Paul Craig Roberts
VDARE.com

The United States is running out of time to get its budget and trade deficits under control. Despite the urgency of the situation, 2010 has been wasted in hype about a non-existent recovery. As recently as August 2 Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner penned a New York Times Column, Welcome to the Recovery.

As John Williams (shadowstats.com) has made clear on many occasions, an appearance of recovery was created by over-counting employment and undercounting inflation. Warnings by Williams, Gerald Celente, and myself have gone unheeded, but our warnings recently had echoes from Boston University professor Laurence Kotlikoff and from David Stockman, who excoriated the Republican Party for becoming big-spending Democrats.

It is encouraging to see a bit of realization that, this time, Washington cannot spend the economy out of recession. The deficits are already too large for the dollar to survive as reserve currency, and deficit spending cannot put Americans back to work in jobs that have been moved offshore.

However, the solutions offered by those who are beginning to recognize that there is a problem are discouraging. Kotlikoff thinks the solution is massive Social Security and Medicare cuts or massive tax increases or hyperinflation to destroy the massive debts.

Perhaps economists lack imagination, or perhaps they don’t want to be cut off from Wall Street and corporate subsidies, but Social Security and Medicare are insufficient at their present levels, especially considering the erosion of private pensions by the dot com, derivative and real estate bubbles. Cuts in Social Security and Medicare, for which people have paid 15% of their earnings all their life, would result in starvation and deaths from curable diseases.

Tax increases make even less sense. It is widely acknowledged that the majority of households cannot survive on one job. Both husband and wife work and often one of the partners has two jobs in order to make ends meet. Raising taxes makes it harder to make ends meet—thus more foreclosures, more food stamps, more homelessness. What kind of economist or humane person thinks this is a solution?

Ah, but we will tax the rich. The usual idiocy. The rich have enough money. They will simply stop earning. Let’s get real. Here is what the government is likely to do.

More »

Stephen Lendman

Dr. Ilan Pappe

Born in Haifa, the son of German-Jewish immigrants who fled during the Nazi period, noted historian Ilan Pappe left Israel in summer 2007, telling London Guardian writer Chris Arnot he began "feeling for a while like public enemy No. 1" for his anti-Zionist views and supporting a boycott against Israeli universities, saying:

"I supported (it) because I believe that without pressure, Israel will not end the occupation....I believe that things would change only if Israel receives a strong message that as long as the occupation continues it would not be a legitimate member of the international community, and that until then its academics, doctors and authors would not be welcome. A similar boycott was imposed on South Africa. It took 21 years, but it eventually led to the end of Apartheid."

Now chairing Britain's Exeter University's history department, he explained by the time he left, the Knesset publicly condemned him and Israel's education minister, Yuli Tamir, wanted him sacked.

In addition, death threats came by mail, email and phone, and his picture once appeared in Israel's "biggest-selling newspaper at the centre of a target," the caption reading: "I'm not telling you to kill this person, but I shouldn't be surprised if someone did."

An environment this hostile got him to leave, the same one today afflicting other Israeli academics, opposing policies they don't accept, nor should anyone respecting the rule of law, democratic freedoms, and equal justice, endangered species in Israel for Jews - non-existent for Occupied Palestinians and Israeli Arab citizens.

More »

Ian Williams
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs

In the West Bank village of Bil’in, where nonviolent protests against Israel’s
apartheid wall are held every Friday, a foreign journalist wearing a gas mask
throws an Israeli soldier to the ground near a model of a Gaza Freedom Flotilla
ship, June 4, 2010. (AFP photo/Abbas Momani)

THE FIRST week in May saw a media storm in Israel when the Hebrew tabloid Yediot Ahronot broke the news that, while he was an appeals court judge in apartheid South Africa, Richard Goldstone was in some way linked to rejecting the appeals of 28 death sentences.

As one of Napoleon's generals said of the emperor's kidnapping and execution of a member of the royal family, "It's worse than a crime—it's a blunder." Even more than the 2008-9 Operation Cast Lead, Israel's attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla was a self-inflicted diplomatic disaster, which it seems to be determined to exacerbate. One of the problems for the Israeli worldview is that it tends to use Capitol Hill as a mirror: if the suckers there will swallow the big lies, the reasoning goes, so will everyone else.

And it is true, the suckers did some impressive swallowing. To see so-called progressives like New York City Reps. Charles Rangel and Jerry Nadler standing in Times Square calling upon the State Department to deny entry to witnesses of the attack on the flotilla was almost as nauseating as the cold-blooded murder of the nine crew members. As Patrick Buchanan teasingly pointed out (see p. 14), it is as if they supported the gunning down of the Freedom Marchers in the South, or the summary execution of Rosa Parks for sitting in the wrong part of the bus.

More »

Vilani Peiris
WSWS

After a two-day session of the UN General Assembly ended yesterday, the amount of international aid pledged for Pakistani flood victims still fell well short of the $US460 million in emergency aid that the UN has appealed for. For all of the cynical displays of concern for the fate of the Pakistani people at the UN meeting, the issue of aid was dominated by the narrow self-interest of the major powers.

Addressing the UN on Thursday, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that the US would contribute an additional $60 million in aid to Pakistan, bringing its total to more than $150 million, of which about $92 million would go to the UN. In calling for other countries to do more, she declared: “I realise that many countries, including my own, are facing tough economic conditions and very tight budgets … But we must answer the Pakistani request for help.”

Washington’s aid effort, however, is not motivated by concern for the estimated 20 million Pakistanis impacted by the floods. Rather the Obama administration is driven by the need to prop up the Pakistani government of President Asif Ali Zardari, on which the US relies to wage a proxy war on Islamist insurgents in areas bordering Afghanistan. US officials have warned that organisations sympathetic to the Islamist fighters might gain in influence as a result of government and international inaction on the floods.

As for “very tight budgets”, the Obama administration’s offer of aid is a pittance compared to the trillions of dollars spent to fund the bailouts of US banks, financial institutions and corporations during 2008-09. In fact, the White House is implementing austerity measures against working people in the US and provides limited aid to Pakistani flood victims precisely because it has taken massive corporate bad debts onto the government’s books. At the same time, Obama can find tens of billions of dollars to escalate the US-led war in Afghanistan.

More »