Dangerous and Loud

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/bassem_naeem/2008/05/hamas_condemns_the_holocaust.html

Hamas condemns the Holocaust

We are not engaged in a religious conflict with Jews; this is a
political struggle to free ourselves from occupation and oppression

Bassem Naeem

May 12, 2008

As the Palestinian people prepare to commemorate the 60th anniversary
of the Nakba (”catastrophe”) - the dispossession and expulsion of
most of our people from our land - those remaining in Palestine face
escalating aggression, killings, imprisonment, ethnic cleansing and
siege.  But instead of support and solidarity from the western media,
we face frequent attempts to defend the indefensible or turn fire on
the Palestinians themselves.

One recent approach, which seems to be part of the wider attempt to
isolate the elected Palestinian leadership, is to portray Hamas and
the population of the Gaza strip as motivated by anti-Jewish
sentiment, rather than a hostility to Zionist occupation and
domination of our land.  A recent front page article in the
International Herald Tribune followed this line, as did an article
for Cif about an item broadcast on the al-Aqsa satellite TV channnel
about the Nazi Holocaust.

In fact, the al-Aqsa Channel is an independent media institution that
often does not express the views of the Palestinian government headed
by Ismail Haniyeh or of the Hamas movement.  The channel regularly
gives Palestinians of different convictions the chance to express
views that are not shared by the Palestinian government or the Hamas
movement.  In the case of the opinion expressed on al-Aqsa TV by Amin
Dabbur, it is his alone and he is solely responsible for it.

It is rather surprising to us that so little attention, if any, is
given by the western media to what is regularly broadcast or written
in the Israeli media by politicians and writers demanding the total
uprooting or “transfer” of the Palestinian people from their land.

The Israeli media and pro-Israel western press are full of views that
deny or seek to excuse well-established facts of history including
the Nakba of 1948 and the massacres perpetrated then by the Haganah,
the Irgun and LEHI with the objective of forcing a mass dispossession
of the Palestinians.

But it should be made clear that neither Hamas nor the Palestinian
government in Gaza denies the Nazi Holocaust.  The Holocaust was not
only a crime against humanity but one of the most abhorrent crimes in
modern history.  We condemn it as we condemn every abuse of humanity
and all forms of discrimination on the basis of religion, race,
gender or nationality.

And at the same time as we unreservedly condemn the crimes
perpetrated by the Nazis against the Jews of Europe, we categorically
reject the exploitation of the Holocaust by the Zionists to justify
their crimes and harness international acceptance of the campaign of
ethnic cleansing and subjection they have been waging against us - to
the point where in February the Israeli deputy defence minister Matan
Vilnai threatened the people of Gaza with a “holocaust”.

Within 24 hours, 61 Palestinians - more than half of them civilians
and a quarter children - were killed in a series of air raids.
Meanwhile, a horrible crime against humanity continues to be
perpetrated against the people of Gaza: the two-year-old siege
imposed after Hamas won the legislative elections in January 2006,
which is causing great suffering.  Due to severe shortages of
medicines and food, scores of Palestinians have lost their lives.

It cannot be right that Europeans in general and the British in
particular maintain a virtual silence toward what the Zionists are
doing to the Palestinians, let alone supporting or justifying their
oppressive policies, under the pretext of showing sympathy for the
victims of the Holocaust.

The Palestinian people aspire to freedom, independence and peaceful
coexistence with all their neighbours.  There are, today, more than
six million Palestinian refugees.  No less than 700,000 Palestinians
have been detained at least once by the Israeli occupation
authorities since 1967.  Hundreds of thousands have so far been
killed or wounded.  Little concern seems to be caused by all of this
or by the erection of an apartheid wall that swallows more than 20%
of the West Bank land or the heavily armed colonies that devour
Palestinian land in a blatant violation of international law.

The plight of our people is not the product of a religious conflict
between us and the Jews in Palestine or anywhere else: the aims and
positions of today’s Hamas have been repeatedly spelled out by its
leadership, for example in Hamas’s 2006 programme for government.
The conflict is of a purely political nature: it is between a people
who have come under occupation and an oppressive occupying power.

Our right to resistance against occupation is recognised by all
conventions and religious traditions.  The Jews are for us the people
of a sacred book who suffered persecution in European lands.
Whenever they sought refuge, Muslim and Arab lands provided them with
safe havens.  It was in our midst that they enjoyed peace and
prosperity; many of them held leading positions in Muslim countries.

After almost a century of Zionist colonial and racist oppression,
some Palestinians find it hard to imagine that some of their
oppressors are the sons and daughters of those who were themselves
oppressed and massacred.

Palestinians had nothing to do with the Holocaust but find themselves
punished for someone else’s crime.  But we are well aware and warmly
welcome the outspoken support for Palestinian rights by Israeli and
Jewish human rights activists in Palestine and around the world.

We hope that journalists in the west will begin to adopt a more
objective approach when covering events in Palestine.  The
Palestinian people are being killed by Israel’s machine of
destruction on a daily basis.  Nevertheless, we still see a clear
bias in favour of Israel in the western media.

The Europeans bear a direct responsibility for what is befalling the
Palestinians today.  Britain was the mandate authority that handed
over Palestine to Israeli occupation.  Nazi Germany perpetrated the
most heinous crimes against Jews, forcing the survivors to migrate to
Palestine in pursuit of safety.  We, therefore, expect the Europeans
to atone for their historic crimes by restoring some balance to the
inhuman and one-sided international response to the tragedy of our
people.

Bassem Naeem is the minister of health and information in the
Hamas-led Palestinian administration in Gaza.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-oath2-2008may02,0,6280956.story

Teacher fired for refusing to sign loyalty oath

Cal State system ousts another instructor who objects on religious
grounds to a pledge adopted by California in 1952 to root out
communists.

By Richard C. Paddock
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

May 2, 2008

When Wendy Gonaver was offered a job teaching American studies at Cal
State Fullerton this academic year, she was pleased to be headed back
to the classroom to talk about one of her favorite themes: protecting
constitutional freedoms.

But the day before class was scheduled to begin, her appointment as a
lecturer abruptly ended over just the kind of issue that might have
figured in her course. She lost the job because she did not sign a
loyalty oath swearing to “defend” the U.S. and California
constitutions “against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

The loyalty oath was added to the state Constitution by voters in
1952 to root out communists in public jobs. Now, 16 years after the
collapse of the Soviet Union, its main effect is to weed out
religious believers, particularly Quakers and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

As a Quaker from Pennsylvania and a lifelong pacifist, Gonaver
objected to the California oath as an infringement of her rights of
free speech and religious freedom. She offered to sign the pledge if
she could attach a brief statement expressing her views, a practice
allowed by other state institutions. But Cal State Fullerton rejected
her statement and insisted that she sign the oath if she wanted the
job.

“I wanted it on record that I am a pacifist,” said Gonaver, 38. “I
was really upset. I didn’t expect to be fired. I was so shocked that
I had to do this.”

California State University officials say they were simply following
the law and did not discriminate against Gonaver because all
employees are required to sign the oath. Clara Potes-Fellow, a Cal
State spokeswoman, said the university does not permit employees to
submit personal statements with the oath.

“The position of the university is that her entire added material was
against the law,” Potes-Fellow said.

In February, another Cal State instructor, Quaker math teacher
Marianne Kearney-Brown, was fired because she inserted the word
“nonviolently” when she signed the oath. She was quickly rehired
after her case attracted media attention.

It is hard to know how many would-be workers decline to sign the
pledge over religious or political issues. Some object because they
interpret the pledge as a commitment to take up arms. Others have
trouble swearing an oath to something other than their God.

Public agencies do not appear to keep a record of people denied
employment over the oath. Union grievances and lawsuits are rare.

Some agencies take the oath more seriously than others. Certain
school districts and community colleges have been known to let
employees change the wording of the oath when they sign or to ignore
the requirement altogether. Others, including the University of
California, advise employees on how they can register their
objections yet still sign the pledge.

All state, city, county, public school, community college and public
university employees — about 2.3 million people — are covered by
the law, although noncitizens are not required to sign.

UC Berkeley was the first to impose a tough anti-communist loyalty
oath in 1949 and fired 31 professors who refused to sign.

After a version of the oath was added to the state Constitution,
courts eventually struck down its harshest elements but let stand the
requirement of defending the constitutions. In one court test,
personal statements accompanying the oath were deemed constitutional
as long as they did not nullify the meaning of the oath.

Now, the University of California advises new employees who balk at
signing the pledge that they can submit an addendum, as long as it
does not negate the oath.

UC even provides sample declarations, such as: “This is not a promise
to take up arms in contravention of my religious beliefs,” or “I owe
allegiance to Jehovah.”

The California State University system takes a firmer approach.

Kearney-Brown, the math instructor fired by Cal State East Bay, said
she added the word “nonviolently” just as she had when taking
previous jobs as a high school teacher. The university, however, told
her she could not alter the pledge.

After her case attracted media attention and help from the United
Auto Workers, which represents some Cal State employees, the
university reversed course. The office of Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown
drafted a statement declaring that the oath does not commit employees
to bear arms in the country’s defense. Cal State agreed to let
Kearney-Brown attach it to her oath and she was reinstated.

Kearney-Brown said she believed she was defending the Constitution by
objecting to the oath and argued that signing a pledge should not be
reduced to a meaningless formality.

“The way it’s laid out, a noncitizen member of Al Qaeda could work
for the university, but not a citizen Quaker,” she said.

The 23-campus Cal State system has fired instructors over the oath at
least twice before.

In 2001, Cal StateDominguez Hills dismissed geography lecturer
Alejandro Alonso after he refused to sign. He said at the time that
he identified with the Jehovah’s Witnesses and that swearing an oath
to anyone but God violated his religious beliefs.

When his request for a religious exemption was denied, he proposed
signing the oath and attaching a personal statement. That also was
denied. Alonso, who went on to teach at USC, has become an expert on
Los Angeles gangs and runs the website www.streetgangs.com.

In 1995, Methodist minister Bud Tillinghast was teaching a course on
comparative religion at Humboldt State University, when he was pulled
out of class by campus police and fired because he had not signed the
oath.

Tillinghast said he believed that swearing an oath to the state
helped establish the government as a religion.

“I was teaching world religions and I ran up against a state
religion,” the retired minister recalled. “My concern was that this
was breaking down the separation of church and state and making the
state a religion you swear allegiance to.”

He filed suit against Cal State for reinstatement arguing that the
oath violated the 1993 federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act. But
after a court found that law unconstitutional, his suit was thrown
out.

In all, Tillinghast said, he went up against the loyalty oath three
times. Before being fired by Humboldt, he taught a religion class at
a community college for nearly a decade. For that job, the school
allowed him to sign an alternate oath.

Last year, he was named to the Humbolt County Human Rights
Commission. A potential problem was averted when officials decided he
didn’t need to sign the oath.

Efforts to remove the oath from the state Constitution have been
unsuccessful, although the matter came under scrutiny in 1998 when a
congressional subcommittee held a hearing on religious freedom.

Among those who testified was Zari Wigfall, a Jehovah’s Witness who
said she twice lost jobs at Sacramento City College in 1994 because
of the oath, first as a student tour guide and later as a theater
house manager for a children’s play.

“Citizens are entitled to certain rights, and also minorities,
including religious minorities, are given certain guarantees,” she
told the committee. “And I just didn’t think that . . . because of my
religious beliefs I would have two jobs taken away from me.”

She is now a dancer, choreographer and teacher in Southern California.

For Gonaver, the oath came up unexpectedly.

She was offered the job at Fullerton teaching two classes last fall,
Introduction to American Studies and Introduction to Intercultural
Women’s Studies. She received two appointment letters and signed a
contract. When she attended an orientation session for new faculty,
she heard of the oath for the first time.

After researching the issue and learning that UC allowed its
employees to provide personal statements, she submitted her own
six-sentence declaration to Fullerton.

In her statement, she wrote that the oath violates the 1st Amendment
and discriminates against religious pacifists, such as Quakers and
Buddhists. She called the pledge an “instrument of intimidation.” And
she wrote that employees who sign it “while harboring legitimate
religious and political objections” could be exposed to a charge of
perjury.

Margaret Atwell, the Fullerton school’s associate vice president for
academic affairs, replied in an e-mail that Gonaver was not allowed
to submit any statement, no matter what the practice at UC. Gonaver
would have to sign the oath or lose the job, Atwell said.

Gonaver refused.

Potes-Fellow, the Cal State spokeswoman, said the university stands
by its stricter interpretation of the requirement and is not affected
by how UC or other public institutions handle the oath.

“The university concluded that state law did not allow her to attach
her addendum,” Potes-Fellow said.

The attorney general’s statement that Kearney-Brown was allowed to
attach her oath did not violate Cal State’s policy because it was not
an addendum, Potes-Fellow said. “We think the circumstances are
different in both cases,” she said.

Gonaver said the attorney general’s statement does not go far enough
in answering her objections to the oath. But if she had been offered
a chance to use it last fall, she said, she probably would have
signed the oath and would have been teaching all year at Fullerton.

Now, she would like to see the oath eliminated for all public
employees except those who deal with sensitive information. She also
would like an apology and a job next year.

“It makes no sense that they do this to people,” she said. “It’s
people who take it seriously who don’t get hired.”

Just received this by email (from kashyyyyko <kashyyyyko@yahoo.com>; feel free to send him email). Can this rant be serious? It is like a parody of right wing thought. Scary over-the-top.

i found out about you from a conservative website and i saw some of your dirty shit-screeds; your own words.
you are a dirty liberal I hate you you are ugly and you are anti-american and evil.  i wish it was illegal for liberals to do alot of things, including teach, abuse their citizenship, and protest those who Love America (see Minutemen Project and your american-hating beliefs).  we need to close the border because illegals cause crime and blight.  i love it when police go after liberals it gives me Hope, real Hope, not dirty liberal “change” hope- that empty suit platitudes and the mexican scum love- REAL REPUBLICAN PRO-AMERICAN HOPE!
only Conservatives, Republicans, Ultra-Nationalists, Lou Dobbs Independents, Anti-Immigration people, and Liberal-Haters are true Americans.  Blame-America-First democRATS and liberal socialists are not american and should all be tried for treason!!!!
Even racists make better Americans than liberals, but only if they are white.  Hispanics are virulently racist and they hate whites and thus they hate Americans.  Black people have their problems but they hate Mexicans #1 and so the possibility of Black on Brown Mania!!!!!!!!  YES it is just so titilating
im not racist i just hate mexicans and brown people and some scummy ghetto blacks and some asians and wiggers because they hate ME, MY PEOPLE, MY FAMILY, and MY COUNTRY!
as some black people say  “mmmhmmmm”
Why don’t you just take your liberal ass and go to cuba, china, north korea, or iran and STAY THERE
you love immigrants from the third world GO FUCKING LIVE THERE LIVE WITH THEM YOU DUMBASS CUNT DRINK THE WATER not bottled HAAHAHAHAHA
go ahead and snarl at a real american you coward I don’t know why people with PHD’s have their heads so far up their ass!  id rather Love America and be less educated than have a PHD and hate this country.

But it’s not a good thing.

Debt Reckoning: U.S. Receives a Margin Call
By LIZ RAPPAPORT and JUSTIN LAHART
March 15, 2008; Page A1

The U.S. is at the receiving end of a massive margin call: Across the economy, wary lenders are demanding that borrowers put up more collateral or sell assets to reduce debts.

The unfolding financial crisis — one that began with bad bets on securities backed by subprime mortgages, then sparked a tightening of credit between big banks — appears to be broadening further. For years, the U.S. economy has been borrowing from cash-rich lenders from Asia to the Middle East.  American firms and households have enjoyed readily available credit at easy terms, even for risky bets. No longer.

Recent days’ cascade of bad news, culminating in yesterday’s bailout of Bear Stearns Cos., is accelerating the erosion of trust in the longevity of some brand-name U.S. financial institutions. The growing crisis of confidence now extends to the credit-worthiness of borrowers across the spectrum — touching American homeowners, who are seeing the value of their bedrock asset decline, and raising questions about the capacity of the Federal Reserve and U.S. government to rapidly repair the problems.

Global investors are pulling money from the U.S., steepening the decline of the U.S. dollar and sending it below 100 yen for the first time in a dozen years.  Against a trade-weighted basket of major currencies, the dollar has fallen 14.3% over the past year, according to the Federal Reserve. Yesterday it hit another record low against the euro, falling 2.1% this week to close at 1.567 dollars per euro.

Lenders and investors are pushing up the interest rates they demand from financial institutions seen as solid just a few months ago, or demanding that they sell assets and come up with cash.  Banks and Wall Street firms are so wary about each other that they’re pulling back.  Financial markets, anticipating that the Fed will cut rates sharply on Tuesday to try to limit the depth of a possible recession, are questioning the central bank’s commitment or ability to keep inflation from accelerating.

There are other symptoms of declining confidence.   Gold, the ultimate inflation hedge, is flirting with $1,000 an ounce.  Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services, a unit of McGraw-Hill Cos., predicted Thursday that large financial institutions still need to write down $135 billion in subprime-related securities, on top of $150 billion in previous write-downs.  Ordinary Americans are worried: Only 20% think the country is generally headed in the right direction, nearly as low as at any time in the Bush presidency, according to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.

“Clearly, the whole world is focused on the financial crisis and the U.S. is really the epicenter of the tension,” says Carlos Asilis, chief investment officer at Glovista Investments, an advisory firm based in New Jersey.  “As a result, we’re seeing capital flow out of the U.S.”

That is a troubling prospect for a savings-short, debt-heavy economy that relies on $2 billion a day from abroad to finance investment.  It is raising the specter of the long-feared crash in the dollar that could further rattle financial markets and boost U.S. interest rates.

Offsetting the Pain

Though the risks of an unpleasant outcome are worrisome, the effects of Fed interest-rate cuts and fiscal stimulus have yet to be fully felt by the U.S. economy.  Moreover, the combination of a weakening dollar — which remains the world’s favorite currency — and still-growing economies overseas is boosting U.S. exports and offsetting some of the pain of the housing bust and credit crunch.

But while cash continues to pour into the U.S. from abroad, this flow has been slowing.  In 2007, foreigners’ net acquisition of long-term bonds and stocks in the U.S. was $596 billion, down from $722 billion in 2006, according to Treasury Department data.  Americans, meanwhile, are investing more of their own money abroad.

Hopes are fading fast that the U.S. economy was suffering from a thirst for liquidity that standard Fed remedies could quench.  Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, speaking in Washington yesterday, said he sees “an increasing risk that the principal policy tool on which we have relied — the Federal Reserve lending to banks in one form or another” — is like “fighting a virus with antibiotics.”

Bob Eisenbeis, a former executive vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, says the problem is more than an inability to find ready buyers for assets.  “It is time to step back and recognize that the current situation isn’t a liquidity issue and hasn’t been for some time now,” said Mr. Eisenbeis, the chief monetary economist for Cumberland Advisers.  “Rather, there is uncertainty about the underlying quality of assets — which is a solvency issue, driven by a breakdown in highly leveraged positions.”

President Bush, speaking in New York and in a television interview yesterday, showed little appetite for further action.  Detailing the steps the administration has already taken, the president in a speech knocked a couple of pending proposals. “Government policy,” he said, “is like a person trying to drive a car on a rough patch.  If you ever get stuck in a situation like that, you know full well it’s important not to overcorrect — because when you overcorrect you end up in the ditch.”

But few in markets and elsewhere are convinced that the worst is over for the U.S., as each player moves to protect its own interests against potential calamities seen as improbable just a few months ago. Bear Stearns reassured investors earlier this week that it was solvent, but speculation that Bear faced a liquidity crunch had some traders and hedge funds moving to limit their exposure to it.

Yesterday, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York offered emergency funds to keep the troubled investment bank afloat.

The loss of confidence is now spreading beyond the biggest banks, with their well-publicized losses on subprime and other risky assets, to regional and small banks.  In the fourth quarter, U.S. banks reported their smallest net income — a total of $5.8 billion — in 16 years, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

There’s little sign yet that the worst is past.  The “moment of recovery” is when forecasters turn out to be too pessimistic, says Mr. Summers.  That point hasn’t likely arrived.  A Wall Street Journal survey of more than 50 economic forecasters in early March found a profound shift toward pessimism: About 70% say the U.S. is currently in recession, and on average they put the odds that this recession will be worse than the past two mild, short recessions at nearly 50%. Most expect house prices to decline into 2009 or 2010.

This couldn’t come at a worse time for U.S. homeowners.  American household debt has more than doubled in a decade to $13.8 trillion at the end of 2007 from $6.4 trillion in 1999, the vast majority of it in mortgages and home equity lines, according to Fed data.  But the value of U.S. householders’ biggest asset — their homes — is now falling.

Federal Response

The response of the Republican White House, Democratic Congress and Federal Reserve have been substantial.  President Bush and Congress, with remarkable speed, agreed to a $160 billion fiscal-stimulus package that will put money in consumers’ wallets soon.  The Fed already has cut interest rates by 1 1/4 percentage points this year, and markets anticipate another 3/4 point cut on Tuesday.  The Fed has moved to buy $400 billion worth of mortgage-backed securities for its $800 billion total securities portfolio in an effort to jolt that crucial market back to life and prevent rising mortgage rates from further depressing the U.S. housing market.

While there is continued debate about how to treat the current disease, there is a consensus emerging on the causes.  “Soaring delinquencies on U.S. subprime mortgages were the primary trigger,” the heads of the Treasury, Federal Reserve and Securities and Exchange Commission said in a lessons-learned report.  “However, that initial shock both uncovered and exacerbated other weaknesses in the global financial system.”

Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard University economist, says the current difficulty has many mothers — the housing bubble, the subprime problem and the fact that the value of U.S. imports has long outstripped the value of exports. The current account deficit — the broadest measure of the trade deficit — burgeoned, and the U.S. needed to borrow ever larger amounts of cash from abroad to fund it.

For years, Mr. Rogoff and like-minded economists harped that the U.S. current account deficit was unsustainable.  But despite the belief that it would necessarily reverse, it kept growing through the first part of this decade, going from 3.6% of gross domestic product at the end of 1999 to a record 6.8% at the end of 2005.  Lately, the deficit has seen a slight narrowing, but the combination of credit crisis and the economic downturn may have proved the catalyst for a faster, and potentially more dangerous, adjustment.

Pressures in one market spread rapidly to other, often more distant markets.  “The dollar and subprime — they’re two sides of the same coin,” says Princeton University economist Hyun Song Shin.  Many U.S. hedge funds and financial institutions were speculating in mortgage-related securities with money that was ultimately borrowed in Japan, where interest rates have been low for years.  He notes foreign banks’ net liabilities in the yen interbank market surged between April 2006 and April 2007.  As investments bought with money borrowed in Japan get sold and converted back into yen, he says, “we see both a fall in asset prices and a fall in the dollar.”

Crossing a Line

The resulting blow to confidence threatens to further weaken lending, borrowing, spending and investment in the U.S. economy. “Hedge fund blowups have so far been one-off situations. One worry is that we’ll cross some line and there’ll be a systemic wave of fund failures. It’s a reason why the market is so nervous,” says John Tierney, credit derivatives strategist at Deutsche Bank.
Banks also are increasing the collateral they demand when they lend to hedge funds that hold municipal bonds.  One hedge fund manager described what appears to be a coordinated effort by big investment banks to reduce their risk as they faced quarter-end pressures to cleanse their balance sheets.  Lenders declared “by fiat,” he said, that municipal-bond-fund managers needed to post more collateral to back their borrowings.

As a result, funds run by Blue River Asset Management, 1861 Capital Management and others circulated lists of assets to raise cash. The sell-off flooded the market with municipal bonds, making it more expensive for municipalities to borrow and upending the traditional relationship between tax-exempt municipal bonds and taxable U.S. Treasury bonds.  For the first time in memory, yields on tax-exempt municipal bonds jumped above yields on taxable U.S. Treasury debt.

Now, many hedge fund managers say, access to borrowed money, essential for many of their investment strategies to work, has become virtually impossible.

Mohamed El-Erian, co-chief executive officer of Allianz SE’s Pacific Investment Management Co., says the hedge-fund community is unwinding its leverage.  “This will push more of them into ’survival mode,’ further accentuating distressed sales and nervousness among the prime brokers,” he wrote to his colleagues Thursday morning. “In such a world, the quality of the assets matters less than whether you can finance them [or] how liquid they are.”

Not to mention the many hundreds of thousands of lives. This from Bob Herbert at The New York Times:

“For a fraction of the cost of this war we could have put Social Security on a sound footing for the next half-century or more.”

The money spent on the war each day is enough to enroll an additional 58,000 children in Head Start for a year, or make a year of college affordable for 160,000 low-income students through Pell Grants…

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/opinion/04herbert.html

The $2 Trillion Nightmare

By BOB HERBERT
Published: March 4, 2008

We’ve been hearing a lot about “Saturday Night Live” and the fun it has been having with the presidential race. But hardly a whisper has been heard about a Congressional hearing in Washington last week on a topic that could have been drawn, in all its tragic monstrosity, from the theater of the absurd.

The war in Iraq will ultimately cost U.S. taxpayers not hundreds of billions of dollars, but an astonishing $2 trillion, and perhaps more. There has been very little in the way of public conversation, even in the presidential campaigns, about the consequences of these costs, which are like a cancer inside the American economy.
On Thursday, the Joint Economic Committee, chaired by Senator Chuck Schumer, conducted a public examination of the costs of the war. The witnesses included the Nobel Prize-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz (who believes the overall costs of the war - not just the cost to taxpayers - will reach $3 trillion), and Robert Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International.

Both men talked about large opportunities lost because of the money poured into the war. “For a fraction of the cost of this war,” said Mr. Stiglitz, “we could have put Social Security on a sound footing for the next half-century or more.”

Mr. Hormats mentioned Social Security and Medicare, saying that both could have been put “on a more sustainable basis.” And he cited the committee’s own calculations from last fall that showed that the money spent on the war each day is enough to enroll an additional 58,000 children in Head Start for a year, or make a year of college affordable for 160,000 low-income students through Pell Grants, or pay the annual salaries of nearly 11,000 additional border patrol agents or 14,000 more police officers.

What we’re getting instead is the stuff of nightmares. Mr. Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia, has been working with a colleague at Harvard, Linda Bilmes, to document, among other things, some of the less obvious costs of the war. These include the obligation to provide health care and disability benefits for returning veterans. Those costs will be with us for decades.

Mr. Stiglitz noted that nearly 40 percent of the 700,000 troops from the first gulf war, which lasted just a month, have become eligible for disability benefits. The current war is approaching five years in duration.

“Imagine then,” said Mr. Stiglitz, “what a war - that will almost surely involve more than 2 million troops and will almost surely last more than six or seven years - will cost. Already we are seeing large numbers of returning veterans showing up at V.A. hospitals for treatment, large numbers applying for disability and large numbers with severe psychological problems.”

The Bush administration has tried its best to conceal the horrendous costs of the war. It has bypassed the normal budgetary process, financing the war almost entirely through “emergency” appropriations that get far less scrutiny.

Even the most basic wartime information is difficult to come by. Mr. Stiglitz, who has written a new book with Ms. Bilmes called “The Three Trillion Dollar War,” said they had to go to veterans’ groups, who in turn had to resort to the Freedom of Information Act, just to find out how many Americans had been injured in Iraq.
Mr. Stiglitz and Mr. Hormats both addressed the foolhardiness of waging war at the same time that the government is cutting taxes and sharply increasing non-war-related expenditures.

Mr. Hormats told the committee:

“Normally, when America goes to war, nonessential spending programs are reduced to make room in the budget for the higher costs of the war. Individual programs that benefit specific constituencies are sacrificed for the common good … And taxes have never been cut during a major American war. For example, President Eisenhower adamantly resisted pressure from Senate Republicans for a tax cut during the Korean War.”

Said Mr. Stiglitz: “Because the administration actually cut taxes as we went to war, when we were already running huge deficits, this war has, effectively, been entirely financed by deficits. The national debt has increased by some $2.5 trillion since the beginning of the war, and of this, almost $1 trillion is due directly to the war itself … By 2017, we estimate that the national debt will have increased, just because of the war, by some $2 trillion.”

Some former presidents - Washington, Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower - were quoted at the hearing on the need for accountability and shared sacrifice during wartime. But this is the 21st century. That ancient rhetoric can hardly be expected to compete for media attention, even in a time of war, with the giddy fun of S.N.L.

It’s a new era.

Refusing to offer David Horowitz a platform is not indicative of intolerance - it is application of standards that fairy tales and schoolyard bullying simply do not meet. Rather than introducing debate of issues of academic freedom by extending speaking offers to well known conservative and liberal scholars NCA has elected to turn itself into the quasi-academic version of a Bill O’Reilly shouting match. As an unfortunate result, Horowitz has been handed more fodder to spin into his complaints about academic bias and censorship, and those involved owe NCA members an explanation.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has identified David Horowitz’s right-wing ideological campaign against intellectualism as “bigoted and discredited”. In Pennsylvania, Horowitz’s claims of academic bias were found - by a taxpayer funded investigation of the Pennsylvania State System Universities and state affiliated schools, including Penn State - to be utterly without merit.

Despite Horowitz’s widely recognized agenda, absolute lack of credibility, and problematic stances on issues of diversity and race, Michael Hogan extended an offer - on behalf of NCA, on behalf of all of us who are dues paying members - to allow Horowitz to speak at the annual convention of our organization. Now Hogan is “personally disappointed” that Horowitz won’t be using NCA as a public stage for his anti-academic crusade?

What are the “important issues” that Horowitz raises and Hogan believes are so vital to the proceedings at NCA that Hogan would allow our membership to be manipulated into Horowitz’s line of fire? The notion that anyone whose political ideology is left of center supports terrorism? The misrepresentation of academia through analyses that any well-taught undergraduate could poke holes through? The intolerant and inflammatory labeling of critical discussion as “anti-Semitic”? Unsubstantiated, wildly over exaggerated, and inaccurate claims of “indoctrination” by faculty repeatedly found false by neutral agencies and even Horowitz’s own allies? The accusation of a lack of professionalism by faculty who are registered Democrats, as though we are unable to distinguish between personal politics and classroom conduct?

Since when do those in our profession endeavor to elevate sophistry to the position of reasoned discourse?

Next year, I could make sure that I submit academic work before the due date (lest I be scolded by the powers that be) and then wait for a competitive review to determine if my research meets NCA’s standards. It seems, though, that I would be better served if I spent my time producing shoddy scholarship by bullhorn and waiting for Mike Hogan to give me a call.

–Kara Lakowski

Shippensburg University

This excerpted from the Rhetoric Society of America’s “Blogora” (http://rsa.cwrl.utexas.edu/?q=node/2000):

Communicating About David Horowitz

Inside Higher Ed has an article out about NCA’s decision not to invite (or to take back the invitation to) Horowitz.

I feel a bit confused about the portrayal of both the events and of Cloud’s involvement in the matter (leaving the comments section of the article aside for now). Mostly, I’m troubled by the implicit assumption that there are no real consequences to even the most rhetorically-sanctioned public sphere for “deliberative discourse.” To assume that Horowitz would speak and there would be or could be no effects goes against everything I understand discourse to be and do.

Consequently, I’m also troubled by the suggestion that a counter-demonstration to Horowitz would have been inapprorpiate. Some suggested the protests could be a threat to his safety. As someone who voiced her support of a counter-demonstration to his potential presence, I find this suggestion demonstrates a lack of understanding of the role of protests, as well as a complete lack of acknowledgment of the ideological assumptions in free speech, academic freedom, and deliberative discourse. Not all protests, even those that question the privileging, legitimating, and naturalizing narrative of “academic freedom” and of “free speech” in general, are meant to create violent disruptions. (The guy is going to be a chapter in my dissertation–if anything, I would very much like an interview with him).

Furthermore, why must Horowitz’s presence be the only means for NCA scholars to engage concepts such as political indoctrination and academic freedom? In my research for the comps question on academic freedom, I came across an interview with Stanley Fish, who, for those of you who would have liked Horowitz to be in attendance, wrote:

“[Horowtiz's] strong suggestion is that academic freedom and intellectual diversity go together, but in fact they pull in opposite directions. Academic freedom is the freedom to go wherever an intellectual inquiry takes you without regard to directives proclaimed in advance by a regime of prior restraint. Intellectual diversity is a prior restraint; it tells you where to look and what you must look at—you must take into account every point of view independently of whether you think it is worth considering—and it tells you what materials you must include in your syllabus.” (Stanley Fish, “Think Again,” New York Times, 2 May 2006.)

Of course, I think Fish generously assumes Horowitz’s intentions to be legitimate, which I do not. But regardless, is not the negative response to NOT inviting Horowitz an assumption that we need to look in a particular direction to a particular person and consider his outrages attacks against (and the subsequent implicit harassment of) numerous scholars as a legitimate perspective?? I don’t think we need Horowitz to provoke an intellectually rigorous conversation about what is academic freedom (which, for the record, although the Supreme Court still can’t figure out, should NOT be conflated with free speech…which, it should be pointed out, advocates the right to hold counter-demonstrations without violence or disruption).

The article ends with: “Horowitz said of the turn of events: ‘It is obviously a rejection of the idea of by the NCA — the idea being that after five years David Horowitz should actually get to present his ideas to an academic association…. The fact that no academic group has had the balls to invite me says a lot about the ability of academic associations to discuss important issues if a political minority wants to censor them.’”

You know, in a 2000 interview with Scott Sherman of The Nation, Horowitz discussed his feelings on another what-he-hoped-to-be turn of events: “Lapsed radicals like ourselves are always condemned to regard the left as their Great White Whale. This book is a record of our sighting of the beast. We may not yet have set the final harpoon, but we have given chase.”

“Politics is war. Don’t forget.” –Horowitz, The Art of Political War: And Other Radical Pursuits (Texas: Spence Publishing, 2000), 11.

For the record, I have not advocated censorship of views opposed to my own (with one exception: right wing hate groups like the Klan and National Alliance–they recruit people to kill others). It is an embrace of the First Amendment, not an affront to it, to meet hateful speech with more speech. In political contexts, conservatives heckle me all the time. That’s politics. If I were to speak at a FrontPageMag conference or any other Horowitz outfit, I’d certainly expect a noisy crowd. I would not think that protests were an attempt to censor me.

There may be no specific “right” to disruptive protest, but there is a proud tradition of it; sometimes it is a necessity.

Well, InsideHigherEd today reported that NCA has withdrawn its invitation to David Horowitz to debate at its annual meeting this November. See story at http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/02/19/horowitz .

Here is my response:

My reasons for not welcoming Horowitz have less to do with his anti-intellectualism (for he is, in a Gramscian sense, an intellectual organic to the ruling class) than with with decidedly opportunistic and explicitly McCarthyist m.o. The man is about persecuting intellectuals, not engaging them.

I have said it before and I’ll say it again: We may remember these years as the “Horowitz years” in the same way that people remember McCarthyism if we do not successfully interrupt his campaign to purge critical intellectuals from the academy.

NCA’s decision is proof, in fact, that protest (even simply the “threat” of protest) works. I find it ironic that a communication association housing some prominent social movement scholars fears peaceful protest so much. But the implication that I or others would pose a physical threat to DH is ridiculous. He can play the martyr but the fact of the matter is, he is not getting a credible hearing. He can whine all he wants to.

Getting Ann Neal, instead, however is no victory and now we must strategize as to how to respond productively but strongly to her agenda as well. ACTA (her outfit) was the organization behind the Churchill firing; their report called him “low hanging fruit,” and intimated that his case was just the beginning of their quieter efforts to rid universities of activists.

I believe that the influence of these folks is waning given recent shifts in the national political climate. However, I believe that they must always be challenged in public in the way that McCarthy–once dismissed as a crank–should have been from the get-go.

Iraqis blame U.S. for discord. Shocker.
The Dems keep giving Bush $. Promises, promises.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/18/AR2007121802262.html

All Iraqi Groups Blame U.S. Invasion for Discord, Study Shows

Iraqis of all sectarian and ethnic groups believe that the U.S.
military invasion is the primary root of the violent differences
among them, and see the departure of “occupying forces” as the key to
national reconciliation, according to focus groups conducted for the
U.S. military last month.

That is good news, according to a military analysis of the results.
At the very least, analysts optimistically concluded, the findings
indicate that Iraqis hold some “shared beliefs” that may eventually
allow them to surmount the divisions that have led to a civil war.
(!!)

…The results are analyzed and presented to Petraeus as part of the
daily Battle Update Assessment or BUA (pronounced boo-ah).

- - -

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/sns-ap-budget-battle,1,5411202.story

Senate OKs $70B for Iraq, Afghanistan

The Senate gave President Bush a big win on Iraq Tuesday night as it
passed a massive $555 billion spending bill combining funding for 14
Cabinet departments with $70 billion for U.S. military operations
there and in Afghanistan.

…In rapid succession, the Senate cast two votes to approve the
hybrid spending bill.  By a 70-25 vote, the Senate approved the Iraq
and Afghanistan war funds — without restrictions that Democrats had
insisted on for weeks.