Emilio Dabed

Old Strategies Against New Enemies: Chile 1970-1973 and Palestine 2006-2009

“You said we’d never defeat them: On the contrary, we needed to help them defeat themselves. No one is defeated from the outside; every defeat is internal…they have fallen into the whirlpool of defeat, and it’s up to us to keep them going in this direction.” -Elias Khoury, Bab al-Shams

The explanations given by Israel to justify the onslaught on Gaza in last December were confused. The goals advanced by military and political Israeli apparatus varied, depending either on the person speaking or on the moment in which they were stated: from overthrowing the Hamas-led government and annihilating the movement, to putting an end to the launching of Hamas rockets from the Strip, to destroying Hamas’s military capabilities, to stopping the smuggling into Gaza, and so on. However, none of these stated objectives were met. The Hamas government remains in Gaza.

Indeed, immediately after the cease fire was declared, the TV screens showed the Gaza police putting the streets in order while the armed resistance groups were firing rockets into Israel again. The message was clear: Hamas government holds power in Gaza, its capability to fire on Israel was far from being destroyed and the underground economy of Gaza continued to grow, becoming more and more sophisticated. But despite these facts, the Israeli establishment triumphantly declared that its war objectives were reached. [1] How do we reconcile these statements with the reality? Should we interpret it as a sort of “cognitive dissociation”, a tendency to hold as “reality” what is constantly belied by the facts? Indeed this is a resilient historical trend in Israeli policy.

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Aletho News

By now we know that Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory has been built on a mixture of hype and massaged data. Various carbon tax schemes have been put forward, even unprecedented proposals for a world wide taxation authority to be overseen by the UN. Does it follow that the primary agenda behind the fraud was the implementing these new taxes, or, were these proposed tax schemes secondary and part of a proclivity on the part of the state to seize any opportunity to enhance revenue?

In the three decades since AGW was made into a political tool by Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Party, tax laws have been "reformed" many times in Britain, as well as other Western nations dominated by the AGW meme. Margaret Thatcher and her Conservative Party were known for their opposition to social leveling through taxation. Reduction of public services, combined with hectoring the disadvantaged about self reliance, were hallmarks of British politics through the 1980's and beyond. In Europe and North America, today's overall level of taxation is not higher than that prevalent in 1979.

In Britain and the US, governments have been able to utilize the issuance of sovereign debt to increase military budgets while at the same time reducing capital gains and corporate tax rates creating an era of "borrow and spend" growth for the state sector. In the US, the higher income tax brackets have come down while middle class employees have seen increased social security deductions from their paychecks. These revenues were then "borrowed" by the general fund and in fact replaced the revenues lost due to the reduction of corporate taxes.

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Arthur Silber

To all those who repeatedly claimed that, no matter what "mistakes" he might make and regardless of the scope of the devastating effects of those errors, Obama had to represent a markedly better choice than McCain, take note: in certain respects, Obama is far more dangerous than McCain could have been. For the same reasons, Obama is also more dangerous than Bush was. I remind you that I have written numerous essays damning Bush for almost every single one of his policies. It is hardly the case that I viewed Bush in anything approaching a positive light, however remotely.

In large part, the danger represented by Obama arises from the fact that Obama's election gutted whatever effective opposition might have existed. To their eternal shame, the Democrats never opposed Bush in any way that mattered -- but at least the possibility of opposition had not been obliterated entirely. In the near term and probably for longer, that possibility now appears to have been extinguished. I've been writing about this aspect of Obama and what he embodies for some time; see, as one example, "The Fatal Illusion of Opposition." As I noted in a later article:

I confess that I am very fearful for the future of this country, even more fearful than I have been in the Bush years. And that, I also confess, is a development I would never have predicted. But there had been the possibility of opposition over the past seven years, although it finally became clear that all such opposition was a deadly illusion, and that the nominal opposition was in certain respects even guiltier than the Bush criminals.

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