As usual, I did not watch last Saturday’s Republican debate, preferring to learn about it from Richard Adams’ always entertaining live blog for The Guardian. One exchange that caught my eye was when Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich fell over themselves trying to show who was more devoted to Israel, repeatedly referring to the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu as their friend ‘Bibi’.

Romney: Of course you [Gingrich] stand firm and stand for the truth, but you don’t speak for Israel.
Gingrich: I didn’t.
Romney: If Bibi Netanyahu wants to say what you said, let him say it. But our ally, the people of Israel should be able to take their own positions and not have us negotiate for them.
Gingrich: Can I just say one last thing? Because I didn’t speak for the people of Israel. I spoke as a historian who has looked at the world stage for a very long time. I’ve known Bibi [Netanyahu] since 1984. I feel quite confident an amazing number of Israelis found it nice to have an American tell the truth about the war they are in the middle of and the casualties they’re taking and the people who surround them who say, you do not have the right to exist and we want to destroy you.
Romney: I’ve also known Bibi Netanyahu for a long time. We worked together at Boston Consulting Group. And the last thing Bibi Netanyahu needs to have is not just a person who’s a historian, but someone who is also running for president of the United States stand up and say things that create extraordinary tumult in his neighborhood. And if I’m president of the United States, I will exercise sobriety, care, stability and make sure that I don’t say anything like this.

Anything I say that can affect a place with rockets going in, with people dying. I don’t do anything that would harm that process. And, therefore, before I made a statement of that nature, I’d get on the phone to my friend, Bibi Netanyahu and say, would it help if I say this? What would you like me to do? Let’s work together because we’re partners.

I find it extraordinary that people running for the leadership of one country would so proudly proclaim their undying loyalty to another country, to the extent that they would not say anything without first getting it approved by the head of that country, even though that head is despised by world leaders as a liar.

I would like moderators at these debates to ask the candidates if there is any issue on which the interests of the US and Israel diverge. Except for Ron Paul, I expect them all to answer ‘no’, even though such an answer is patently absurd.

I have written before about the important practice of jury nullification, in which juries exercise their option to be the ultimate judges of the validity of laws and have the right, if they think that the law itself is unjust, to acquit someone of a charge even if the person is clearly guilty of violating the law. (See here and here)

Juries have this right because they, not the legislators, are the ultimate judges of a whether a law is just and are the ultimate bulwark against governments that can manipulate the system to pass laws that are not in the public interest. Judges and prosecutors often oppose sharing information about this right with juries, another example of the desire of the elites to prevent ordinary people from exercising any power. Judges want to preserve their right to be the sole interpreters of the law while prosecutors do not want to allow another mechanism for acquittal.
[Read more…]

As I have said many times before, the Republican party establishment had for a long time fed fiery rhetoric on social issues to its party’s base in order to win votes, while following pro-oligarchic policies when in power. But the 2008 election provided indicators that the base was fed up with being used this way and wanted to wrest control of the leadership. I said that the 2012 election would bring this fault line to the forefront and show whether the establishment still had control. This has happened and the Romney-Gingrich contest is a good measure of it. News reports are emerging all over of the party establishment attacking Newt Gingrich and pulling for Romney. (See here, here, and here.) It will be interesting to see how they eat their words and support Gingrich if he should be the eventual nominee.

What is noticeable in this race is that the headliners in the Republican party establishment have so far largely steered clear of making any endorsements. They usually play safe and wait until the result is a foregone conclusion and declare their support for the likely winner. But this time around they may face pressure to endorse Romney in order to help him win.

I must admit that I am surprised that Gingrich, of all people, has emerged as the flag bearer for the anti-establishment movement. After all, he is a career politician and ultimate Washington insider, which should make the establishment favor him, but that very fact, plus that he has a lot of baggage in his past, should make the nutty base of the party skittish. The only explanation I can come up with for this weird reversal is that the party establishment is opposing him, not because they fear his policies which are reliably pro-oligarchy, but because they are rightly fearful that Gingrich is too mercurial and unstable and that he will self-destruct, giving Obama an easy re-election victory. And paradoxically, the party establishment’s opposition to Gingrich may be what is making him attractive to the base, who have never quite warmed to department store mannequin Mitt Romney.

The Ron Paul camp sees this struggle, along with the revised party rules for awarding primary delegates, as providing a possible path to the nomination, though that remains a very long shot. Recall that the Obama camp in 2008 also cleverly used party rules to amass sizable delegate totals even when they were losing primaries.

This year’s Republican primary has been so wacky that we may think that previous races did not have crazy candidates. That is not true. In the 2008 race, there were also people who were nutty as well as a whole bunch of short-lived candidacies by people who quickly faded into obscurity and whose names you have likely forgotten.

The difference this time is that the multitude of debates has given candidates a much longer shelf-life and visibility, and this is likely to increase the likelihood of attention seekers to run in the future. There is one other new wrinkle this time around. One of the side effects of the candidacies of Herman Cain and Donald Trump is that it will likely spawn a lot of future candidates in their mold: Business people who have made a lot of money and are bored with their lives and want some limelight and excitement in the twilight of their careers. They might look at the way Cain went from obscurity to household name and decide that next time around they too will run for president.

While Cain seemed utterly clueless in thinking that his past would not be examined closely, the more cautious among the future rich candidates would run only if there is nothing in their past that will cause them embarrassment. But even that may not deter some because they are so arrogant that they will not realize that what they consider normal behavior toward others may be viewed differently by regular people. These people have lived so long in the bubble that wealth provides, surrounded by toadies who tell them what they want to hear, that they tend to be arrogant and think that nothing can harm them.

So if there is no Republican incumbent in 2016, expect to see a slew of rich businessmen who have never held elected office running for president, portraying themselves as saviors of the country.

If there is one thing that exceeds the absurd extravagance with which American politicians declare their love for Jesus, it is how they describe their love for Israel. It seems like no level of pandering is enough. Just yesterday, six of the Republican candidates attended a forum of the American Jewish Coalition and fell over themselves trying to outdo each other in supporting the most extreme policies of Israel and criticizing president Obama for not doing enough, even though Obama has been as obsequious in appeasing the Israel lobby as any previous president. Ron Paul was not invited to this gathering because he alone has questioned America’s massive subsidizing of Israel’s economy and unquestioned support for its dangerous policies in the Middle East.

The pandering to Israel does not stop with politicians either. The mainstream media is also wary of saying anything that could be construed as anything other than whole-hearted support for Israel. The level of self-censorship in the Western media when it comes to Israel is quite extraordinary. For example, at a recent summit meeting, an open microphone picked up the following bit of dialogue:

French president Nicholas Sarkozy: “I can’t stand him [Netanyahu] any more, he’s a liar.”
US president Barack Obama: “You may be sick of him, but me, I have to deal with him every day,”

Uri Avnery says that this exchange followed a report that German chancellor Angela Merkel had told her cabinet that “every word that leaves Netanyahu’s mouth is a lie.”

The dialogue was broadcast live to a group of senior French media people, because somebody forgot to turn the microphone off. A piece of luck of the kind that journalists dream about.

Yet not one of the journalists in the hall published a word about it. They kept it to themselves and only told it to their colleagues, who told it to their friends, one of whom told it to a blogger, who published it.

Why? Because the senior journalists who were present are friends and confidants of the people in power. That’s how they get their scoops. The price is suppressing any news that might hurt or embarrass their sponsors. This means in practice that they become lackeys of the people in power – betraying their elementary democratic duty as servants of the public.

I know this from experience. As an editor of a news magazine, I saw it as my duty (and pleasure) to break these conspiracies of silence. Actually, many of our best scoops were given to us by colleagues from other publications who could not use them themselves for the same reason.

Luckily, with the internet now everywhere, it has become almost impossible to suppress news. Blessed be the online Gods.

You would think that the news that the heads of three major economic powers so utterly despise the head of a country they publicly support unconditionally would be big news and the leaders would be repeatedly asked about this. But this news item lasted just a couple of days in the American media, disappearing as fast as it appeared.

But as Avnery said, the Sakozy-Obama exchange might not have made it into the media at all if not for bloggers on the internet, so we should at least be grateful for that.

An interesting report came out last week. The Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry (BICI) investigating the protests in Bahrain delivered its report last week and said that the Bahraini government had used “excessive force and torture” on demonstrators. (The full report can be read here.) This was significant in that the authoritarian Bahraini government that was responsible for those actions, and was aided by the Saudi Arabian military in its harsh crackdown, was still in power. The fact that they created a commission and allowed such a report to be released is a tribute to the fact that popular protests seen worldwide against the repressive government had created considerable pressure on even such a government to try and mitigate the damage.

The commission used as its definition of torture Article 1 of the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment that says that:

For the purposes of this Convention, the term “torture” means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

But although the report said that the government had used torture, the news reports that I read in the US were curiously coy about exactly what actions were considered to be torture. However much I searched for them, I could not get the details. For example, this typical report in the New York Times, which prides itself on being ‘the newspaper of record’ and usually provides the most details in US media shows how they skated over the issue:

Five detainees were tortured to death while in custody, the panel concluded, and other detainees endured electric shocks and were beaten with rubber hoses and wires.
…
In Washington, the Obama administration welcomed the report, but said the onus was now on Bahrain’s government to hold accountable those responsible for abuses and to undertake reforms to make sure they do not occur again.

The subtle implication in this report is that being given electric shocks or beaten with rubber hoses and wires was not part of the torture regimen. I finally found an NPR story that provided more details.

Using words like torture, mistreatment and threatened rape, the head of the commission said the kinds of things that are rarely said out loud — especially in the conservative, oil-rich Gulf.

The commission head, Cherif Bassiouni, listed abuses he says were committed against protesters who were detained: They were blindfolded, forced to stand for long periods of time, whipped, beaten, subjected to electric shock, deprived of sleep, and exposed to high temperatures and insults.

These acts, Bassiouni said, amounted to torture. [My emphasis]

I now understood why the mainstream media was shy about specifying the acts. These are the very same actions, or even worse, that are done by the US on its detainees and since the US media is deferential to the claims by the US government that it does not torture, this element of the Bahraini report must have caused considerable cognitive dissonance and had to be suppressed. In the US, in an effort to excuse the Bush administration from war crimes, there was hesitancy to say that even waterboarding was torture, so all these other forms of torture have to be also not mentioned.

Eric Lewis, a lawyer whose efforts to prosecute Donald Rumsfeld and the military chain of command for torture were opposed by the Obama administration, blasts Obama for his hypocrisy on torture, comparing his statements as a candidate with his actions as president, and says that by not prosecuting those who committed such acts, he has left the door wide open for the use of torture by any future president.

The president has rejected three clear opportunities to erect a high legal wall against the return of torture: he has made it clear that criminal prosecutions for torture will not go forward; he has opposed the creation of a truth commission to examine events comprehensively; and he has affirmatively intervened to stop civil litigation by detainees against their torturers.
…
Had President Obama shown the courage of candidate Obama, he would have strongly supported civil litigation under the Constitution against officials who authorized torture. The argument that it involves the courts in foreign policy or causes officials to be wary in their actions is nonsense. The ban on torture should be absolute; it is not a foreign policy or defense issue and it is salutary for officials to know that they will be held accountable for torture.
…
The Obama administration can’t just say, “Trust us.” Its challenge was not only to stop the American government from torturing detainees, but to institutionalize the legal infrastructure that would prevent the resumption of torture. President Obama had the opportunity to leave an unambiguous legal legacy that prohibited torture and inhibited the torturers of tomorrow from finding legal cover. Instead, we may reap the whirlwind of his timidity, and soon.

Until such time as we are willing to bring those who commit torture to justice, irrespective of who and where they are, these abuses will continue.

He has an interesting take on the origins of ‘Christian’ politics in the US and how politicians use religion.

(Via Jeff at Have Coffee Will Write.)

The agents of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency “operate in a secretive judicial environment where detention hearings are held out of public view”, according to this news report and this lack of oversight leads to abuses in which even US citizens are picked up, kept in detention for long periods, and even deported.

After a detailed examination of federal immigration records, Prof. Jacqueline Stevens of Northwestern University estimated this year that about 4,000 American citizens were illegally detained or deported as aliens in 2010. In a study published last summer, she found that as many as 20,000 citizens may have been wrongly held or deported since 2003.

“If they can’t even protect the rights of citizens, think about the others who are being put through this system,” Stevens said. “You have agents making life and death types of decisions and there is no check on their honesty.”

A US citizen who was detained for 43 days and almost deported is now suing the ICE agency for $1 million.

Once again, this shows the abuses that inevitably occur when people are given power that they can exercise in secret. Transparency has to be the foundation of a democracy but the government keeps steadily increasing the levels of secrecy under which it operates.

This year’s Republican primary race has to be the strangest in recent history.

As this graph of poll averages from Real Clear Politics shows, the party continues its lurching from one non-Romney to another, with Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, and now Newt Gingrich having their peaks of support, while that of Mitt Romney and Ron Paul maintain steady but at low levels, and Rick Santorum and Jon Huntsman are also steady but almost non-existent. And of course, at one time we had The Donald, the effects of whose brief cameo appearance is not recorded

It says a lot about the modern Republican party that such a repulsive opportunist blowhard like Newt Gingrich is being touted as a clever person, a man of ideas. For a party that has turned its back on science and knowledge in general, their embrace of Gingrich, a man who oozes contempt for everyone else, requires some explaining. I think Paul Krugman was right when he said: “He’s a stupid man’s idea of what a smart person sounds like.” Republicans seem to be impressed by cocky smart mouths (Sarah Palin being the poster child), and repelled by people with real knowledge and expertise.

The person who has the most reason to be righteously aggrieved by this parade of successive contenders to Romney is Rick Santorum, who must have hoped that his smug religiosity, devotion to the oligarchy, and homophobia would appeal to the not-insignificant bloc of knuckle-dragging Neanderthals in the party. Every time the leading non-Romney stumbled, his hopes must have been raised of being anointed the next flag bearer, only to see others being awarded the prize. One can almost hear him wailing in prayer in his lonely hotel room in Iowa, “Why have you forsaken me, Lord? When will it be my turn?”

The Occupy movement in many cities have been forced to fully or partially vacate their sites and people are wondering what’s next. Chris Hedges has been doing some excellent reporting on the movement and in a recent piece titled This Is What Revolution Looks Like he argues that the movement has exposed the bankruptcy of the oligarchy. The oligarchy thinks that by forcibly disrupting the demonstrations and evicting the encampments, they will destroy the movement and force the occupants to go back to meekly accepting the status quo.

The rogues’ gallery of Wall Street crooks, such as Lloyd Blankfein at Goldman Sachs, Howard Milstein at New York Private Bank & Trust, the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, the Koch brothers and Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase & Co., no doubt think it’s over. They think it is back to the business of harvesting what is left of America to swell their personal and corporate fortunes.

He says they are wrong.

The historian Crane Brinton in his book “Anatomy of a Revolution” laid out the common route to revolution. The preconditions for successful revolution, Brinton argued, are discontent that affects nearly all social classes, widespread feelings of entrapment and despair, unfulfilled expectations, a unified solidarity in opposition to a tiny power elite, a refusal by scholars and thinkers to continue to defend the actions of the ruling class, an inability of government to respond to the basic needs of citizens, a steady loss of will within the power elite itself and defections from the inner circle, a crippling isolation that leaves the power elite without any allies or outside support and, finally, a financial crisis. Our corporate elite, as far as Brinton was concerned, has amply fulfilled these preconditions. But it is Brinton’s next observation that is most worth remembering. Revolutions always begin, he wrote, by making impossible demands that if the government met would mean the end of the old configurations of power. The second stage, the one we have entered now, is the unsuccessful attempt by the power elite to quell the unrest and discontent through physical acts of repression.

Hedges draws upon his long experience as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times to draw parallels between what is happening in the US and what he saw in crumbling despotic regimes elsewhere.

George Orwell wrote that all tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but that once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force. We have now entered the era of naked force. The vast million-person bureaucracy of the internal security and surveillance state will not be used to stop terrorism but to try and stop us.

Despotic regimes in the end collapse internally. Once the foot soldiers who are ordered to carry out acts of repression, such as the clearing of parks or arresting or even shooting demonstrators, no longer obey orders, the old regime swiftly crumbles.

The signs of collapse are everywhere. It begins when bystanders, impressed by the stoicism and doggedness of the protestors, defect from their usual stance of neutrality or subservience to the state and ruling class and into the ranks of the protestors.

The process of defection among the ruling class and security forces is slow and often imperceptible. These defections are advanced through a rigid adherence to nonviolence, a refusal to respond to police provocation and a verbal respect for the blue-uniformed police, no matter how awful they can be while wading into a crowd and using batons as battering rams against human bodies.

Hedges wrote this on November 15 before the police actions that occurred at UC Berkeley and Davis. In Berkeley, 70-year old Robert Hass, a professor of poetry, former poet laureate and Pulitzer prize winner, couldn’t believe what he was hearing of police viciously beating students and hurriedly went with his wife to see if the reports were true. He described what happened to them when they found themselves face to face with police in the now familiar paramilitary riot gear assembled in riot formation.

Once the cordon formed, the deputy sheriffs pointed their truncheons toward the crowd. It looked like the oldest of military maneuvers, a phalanx out of the Trojan War, but with billy clubs instead of spears. The students were wearing scarves for the first time that year, their cheeks rosy with the first bite of real cold after the long Californian Indian summer. The billy clubs were about the size of a boy’s Little League baseball bat. My wife was speaking to the young deputies about the importance of nonviolence and explaining why they should be at home reading to their children, when one of the deputies reached out, shoved my wife in the chest and knocked her down.
…
My wife bounced nimbly to her feet. I tripped and almost fell over her trying to help her up, and at that moment the deputies in the cordon surged forward and, using their clubs as battering rams, began to hammer at the bodies of the line of students. It was stunning to see. They swung hard into their chests and bellies. Particularly shocking to me — it must be a generational reaction — was that they assaulted both the young men and the young women with the same indiscriminate force. If the students turned away, they pounded their ribs. If they turned further away to escape, they hit them on their spines.

None of the police officers invited us to disperse or gave any warning. We couldn’t have dispersed if we’d wanted to because the crowd behind us was pushing forward to see what was going on. The descriptor for what I tried to do is “remonstrate.” I screamed at the deputy who had knocked down my wife, “You just knocked down my wife, for Christ’s sake!” A couple of students had pushed forward in the excitement and the deputies grabbed them, pulled them to the ground and cudgeled them, raising the clubs above their heads and swinging. The line surged. I got whacked hard in the ribs twice and once across the forearm.
…
One of my colleagues, also a poet, Geoffrey O’Brien, had a broken rib. Another colleague, Celeste Langan, a Wordsworth scholar, got dragged across the grass by her hair when she presented herself for arrest.

What popular movements have is a process of ebb and flow. Because they are loose and unorganized and lack money, they tend to occur in waves, with periods of dormancy in between. The key question is whether subsequent waves build on the previous ones and get larger.

When you see elderly and ‘respectable’ people, members of the class that would normally favor law and order and ally themselves with the oligarchy and against the rabble in the streets, willing to switch sides and put their own bodies on the line, you are witnessing a sea change.