans in the United States. They are ordinary people who belong to no elite and who judge their government in moral terms, though they would call it common decency. They are not vain. They are the people with a wakeful conscience, the best of America’s citizens. They can be counted on. They were in the South with the civil rights movement, ending slavery. They were in the streets, demanding an end to the wars in Asia. Sure, they disappear from view now and then, but they are like seeds beneath the snow. I would say they are truly exceptional.”

Immigrant Rights Activists Condemn Obama Plan to Expand Use of Local Police to Enforce Immigration Law

Immigrant Rights Activists Condemn Obama Plan to Expand Use of Local Police to Enforce Immigration Law

On July 10, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano  announced plans to standardize and greatly enlarge the 287(g) program,  by which local law enforcement is given money, equipment, and powers  to enforce federal immigration law.  (See Homeland Security’s press release.)

As the following press release shows, turning immigration enforcement over to local police has led to  frequent police abuse, racial profiling, and rapid-fire detentions and  deportations.

In a related development, the ACLU has condemned the new standardized  Memorandum of Agreement governing local police under the 287(g) plan,  as a meaningless gesture to reduce local police abuses, writing “The  new standardized MOA makes no serious attempt at discouraging illegal  racial profiling or reducing the conflict between sound community  policing principles and the expansion of this program.”

As one immigrant rights activist wrote, “More groups and individuals going against the “Washington Consensus” –  legalization in exchange for even more enforcement-on immigration.  Please distribute this far and wide as the Obama and Napolitano are  trying to do this below the clouds-and some fog- of excitement around  the Sotomayor confirmation hearings. This is the clearest statement to  date of Obama’s willingness to support racist, dangerous and  ultimately failed immigration policy. That some of these groups have  not previously made statements against Obama and that they waste no  time using language still unheard of in echo chamber of Washington  (ie;” Condemning”) provides,  I think, an interesting preview of where  and how Obama’s credibility may rapidly drop in immigrants rights and  Latino communities.”

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ADVOCATES ISSUE STATEMENT CONDEMNING OBAMA ADMINISTRATION’S

EXPANSION OF DHS’S FAILED 287(g) PROGRAM

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE July 17, 2009

Media Contacts:

Adela de la Torre, Communication Specialist, National Immigration Law  Center, 213.674.2832 (office), 213.400.7822 (cell)

Andrea Black, Coordinator, Detention Watch Network, 202-393-1044 ext.  227 (office), 520-240-3726 (cell)

Judith Greene, Director, Justice Strategies, 718-857-3316,  jgreene@justicestrategies.net

Civil rights and community groups across the country denounce  Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano’s  plans to expand the highly criticized 287(g) program to eleven new  jurisdictions around the country.  The program, authorized in 1996 and  widely implemented under the Bush Administration, relinquishes, with  no meaningful oversight, immigration enforcement power to local law  enforcement and corrections agencies.

Since its inception the program has drawn sharp criticism from federal  officials, law enforcement, advocates and local community groups.  A  February 2009 report by Justice Strategies, a nonpartisan research  firm, found widespread use of pretextual traffic stops, racially  motivated questioning, and unconstitutional searches and seizures by  local law enforcement agencies granted 287(g) powers.  Justice  Strategies recommended the program be suspended.  “We found evidence  that growth of the 287(g) program has been driven more by racial  animus than by concerns about public safety.  The expansion of this  deeply flawed program cannot be justified before a thorough test of  corrective actions shows solid proof that they have been effective,”  reports Judy Greene, Director of Justice Strategies. A March 2009  Government Accountability Agency (GAO) report, criticized DHS for  insufficient oversight of the controversial program.

Also in March, the United States Department of Justice launched an  investigation into Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, to  determine whether Arpaio is using his 287(g) power to target Latinos  and Spanish-speaking people.  In Davidson County, Tennessee, the  Sheriff’s Office has used its 287(g) power to apprehend undocumented  immigrants driving to work, standing at day labor sites, or while  fishing off piers. One pregnant woman—charged with driving without a  license—was forced to give birth while shackled to her bed during  labor. Preliminary data indicate that in some jurisdictions the  majority of individuals arrested under 287(g) are accused of public  nuisance or traffic offenses: driving without a seatbelt, driving  without a license, broken taillights, and similar offences.  Such a  pattern of arrests suggest that local sheriff’s deputies are  improperly using their 287(g) powers to rid their counties of  immigrants, by making pretextual arrests that are then used to  forcefully deport people. “We need only look at the example of  Maricopa County to understand the devastating effects the increased  287(g) program will have on our communities,” said Chris Newman, Legal  Programs Director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network.  “The Obama administration must recognize that the 287(g) program is  predatory and ripe for corruption and profiling that will harm  community stability and safety for everyone.”

The Police Foundation, the International Association of Chiefs of  Police, and the Major Chiefs Association have expressed concerns that  deputizing local law enforcement officers to enforce civil federal  immigration law undermine the trust and cooperation of immigrant  communities, overburdens cities’ already reduced resources, and leaves  cities vulnerable to civil liability claims.  “When victims and  witnesses of crime are afraid to contact police for fear of being  jailed or deported, public safety suffers,” said Marielena Hincapie,  Executive Director, National Immigration Law Center.

Napolitano’s July 10 announcement that DHS has granted 11 new  jurisdictions 287(g) powers stunned advocates who had been expecting a  major overhaul of – or end to – this failed program.  “DHS is fully  aware that the abusive misuse of the 287(g) program by its current  slate of agencies has rendered it not only ineffective, but dangerous  to community safety.   It is surprising Napolitano did not simply shut  this program down.  Expanding this failed program is not in line with  the reform the administration has promised,” said Andrea Black,  Coordinator of the Detention Watch Network.

Signatory Organizations:

A Better Way Foundation, New Haven, CT

All of Us or None, San Francisco, CA

Border Action Network, Tucson, AZ

Center for Constitutional Rights, New York, NY

Center for Media Justice, Oakland, CA

Detention Watch Network, Washington, D

Families for Freedom, New York, NY

Florida Immigrant Coalition, Miami, FL

Grassroots Leadership, Austin, Texas

Homies Unidos, Los Angeles, CA

Immigrant Defense Project, New York, NY

Immigrant Justice Network

Immigration Law Clinic, UC Davis School of Law, Davis, CA

Immigrant Legal Resource Center, San Francisco, CA

Judson Memorial Church, New York, NY

Justice Strategies, New York, NY

Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, San Francisco, CA

Main Street Project, Minneapolis, MN

Media Action Grassroots Network, Oakland, CA

National Day Laborer Organizing Network

National Immigration Law Center, Los Angeles, CA

National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild, Boston, MA

Partnership for Safety and Justice, Portland, Oregon

Project Rethink

Southern Center for Human Rights, Atlanta, GA

Breaking the Silence: “Israeli war crimes were daily and too numerous to count”

The recently released report of Israeli soldiers in Gaza, “Breaking the Silence,” which attested to war crimes there,  but a March 30 Palestine Monitor report, “Israeli war crimes were daily and too numerous to count,” tells the story in more detail.  It is reproduced below.

Common Dreams, Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Israeli Soldiers in Gaza Describe a ‘Moral Twilight Zone’

by Dion Nissenbaum

JERUSALEM – Israeli combat soldiers have acknowledged that they forced Palestinian civilians to serve as human shields, needlessly killed unarmed Gazans and improperly used white phosphorus shells to burn down buildings as part of Israel’s three-week military offensive in the Gaza Strip last winter.

Israeli mobile artillery fires shells towards the Gaza Strip on January 9. Israeli soldiers involved in the war on Gaza were told to shoot first and worry about the consequences later, and used Palestinian civilians as human shields, an activist group’s report has said. (AFP/File/Jack Guez)

In filmed testimony and written statements released Wednesday, more than two dozen soldiers told an Israeli army veterans’ group that military commanders led the fighters into what one described as a “moral Twilight Zone” where almost every Palestinian was seen as a threat.

Soldiers described incidents in which Israeli forces killed an unarmed Palestinian carrying a white cloth, an elderly woman carrying a sack, a Gazan riding a motorcycle, and an elderly man with a flashlight, said Breaking the Silence, a group formed by army reservists in 2004.

Any Palestinian spotted near Israeli troops was considered suspect. A man talking on a cell phone on the roof of his building was viewed as a legitimate target because he could’ve been telling militants where to find Israeli forces, the group quoted soldiers as saying.

“In urban warfare, everyone is your enemy,” said one soldier. “No innocents.”

The 110-pages of testimony – along with 16 video clips – of interviews with 26 unnamed Israeli soldiers offers the most comprehensive look inside a military campaign that’s become the subject of an unfolding United Nations war crimes investigation.

The Israel Defense Forces dismissed the report.

IDF spokeswoman Avital Leibovich said Tuesday that the IDF now is conducting dozens of investigations into troop conduct during the Gaza operation and that more than a dozen cases led to police investigations.

In April, the IDF announced it had concluded five high-level investigations, including one into the use of phosphorus to burn down buildings, and cleared itself.

Yehuda Shaul, a co-founder of Breaking the Silence, said the report didn’t identify the soldiers by name because at least half the men quoted were young conscripts who could be jailed for speaking to the media. He agreed, however, to name the units and where they were operating in several instances.

Two soldiers from the Givati brigade who served in Zeitoun told the story of shooting an unarmed civilian without warning him.

The elderly man was walking with a flashlight toward a building where Israeli forces were taking cover.

The Israeli officer in the house repeatedly ignored requests from other soldiers to fire warning shots as the man approached, the soldiers said. Instead, when he got within 20 yards of the soldiers, the commander ordered snipers to kill the man.

The soldiers later confirmed that the man was unarmed.

When they complained to their commander about the incident, the soldiers were rebuffed and told that anyone walking at night was immediately suspect.

Michael Sfard, an Israeli human rights attorney who reviewed the testimony, said the stories reflected a “dramatic change in the ethos” of the Israeli military that portrays itself as the most moral army in the world.

“What we are seeing now is a deterioration of our moral values and red lines,” Sfard said. “This is a dramatic change in heart and values.”

Israel launched the 22-day military offensive on Dec. 27 in a bid to destabilize the Hamas-led government and deter Palestinian militants who’ve fired thousands of crude rockets and mortars at southern Israel that have killed 12 people in the past four years.

Nine Israeli soldiers were killed in Gaza during the fighting, four of them by friendly fire.

By contrast, Palestinian human rights groups and Gaza medical officials said that 1,400 Palestinians, more than half of them civilians, were killed by Israeli forces. The Israeli military has questioned that figure, but hasn’t made its own analysis available for review.

Breaking the Silence identified other specific instances in which Israeli forces carried out highly questionable practices.

According to the soldiers, the Israeli military fired white phosphorus mortars and artillery shells to set suspicious buildings ablaze and destroyed scores of Palestinian homes for questionable reasons. The white phosphorus supplied by the U.S. is supposed to be used to illuminate targets or provide smoke cover for advancing troops.

“Phosphorus was used as an igniter, simply make it all go up in flames,” one soldier said.

A second soldier – said by the reservists’ group to have been in a tank brigade stationed in the Atatra neighborhood – told Breaking the Silence that at least one officer fired unauthorized white phosphorus mortars because it was “cool.”

The use of white phosphorus to destroy buildings was part of a larger campaign to demolish parts of Gaza to make it more difficult for Palestinian militants to fire rockets at Israel, the soldiers said.

One soldier, who served in an infantry reserve unit of the Negev Brigade near Netzarim, said they were repeatedly told by officers to raze buildings as part of a campaign to prepare for “the day after.”

“In practical terms, this meant taking a house that is not implicated in any way, that its single sin is the fact that it is situated on top of a hill in the Gaza Strip,” said one soldier.

“In a personal talk with my battalion commander he mentioned this and said in a sort of sad half-smile, I think, that this is something that will eventually be added to ‘my war crimes,” he added.

In the Ezbt Abd Rabbo neighborhood, Israeli combatants said they forced Palestinians to search homes for militants and enter buildings ahead of soldiers in direct violation of an Israeli Supreme Court ruling that bars fighters from using civilians as human shields.

“Sometimes a force would enter while placing rifle barrels on a civilian’s shoulder, advancing into a house and using him as a human shield,” said one Israeli soldier with the Golani Brigade. “Commanders said these were the instructions, and we had to do it.”

Each Palestinian forced to work with the Israeli military was given the same nickname: Johnnie.

The story was confirmed by four other Israeli soldiers who seized control of the Gaza neighborhood, but declined to speak on the record, Shaul said.

The testimony matches with that of nine Palestinian men who told McClatchy last winter that Israeli soldiers forced them into battle zones during the offensive in their northern Gaza Strip neighborhood.

One Palestinian, Castro Abed Rabbo, said Israeli soldiers ordered him to enter buildings to search for militants and booby traps before they sent in a specially trained dog with high-tech detection gear.

Two other Palestinian men told McClatchy that Israeli soldiers used them as human shields by forcing them to kneel in a field during a firefight as they exchanged fire with Gaza fighters.

“I was down on my knees and they fanned out in a ‘V’ behind me,” Sami Rashid Mohammed, a Fatah-leaning former Palestinian Authority police officer, said in an unpublished interview in February. “It wasn’t more than 10 or 15 minutes of shooting, but it was so scary.”

One of the Israeli soldiers interviewed described the offensive was necessary.

“We did what we had to do,” he said. “The actual doing was a bit thoughtless. We were allowed to do anything we wanted. Who’s to tell us not to?”

One Israeli reservist said a brigade commander gave them stark orders as they were preparing for combat.

“He said something along the line of ‘Don’t let morality become an issue; that will come later,’” the soldier said. “He had this strange language: ‘Leave the nightmares and horrors that will come up for later – now just shoot.”

“You felt like a child playing around with a magnifying glass, burning up ants,” another Israeli soldier said. “A 20-year-old kid should not be doing such things to people. . . . the guys were running a ‘Wild West’ scene: draw, cock, kill.”

(McClatchy special correspondent Cliff Churgin contributed to this article from Jerusalem.)

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Palestine Monitor, March 30, 2009

“Israeli war crimes were daily and too numerous to count”

In the past few days various internationally recognized associations have heavily condemned the Israeli actions in Gaza, shedding light on the recurrent crimes. Alleged accusations are becoming more certain now and are being backed up with evidence and testimonies from both sides, including the Israeli soldiers themselves. Even war has rules and they were repeatedly breached. What is justice waiting for?

Two months after the end of the deadly Israeli assault on the Gaza strip tongues are loosened and several human rights organizations, along with journalists and UN officials, are now releasing reports gathering evidences on war crimes carried out by Israel.

Human Right Watch, Amnesty International, Physicians for Human Rights and many more are now seeking for inquiry with a common aim: shedding documented light on Israel’s human rights violations and war crimes during the Cast Lead operation. Their message is united and clear: an international independent investigation is needed. Time has finally come for the State to give accountability for the 23 days of continuous, barbaric actions in the Strip.

For the first time since its creation in 1948, and after 40 years of occupation of Palestinian land, the Israeli government is facing serious allegations of war crimes, issued by respected figures throughout the world. Even war has rules and they have been breached several times.

Today detailed evidence of alleged war crimes committed by Israel has been released. It includes various inhuman actions such as the use of Palestinian children as human shield, firing upon medical teams on duty and the willful use of prohibited weapons.

If these allegations have been publicized since the beginning of the aggression what has change now is that facts are now being backed up by Israeli soldiers’ narratives and irrefutable evidence.

Detailed reports now attest that it is pointless and naïve to still believe in the Israeli assumption that Cast lead aimed only at Hamas. The reality is that it left one in every 250 residents of the Strip killed or severely injured. [1]

Similarly, the Israeli claim of acting strictly within the frame of the international law sounds hollow too.

They said their snipers were moral and well trained, they said their artilleries were amongst the most sophisticated in the world, their targets were so accurate and their drones so precise that their operators can tell the color of the clothes worn by a target. They claimed this would prevent any mistake.

In Gaza, over 900 ‘mistakes’ were committed.

As time passes and reports flow, it is becoming obvious that many ‘mistakes’ were intentional and planned. By commanders consciously using weapons they shouldn’t, by firing upon harmless targets or by giving orders that bypassed the rules of war. Facts and evidence below speak for themselves. The decimated population can no longer be considered as ‘collateral damage’. It was deliberate.

We have claimed this since the very beginning of the attacks. But apparently Palestinian voices count less than international ones, so we have collected them for you. This is what they have reported:

The first obvious feature that characterized the assault since its very first hour was the disproportionate use of force against civilians as a response to the rocket attacks.

Internationally impartial human rights groups commonly attested that the majority of the offenses have been committed by Israel. In terms of victims, there were 1,400 Palestinian killed in Gaza in 23 days while since 2002, there have been 21 Israeli deaths by rockets fired from Gaza. During Cast Lead Operation three Israeli civilian deaths were reported, six Israeli soldiers were killed by Palestinian fire and four by friendly fire.

The tactic used on Gaza was broadly inhuman as Israel had imposed a heavy siege on the Strip for the eighteen months that preceded the Cast Lead attack and totally severed entry in the days leading up to the operation. Besieged and closed from the rest of the world, no one could escape. Neither harmless civilians seeking safety, nor the injured, turning Gaza into an open-air jail. There was nowhere to escape further bombing for Gaza’s residents while Israel failed to differentiate between civilian and military targets.

Richard Falk, a senior UN official recently suggested that Israel should be held accountable for a “new crime against humanity” during its January assault on the Gaza strip, mentioning that Israel had confined Palestinian civilians to the combat zone in Gaza, a unique move which should be outlawed.

“Such a war policy should be treated as a distinct and new crime against humanity, and should be formally recognised as such, and explicitly prohibited,” Falk said in a report to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva as part of a much longer report from nine UN investigators including specialists on the right to health, food, adequate housing and education, as well as on summary executions and violence against women.

1. Children as human shield

The UN special Rapporteur for Children in armed conflict reported this week that the Israeli soldiers used an 11 year-old boy as a human shield during the latest Israeli aggression against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the Cast Lead operation. According to the UN human rights experts, the Israeli soldiers forced the child to walk in front of them in the Tel Hawa neighborhood in Gaza city, using him while breaking into buildings and homes.

Later then, the Guardian reported the same inhuman tactic involving three Palestinian brothers, who gave their testimonies to the British journalist.

Al’a, Ali and Nafiz described how they were taken from their home at gunpoint, made to kneel in front of tanks to deter Hamas fighters from firing and sent by Israeli soldiers into Palestinian houses to clear them.

“They would make us go first, so if any fighters shot at them the bullets would hit us, not them,” said 14-year-old Al’a al-Attar. His brothers further described how when the three of them were being led through built-up areas in their home town the soldiers would order them to suddenly stop – then fire their rifles over the brothers’ shoulders and between their legs.

The use of “human shields” is prohibited under article 28 of the fourth Geneva Convention, ratified by Israel and therefore bound by it. The use of human shields was further outlawed by Israel’s supreme court in 2005 following several clearly identified incidents. But human rights groups insist the Israeli military continues to use civilians in this way.

13 year-old Mohammad Badwan was tied by the arm to an Israeli military jeep in Biddo in April 2004.

Radhika Coomaraswamy, the UN Rapporteur stated that several similar incidents took place during the war, with Israeli troops reported to have shot at harmless children, bulldozing homes –including a home were a woman and her child were still inside- as well as shelling a building after forcing dozens of civilians from the same family to gather into it a day earlier.

“Violations are carried out on a daily basis”, she commented, “they are too numerous to count”. But the UN experts will investigate the claims nonetheless.

The 43-page report was mostly denied by the Israeli ambassador to the UN, claiming that it “demonizes” Israel, stating that the UN is becoming “an informal bloc of African and Islamic Nations, supported by Russia and Cuba”.

2. “Fire upon rescue” – easing the rules of war

Physician for Human Rights, the Israeli human rights association, also released a report this week highlighting several attacks against medical teams on duty and medical centers in Gaza. The report also calls for an independent, unbiased international investigation into the Israeli violations of human rights in Gaza, especially violations against patients, the wounded and medical teams.

The report detailed the work of doctors under fire, adding that attacks on medical teams were not isolated cases but recurrent actions.

According to the association the Israeli army barred medics, including the Red Cross movement, Amnesty International and UNRWA personnel from reaching wounded residents, further preventing first aid from reaching injured Palestinians. This led to a number of deaths and increased the already dramatic statistics.

The Israeli army never respected the rules of humanitarian law endorsed by 4th Geneva Convention that prohibit harming civilians and attacking medical facilities and medical personnel. Doctors and medical crew were often deliberately targeted. Soldiers killed 16 doctors and injured 25 in addition to shelling 34 medical centers, including overcrowded hospitals, and 26 first aid clinics.

Medical Human Rights groups affirm now that there was “certainty” that Israel violated the international humanitarian law during the war, with attacks on medics, damages to medical buildings and indiscriminate attacks on civilians, and delaying medical treatment for the injured.

“We have noticed a stark decline in IDF morals concerning the Palestinian population of Gaza, which in reality amounts to a contempt for Palestinian lives,” said Dani Filc, chairman of Physicians for Human Rights Israel.

The Israeli army responded to those allegations, saying they were under orders to avoid harming medics, but: “However, in light of the difficult reality of warfare in the Gaza Strip carried out in urban and densely populated areas, medics who operate in the area take the risk upon themselves.”

What is this supposed to mean? That because Israel is firing upon Gaza, one of the most tiny and densely populated areas on the planet, doctors should stop carrying out their duty?

In Ha’aretz, Amira Hass backed up the human rights group’s claims by reporting that, days after the end of the hostilities a sheet of paper entitled “Situational assessment” was found in one of the Palestinian homes the IDF took over, with a handwritten notice mentioning “rules of engagement: Open fire upon rescue”, both in Hebrew. A reservist officer who did not take part in the Gaza offensive believes that the note is part of orders from a low-level commander written before giving his soldiers their daily briefing.

This week the Guardian reported that the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz discovered that the IDF’s international law division (ILD), the body responsible for advising Israeli forces on the legality of their actions, had authorised an easing of the rules of engagement in Gaza, including the targeting of medics.

A copy of the rules of engagement for Operation Cast Lead was obtained by Ha’aretz in the days before the offensive began. According to a journalist who saw the document the new, less stringent rules were approved at the highest levels of the Israeli military.

Ha’aretz was repeatedly blocked from publishing the document by the military censor.

3. White Phosphorus and unmanned drones distinguishing civilians

Several investigations into the high number of civilian deaths have found that Israel used a variety of weapons in illegal ways. Indiscriminate munitions, including shells packed with white phosphorus, were fired into densely populated areas, while precision missiles and tanks shells were fired into civilian homes.

Richard Falk, the UN special Rapporteur for the Human Rights in the oPt, made, during and after the invasion, countless declarations and statements denouncing the Israeli violations in Gaza. In his latest paper on alleged war crimes during the Cast Lead operation he describes why the 23 days of attacks in Gaza stand shockingly apart from much prior recourse to force by Israel to uphold its security and strategic interests.

In terms of battlefield practices Falk re-affirms the various allegations associated with the use of phosphorus bombs in residential areas of Gaza, as well as legal complaints about the use of a new cruel weapon, known as DIME (Dense Inert Metal Explosive), that explodes with such force that it rips body parts to pieces.

The controversial use of the lethal snow powder

Human Rights Watch made the news this week by providing documented evidence in its latest report entitled “rain of fire, Israel’s unlawful use of White Phosphorus in Gaza”, claiming war crimes were committed.

Since the beginning of the ground offensive in Gaza, several media sources reported the possible used of the chemical military ordnance, despite the IDF’s constant claim that no such thing has been used. “I can tell you with certainty that white phosphorus is absolutely not being used”, said an IDF spokesperson on CNN on the 7th of January, during the midst of the war.

Today HRW affirms it firmly: “Israel’s repeated firing of firing white phosphorus shells over densely populated areas of Gaza was indiscriminate and is evidence of war crimes.”

The 71-page report provides witness accounts of the devastating effects that the munitions have had on civilians and civilian property in Gaza. Its researchers went on the ground immediately after hostilities ended and found spent shells, canister liners and dozens of burnt felt wedges containing white phosphorus on city streets, apartment roofs, residential courtyards and at UN schools -a substance that has a significant, incidental, incendiary effect and can severely burn people and set structures, fields, and other civilian objects in the vicinity on fire. Its principle is easy: the phosphorus burns anything it touches. The potential for harm to civilians is further magnified by Gaza’s high population density, among the highest in the world.

It is Israel’s tactical use of White Phosphorus that is controversial, as the ordnance in itself is not prohibited. Used as an “obscurant” (a chemical used to hide military operations) is permissible in principle under international humanitarian law (the laws of war). However, when used deliberately in open areas, white phosphorus munitions are illegal.

“In Gaza, the Israeli military didn’t just use white phosphorus in open areas as a screen for its troops,” said Fred Abrahams, senior emergencies researcher at Human Rights Watch and co-author of the report. “It fired white phosphorus repeatedly over densely populated areas, even when its troops weren’t in the area and safer smoke shells were available. As a result, civilians needlessly suffered and died (…). For the needless civilian deaths caused by the white phosphorus, senior commanders should be held to account”, Abrahams said.

White Phosphorus shells fall on a UN school converted into shelter, Jabalya/Gaza, January 2009

Picture: AP

According to HRW, in the recent Gaza operations Israeli forces frequently air-burst white phosphorus in artillery shells in and near populated areas. Each air-burst shell spreads 116 burning white phosphorus wedges in a radius extending up to 125 meters from the blast point. White phosphorus ignites and burns on contact with oxygen, and continues burning at up to 816 degrees Celsius until nothing is left or the oxygen supply is cut. When white phosphorus comes into contact with skin it creates intense and persistent burns.

Conclusion is reached that IDF repeatedly exploded it unlawfully over populated neighborhoods, killing and wounding civilians and damaging civilian structures, including a school, a market, a humanitarian aid warehouse and a hospital.

According to HRW, The IDF knew that white phosphorus posed life-threatening dangers to civilians. A medical report prepared during the recent hostilities by the Israeli ministry of health said that white phosphorus “can cause serious injury and death when it comes into contact with the skin, is inhaled or is swallowed.” Burns on less than 10 percent of the body can be fatal because of damage to the liver, kidneys and heart, the ministry report says. Infection is common and the body’s absorption of the chemical can cause serious damage to internal organs, as well as death.

Israel at first denied it was using white phosphorus in Gaza but, facing mounting evidence to the contrary, said that it was using all weapons in compliance with international law. Later it announced an internal investigation into possible improper white phosphorus use.

Precise unmanned drones hitting harmless families

White phosphorus was not the only controversial weapon used: Israel’s unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) – or drones – were also reported to have killed civilians.

The drones are operated from a remote position, usually outside the combat zone. They use optics that are able to see the details of a man’s clothing and are fitted with pinpoint accurate missiles, Israel claims. If this is so, why then has it been reported that drones have killed at least 48 civilians, as claimed earlier this week by the Guardian presenting the conclusions of its investigations in Gaza?

Mounir al-Jarah’s family was decimated by the unmanned weapon.

On the 16th of January a rocket fired from an unmanned aerial vehicle killed Mounir’s sister, her husband and four of her children, who drinking tea in their small courtyard in Gaza. All six members of the family were blown to pieces. “We found Mohammed lying there, cut in half. Ahmed was in three pieces; Wahid was totally burnt – his eyes were gone. Wahid’s father was dead. Nour had been decapitated. We couldn’t see her head anywhere”, she reported to the Guardian.

Drones are known to be extremely accurate. If Israel was effectively only aiming fighters, then why was a peaceful family drinking tea in a garden blown to pieces? Why were a group of girls walking in the street targeted too? Along with children playing in a field? These are only few cases reported by the Guardian on the use of unmanned drones killing harmless civilians.

Israeli-made Drone, known as Hermes 450

Picture: AFP/Getty Images

Though Israel still claim their use of weapons conforms with international law and denied having used unmanned drones on Gaza, the Guardian found in the online version of an Israeli army magazine, Major Gil, the deputy commander of the first UAV squadron, describes using the drones to carry out attacks during this offensive. He describes being able clearly monitor accurately everything and to clearly distinguish fighters from women and children and other civilians.

On the drone’s use, as it is the case for the White phosphorus, teams of human rights investigators and international law experts are now building the case for war crimes charges against Israel for having killed so many civilians.

4. Home destruction ‘wanton’

During the 23-days of what should be better named an aggression than a war, UNDP estimated that 14,000 Palestinian homes were destroyed, along with 219 factories and 240 schools.

But most of them, said human right groups, were not necessary but rather deliberate destruction aimed at ruining Palestinian lives and economy.

Over 14,000 homes have been destroyed during the Cast Lead operation, Gaza 2009

Picture: AP

Amnesty International challenges the Israeli main narrative that “buildings were destroyed because of the military operation needs”, by releasing evidences of the use of mines. Fragments of anti-tank mines have been found in the rubbles of destroyed properties, highlighting that houses were blown from below, rather than being destroyed from above in an airstrike.

“Israeli troops have to leave their vehicles to plant the mines, indicating that they faced no danger and that there was no military or operational justification. (…) Unless those operating on the ground felt not just 100% but 200% secure – that the places were not booby trapped, that they wouldn’t come under fire – they could not have got out of the vehicles,” she said. “They would not have used that method”, said Donatella Rovera, the head of the AI fact-finding mission to Southern Israel and Gaza.

This allegation is furthermore backed up by the conclusion of Breaking the Silence, an Israeli group, stating that “many demolitions had been carried out when there was no immediate threat” and that “from the testimonies that we’ve gathered, lots of demolitions – buildings demolished either by bulldozers or explosives – were done after the area was under Israeli control,” said Yehuda Shaul, one of the group’s members.

Though destruction of civilian property is not illegal in itself under international law, it must be justifiable on military grounds – for example if the building was booby trapped or being used as cover for enemy fighters which was apparently not always the case.

But wanton destruction on a large scale would qualify as a war crime, emphasized Amnesty. Could 15,000 private homes constitute a ‘large scale’? It is likely so.

5. Inhumanity among the Israeli army, dehumanizing the Palestinians – the mature fruit of the occupation

Another investigation from Ha’aretz made a lot of noise this week, embarrassing strongly the Israeli commanders when the newspaper published striking testimonies from Israeli soldiers involved in the Gaza fighting, in which they described the shooting of civilians and the low regard held among the troops for Palestinians.

Over 20 documented occasions have been reported on which Israeli soldiers were seen firing at women and children carrying white flags.

Their horrendous tales includes the killing of an elderly and harmless Palestinian woman walking on a road and the willful killing of a woman and her two children, after been told they would be safe.

A young sharpshooter witnessed his colleague’s crime and testified: “I don’t think he felt too bad about it, because after all, as far as he was concerned, he did his job according to the orders he was given. And the atmosphere in general, from what I understood from most of my men who I talked to … I don’t know how to describe it …. The lives of Palestinians, let’s say, is something very, very less important than the lives of our soldiers. So as far as they are concerned they can justify it that way,” he said.

Though we had already assumed this, it has now been revealed by several testimonies from the army itself that soldiers acted in complete disregard to the Palestinian lives in Gaza.

Rules of engagement were also reported to have been eased, such as allowing the clearing out of Palestinian houses by shooting without warning the residents beforehand. An IDF squad leader is quoted in the daily newspaper Ha’aretz as saying his soldiers interpreted the rules to mean “we should kill everyone there [in the centre of Gaza]. Everyone there is a terrorist.”

Acts of unjustified vandalism where also common such as writing ’death to the Arabs’ on the walls of a family house or to take family pictures and spit on them. “I think this is the main thing: To understand how much the IDF has fallen in the realm of ethics, really. It’s what I’ll remember the most”, testified a squad leader, who took part in the operation.

A Palestinian man looks through a door as he stands in a home commandeered by Israeli soldiers during the recent Gaza offensive, in Gaza City, Monday, March 23, 2009. The Hebrew graffiti on the wall reads “The eternal people has no fear”, bottom, and “Shaked”, a name referring to an army battalion. In recent testimony, several Israeli soldiers confirmed they were engaged in unnecessary destruction.

Picture: AP

Those testimonies further challenge the IDF claim that “The Israeli army is the most moral army in the world”, and, as more and more emerge by the day, it is also very unlikely to believe in the argument that these are isolated incidents.

They are far from being isolated. And further away from being incidents.

If it is satisfactory that the eyes of the world have now been opened to the Israeli violations, one should never forget that they neither start nor stop with the Gaza operation. Those who have monitored the situation in Gaza and the West Bank for months or years know that everything started long before this and violations are not limited to the tiny, besieged strip.

Further from Gaza, in the towns and cities of the West Bank it isn’t much different. Illegal bombs or drones are not used, but prohibited bullets are shot at close range to peaceful demonstrators and the constant humiliation and the killing of the innocent is routine.

The dehumanization of the IDF troops is the result of a long lasting process. It is the result of dozens of years of occupation in which an entire generation of soldiers has grown into a context of impunity where demolishing Palestinian houses or killing children has become common.

Gideon Levy, a well-know Ha’aretz columnist further noted that “Most of the soldiers who took part in the assault on Gaza are youths with morals. They will escort an old woman across the street or rescue earthquake victims. But in Gaza, when faced with the inhuman Palestinians, the package will always be suspicious, the brainwashing will be stupefying and the core principles will change. That is the only way they can kill and engage in wanton destruction without deliberating or wrestling with their consciences, not even telling their friends or girlfriends what they did.”

It is an entire trend that has to be reversed. And it can only be done by challenging the impunity that the Israeli army and government had benefited from for over six decades.

We do not want the IDF to investigate their crimes. We want an impartial, independent investigation that would ask for individual accountability

Gathering these cases above, we now have what we need: facts and evidence.

During the Operation so many citizens around the world expressed their solidarity with Gazans and their tiredness of Israel being far above every rule and killing with total impunity. Thousands and thousands of world citizens, led by their conscience and beliefs in social justice, stood up in the cold to pressure their government. The message was unique: “Act to End This Now.”

The laws of war obligate states to investigate impartially allegations of war crimes. The IDF won’t be impartial. Israel has to be under independent investigation for the war crimes, along with the governments which supplied Israel with its munitions.

Though the Israeli army, now embarrassed, claimed it would investigate such violations it appears to be very unlikely that any serious steps towards justice will be taken by the army itself.

Without a proper independent investigation there will be no deterrent. We need a binding, compulsory conclusion that would finally mean something on the ground. If not, the message of the international community will remain the same, “keep on doing what we don’t like, there will be no sanctions.”

To change this we need a political will and courage. Various bodies announced their will to investigate the Israeli crimes and charged the State for war crimes.

Judges who participated in investigation committees into crimes in Darfur, the former Yugoslavia and East-Timor, decided to set up a similar international committee to investigate “all the parties” in the IDF offensive on Gaza, concluding that these events go beyond isolated incidents and that “the problem is not only soldiers’ behavior, but the instructions from the senior military ranks and the minister in charge.”

Similarly, the UK has announced unofficially this week the impossibility to hold its promise to Israel to cover up their war crimes. As the British law permits private citizens to press charges against foreigners on war crimes the legislation permits the arrest of IDF officers visiting Britain on war crimes. The UK promised the Israeli government to amend the law, protecting the State from any investigation from their side.

But the UK just stepped back under the pressure of its public opinion, claiming that “as a result of the decline in Israel’s public image following the Cast lead Operation, the government believes it will be unable to pass the amendment to the legislation before the next elections”, understanding that for its citizens, backing up Israel blindly is not synonymous with gaining voices anymore.

This is a discrete trend, but a good sign, that impunity might not last any longer.

If international NGO’s, the United Nations, and the citizens are behind us What are we waiting for? What are you waiting for?

[1] 1,450 Palestinians were killed, including at least 960 were civilians and among them 431 children and 114 women.

Gov. Schwarzenegger, show us the IHSS fraud

LA Times, Opinion, July 14, 2009

Gov. Schwarzenegger, show us the fraud.

By Deborah Doctor

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has made fraud in California’s In-Home Supportive Services program a budget issue as the state tries to deal with its financial crisis.

The in-home program provides critical care to 430,000 low-income Californians in their homes so they are not forced to move into institutions or onto the streets. It is often cited — including by Schwarzenegger — as a key to keeping Californians out of nursing homes that would cost the state much more.

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Everyone is against fraud, but what exactly is Schwarzenegger talking about? How much of the program’s money is wasted on fraud?

The governor can’t seem to make up his mind. A couple of years ago, he estimated it at 10%, so the state spent thousands and thousands of dollars retraining county social workers, who assess the program’s consumers. After home visits, the social workers discovered that the vast majority of Californians receiving aid were eligible and in need of the services.

On July 2, the governor told a news conference that “our In-Home Supportive Services program is riddled with fraud.” A day later, in an Op-Ed article in this newspaper, he wrote: “Although this kind of abuse of taxpayer dollars is not rampant, we know it exists.” And then last week, basing his numbers on what “some people say,” Schwarzenegger estimated that 25% of the IHSS program is fraud.

In his Op-Ed and in answer to follow-up questions about in-home-care fraud, the governor refers to recent grand jury reports from six counties that found there were no safeguards against fraud in their programs. He cites care providers who collect checks under aliases or who over-report their hours, and he says greater vigilance would save the state hundreds of millions of dollars this year alone.

But where are the details?

A Contra Costa Times reporter took a closer look. In San Bernardino County, according to a July 8 story, of 19,798 IHSS recipients, the grand jury found that there were about 60 fraud cases a year referred by investigators. The reporter, James Koren, pointed out that even if all 60 cases were ultimately proved to be fraud, that would yield a rate of 0.3% — not quite “massive amounts of fraud.”

Sacramento County, meanwhile, reported that, in fiscal year 2006-2007, there were 397 reports of suspected fraud out of 17,735 cases, a rate of 2.2%. Of these, 31 were accepted for prosecution, a rate of 0.2% of prosecutable fraud.

In Los Angeles County, the district attorney recently said that, as the largest county with 200,000 In-Home Support Services consumers, L.A. had the largest amount of abuse. However, the Los Angeles Commission for Public Social Services reviewed a 2008 grand jury investigation and found it lacking in documentation, with “no evidence to support the allegations.”

Which brings us back to the governor. He has cited one unfortunate situation — a son, the in-home caregiver for his father, who delivered appallingly poor care — and called that fraud. I understand the point, but in reality this is more an example of elder abuse, not fraud that costs taxpayers money. That’s because no one claims the father wasn’t eligible or deserving. Even if the state had discovered the abuse and stopped paying the son, it wouldn’t have ended the father’s need for help.

If the governor wants to find and eliminate fraud and protect seniors and people with disabilities, he should proceed based on evidence, not on unfounded estimates.

He must be honest about the high costs of proposed anti-fraud measures, such as his suggestion that we launch a mass fingerprinting program for those receiving care and for caregivers. That might help prevent some fraud, but show us the cost-benefit analysis that proves it saves money.

Finally, he should restore the cuts that have reduced the number of county social workers and Adult Protective Services and county ombudsmen, who are the “first responders” against fraud and abuse, and use the same diligence against all providers — including nursing homes, where there is meticulous documentation of needless death and abuse.

He should not single out Californians who need assistance to live at home and the people who help them stay safe.

Deborah Doctor is a legislative advocate at Disability Rights California, the state’s congressionally mandated agency for protecting and advocating for the rights of people with disabilities.