When Jim Rutenberg and Serge Kovaleski refer to “books like The Invention of the Jewish People and March of the Titans: A History of the White Race,” should we assume that these are just ignorant journalists making a grossly inappropriate association, or are they purposefully trying to mislead their readers?
In their New York Timeshatchet job on Ron Paul we are told that “white supremacists, survivalists and anti-Zionists who have rallied behind his candidacy have not exactly been warmly welcomed.”
White supremacists, survivalists and anti-Zionists? In the minds of these reporters, anyone who promotes the idea that Israel should become a state of all its citizens — Jews, Arabs and others — apparently looks like a political bedfellow of the likes of Stormfront or the Militia of Montana.
Kovaleski
The article reports on the appeal that Ron Paul has among some white supremacists and survivalists and yet says nothing on the anti-Zionist element. Rutenberg and Kovaleski were apparently content to merely insinuate that there is a link between criticism of Israel and racism.
The closest they come to providing evidence of such an association is the article’s opening sentence where the two books are linked.
March of the Titans: A History of the White Race is by Arthur Kemp, an advocate of white separatism and foreign affairs spokesman for the ultra-right and racist British National Party. Kemp is a Holocaust denier and was “linked to the murderer of the South African Communist party and ANC leader Chris Hani in 1993,” The Guardian reported in 2009.
The Invention of the Jewish People, first published in Hebrew in Israel with the title, Matai ve’ech humtza ha’am hayehudi?, is by Shlomo Sand, Professor of History at Tel Aviv University. The book was a bestseller in Israel for several months before being translated into French and English.
Tony Judt wrote: “Shlomo Sand has written a remarkable book. In cool, scholarly prose he has, quite simply, normalized Jewish history. In place of the implausible myth of a unique nation with a special destiny – expelled, isolated, wandering and finally restored to its rightful home – he has reconstructed the history of the Jews and convincingly reintegrated that history into the general story of humankind. The self-serving and mostly imaginary Jewish past that has done so much to provoke conflict in the present is revealed, like the past of so many other nations, to be largely an invention. Anyone interested in understanding the contemporary Middle East should read this book.”
Of course Rutenberg and Kovaleski would be unlikely to attach much weight to Judt’s assessment of Sand’s book — Judt was after all one of those dubious anti-Zionists.
The irony about linking anti-Zionists with anti-Semities is that Zionism is a philosophy that has obvious appeal to anti-Semites. Encourage all the Jews to move to Israel — why would the anti-Semites object?
Indeed, the emerging political convergence on the extreme right has been between anti-Semites and Zionists and that’s an unholy alliance that probably finds Ron Paul the least appealing among the GOP presidential hopefuls.
Think Progress reports:The funding behind Newt Gingrich’s American Solutions for Winning the Future, an independent political committee, offers an intriguing clue into the financial deep pockets backing Gingrich’s candidacy. This week, McClatchy revealed that American Solutions footed the $8 million bill for private jet charters while Gingrich weighed whether to enter the 2008 and 2012 presidential races. Casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson was the biggest funder of American Solutions, contributing $7.65 million and rumored to have committed $20 million to a pro-Gingrich super PAC, a report denied by an Adelson spokesperson. Whether the report is true or not, the facts increasingly show that the billionaire casino magnate is a central figure in Newt Gingrich’s political career.
Sands Corporation CEO Sheldon Adelson is based in Las Vegas but has business and political interests in Macau, China and Israel. In Israel, Adelson’s importance stems from his close friendship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ownership of Israel HaYom, a free daily newspaper which supports Netanyahu’s Likud party. Back in the U.S., Adelson sits on the board of the Republican Jewish Coalition and is outspoken about his views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
During the George W. Bush presidency, Adelson opposed efforts to jump start peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians and even took sides against the influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) when the organization supported peace talks. “I don’t continue to support organizations that help friends committing suicide just because they say they want to jump,” Adelson told the Jewish Telegraph Agency.
At the New Yorker, David Remnick comments on Newt Gingrich’s incendiary claim that the Palestinians are an “invented people.”
Gingrich and his fellow Republicans have sensed a potential softening in the Jewish vote. In 2008, only African-Americans were more solidly behind Barack Obama, who, according to exit polls, won seventy-eight per cent of the Jewish vote. But the Republicans are hoping to woo at least the more conservative sector of Jewish Americans—those who feel that Obama has been too hard on Benjamin Netanyahu. And, because Gingrich has a little learning and a darkly sophisticated memory for intellectual battle, he catered to his cause by employing the word “invented.” In this context, the word summons a 1984 bestseller that was once totemic on the Jewish right (and still is, for some): “From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine,” by Joan Peters.
Peters, who was not a historian, put forward a purportedly scholarly construction based on the notion, as Golda Meir famously put it, that there is “no such thing as a Palestinian people.” The book, which is an ideological tract disguised as history, made the demographic argument that most people who call themselves Palestinians have short roots in the territory and are Arabs who came from elsewhere. It suggests that the territory that is now Israel was all but “uninhabited” before the Zionist movement began. It was a book that implicitly made the argument that Palestine was a tabula rasa waiting for its Jewish revival; or, as the old slogan had it: “a land without a people for a people without a land.”
The book was not only a commercial success; it also won plaudits from Saul Bellow, Barbara Tuchman, Martin Peretz, Theodore H. White, Lucy Dawidowicz, Arthur Goldberg, and Elie Wiesel. For a time, it was wielded as a means to dismiss Palestinian claims on the land, and a means to be dismissive of Palestinians entirely. The book was thoroughly discredited by an Israeli historian, Yehoshua Porath, and many others who dismantled its pseudo-scholarship. Even some right-wing critics, like Daniel Pipes, who initially reviewed the book positively, later admitted that Peters’s work was shoddy and “ignores inconvenient facts.”
Philip Weiss, following a point that many of his readers seized on after he praised Remnick’s commentary yesterday, notes:
Remnick left out Norman Finkelstein’s role in exposing the fraud; he gave credit to an Israeli:
The book was thoroughly discredited by an Israeli historian, Yehoshua Porath, and many others who dismantled its pseudo-scholarship.
Remnick’s link was to Porath’s 1986 review of the book, “From Time Immemorial,” in the New York Review of Books.
This is a misrepresentation of intellectual history. The story of Norman Finkelstein’s exposure of Joan Peters is one of the great intellectual whodunnits of the Israel-Palestine issue. Finkelstein’s career began with this undertaking, which long preceded Porath’s– in fact, Porath actually cites Finkelstein’s work in his footnotes.
Here’s some of what Finkelstein has written on Peters’ work:
Having stirred outrage by calling Palestinians an “invented people,” in last night’s GOP presidential debate New Gingrich went even further by saying, “these people are terrorists.”
I guess if he becomes president, at least the United States will have to abandon the pretense that it has any role as a mediator between Israelis and Palestinians.
In a conference call organized by the National Council of Young Israel and broadcast on The Yeshiva World News on Friday, Gingrich took a question from Mort Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America.
Klein is more forthright than some of Gingrich’s other Zionist friends might be — he unequivocally opposes a two-state solution.
Last year he said: “As much as we all want Israel to have peace with the Arabs, Israel can and will survive and thrive without it — as they have since 1948.”
Israel doesn’t need peace — this is the conviction that explains the Israeli intransigence that long ago turned the so-called peace process into a charade.
What those who don’t believe in peace do believe in, is the need for the United States to ensure that Israel maintains its “qualitative military edge” — a commitment that the Obama administration has supported even more strongly than its predecessors.
A nuclear-armed Iran would undermine Israel’s military hegemony in the Middle East and so many of Israel’s supporters are willing to back another war — usually on the pretext that it would prevent a second holocaust — rather than tolerate a significant shift in the regional balance of power.
In spite of the hysterical campaign propaganda that some American politicians are now using, “[f]ew in Netanyahu’s inner circle believe that Iran has any short-term plans to drop a nuclear weapon on Tel Aviv, should it find a means to deliver it,” according to Netanyahu confidant, Jeffery Goldberg.
Klein’s question for Gingrich was on the expansion of settlements, but the strategic perspective they share is that Israel can continue to exist and prosper in a permanent state of war. From that perspective, the two most important features of the relationship between Israel and the United States are that the U.S. continues to maintain a steady flow of military aid and it remains willing to engage in wars that Israel cannot fight alone. It comes down to blood and money.
Note too that a necessary condition that helps ensure that Americans will acquiesce in fulfilling this need is that we must also share the Zionist faith in the sustainability of permanent war.
The unshakable bond that unites Israel and the United States — a bond that in American politics has become an object of cultish devotion — is an absolute faith in war. Perhaps the only thing that will be able to shake that faith will be economic ruin.
Klein: What is your position about the right of Jews to live in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] and the right of Jews to live in communities there at this present time?
Gingrich: Well, it depends on where exactly you define the boundaries. I do not oppose any development in the [Israeli occupied] areas, because I think that’s part of the negotiating process. To the degree that the Palestinians want to stop the developments they need to reach a deal in which they recognize the right of Israel to exist… As long as they are waging war on Israel, they are in no position to complain about developments. I think the whole peace process has been absurd and has created a psychologically almost impossible position for the average person because once you say there’s a peace process you wonder why the Israelis aren’t being more forthcoming. But if you say, look, we’re still in the middle of a war. They’re still trying to destroy the country — they’re still firing rockets, they still have terrorists coming in — then you all of a sudden understand what the real situation on the ground is, and in that setting, why would the Israelis slow down in maximizing their net bargaining advantage?
In other words, settlement expansion is a bargaining tool and thus the more Israelis there are living in the West Bank, the better Israel’s negotiating position.
As a Palestinian negotiator once said, this is like trying to divide a pizza with someone who is intent on eating the whole pie before it gets divided.
The Washington Post reports on responses to Gingrich’s claim that the Palestinians are an “invented people”:
Michigan Sen. Carl Levin sharply criticized Gingrich’s comments as cynical attempts to curry support with Jewish voters and unhelpful to the peace process.
“The vast majority of American Jews (including this one) and the Israeli Government itself are committed to a two-state solution in which Israelis and Palestinians live side-by-side as neighbors and in peace,” Levin said in a statement. “Gingrich offered no solutions — just a can of gasoline and a match.”
[Hanan] Ashrawi, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organisation Executive Committee, said Gingrich’s remarks harked back to days when the Palestinians’ existence as a people was denied by Israelis such as Golda Meir, prime minister from 1969 to 1974.
“It is certainly regressive,” she said. “This is certainly an invitation to further conflict rather than any contribution to peace.”
“This proves that in the hysterical atmosphere of American elections, people lose all touch with reality and make not just irresponsible and dangerous statements, but also very racist comments that betray not just their own ignorance but an unforgivable bias,” she said.
Fawzi Barhoum, a Hamas spokesman in Gaza, said the Gingrich remarks “were grave comments that represented an incitement for ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians.”
In a CNN interview Newt Gingrich volunteers to capitulate to Israeli nuclear blackmail: “I would rather plan a joint operation [against Iran] conventionally, than push the Israelis to the point where they go nuclear.”
Gingrich told The Jewish Channel that Palestinians are not a genuine nation.
The Forward reports: In the battle for the Republican pro-Israel vote, Newt Gingrich lacks Mitt Romney’s broad base of prominent Jewish donors. But he has something potentially more powerful: the support of one of Benjamin Netanyahu’s most significant American backers, and a relationship with the Israeli prime minister himself that stretches back decades.
Billionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, one of the wealthiest men in the world and a major donor to Jewish and conservative causes, is widely known as a Netanyahu stalwart. Less well known are his equally close ties to Gingrich, to whom he has been a major giver in recent years.
Adelson’s faith in Gingrich hasn’t been particularly contagious. High-profile Jewish supporters of Gingrich remain tough to find, even as Gingrich has rocketed into the GOP lead in national polling. Still, the former House speaker’s ties to Adelson, his relationship with Netanyahu and a foreign policy team packed with neoconservatives leave him well situated in the competition for pro-Israel voters.
Neither a spokesman for Adelson nor for the Gingrich campaign responded to repeated requests for comment for this story. But the alliance of Adelson and Gingrich is famous in Jewish Republican circles.
“They have been tremendous fans and supporters of Newt from day one,” Fred Zeidman, a Texas oil executive and prominent Republican Jewish supporter of Romney, said of Adelson and his wife, Miriam.
Adelson, who ranked eighth in Forbes’s 2011 list of the richest Americans, is chairman and CEO of the Las Vegas Sands Corp., which owns casinos in Las Vegas and Macau, China. He has been a major funder of Taglit-Birthright Israel, which sends young Diaspora Jews on free trips to Israel, and has been among the most significant American supporters of Netanyahu.
Seumas Milne writes: They don’t give up. After a decade of blood-drenched failure in Afghanistan and Iraq, violent destabilisation of Pakistan and Yemen, the devastation of Lebanon and slaughter in Libya, you might hope the US and its friends had had their fill of invasion and intervention in the Muslim world.
It seems not. For months the evidence has been growing that a US-Israeli stealth war against Iran has already begun, backed by Britain and France. Covert support for armed opposition groups has spread into a campaign of assassinations of Iranian scientists, cyber warfare, attacks on military and missile installations, and the killing of an Iranian general, among others.
The attacks are not directly acknowledged, but accompanied by intelligence-steered nods and winks as the media are fed a stream of hostile tales – the most outlandish so far being an alleged Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to the US – and the western powers ratchet up pressure for yet more sanctions over Iran’s nuclear programme.
It’s a taste of how the conflict can quickly escalate, as was the downing of a US spyplane over Iranian territory at the weekend. What one Israeli official has called a “new kind of war” has the potential to become a much more old-fashioned one that would threaten us all.
The Guardian reports: Republican presidential candidates made a prolonged pitch for the pro-Israel vote on Wednesday with calls for regime change in Iran and even hints at military action.
Newt Gingrich, the leading Republican contender who holds a double digit lead in three of the first four states to hold nomination contests, backed his hawkish position by announcing that if he wins the election he wants his secretary of state to be John Bolton, the abrasive neoconservative and former ambassador to the UN who has derided Palestinian claims to a state as a “ploy”.
Gingrich was speaking to the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) in Washington along with other presidential candidates, except Ron Paul who was barred for his views on Israel. Mitt Romney, Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann joined Gingrich in stinging attacks on Barack Obama’s Middle East policy, accusing him of weakness in the face of the Jewish state’s enemies and failing to be sufficiently supportive of Israel.
They also sided with Israel in demanding a much tougher stand against Iran over its nuclear programme.
Gingrich said his aim would be to “overtly sabotage (Iran) every day”.
“The only rational long-time policy is regime replacement,” he said.
Romney demanded “crippling sanctions” against Tehran and suggested the US could resort to force against the nuclear programme.
“Ultimately regime change is necessary. We should make it very clear we are developing and have developed military options,” he said.
The calls were met enthusiastically by the Jewish coalition’s audience but were also aimed at a wider consumption of strongly pro-Israel voters.
The Republican Jewish Coalition has barred Ron Paul, one of the party’s leading presidential contenders, from its forum for the candidates on Wednesday because of his “misguided and extreme views” on Israel.
Paul, who consistently ranks among the favourites in polls of Republican primary voters despite strong libertarian views that have alienated many in his own party, has rankled Israel’s supporters by advocating an end to US aid to the Jewish state. He is also strongly opposed to military action against Iran’s nuclear programme and has drawn attention to Israel’s own atomic weapons which it does not officially acknowledge.
The RJC director, Matt Brooks, said Paul was excluded for those and other views.
“He’s just so far outside of the mainstream of the Republican party and this organisation,” he told CBS.
Reuters reports: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called on Monday for a snap leadership vote in his Likud party, a contest he is expected to win and which could pave the way for an early national election in Israel.
Some commentators said Netanyahu was quietly preparing for the possibility that President Barack Obama, with whom he has had a testy relationship, will win a second and final term in November, a year before Israel’s currently scheduled ballot.
Freed of campaigning interests if he wins, the Democratic president could redouble pressure on the rightist premier to accommodate the Palestinians in peacemaking, deepening political division in Israel to the Likud’s detriment, analysts predict.
“I wish to announce that I will request elections on January 31 for the leadership of the Likud and its candidate for prime minister,” Netanyahu told Likud legislators at the open part of their weekly meeting in parliament.
“I want to have it now, not only to save good money for the party, but also to avoid internal anguish, so that we, as the leading party, can grapple with the issues that stand before us,” he said.
Netanyahu loyalists said that by holding the leadership ballot on January 31, the party could cut costs by piggybacking on a vote set for its local lists on that date. The Likud charter requires party leadership votes to take place at least six months before national elections.
“Let’s be honest, no one really thinks that the prime minister, who is really, at the end of the day, running things well, and has wall-to-wall support in the Likud, will not be elected,” said Environment Minister Gilad Erdan of the Likud, whose central committee must be convened to authorize the date.
Hanan Krystal, Israel Radio’s political analyst, said Netanyahu might also opt to bring forward the next Israeli general election, due in November 2013, should Obama look likely to beat Republican rivals in the U.S. ballot.
Resented among Jewish and conservative Christian voters over his handling of the Netanyahu government, Obama last week promoted his administration’s efforts to secure Israel from foes like Iran.
“At the highest echelons, they have long been saying that if Obama is elected for a second term, the carrot will be replaced by a stick,” Krystal said.
John Heilemann writes: In just two months of existence, OWS had scored plenty of victories: spreading from New York to more than 900 cities worldwide; introducing to the vernacular a potent catchphrase, “We are the 99 percent”; injecting into the national conversation the topic of income inequality. But OWS had also suffered setbacks. The less savory aspects of the occupations had provided the right with fuel for feral slander (Drudge: “Death, Disease Plague ‘Occupy’ Protests”) and casual caricature. Even among some protesters, there was a sense that stagnation had set in. Then came the Zuccotti clampdown—and the popular perception that it meant the end of OWS.
It’s perfectly possible that this perception will be borne out, that the raucous events of November 17 were the last gasps of a rigor-mortizing rebellion. But no one seriously involved in OWS buys a word of it. What they believe instead is that, after a brief period of retrenchment, the protests will be back even bigger and with a vengeance in the spring—when, with the unfurling of the presidential election, the whole world will be watching. Among Occupy’s organizers, there is fervid talk about occupying both the Democratic and Republican conventions. About occupying the National Mall in Washington, D.C. About, in effect, transforming 2012 into 1968 redux.
The people plotting these maneuvers are the leaders of OWS. Now, you may have heard that Occupy is a leaderless uprising. Its participants, and even the leaders themselves, are at pains to make this claim. But having spent the past month immersed in their world, I can report that a cadre of prime movers—strategists, tacticians, and logisticians; media gurus, technologists, and grand theorists—has emerged as essential to guiding OWS. For some, Occupy is an extension of years of activism; for others, their first insurrectionist rodeo. But they are now united by a single purpose: turning OWS from a brief shining moment into a bona fide movement.
That none of these people has yet become the face of OWS—its Tom Hayden or Mark Rudd, its Stokely Carmichael or H. Rap Brown—owes something to its newness. But it is also due to the way that Occupy operates. Since the sixties, starting with the backlash within the New Left against those same celebrities, the political counterculture has been ruled by loosey-goosey, bottom-up organizational precepts: horizontal and decentralized structures, an antipathy to hierarchy, a fetish for consensus. And this is true in spades of OWS. In such an environment, formal claims to leadership are invariably and forcefully rejected, leaving the processes for accomplishing anything in a state of near chaos, while at the same time opening the door to (indeed compelling) ad hoc reins-taking by those with the force of personality to gain ratification for their ideas about how to proceed. “In reality,” says Yotam Marom, one of the key OWS organizers, “movements like this are most conducive to being led by people already most conditioned to lead.”
And so in coffee shops and borrowed conference rooms around the city, far from the sound and fury in the park and on the streets, the prime movers have been doing just that—meeting, planning, talking (and talking) about the future of OWS. The debates between them have been fierce. Tensions have been laid bare, factions fomented, and ideological cleavages exposed—all of it a familiar recapitulation of the growing pains experienced by protesters of the past, from those in favor of civil rights and against the Vietnam War in the sixties to those fighting for workers’ rights in the thirties.
The Washington Post reports: Despite frosty relations with the titans of Wall Street, President Obama has still managed to raise far more money this year from the financial and banking sector than Mitt Romney or any other Republican presidential candidate, according to new fundraising data.
Obama’s key advantage over the GOP field is the ability to collect bigger checks because he raises money for both his own campaign committee and for the Democratic National Committee, which will aid in his reelection effort.
As a result, Obama has brought in more money from employees of banks, hedge funds and other financial service companies than all of the GOP candidates combined, according to a Washington Post analysis of contribution data. The numbers show that Obama retains a persistent reservoir of support among Democratic financiers who have backed him since he was an underdog presidential candidate four years ago.
Obama’s fundraising advantage is clear in the case of Bain Capital, the Boston-based private-equity firm that was co-founded by Romney, and where the Republican made his fortune. Not surprisingly, Romney has strong support at the firm, raking in $34,000 from 18 Bain employees, according to the analysis of data from the Center for Responsive Politics.
But Obama has outdone Romney on his own turf, collecting $76,600 from Bain Capital employees through September — and he needed only three donors to do it.
[…]
Obama’s ties to Wall Street donors could complicate Democratic plans to paint Republicans as puppets of the financial industry, particularly in light of the Occupy Wall Street protests that have gone global over the past week.
In response to the protests, the Obama campaign and other Democrats have stepped up their attacks on Romney and other Republicans for their opposition to Wall Street regulations.
One top banking executive who raises money for Obama, discussing fundraising efforts on the condition of anonymity, said reports of disaffection with the president “are exaggerated and overblown.” He said a strong contingent of financiers in New York, Chicago and California remains supportive of Obama and his economic policies, even as some have turned on him.
But, this donor added, “it probably helps from a political perspective if he’s not seen as a Wall Street guy.”
[…]
Obama has raised a total of $15.6 million from employees in the industry, according to the Post analysis. Nearly $12 million of that went to the DNC, the analysis shows.
Romney has raised less than half that much from the industry, while Texas Gov. Rick Perry brought in about $2 million. No other Republican candidate has raised more than $402,000 from the finance sector, which also includes insurance and real estate interests.
Even so, Obama clearly has trouble appealing to Wall Street fundraisers, who have emerged in recent years as among the most important sources of campaign cash for major national politicians.
Put aside the DNC money, for example, and Obama’s numbers look much worse: just $3.9 million from the financial sector, compared with Romney’s $7.5 million.
Obama’s campaign committee has raised notably less money from major banking firms such as Goldman Sachs, whose employees gave him more than $1 million in the 2008 cycle. So far this year, about two dozen Goldman employees together have given Obama’s committee about $45,000, one-sixth of the amount Romney’s campaign has taken in.
But six Goldman employees also gave a total of $92,000 to the DNC side of Obama’s fundraising effort.
[…]
Obama retains a core group of supporters on Wall Street who are central to his fundraising efforts. About a third of his top 40 fundraisers, who have helped bundle together $500,000 or more in contributions, hail from the finance sector, including big names such as former New Jersey governor Jon S. Corzine of MF Global, hedge-fund manager Orin Kramer and UBS executive Robert Wolf.
Obama’s chief of staff, William M. Daley, was also vice chairman at J.P. Morgan Chase before coming to the White House this year.
Obama’s support within the financial industry tends to be more diffuse than the top Wall Street firms. One of his primary sources of cash, for example, is a small Chicago firm called Chopper Trading, which employs a technique of rapid, computer-assisted trading that some experts blame for volatility in the stock market.
The Washington Post reports: President Obama and his team have decided to turn public anger at Wall Street into a central tenet of their reelection strategy.
The move comes as the Occupy Wall Street protests gain momentum across the country and as polls show deep public distrust of the nation’s major financial institutions.
And it sets up what strategists see as a potent line of attack against Republican front-runner Mitt Romney, a former investment executive whom Obama aides plan to portray as a wealthy Wall Street sympathizer.
Many Democrats consider Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, the greatest threat to Obama when it comes to wooing centrist independents next year, and Romney this week has begun to present himself as a champion of middle-income Americans.
Obama aides point to recent surveys that show anger at Wall Street spanning ideologies, including a new Washington Post-ABC News poll in which 68 percent of independents and 60 percent of Republicans say they have unfavorable impressions of the big financial institutions.
But the strategy of channeling anti-Wall Street anger carries risks. Many of Obama’s senior advisers have ties to the financial industry — a point that makes Occupy protesters wary of the president and his party.
In recent days, Obama has ramped up his rhetoric. He took the unusual step of targeting an individual company when he attacked Bank of America for its new $5 monthly debit-card fee, calling it “exactly the sort of stuff that folks are frustrated by.” And his campaign and the White House have distributed messages blasting GOP candidates and lawmakers for wanting to repeal Wall Street regulations pushed by Obama and opposing the confirmation of a leader for the consumer protection bureau created as part of the overhaul.
“We intend to make it one of the central elements of the campaign next year,” Obama senior adviser David Plouffe said in an interview. “One of the main elements of the contrast will be that the president passed Wall Street reform and our opponent and the other party want to repeal it.”
“I’m pretty confident 12 months from now, as people make the decision about who to go vote for, the gut check is going to be about, ‘Who would make decisions more about helping my life than Wall Street?’ ” Plouffe added.
Romney, no doubt anticipating the White House’s new attack line, sought to show solidarity with the demonstrators during this week’s GOP candidates debate.
“The reason you’re seeing protests . . . is middle-income Americans are having a hard time making ends meet,” he said.
GOP leaders say the Wall Street law is government overreach, and Romney’s economic plan calls for replacing it with a “streamlined regulatory framework.”
Obama has tried this line of attack before, railing in 2009 against “fat-cat bankers” who he accused of taking excessive bonuses in the wake of the financial meltdown. But after complaints from Democrats on Wall Street and business leaders, the president has spent much of the past year courting companies — even hiring a new chief of staff, William Daley, from the banking industry.
And many on the left have attacked Obama and his administration for its ties to Wall Street, arguing that the financial regulatory overhaul fell far short of an industry makeover that many critics believed necessary.
Much of his top economic team has roots in the financial services industry, and in recent months Daley and top campaign aides have devoted much of their time improving the relationship with big-dollar donors on Wall Street.
If Iran was going to engage in as risky an operation as to attempt to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, it wouldn’t use a flaky used-car salesman as its lead operative and it wouldn’t outsource the attack to some unknown hit men from a Mexican drug cartel. Anyone who knows anything about how Iran operates finds such a scenario highly implausible.
On the other hand, if someone else wanted to frame Iran, since they wouldn’t be able to enlist the kind of Iranian team capable of carrying out such an attack, they might well end up recruiting the very cast of characters who are alleged to have been involved. Indeed, if the object of the exercise was that the plot be exposed rather than carried out, then unwitting amateurs would be perfect for the job.
Given that informants for the US Drug Enforcement Agency played a pivotal role, suspicion about who might have been directing this operation has to fall on Washington. Are we talking about a false flag operation and a pretext for war?
The intemperate response from the Obama administration over the last few days might suggest that escalating tension with Iran has at this juncture passed a critical point and that the American public and the rest of the world is being warned that war may be on the horizon.
The drums of war have been beating for so long — mostly from Israel — that in some quarters the question has not been if a war will start, but when.
Has Obama now boarded the war train? I seriously doubt it.
Firstly, I think his innate timidity would make him very reluctant to start his own full-scale war — least of all a war that would likely be more devastating than all the wars of the preceding decade. Shock-and-awe was the style for his predecessor — this is a president who prefers assassinations.
Secondly, the American appetite for war has already been well and truly drained. Economic pain has promoted a grim realism in which most people recognize that another war is really the last thing this country needs. Launching a war against Iran would be like pounding the last nails into our own coffin.
So, if Washington was really behind this bombing plot and it wasn’t trying to start a war, how would it stand to benefit?
Here’s how: by driving down the price of oil.
Why make the Saudis the target of the attack? Because they would then feel compelled to retaliate and since they cannot threaten Iran militarily, they will rely on the only weapon they have: increasing oil production.
The consequent drop in oil prices will hurt Iran much more than Saudi Arabia and if by the summer of 2012, gas prices in the US have dropped below $3 a gallon, Americans will travel more and perhaps regain a bit of economic optimism — good news for Obama as he tries to close the deal in securing his second term.
At the same time, the attack-Iran hawks who love to talk war but who are actually happy with anything that undermines the regime in Tehran, will be pleased to see Iran suffer.
Andrew Scott Cooper writes: The alleged Iranian plot to blow up Saudi Arabia’s ambassador in Washington made for blazing headlines even as it obscured a deeper truth: Iran and Saudi Arabia have been engaged in a different sort of war of attrition over the past few decades, with economics, not explosives, the weapon of choice. Both regimes are keenly aware that although bullets may kill, they can’t bankrupt: only a sudden collapse in oil revenue can do that.
Skeptics who find it implausible that the oil markets can be harnessed as a weapon, and that oil can be turned into a financial super bomb to destabilize a national economy, should heed the words of a leading member of the Saudi royal family. Prince Turki al-Faisal, previously his country’s head of intelligence and ambassador to Washington, has long enjoyed a reputation for frank talk. Three and a half months ago, he delivered an address to a select group of NATO officials at an air base deep in the heart of the British countryside. In his remarks, the prince fired a shot across the bows of the Iranian regime.
This past year, the Saudi royal family was caught off-guard by the Arab Spring uprisings and badly shaken by the overthrow of old friends and allies in Egypt and Tunisia. The Saudis blame their neighbor Iran for inciting and stoking the troubles as part of a sinister plot to divide, weaken, and eventually topple the region’s conservative Sunni monarchies. Prince Turki made it clear that after six months of being on the defensive, the Saudi royal family had rallied and was about to fight its corner by unleashing the most powerful weapon in its arsenal: the kingdom’s massive oil reserves.
The Islamic Republic of Iran, jeered Prince Turki, was “dysfunctional,” a “paper tiger,” though one with “steel claws” whose survival depended on its ability to cash in on high oil prices “to maintain a level of economic prosperity that is just enough to pacify its people.” The implication was that Iran’s reliance on a single revenue stream to prop up a sclerotic political structure had left the regime in Tehran vulnerable to sabotage.
The Saudis, continued Prince Turki, were quite prepared to use their swing power as the world’s biggest oil producer to “squeeze” the Iranian economy. They could presumably do this by opening the spigots to flood the market with cheap oil, enough cheap oil indeed to force prices down and deprive Iran’s rulers of billions of dollars in government revenue necessary to buy social tranquility at home. Flooding the market is economic warfare on a grand scale, the oil industry’s equivalent of dropping the bomb on a rival. The prince’s threat sounds like a diabolical plot best suited for a novel–holding the world economy to ransom by manipulating commodity prices to settle scores with a neighbor–until you realize it’s been done before.
Scott Wilson writes: Beyond the economy, the wars and the polls, President Obama has a problem: people.
This president endures with little joy the small talk and back-slapping of retail politics, rarely spends more than a few minutes on a rope line, refuses to coddle even his biggest donors. His relationship with Democrats on Capitol Hill is frosty, to be generous. Personal lobbying on behalf of legislation? He prefers to leave that to Vice President Biden, an old-school political charmer.
Obama’s circle of close advisers is as small as the cluster of personal friends that predates his presidency. There is no entourage, no Friends of Barack to explain or defend a politician who has confounded many supporters with his cool personality and penchant for compromise.
Obama is, in short, a political loner who prefers policy over the people who make politics in this country work.
“He likes politics,” said a Washington veteran who supports Obama, “but like a campaign manager likes politics, not a candidate.” The former draws energy from science and strategy, the latter from contact with people.
Which raises an odd question: Is it possible to be America’s most popular politician and not be very good at American politics?
Candidates run on hope. Incumbents run on their record. But Barack Obama, lining up for a second term at the White House next year, has little to offer on either score. The heady optimism of 2008 has dissipated. At home, Obama is primarily associated with hard times: only 34% of voters approve of his handling of the economy, according to a recent poll. Abroad, his presidency has come to stand for impotence and incompetence. He promised new beginnings; what he has delivered, for the most part, is waffle, dither and drift.
If this verdict seems harsh, take a quick tour round the globe. Everywhere the pillars of American superpower are crumbling. The old habit of hegemony, formed in the postwar decades and confirmed in 1989 as Soviet power imploded, is fading as fast as a Honolulu sunset.
Part of the explanation is faltering industrial and financial clout, reflecting the rapid rise of rivals like China and India. But that is compounded by another central element: Obama’s persistent failure to stand up, in practical, substantive ways, for the values, beliefs and interests he so eloquently espouses.
Obama’s early, anguished indecision over keeping his promise to close Guantánamo Bay now looks like a grim portent. So, too, does his administration’s failure to support the Iranian students whose “green revolution” was so cruelly suppressed in Tehran in 2009. When the Arab spring took hold this year, the man who in Cairo had preached the pre-eminence of the democratic ideal took fright. Tunisia did not matter much. But when he faced accusations of becoming the president who “lost” Egypt, Obama’s dither default setting was triggered anew.
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