Lithuania Cancels Covid Vaccine Donation To Bangladesh

Say you are at home. An earnest young woman knocks on your door. She has a petition for you to sign. The woman is also taking donations; a $50 minimum is suggested. Perhaps she wants to stop Evil Megacorp Inc. from committing environmental crimes. Maybe she's concerned about sexual, gender, or racial politics. Or maybe this is about a local recall election.

But you have no money to donate. You can't support the cause publicly. Maybe your spouse or parent(s) work(s) for Evil Megacorp Inc. Maybe your local representative has threatened police harassment of petition signers. Maybe you prefer avoiding politics. You don't sign the petition or give money. Angered, this canvasser produces a Molotov cocktail, lights it, and tosses it thru your open door, yelling that "You're either with us or against us!!" 

Or say the canvasser leaves. But the canvasser's husband runs the local sanitation service. No one will pick up your garbage--unless you sign the petition. Are you and your children surviving on church charity? The canvasser's brother-in-law is the church preacher. The preacher tells you that church charity is for petition signers. So you and yours can starve--unless you sign the petition.

Russia and Ukraine War: Quick Thoughts

I hope that the Russia: Ukraine War ends soon with minimal loss of life. In most cases war is an obscenity. 

However, it's impossible not to notice the tremendous implicit bias in the war's media coverage. 

Some pundits have expressed shock and horror that war is occurring in Europe. 

The unspoken feeling is that Europeans should be more advanced than this, not like those other "uncivilized" people of the world. For those other people, evidently, life really should be 'nasty, brutish, and short.' 

One journalist recently made this explicit. I doubt that he has any special animus against people who aren't white or European. He just takes it for granted that such people aren't as advanced or as civilized as his (presumably white) audience.

“Civilized”
pic.twitter.com/AiU7uVmjMr

— Imraan Siddiqi (@imraansiddiqi) February 26, 2022

There are deadlier wars currently occurring in Ethiopia and Yemen. There are people losing their lands and lives in a slow motion strangulation in Palestine. Western powers drop bombs on people in Syria and Somalia with a disregard for civilian casualties. Boko Haram is still kidnapping and murdering people in Nigeria. 

Michael Che Joke: Fragility and Reality

If someone protested against or made sarcastic jokes about apartheid in South Africa, housing discrimination in the United States, or racist soccer fans in Italy or Spain, most of us would not immediately say that the person is anti-white/anti-Afrikaner/anti-Italian/anti-Spanish. They very well could be of course but that wouldn't change the fact that there are/were problems in all of those areas which need(ed) to be addressed.

Most people recognize that it's a dishonest tactic to accuse the person drawing attention to bias of being biased himself or herself. Nobody likes to have their particular group or even a representative of their group in the spotlight for something negative. Just human nature. But no group and especially no government or nation is above criticism. Governments and even nations are not synonymous with ethnic, racial, or religious groups. There is a huge difference between criticizing a government for what it does and criticizing a group for who it is.

Unfortunately the state of Israel and its US partisans have expanded and weaponized claims of anti-Semitism to include anyone who criticizes the appalling treatment that Israel doles out to non-Jews in areas under its control, particularly the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. SNL comedian Michael Che recently made a minor joke about this and was accused of being the second coming of Hitler by some Jewish organizations.

French Fuel Tax Protests

"Let me tell you how it will be/It's one for you and nineteen for me. Because I'm the taxman." 
-Taxman
The Beatles
It's very hard to determine ahead of time when people have had enough. Often the  fuse is lit but no one knows when the bomb will explode. Governments and dissidents alike would love to have the answer to that question. It would make their work a lot easier. If you're a repressive but smart government official you might want to keep the proverbial pot warmed just enough so that the frog doesn't realize he's being cooked.

If you're a dashing would be freedom fighter you don't want to waste your time, good looks, energy, youth and life trying to rally apathetic people to the barricades who would rather be home watching sports or downloading NSFW material. In France recently we had a reminder of what happens when governments get a little too far ahead of what populations will accept. After three weeks of protests and riots which saw three people die as French police and civilians attacked each other with hammers, tear gas and water cannon, the French President Macron announced that there would be a six month suspension of a 25 cent gasoline tax increase. This tax was sold in part as a green initiative required by the Paris Climate Accords but because Macron has cut taxes on the rich this tax wasn't exactly popular with people of more modest income or wealth or those who live in rural areas and have less access to public transportation. 

South Africa ANC Political Murders

It is a damn shame that people who struggled against the violent apartheid regime now have no problem murdering each other for money and power. I suppose that's the way it goes sometimes. Can you imagine living in a country in which power depends not on the vote but on who has more button men? That would be a pretty crappy place to live.

One could argue that political violence in South Africa is the inevitable blowback from apartheid-that people who have grown up impoverished and hating themselves with no strong social, economic, or political systems to safely channel dissent and disagreement will find it easy to use violence against each other. Even so, political murder is not normal. It is symptomatic of a sick society. The US has tons of problems but we're not yet at the point where it's normal for political party leaders to dispatch hit squads against dissenting members. Nancy Pelosi does not, whatever you might see on Fox News, threaten to murder Representatives who don't vote for her as party leader. Mitch McConnell is not sending goon squads to visit the families of Republican senators/congressmen who didn't vote to repeal ObamaCare. And no matter how much Clinton voters despise third party voters, so far neither Gary Johnson nor Jill Stein has been found in car trunks.

UMZIMKHULU, South Africa — Their fear faded as they raced back home, the bottle of Johnnie Walker getting lighter with each turn of the road. Soon, Sindiso Magaqa was clapping and bouncing behind the wheel of his beloved V8 Mercedes-Benz, pulling into familiar territory just before dark. Minutes later, men closed in with assault rifles. Mr. Magaqa reached for the gun under his seat — too late. One of his passengers saw flashes of light, dozens of them, from the spray of bullets pockmarking the doors. The ambush was exactly what Mr. Magaqa had feared. A few months before, a friend had been killed by gunmen in his front yard. Then, as another friend tried to open his front gate at night, a hit man crept out of the dark, shooting him dead.

Next came Mr. Magaqa, 34. Struck half a dozen times, he hung on for weeks in a hospital before dying last year. All of the assassination targets had one thing in common: They were members of the African National Congress who had spoken out against corruption in the party that defined their lives.

Oil Prices and You: Winners and Losers

Although I happen to know a few people working in the financial industry who are peeved about the fall in oil and gasoline prices, I am delighted about the drop. My weekly commuting costs have been cut in half. That's more money to pay down debts, build savings, increase emergency funds, invest, assist relatives or perform any number of other Shady approved initiatives which are of much higher utility to me than spending $15-25 on gasoline every day from Sunday through Thursday. The drop in gas prices has a similar impact to a tax cut or pay raise. For people who drive 200 miles/week or more it's a virtual godsend. I am amused that the conspiracy theorists who come out to blame the Trilateral commission, the oil companies or THEM when oil and gasoline prices are high are nowhere to be found when prices are low. But there is no such thing as a free lunch. These low prices hurt producers. There are some very real winners and losers. I don't much care about the losers but it is worth thinking about because low prices may have bad results down the road. The reason that prices are low is the interaction of supply and demand. Higher oil prices gave US and other producers greater incentive to seek oil through fracking and new drilling, thus increasing supply worldwide. Domestic oil production doubled over the past six to seven years. The US is currently producing about 9.1 million barrels of crude each day. There is a ban on US oil exports but the greater supply still indirectly reduced the global prices. It did this via the mechanism of US production crowding out foreign imports which had to seek new markets. The fact that much of the world is still mired in a slowdown or very weak expansion also caused demand to drop. 

So increasing supply combined with weak demand means that oil prices fell to levels not seen since 2009. Now usually under such circumstances the largest oil producing and exporting countries, many of whom are part of the OPEC cartel, would have a sitdown and arrange for everyone to cut production proportionately in order to boost prices to what they feel are reasonable levels. Don Corleone would give his protection in the east and there would be the peace. So far these reasonable steps haven't happened.

One of the reasons that production hasn't been cut is that Saudi Arabia, who holds the largest oil reserves and the most ability to withstand lower prices for long periods of time, is playing chicken with North American and Russian oil producers. Saudi Arabia would like nothing more than to take US energy independence and fracking off the table completely. And if they can harm their Iranian rivals while doing so and punish a few other OPEC members with reputations for cheating then so much the better. Many of the Gulf Arab states feel the same way. So Saudi Arabia and its supporters won't countenance cuts in production. In fact they have had the cheek to suggest that the US cut production. The US is not upset to see Russia have budget issues at a time when US sanctions are starting to bite. All of this means that countries like Russia, Iran, Nigeria, Venezuela among others are in deep trouble. Their budgets and internal income transfers are based on oil prices remaining within a certain range, say $70-100/barrel. Oil that remains at $47/barrel, which is the current price, could cripple their economies. There are some obvious political repercussions here. For example some of the funding from the Gulf states to ISIS could decline or dry up completely. Governments which purchase internal loyalty or stability via high oil prices could destabilize. Other losers could include North American oil producers who only expanded or entered their business because their forecasts predicted high oil prices for the foreseeable future. Obviously no one knows what the future holds. It may take more time for the ill effects to be felt. But if oil prices stay low we will see increasing and ongoing employment losses in such states as North Dakota, Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma, throughout 2015 and perhaps even into 2016. At that point production will have dropped enough for prices to recover somewhat.

But it's not just people directly involved in the oil and gasoline business who may be facing economic or political problems from lower oil prices. When gas prices drop as much as they have done, consumers tend to lose interest in electric cars, hybrids or super efficient smaller vehicles and start to purchase more full size vehicles, particularly SUVs and pickups. The auto companies like this because they make thousands of dollars more profit per unit on the larger models. However the auto companies also have CAFE standards to meet. It is more difficult for them to do this selling larger vehicles. In general lower energy costs for fossil fuels don't align with decreased carbon production and pollution. There may well be more friction between certain government mandates and market realities. It's ironic that the end to fracking and drilling in pristine areas, something that is high on the agenda of many environmentalists may well occur because of market signals as opposed to social activism or new laws. And although by some lights, now would be the perfect time to increase the gas tax, there probably isn't much political support for that move.

So in any event, enjoy the lower prices while they last. I know I will. But keep in mind that lower prices are causing other people some hardships. We're all connected on some level. And there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

How have the lower gasoline prices impacted you?

How much longer do you think these prices can last?

If you're saving money, what are you doing with it?

Let's bomb Iran!!!

You may have noticed that Iran is in the news a lot lately. Israel Someone has been murdering their nuclear research scientists while various politicians in the United States and Israel and elsewhere are pounding the drums for war. The cause? Well they say that Iran is working on a nuclear bomb and will attack Israel. Therefore we (by which they mean the US) must attack Iran immediately otherwise it's just like 1939 all over again and we (by which they mean the US) are appeasing Hitler. The President, mistakenly in my view, spoke before AIPAC on Sunday, where he said that he was willing to use military force to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Netanyahu will meet with President Obama on Monday to presumably make more of these arguments and attempt to get even firmer commitments of war. After all, before the election is when Netanyahu's influence over President Obama will be at its peak.

There are many problems with this line of logic. Honestly I am too disgusted and too busy with other things today to go off into a long essay about this. I am trying to write shorter pieces anyway. So let's just stick to a few pertinent facts here.

1. According to the US NIE estimates of 2007, 2010 and the most recent, Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program. Period.
2. The same malicious mendacious miscreants who lied us into war over Iraqi WMD are currently saying the same things about Iran. Of course even a broken clock is right twice a day but given that the costs of war are immense and these malicious mendacious miscreants are known to be liars, one should at the very least check what they say to see if it passes the smell test. And if you lean closer for a good whiff, I think you're going to smell rotten eggs. Again.
3. Iran has not attacked the United States.
4. Israel has nuclear weapons of its own.

Netanyahu, a senior Israeli official actually had the chutzpah to accuse an AMERICAN general of saying something "that served Iran's interests." Now I am hardly the most jingoistic fellow around but in my view if you're taking American money (which Israel is to the tune of over $3 billion in official aid each year) then you need to keep a civil tongue. Where the hell does some foreigner get off talking about an American military leader in such a way?

So to reiterate, a foreign client state (with the help of domestic warmongering neocons, chickenhawks, and neo-colonialists) is trying to bully the United States into greenlighting its attack or preferably making its own attack on Iran. Didn't we JUST go through this? As any dog trainer will tell you when a dog pulls on the leash you must immediately adjust its attitude so that it understands that you, not it, are the one in charge. Otherwise you're gonna get pulled every which way when you go for walks. It is easiest to correct this when the dog is a puppy. Doing so when the dog is full grown and stronger than you is quite painful for you and the dog. But corrected it must be. It's long past time that the US gave Israel a collar pop and stopped moving. The Israeli right wing doesn't seem to understand who's holding the leash in the relationship. Or maybe I don't understand...

Do I think that the mullahs in Iran are nice people? Of course not.
But the world is full of countries run by people that are not so nice. I don't think it's the job of the United States to run around overthrowing governments that it doesn't like.

War with Iran is not in the interest of the United States. We don't need increased gasoline prices. We don't need more body bags coming home.  We don't need to spend billions more on war. We don't need another occupation. And unless I missed something China and Russia are not on board with attacks on Iran. Feeling misled by the US war on Libya, China and Russia vetoed a UN resolution on Syria. Fool me once shame on you. Fool me twice shame on me. Will they go along with an attack on Iran?

Something has gone very wrong in the American body politic. Another war of choice should not even be up for discussion at this point. I think that because of the volunteer Armed services, the incredible amounts of firepower that we possess and the good fortune to mostly have avoided battle in this country, most people don't have any understanding of the costs of war. Our idea (non-military) of war is something in which the other side does all of the dying. From a purely pragmatic point that may be a good thing but most of the people who think that probably aren't worried about their children being born deformed from depleted uranium usage, their daughters turning to prostitution to provide for the family, or having to worry about getting clean drinking water.

Am I the only person who remembers this quote???

"War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression therefore, is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”


Questions
1) Do you think either the US or Israel should or will attack Iran this year?
2) What impact would a possible war with Iran have on the fall election?
3) Will an attack on/war with Iran prevent an Iranian nuclear weapons program or make it more likely?
4) Why don't we have an off switch for wars anymore?

Israeli Settler Violence: Double Standards

Everyone has double standards. It's part of being human, unfortunately. If someone who's not on our team does something dirty we scream in horror and call for penalties. If someone who's on our team does the same action, we chuckle and say hey the guy's a bit aggressive sure, but ultimately he's a good fellow.

Although this might be par for the course it's really not a good thing. It's actually something humans need to strive to eliminate actually, especially when it comes to justice. You may not have heard about this but in the West Bank Israeli settler movement there is a subgroup of settlers who take what they call "price-tag" attacks on Palestinian homes, farms, churches, mosques and well Palestinians themselves. Occasionally these are in response to Palestinian attacks but are more usually done in response to "provocations" like the Israeli closing of a settlement outpost or other political moves. Settlers also seem to enjoy such fun date night activities as random beatings of/shootings at Palestinians, destruction of Palestinian olive groves and farmlands and just general harassment such as calling your mother all sorts of foul names.

Despite the violence of these attacks and the harm they cause the Israeli government has more or less turned a blind eye to the settler movement's violence against Palestinians. Settlers have had government support. Well the problem with double standards is that quite often they come back to bite you in your tuchus. 

Some 50 settlers and right-wing activists entered a key West Bank military base early Tuesday morning and threw rocks, burned tires, and vandalized military vehicles. The settlers were acting in response to a rumor that the IDF would act to evict a West Bank settlement in accordance with an August Supreme Court ruling. In the attack on the Efraim Regional Brigade's base near the West Bank city of Qalqilya, right-wing activists threw stones at region's brigade commander and his deputy after forcefully opening the door to their jeep. The brigade commander was lightly wounded after a stone hit his head.

LINK

No arrests were made. Now it's pretty obvious or should be what would have happened if a wild bunch of Palestinians had invaded an Israeli military base to throw rocks, burn tires and vandalize military equipment. You would have been reading the next day about a bunch of dead Palestinians. Period.
This has embarrassed the IDF to an extent. After all no matter whose side they're on, no army wants people to get the idea that they can just roll up to a military base and pimp-slap soldiers willy-nilly. So they are trying to find a way to deal with settler violence-settler violence directed at the army anyway. They could care less about settler violence directed at Palestinians.

The IDF is holding discussing on ways of handling future cases of settler violence following the raid on the Ephraim Brigade base and the attack on the brigade commander on Tuesday. The army is considering taking a firmer hand against rioters targeting the IDF.

Among the options being explored is the use of crowd dispersal means such as shock or gas grenades, water canons and in cases of mass riots more advanced tools such as odor and noise weapons.

The IDF is also revisiting fire protocols in cases where soldiers' lives may be in danger which involve the hurling of stones or glass bottles. IDF forces refrained from using weapons in previous clashes with Jewish rioters and physically blocked the assailants. Ephraim Brigade deputy commander Lt. Col. Tzur Harpaz did just that on Tuesday when he left his weapon in the jeep before being hit with a stone in his head.

Oops upside your head indeed..

I see this just as chickens coming home to roost. You can not lovingly give a bunch of insane chauvinists guns, tax-exempt donations from the US, turn a blind eye to their violent rhetoric and actions against Palestinians and then be surprised when they decide that the Palestinians aren't the only people that might need to be punched in the face. Settlers across the world have often turned against their own government-whether it be Algeria, South Africa, Kenya or elsewhere. The increasing violence of some settlers and their disdain for political authority was thoroughly predictable. The Israeli political leadership finally decided to state that violent settlers would be subject to administrative detention though Prime Minister Netanyahu still refused to call them terrorists. 

I think that this will just be a road bump. In the short term both sides will do their best to contain their ire at each other and instead take it out on the hapless Palestinians. It's not in either side's interest to raise the level of violence even further. The long term question is that since much of the settler movement believes that God gave them the West Bank and no politician has any right to remove them, is it even possible for any sort of two-state solution to go forward-especially since settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem are still continuing. I say no.

QUESTIONS

1) What should the Israeli government do with the settler movement?

2) Why didn't the IDF soldiers defend themselves against the settler attack?

3) Do you think a two state solution is still possible or desirable?

4) Why is the US allowing tax breaks for settlement donations?

A State Called Palestine

The Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, will submit a bid for Palestinian statehood to the UN Security Council this week. The US will veto this application. The US has been working diplomatically to prevent Abbas' move. The US claims that "unilateral" actions are unhelpful though somehow it never seems to get too upset about unilateral Israeli actions. Abbas has a fallback option of submitting an application for UN observer membership (similar to the Vatican) to the UN General Assembly. This can't be vetoed. Either way, a Palestinian state would have greater access to international treaties, organizations and courts. This worries Israel. The US and its allies have tried to persuade some UN states to vote against the application, though it is conceded that a General Assembly vote offers the Palestinians a better chance of success.

In either case, the Palestinians do not have the military strength to evict the Israeli Army and Israeli settlers from a Palestinian state. The Palestinians lack the latest and greatest in land mines, fuel air bombs, automatic shotguns, cluster bombs, small arms, helicopter gunships, jet fighters, armored personnel carriers, self-propelled artillery, tear gas, bulldozers, tanks, mortars, depleted uranium munitions, unmanned drones, motion detectors, sniper rifles and other weapons which Israel either lovingly obtains from the US or produces on its own.

On cue, several US elected representatives or Presidential candidates have started to agitate to cut off aid to any Palestinian state and/or to the UN. As some Western commentators or politicians have cynically pointed out, any declaration of statehood-whether it is a formal UN Security Council resolution or the lesser General Assembly version will not change anything for the Palestinians. Israel is not ending the occupation so why bother going thru with it?

Give Peace a Chance

One could just as easily ask the people who say this, if you aren't worried about an independent Palestine, why are you so desperately trying to prevent Abbas from making good his promise to submit the application?

The answer is pride and arrogance on the one hand, desperation on the other. The US doesn't wish to be embarrassed by vetoing the Palestinian drive for independence at the same time it is mouthing pieties about the Arab Spring. It just wants the Palestinians to bleed peacefully and hopefully fade away into irrelevance. Israel doesn't want to admit to what exactly it's been doing in the occupied territories-which is why the state and its supporters diligently work to prevent any information from getting out. Apparently, the Palestinian Authority has finally realized that Israel has absolutely no intention of ending the military occupation. NONE. As the Wikileaks documents made clear not only does Israel not wish to end the occupation, its concept of a Palestinian state is at most a "state" which cedes control over its airspace, radio frequencies, immigration policies, boundaries and water rights to Israel, is disarmed, and allows Israeli troops to enter at any time to arrest or kill "terrorists"-in other words, no state at all. 


When you are dealing with someone who is so confident in their total control and superiority over you that they see no need to even throw you a face-saving crumb, at some point you will do something, ANYTHING, to make the point that you're here, you matter, you're human and you intend to resist. The negotiations have dragged on, halted, restarted and are currently stopped. But one thing that has been a constant in the West Bank and East Jerusalem is the establishment of new Israeli settlements and the growth of existing ones. There are over 500,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank, roughly triple the number that was there when the "peace process" started.

Israelis "negotiating" with a Palestinian woman.

It is difficult to overstate how humiliating this is to the Palestinians and how corrosive it is to negotiation. If we intend to share a pizza and I continuously take more slices from your portion while mumbling through mouthfuls that "We need to continue the negotiations", eventually you will stop the "negotiations". You will attempt to either physically prevent me from eating the rest of your food or find someone who can. Otherwise there will be nothing left to share. Actions speak louder than words.

The US is the only state which could make Israel do something it doesn't want to do, which is why some Palestinians were actually happy to see President Obama elected. They believed that perhaps there was finally a US President who could be a fair broker. These people soon learned that that wasn't the case.

• The settlements are illegal under both the Geneva Conventions and previous UN resolutions. The Palestinians sought a new UN Security resolution stating this. The US vetoed it.
• When President Obama said that the settlements needed to stop, Prime Minister Netanyahu gave him the finger and said settlements would continue. President Obama backed down.
• When Vice-President Biden visited Israel the Israelis took the opportunity to announce new settlements. President Obama backed down. 
• When President Obama mentioned that the 1967 border needed to be the basis of negotiations, Prime Minister Netanyahu threw a temper tantrum and stated that there would be no going back to 1967 lines under any circumstances. Just so no one would misunderstand he publicly lectured President Obama on this and proceeded to share his opinion with the US Congress. President Obama backed down.

A blind man can see that here the tail is wagging the dog. As even pro-Israel NYT columnist Thomas Friedman belatedly and ruefully admits, there is a very strong US pro-Israel lobby that plays hardball against anyone who doesn't obsequiously prostrate themselves before the throne of reactionary Israeli stances. As he puts it "..This has also left the U.S. government fed up with Israel’s leadership but a hostage to its ineptitude, because the powerful pro-Israel lobby in an election season can force the administration to defend Israel at the U.N."

Obama and Abbas will meet today. The US wants Abbas to back down for some vague promise to restart negotiations. He may well do that. He doesn't strike me as the bravest man. 
But as one man once said "There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair." We will see if Abbas is ready to stand up and be counted. Ironically Hamas and some other Palestinian activists and intellectuals oppose Abbas' gambit, decrying it as futile and as ceding rights to land inside pre-1967 Israel. In this view Abbas is implicitly (and perhaps explicitly?) recognizing Jewish hegemony in Israel. Politically Abbas is under pressure to show Hamas and the Palestinian people that he can actually win something.

I think that the settlements are so thoroughly embedded in the West Bank that the Palestinians would be smarter to agitate for equal rights in a unitary state-a la South Africa. If Apartheid South Africa can change then so can Israel. I don't think a West Bank state is viable.

A brave Israeli soldier defends himself against terrorists

But then again I don't have to worry about not being allowed to drive on a road in my own neighborhood. I'm not surrounded by military checkpoints and humiliated for fun by bored soldiers. I'm not being used as a test subject for new crowd control technologies. There are no crazed armed-to-the-teeth settlers defacing my place of worship, shooting my children, or tearing down my olive trees out of pure malice. I haven't gone to a demonstration and been shot at with live ammo. I haven't had my legs broken for throwing rocks. I haven't visited a theater and had it raided by the Israeli Army. I don't have execution squads looking for my brother and killing my father by "mistake". So it's easy to pontificate from over here what the Palestinians should do. Like anyone else they're probably trying to do the best they can.

Questions
Will Abbas defy the US and submit a UN application? 
If he does this what will this mean for the Palestinians?
Is a US veto the right move?

Power to the People

They know we’re not satisfied, so we begin to holler

They make us a promise and throw in a few more dollars

There’s no price for happiness, there’s no price for love

 Up goes the price of living, and you’re right back where you was

“(For God’s Sake) Give More Power to the People"- The Chi-Lites

"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."

-Frederick Douglass

 “I would not refer to him as a dictator” 

-Joe Biden speaking of Hosni Mubarak who has ruled for thirty years, uses emergency decree as a normal state of affairs and exiles, imprisons or tortures political opponents.

At the time of this posting Hosni Mubarak is still the dictator of Egypt.  He has shut down the internet and phone service in an attempt to stop protesters from communicating.  The Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei was placed under house arrest. The state has placed tanks in the streets of Cairo and the police are in full attack mode –water hoses, beatings, tear gas, the works. There are differing reports on how many have been killed so far but one thing seems to be safe to say : the protesters don’t want reform-they want revolution. On MSNBC last night one protester was helpful enough to carry a sign that read “GET OUT” in English, French, Arabic, German and what looked like Spanish.

 Although Mubarak is talking of forming a new government and our President is trying to walk a fine line by talking of reform I think it’s fair to say that reform would not be welcomed by anyone.

The ironic thing in all this is that it was just recently that Secretary of State Clinton chided the “Arab World” for not having greater democratic freedoms.

Of course the US doesn’t really give a damn about democratic freedoms in the Arab world as witnessed by the tepid US response to the overthrow of the Tunisian dictator Ben Ali, the US endorsement of the undemocratic Palestinian Authority, the Saudi and Jordanian monarchies, the Gulf States and the hostility to votes that go the wrong way in Gaza, Turkey or Lebanon. Always judge by a government’s actions, not its words.

We will see how this Egyptian situation turns out. It really does come down to how brutal the regime wishes to be in holding on to power against how much can the people truly endure in their quest for freedom. Much of the time state brutality wins. That’s just how it is. But not always….

The other great irony about all this is that if it were Arabs in the West Bank protesting conditions that are just as bad if not worse than those in Egypt the US would not even feel compelled to try to pretend to stand with the protesters. These events should if nothing else caution people who think that some basic universal rights are not desired by all.

QUESTION: What should the US be doing, if anything? Why does the US support so many dictators? Are you disappointed that the US President, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, did not mention that another Nobel Peace Prize winner is under house arrest? Will Mubarak be forced to step down?