This just goes to show yet again that you cannot trust the mainstream media to tell the full story if it conflicts or undermines the U.S. elite’s policy goals.

I received the following from Steven L. Robinson via Green Alliance’s Green All Views Listserve.

by Joshua Holland & Raed Jarrar

AlterNet

http://www.alternet.org/story/52135/

May 21, 2007.

Iraq’s resistance groups have offered a series of peace plans that might put an end to the country’s sectarian violence, but they’ve been ignored by the U.S.-led coalition because [the resistance groups are] opposed to foreign occupation and privatization of oil.

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An online search shows that the peace plan was largely ignored by the Western commercial media.

That’s par for the course. While every nuance of every spending bill that passes the U.S. Congress is analyzed in minute detail, the Iraqis — remember them? — have proposed a series of comprehensive peace deals that might unite the country’s ethnic and sectarian groups and result in an outcome American officials of all stripes say they want to achieve: a stable, self-governing Iraq that is strong enough to keep groups like al Qaeda from establishing training camps and other infrastructure within its borders.

Al Fadhila’s peace plan was not the first one offered by Iraqi actors, nor the first to be ignored by the Anglo-American Coalition.

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But these plans are unacceptable to the Coalition because they A) affirm the legitimacy of Iraq’s armed resistance groups and acknowledge that the U.S.-led coalition is, in fact, an occupying army, and B) return Iraq to the Iraqis, which means no permanent bases, no oil law that gives foreign firms super-sweet deals and no radical restructuring of the Iraqi economy. U.S. lawmakers have been and continue to be faced with a choice between Iraqi stability and American Empire, and continue to choose the latter, even as the results of those choices are splashed in bloody Technicolor across our TV screens every evening.

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As early as 2005, the University of Michigan’s Juan Cole reported that the Sadrist movement — named after the father of the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr — had gathered a million signatures on a petition demanding a timetable for occupation forces to withdraw. More recently, the Arabic press reported that as many as a million Iraqis — a million Shia and Sunni working together — had protested the continuing occupation in Najaf on the fourth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad last month.

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One of the few laws left on the books from the Saddam Hussein era is one that severely limits the rights of Iraqi workers to organize. As journalist
David Bacon reported in the winter of 2003, coalition forces “escalated their efforts to paralyze Iraq’s new labor unions with a series of arrests”
that left one of the few surviving segments of Iraq’s once-vibrant secular civil society toothless.

Paramilitary Ties to Elite In Colombia Are Detailed

Commanders Cite State Complicity in Violent Movement

Top paramilitary commanders have in recent days confirmed what human rights groups and others have long alleged: Some of Colombia’s most influential political, military and business figures helped build a powerful anti-guerrilla movement that operated with impunity, killed civilians and shipped cocaine to U.S. cities.The commanders have named army generals, entrepreneurs, foreign companies and politicians who not only bankrolled paramilitary operations but also worked hand in hand with fighters to carry them out. In accounts that are at odds with those of the government, the commanders have said their organization, rather than simply sprouting up to fill a void in lawless regions of the country, had been systematically built with the help of bigger forces.

Is it any wonder that Columbia is a poor country?  (click here for article)  These elites find it second nature to rape the country’s natural resources and to ignore the plight of the poor.

Online, GOP Is Playing Catch-Up

Democrats Have Big Edge on Web

Besides TechRepublican, the group blog started two weeks ago by All, who worked as communications director for Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.), there is QubeTV, founded in March as an alternative to what one of its founders, Charlie Gerow, a former Reagan campaign aide, calls “the liberal bias” of YouTube.  [my emphasis]

YouTube has a liberal Bias???!!!  YouTube???!!!  (Click here for the entire article.)   ANYBODY can post to the site!  ANYBODY!!!  By definition, it is impossible for the site to have any kind of bias!  (with the exception of “objectionable” and copyrighted material)

“But look at the short history of online politics,” Glover said. “For Republicans, the Internet is where bad things happen. Take [former U.S. senator] George Allen and his ‘macaca’ moment. . . . You can kind of understand why Republicans have this almost instinctive fear of the Internet, where the mob rules.“  [my emphasis]

“WHERE THE MOB RULES”???!!!  Somebody tell me that that is not an elitist and condescending remark! How typical of the Repugnicans!  (not that the Democratic leadership is much better…)

Broder opposes Democracy at the Federal level of U.S. Government.

That’s right, folks: The Washington Post Columnist David S. Broder opposes the principle of one-person-one-vote at the Federal level. If you do not believe me, then check out his column for yourself. It does not make for just interesting reading — it makes for incredible reading. He justifies his opposition to one-person-one-vote at the Federal level (Although, given the way he frames the issue, he almost certainly opposes one-person-one-vote at the state level as well.) on the grounds that the two party system might suffer. It is quite obvious that he is contemptuous of any voter who supports an independent/third-party candidate. This does beg the following question: Is he an elitist? Does he support the interests of the wealthy at the expense of the common people? Before reading this column, I would immediately have dismissed this question from my mind as being ridiculous; but now I can no longer do so. All of his rationalizations come straight out of the elite playbook: Say that you are opposing this in order to protect minorities (while at the same time opposing any allocation of any meaningful resources to assist said minorities that are discriminated against in the popular culture); Say that you are opposing this in order to protect the family farmer (while at the same time supporting corporate farmers at the expense of the small stakeholder); in short, say and do anything in order to maintain your political hegemony in this country — and indeed, throughout the world.

I never before would have argued that Broder is an elitist — but now I wonder.

As the primary season draws to a close in Maryland, there’s been a lot of talk about who should be included in debates and while it is a tough question with no easy answer (if you include everyone who files in the primary season than you’ll have a debate that isn’t substantive, but when you start to narrow the field it gets arbitrary), it gets tougher when a semi-public entity supported by taxes, in this case Maryland Public Television, is making the decision.

Allan Lichtman’s supporters put up a couple of videos of his recent arrest while trying to get into a debate between the two “leading” Senate candidates. Amidst all of the rhetoric, tension, and even action (between 1:20 and 2:20 is where things get energized and Lichtman gets arrested), the most interesting question isn’t really explored. You know this will be a question we get into in the general.

The real question is, who controls the public space, both literally and figuratively? What happens when public television staff decide who gets to be on tv? And what happens when security staffers keep Lichtman or really anyone out of a particular publicly funded and controlled (i.e. by your tax dollars) space, namely the MPT studio? Lichtman asks under what authority they are trying to drive him out and then, under what authority they are arresting him. He asks what laws were violated, what right they have to arrest him. And it’s a good question.

Who decides who can come on public property and what they can do there? And is it just the fact that they are government employees that the police can arrest someone? I don’t think so. Lichtman’s letter from jail and the presence of Kevin Zeese outside the studio (yes, he’s on camera), suggests we need to grapple with this. How far will some go with power if we don’t question them?

I write a blog and organize a generally progressive, collaborative Maryland politics and policy blog (that is looking for more progressive voices).

Workers at Meatpacking Plant Must First Overcome Distrust

When she finished eating dinner at the party, Lenora Bruce Bailey sat for a spell on a little wood porch facing Main Street. Two years ago, she had one of the best jobs around: boxing scraps of hog meat at the nearby packing plant. Then she got sick. “They terminated me,” she said. “Took away my health insurance.”

In a nearby room, Raphael Abrego held up his purple and swollen right hand and wondered whether the same might happen to him. He was one of the better cutters on the fast-moving butcher line, but he slipped one day and injured his hand. “I can’t close it,” he said in Spanish, trying to clench bloated fingers.

Bailey is a black, native-born American. Abrego is a Latino immigrant. At Smithfield Packing Co., the largest meat-processing facility in the world, the two think of themselves as being in the same boat.

Recently, they attended a potluck to try to do something that is rare for African Americans and Latino immigrants: come together to fight for workers’ rights.
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The union’s difficulties are part of a larger story of distrust between black and Latino workers, a vast cultural divide between immigrants who illegally enter the country seeking work and African Americans who worry that immigrants will take over their jobs, communities and local political power.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/23/AR2006072300698.html?nav=trm

I got this from Dennis Kobray via Green Alliance’s discussion listserv.

The apartheid state in question is, of course, Israel.  Its first class citizens are Israeli Jews, the majority of them of European or sometimes American origin.  The second class citizens are Israeli Arabs, who enjoy significant but limited rights under the law including token representation in the Knesset.  The eleventh class citizens are not citizens at all.  They are Palestinians.  One expects to be able to say that Palestinians live in Palestine and are governed by Palestinians, but the truth is something different.  The areas in which Palestinians may inhabit have shrunk nearly every year since the Nakba, their  name for the wave of mass deportations, murders, the dispossession, destruction and exile of whole Arab towns, cities and regions that attended the 1948 founding of the state of Israel.  As the whole world, except for the US public knows, Palestinians have lived under military occupation, without land, without rights, without hope, for nearly sixty years now.

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The parallels with apartheid South Africa are many and striking.  Like its earlier apartheid cousin, Israel menaces all its neighbors with an impressive array of nukes and the largest military establishment in the region.

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White South Africans rightly fretted at the fact that they were a minority ruling over an unhappy majority, and concocted schemes to exile the country’s black population to isolated rural reservations it called bantustans.  Israeli pundits calmly discuss the demographic bomb, their name for the fact that second and eleventh class citizens, Israeli Arabs and Palestinians will soon outnumber them within the borders of their supposed “Jewish state” while Israeli politicians sit in Knesset and hold ministries in successive governments openly calling for mass deportations and ethnic cleansing.

http://www.blackcommentator.com/192/192_cover_Israeli_apartheid_dixon.html

I got this from Dennis Kobray on Green Alliance’s discussion listserv.

Twenty-five years ago I stared into the eyes of Michael Berman, chief operative for his congressman-brother, Howard Berman. I was a neophyte running for the California Assembly in a district that the Bermans claimed belonged to them.

“I represent the Israeli defense forces,” Michael said. I thought he was joking. He wasn’t. Michael seemed to imagine himself the gatekeeper protecting Los Angeles’ Westside for Israel’s political interests, and those of the famous Berman-Waxman machine. Since Jews represented one-third of the Democratic district’s primary voters, Berman held a balance of power.

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I can offer my real-life experience to the present discussion about the existence and power of an “Israel lobby.” It is not as monolithic as some argue, but it is far more than just another interest group in a pluralist political world. In recognizing its diversity, distinctions must be drawn between voters and elites, between Reform and Orthodox tendencies, between the less observant and the more observant. During my ultimate 18 years in office, I received most of my Jewish support from the ranks of the liberal and less observant voters. But I also received support from conservative Jews who saw themselves as excluded by a Jewish (and Democratic) establishment.

http://www.counterpunch.org/Hayden07202006.html

The ICC Plans Are Overrunning Derwood

Most of us in Derwood have done our homework on the planned intercounty connector because our town is slated to be the ICC entry point. This summer we’ve watched Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. and Montgomery County Executive Douglas M. Duncan ram through the approvals before the November elections. We’ve seen surveyors’ plastic ribbons fluttering in our woods. We’ve blanched as the state pushes forward on eminent-domain seizure of homes in nearby Cashell Estates.

But no one told us that a midnight confiscation of our private property was in the plan.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/21/AR2006072101413.html

Codeword: Hannibal

Please note that the idea that their problems might be resolved by building up Lebanese civil society (Law enforcement, education, housing, civil engineering, mass transit, social welfare, health care, etc.) is conspicuously absent from this piece.

…I fear that we might not stop there, and that we might succumb to the delusion that military action can transform Lebanon’s political and social realities. That same delusion led Israel to occupy Lebanon for an agonizing decade and a half in which hundreds of our troops — and many more Lebanese and Palestinians — were killed.

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The following winter, helicopters suddenly descended near the muddy clearing in Galilee, where my unit was training. We were sent to Beirut, where before long I saw that our mission had little to do with protecting my neighbors back home. Instead, we served as a wedge between Christians, Muslims and Druze, who were taking advantage of the occupation to settle old scores. It would be the first of several tours of duty for me in Lebanon.

Sharon’s grand plan failed. True, the PLO was forced out three months after the invasion, and the rockets stopped falling on Israeli settlements. But we paid a huge price in Israeli troops killed and wounded — not to mention the casualties suffered by the Lebanese. Instead of remaking Lebanon, we found ourselves bogged down there much as the United States is now bogged down in Iraq. During some of my tours, we spent most of our energy keeping Lebanese from killing one another, rather than protecting Israel’s borders and civilians.

…[B]eing angry…can cloud your judgment and make you do foolish things. I can only hope that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will not fall victim to the same fantasies that sent me and so many other soldiers to Lebanon. In Lebanon’s unending political vacuum, no government can be strong and decisive. That’s why the country has been a pawn that the stronger countries around it have so willingly sacrificed. Absent a multinational campaign against Iran and Syria, Israel cannot permanently prevent southern Lebanon from serving as a forward base for enemy forces. Instead, Israel must use force every few years to push back the enemy, knowing that once we leave, our foes will return and rearm.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/21/AR2006072101372.html