WASHINGTON - In separate speeches delivered an ocean apart, the two standard bearers of the Republican Party Thursday offered rosy visions of a future designed to gladden the hearts of Israel-centred neo-conservatives without offering any details about how their dreams will be achieved.

In an address marking the 60th anniversary of Israel’s founding before the Knesset in Jerusalem, President George W. Bush predicted that, 60 years from now, the Jewish state will co-exist with a Palestinian homeland in a democratic Middle East where “Al Qaeda and Hezbollah and Hamas will be defeated” and “Iran and Syria will be peaceful nations, with today’s oppression a distant memory…”

“From Cairo to Riyadh to Baghdad and Beirut, people will live in free and independent societies, where a desire for peace is reinforced by ties of diplomacy and tourism and trade,” he said.

Such a “bold vision” will not “arrive easily overnight”, he said. But it will be possible “so long as a new generation of leaders has the courage to defeat the enemies of freedom, to make the hard choices necessary for peace, and stand firm on the solid rock of universal values.”

Just a few hours later and some 11,000 kms away, Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, told a partisan audience in Columbus, Ohio that, if elected, he will have “won” the Iraq war by 2013 and brought home “most of the servicemen and women who have sacrificed terribly so that America might be secure in her freedom.”

By the end of his first term, he went on, the threat from the Taliban in Afghanistan will have been greatly reduced, al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden and his key lieutenants captured or killed, and Iran “persuaded (by) a reluctant Russia and China to cooperate in pressuring Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions, and North Korea to discontinue its own.”

In contrast to Bush, however, McCain failed to mention any progress on settling the Israel-Palestinian conflict, suggesting that such an effort will not rate particularly high on his foreign policy agenda.

That should be just fine with pro-Likud neo-conservatives who, despite their appreciation for Bush’s staunch support for former hard-line Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (whom the president Thursday praised as “warrior for the ages, a man of peace” in his speech), have been uneasy about his thus far feeble efforts to prod the two sides towards a framework peace agreement by the time he leaves office next January.

Indeed, Thursday’s speeches served to underline how powerful and durable the neo-conservative vision of the world, particularly for the Middle East, remains, at least for the Republican Party, and how likely it will be that a President McCain will “stay the course” set by Bush.

Bush’s speech was pure neo-conservatism, beginning with his assurance that Washington was “Israel’s closest ally and best friend in the world” and featuring a familiar depiction of the world as a struggle between the forces of “good and evil”, the latter embodied by the most immediate threats to Israel’s security — Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and Syria.

“Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along,” he declared in a thinly veiled slap at the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Barack Obama, who, along with most of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, has called for engagement with Tehran and Damascus.

“We have heard this foolish delusion before,” he said, referring to the failure of western powers to challenge the Nazis in the 1930s, a core neo-conservative leitmotif. “We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history,” he continued, implicitly comparing the threats faced by Israel with Nazi Germany and explicitly assuring his audience that “…(T)he world must not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”

But, apart from confronting “evil”, presumably through military force, if necessary, and steadfastly promoting basic freedoms and democracy in the region — a policy which even some of his neo-conservative backers believe Bush has largely abandoned as he has sought to rally Sunni Arab leaders against Iran and its allies — Bush offered no ideas as to how his hopeful vision of the Middle East, particularly that of a “homeland (Palestinians) have long dreamed of and deserved”, in 2068 will be achieved.

McCain similarly failed to explain how he would achieve his own vision of victory in Iraq, substantial progress in Afghanistan, a defeated al Qaeda, and Iran’s abandonment of its alleged nuclear ambitions by 2013. His comments led Rand Beers, a top counter-terrorism official under both George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton who resigned from the National Security Council to protest the younger Bush’s decision to invade Iraq, to compare the speech to Richard Nixon’s “secret plan” to end the Vietnam War as a gimmick to win the 1968 presidential election.

McCain’s vision for 2013 was more modest than Bush’s for 2068 — in addition to omitting any mention of an Israeli-Palestinian peace process, he made no predictions about “transforming” the Middle East as a whole — but the basic trajectory was consistent.

He described an Iraq at the end of his first term in office as “a functioning democracy” in which violence would be “spasmodic (but) much reduced”, militias would be disbanded, al Qaeda in Iraq defeated, the central government able to impose its authority “in every province of Iraq”, and the U.S. military presence “much smaller” and no longer engaged in combat.

And not only would the threat from the Taliban be “greatly reduced” and the al Qaeda leadership captured or killed, he said, but a newly formed “League of Democracies” — another neo-conservative chestnut — would “apply stiff diplomatic and economic pressure” on Sudan to stop genocide in Darfur and use similar tools to end gross human rights abuses, such as human trafficking, in other parts of the world.

The absence of detail regarding how these goals will be accomplished drew mainly scorn from both Democrats and independent observers, with the former president of the influential Council on Foreign Relations, Leslie Gelb, describing McCain’s vision as “kind of a wild-eyed, unsupported prediction.”

“I think John McCain has been one of the most important voices on national security policy for many years now, so it really surprises me to see him giving speeches like the one today that are almost in la la land,” Gelb told reporters in a teleconference sponsored by the National Security Network.

At the same time, Sen. Hillary Clinton, who is lagging behind Obama in the race for the Democratic nomination, noted that “this is not the first time Sen. McCain has predicted victory in Iraq” and that his speech “promises more of the same Bush policies…”

McCain himself suggested that his worldview was not so different from Bush’s. Asked later Thursday about the president’s assertion that negotiating with “terrorists and radicals” today was similar to appeasing Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, McCain said he agreed with the analogy.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy, and particularly the neo-conservative influence in the Bush administration, can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.

© 2008 Inter Press Service

A psychologist who helps lead the post-traumatic stress disorder program at a medical facility for veterans in Texas told staff members to refrain from diagnosing PTSD because so many veterans were seeking government disability payments for the condition.

“Given that we are having more and more compensation seeking veterans, I’d like to suggest that you refrain from giving a diagnosis of PTSD straight out,” Norma Perez wrote in a March 20 e-mail to mental-health specialists and social workers at the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Olin E. Teague Veterans’ Center in Temple, Tex. Instead, she recommended that they “consider a diagnosis of Adjustment Disorder.”

VA staff members “really don’t . . . have time to do the extensive testing that should be done to determine PTSD,” Perez wrote.

Adjustment disorder is a less severe reaction to stress than PTSD and has a shorter duration, usually no longer than six months, said Anthony T. Ng, a psychiatrist and member of Mental Health America, a nonprofit professional association.

Veterans diagnosed with PTSD can be eligible for disability compensation of up to $2,527 a month, depending on the severity of the condition, said Alison Aikele, a VA spokeswoman. Those found to have adjustment disorder generally are not offered such payments, though veterans can receive medical treatment for either condition.

Perez’s e-mail was obtained and released publicly yesterday by VoteVets.org, a veterans group that has been critical of the Bush administration’s policies in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a nonprofit government watchdog group.

“Many veterans believe that the government just doesn’t want to pay out the disability that comes along with a PTSD diagnosis, and this revelation will not allay their concerns,” John Soltz, chairman of VoteVets.org and an Iraq war veteran, said in a statement.

Melanie Sloan, executive director of CREW, said in a statement: “It is outrageous that the VA is calling on its employees to deliberately misdiagnose returning veterans in an effort to cut costs. Those who have risked their lives serving our country deserve far better.”

Veterans Affairs Secretary James B. Peake said in a statement that Perez’s e-mail was “inappropriate” and does not reflect VA policy. It has been “repudiated at the highest level of our health care organization,” he said.

“VA’s leadership will strongly remind all medical staff that trust, accuracy and transparency is paramount to maintaining our relationships with our veteran patients,” Peake said.

Peake said Perez has been “counseled” and is “extremely apologetic.” Aikele said Perez remains in her job.

A Rand Corp. report released in April found that repeated exposure to combat stress in Iraq and Afghanistan is causing a disproportionately high psychological toll compared with physical injuries. About 300,000 U.S. military personnel who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan are suffering from PTSD or major depression, the study found. The economic cost to the United States — including medical care, forgone productivity and lost lives through suicide — is expected to reach $4 billion to $6 billion over two years.

Ng said diagnosing PTSD often requires observing a patient for weeks or months because the condition implies a long, lingering effect of stress.

“Most people exposed to trauma, in general, can get better,” Ng said. “You don’t want to over-diagnose people with PTSD. Whether it’s adjustment disorder is one thing. It’s usually a temporary disorder with severity that is not as bad as someone with full-blown PTSD.”

© 2008 The Washington Post

Comcast Corp.’s interference with Internet traffic has prompted a federal investigation and is at the center of calls for network neutrality laws, but another U.S. cable company appears to be doing the same thing without drawing scrutiny.

A study released Thursday found conclusive signs that file-sharing attempts by subscribers of Cox Communications were blocked, along with customers at Comcast.

Of the 788 Comcast subscribers who participated in the study, 62 percent had their connections blocked. At Cox, 54 percent of subscribers examined were blocked, according to Krishna Gummadi at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Saarbruecken, Germany. The institute examined the network connections of 8,175 Internet subscribers around the world.

Comcast is the country’s second-largest Internet service provider, with 14.1 million subscribers. Cox is the fourth-largest, with 3.8 million; it is part of privately held Cox Enterprises Inc.

Comcast’s practice of interfering with traffic was brought to light by user reports last year and confirmed by an Associated Press investigation in October.

Consumer advocacy groups and legal scholars criticized the interference, saying that letting a service provider selectively block some connections makes it a gatekeeper to the Internet, violating the network’s open principles. Their complaints prompted the Federal Communications Commission to start an investigation, which is ongoing.

Legislation also has been introduced in Congress to guarantee net neutrality, or equal treatment of traffic by Internet service providers.

“This research proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that consumers, Congress and the FCC must urgently pursue the complaints against network providers,” said Ben Scott, policy director of Free Press, one of the groups that urged the FCC to fine Comcast.

File-sharing programs like BitTorrent, which let people exchange documents, songs, movies and other content, can be heavy users of Internet bandwidth.

Comcast maintains that hampering such programs helps ensure that traffic other than file sharing is not impeded by a few big users. The company says that it is delaying file transfers rather than blocking them. Even that will end later this year, Comcast said in March, as it pledged to stop the practice.

At least since 2006, Cox’s subscriber agreement has noted that the company engages in “protocol filtering,” which means it treats different types of Internet traffic, like Web surfing, e-mail and file sharing, differently.

Cox said Thursday that it takes such steps “to ensure the best possible online experience for our customers.” But Cox denied that protocol filtering amounts to discrimination of any specific services.

The blocking observed by Gummadi’s group occurs when a subscriber has downloaded a file using the BitTorrent application and tries to upload it, or share it with others, over the Internet. The main victims are the other Internet subscribers, who will not be able to download a file if a complete version is not available from someone else’s computer.

Persistent attempts by file-sharing software to get through an Internet service provider’s filtering may succeed after several minutes, as experienced in the Associated Press test last year. But Gummadi’s test did not look at the duration of the traffic blocks.

Gummadi found signs of interference at seven other U.S. Internet providers, all of them cable companies.

© 2008 Associated Press

Vancouver businessman Randy Puder was drawn to the booth operated by Taser International at the Consumer Trade Show in Las Vegas last January.

Playboy bunnies were signing photographs while salesmen pitched a new personal Taser that’s small enough to fit into a woman’s purse, he recalled.

“It was excellent marketing,” Puder told a public inquiry Thursday probing the use of Tasers in B.C.

He got a signed photo from a Playboy bunny, which he showed to The Vancouver Sun. It has the Taser company logo on it. He was asked who he wanted it signed to and he said, half-joking, “The Vancouver police board.”

Puder said he attended the trade show because he has his own electronic systems integration company and wanted to check out that latest technology.

While at Taser’s booth, he said, he was approached by the company’s international sales manager, responsible for sales in B.C., and Puder recalled asking questions about the testing of the Taser.

“I asked if it had been tested on psychotic people who had medications in their system. He said, ‘No.’”

Puder said he has a personal interest in mental health issues because he was a caregiver for his late mother, who was bipolar, and his grandparents, who had Alz-heimer’s. He has made submissions to the Vancouver police board on the issue, he said.

He also discussed with the Taser salesman what happened at the Vancouver airport with Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski, who died after being zapped by a Taser. He recalls the sales manager saying: “Dziekanski would have died anyway.”

(Later, outside the inquiry, Puder told reporters that the man said Dziekanski was suffering from alcohol withdrawal.)

“I was shocked, actually, which is why I’m here today,” Puder told the inquiry, pointing out that his late brother, Gil Puder, was a use-of-force trainer with Vancouver police from 1990 to 1993.

Puder said he was a concerned citizen and suggested a moratorium should be placed on Taser use until there can be proper testing in Canada.

“Until tested in Canada by Canadian medical practitioners, it should be put on the shelf,” he said of the weapon, which incapacitates a person through a five-second, 50,000-volt pulse of electricity.

“We are not the United States,” Puder said. “We have an entirely different model of police and training.”

He also raised a possible conflict of interest, pointing out that two officers who do police training have a website for their private company, Defensive Tactics Inc. of Vancouver, which says the officers — Vancouver police Insp. John McKay and Sgt. Joel Johnston — are trainers certified by Taser International.

Johnston made an earlier presentation at the inquiry, where he said he had approval from the police chief to run a private company. He is in favour of Taser use in B.C. and is the province’s use-of-force coordinator for police services, a division of the Solicitor-General’s Ministry.

Murray Mollard, executive director of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, said in an interview he has concerns about Johnston being a possible Taser instructor to other police forces through his private company. He said Johnston is also in charge of a review of Taser use in B.C. for the B.C. Association of Municipal Chiefs of Police.

nhall@png.canwest.com

© The Vancouver Sun 2008

The Israelis are celebrating the 60th anniversary of the creation of the nation of Israel.

The Palestinians have only to mourn the loss of their land and the oppression they have suffered as refugees in camps and caves since 1948, their life under military occupation and their humiliation at myriad Israeli checkpoints.

Defeats in wars that had U.S. military and financial support have left the Palestinians in despair. But all that is history now.

President Bush has led a prestigious parade of statesmen and former statesmen — many of whom made Israel’s takeover possible — to the anniversary celebration in Israel.

Bush has supported Israel’s building of a 400-mile wall on Palestinian land that the Israeli government contends is needed to protect Israel. Bush has been meek in his criticism of Israel’s continued expansion of settlements on Palestinian land, slice by slice.

Bush was very upbeat at the ceremonial start of his visit to Israel, bursting with optimism for democratic change throughout the Middle East.

But reality set in when a rocket fired from Gaza exploded in a shopping center in a southern Israeli city, wounding 14 people, possibly more.

Bush is hoping he has a last chance to show something for his efforts in the Middle East as he prepares to ride into the sunset in less than a year.

Less optimistic was Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who said an Arab-Israeli peace deal “might be improbable, but it’s not impossible.”

Bush has found that one of his favorite rhetorical ploys — promoting “democracy” in the Middle East — can come back and bite him, as was the case two years ago when the Palestinian group Hamas won the election in Gaza. Democracy had gone too far in the eyes of the Bush administration. The president rejected the Hamas victory and helped Israel mount a blockade of Gaza, cutting off food and fuel supplies.

Palestinians hoping for a change in U.S. policy shouldn’t be looking to Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., the leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. Obama — whose middle name is Hussein — is scared of being dubbed a Moslem or even seen as sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians.

Obama, who once indicated that he would talk to foreign leaders on all sides if he became president, has seen the light.

He sacked Robert Malley, a liberal Middle East expert, from his role as an adviser because Malley told The London Times that he had been in contact with Hamas as part of his regular non-campaign job. That surely tells you something about Obama.

The likely GOP presidential nominee, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is also an ardent supporter of Israel. So the Israelis have no worries about the November election.

No one in recent years has done more for Israel than Bush. I expect streets in Tel Aviv will be named after him. A monument may even be built in his honor.

According to Benny Morris, author of “The First Arab-Israeli War,” David Ben-Gurion, the first Israeli prime minister, once confessed that he, too, would wage perpetual war with Israel if he were a Palestinian.

Morris quoted Ben-Gurion as saying:

“Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: We have come here and (have) stolen their country.”

No one can deny the victimhood of the Jews through the ages. But that does not entitle them to take it out on the Palestinians.

Helen Thomas is a columnist for Hearst Newspapers.

Copyright 2008 Hearst Newspapers.

A child’s biopsy shows early-stage cancer, with a high survival rate if treated in time. But his parents secretly pressure the doctor to alter the results because they don’t want to pay the medical bills.

Criminal? Immoral? It’s not so different from what’s been happening at the Environmental Protection Agency these days. Except that the health of all of us, as well as our planet, is at stake.

Evidence has been mounting for some time of growing dangers to our environment from ozone, mercury, carcinogens, and, the most cataclysmic of all, global warming. But the EPA has been pressuring its scientists to withhold inconvenient truths, and thus the need to do something about them.

The list of alleged falsehoods and manipulations is long and outrageous. Here are some lowlights listed by U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., before Senate hearings held last week:

* The EPA “falsified data and fabricated results” about the safety of the air around Ground Zero in New York City following the Sept. 11 attacks.

* The EPA edited reports on climate change, including a 2003 report on the environment, to counteract scientific data confirming the reality of global warming.

* EPA has “hidden, delayed, or suppressed” scientific findings that displeased certain industries. For example, it sat for nine months on a 2002 report on the effects of mercury on children’s health — and then released it only after it was leaked to the media.

The Bush War on Science has been overt for years now, and a survey released last month by the Union of Concerned Scientists provides more evidence of how deeply corrupt EPA has become.

In a questionnaire sent to more than 5,000 EPA scientists last summer, 889 of them — about 60 percent of those who responded — said they had personally experienced political pressure geared to favor government policy rather than the facts.

Government officials publicly misrepresented their findings, the scientists said. Information was used selectively to justify less-stringent regulations. Scientists were pressured to alter or exclude information from scientific documents.

Nearly 500 scientists said they fear retaliation if they express concern about what’s happening within the agency.

Many also faced difficulty sharing their findings with other scientists or publishing them in scientific journals, let alone speaking out publicly to the news media.

The situation has deteriorated in recent years because the Bush administration — as part of its claim to “unitary executive” power that trumps that of Congress and the courts — has allowed the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to make environmental regulations. Time after time, scientists say, the OMB has ignored the data to favor private industry. Congress needs to ensure that the politicization of EPA doesn’t continue beyond January 2009. The first step is to re-assert its power to delegate work to federal agencies without White House interference.

Another safeguard: Include federal scientists in whistle-blower-protection legislation now in conference. If, in 1970, the government had pressured scientists to downplay the danger from unhealthy air quality, Congress might never have passed the Clean Air Act. The effect would have been catastrophic: the Union of Concerned Scientists says 200,000 more people would have died prematurely and millions more cases of respiratory and cardiovascular disease would have developed over the next two decades. Oh, to again have a president with the ethical compass of Richard Nixon!

© Copyright 2008 Philly Online, LLC.

You’ve probably heard that John McCain once said, “I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues.” This line is regularly referenced by Democratic television pundits as evidence that McCain is unprepared to lead the country during a recession.

The criticism is certainly valid, but it ignores something more troubling. It’s not that politicians like McCain “need to be educated” about economics, as he admitted. It’s that they do not comprehend how economics impacts international affairs.

Behold McCain at a recent town meeting.

“We need our Canadian friends, and we need their continued support in Afghanistan,” he said. “So what do we do? The two Democratic candidates for president say they’re going to unilaterally abrogate NAFTA. How do you think the Canadian people are going to react to that?”

Opinion-makers, think-tankers and other assorted conventional wisdom spewers depict McCain’s thesis as unquestioned truth. They claim that though most Americans oppose our trade policies, the world’s masses love them, and if we change those policies we will lose allies.

This rationale justifies the fabled Washington Consensus-the set of right-wing globalization measures currently destabilizing the world economy. And because our politicians’ international curiosity begins and ends with turning French fries into Freedom Fries, this rationale goes unchallenged in America’s political debate.

Facts, however, are persistent things-facts like the Toronto Star report showing “almost half of all Canadians [believe] NAFTA should be renegotiated,” with 80 percent saying it has done little or nothing for workers. McCain wonders how Canadians will react to NAFTA criticism, but the results are already in: According to polls, they prefer the NAFTA-bashing Barack Obama by a five-to-one margin over the NAFTA-glorifying Arizona senator.

“Canadians believe NAFTA needs serious work,” said Jack Layton, leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party. The likely prime minister candidate told me he wants to reform the pact because it helps corporations overturn laws and because its lack of standards forces workers into a wage-cutting, environment-destroying race to the bottom.

“NAFTA has become the template for other trade negotiations,” Layton said. President Bush says that’s terrific-that, for instance, rewarding Colombia’s brutal government with a NAFTA-style pact will quell anti-Americanism from Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. But Layton said these deals are “the real problem” for America around the world-and he has more pesky facts to support the assertion.

The Los Angeles Times reports that polls show animosity toward U.S. globalization policies is growing throughout Latin America. Mexicans now oppose NAFTA by a two-to-one margin-predictable considering their country’s plight. In the 14 years preceding NAFTA, Mexico was among Latin America’s fastest-growing economies. In the 14 years since, it is among the slowest.

When I spoke with Costa Rican economist Otton Solis, he told me, “Many Latin Americans see these trade agreements as an imposition.” He pointed to accords helping agribusiness crush local farmers and pharmaceutical companies inflate medicine prices as typical examples of America foisting corporate-written edicts on poorer countries.

Solis narrowly lost his 2006 bid for Costa Rica’s presidency, and he plans to run again on anti-Washington Consensus themes. He noted that just as in the United States, the public in South America is not clamoring for lobbyist-written trade deals-”only the elites are.” Far from a diplomatic panacea, Solis said, these policies help anti-American rulers like Chavez, who cite them as proof of imperialism.

Now there is the possibility of change. Come November, if Americans elect leaders who are serious about reforming trade policies-a big if-then we may get a government that understands the relationship between economics and foreign policy. We could see a new Washington Consensus: one that actually reflects public consensus at home and abroad.

David Sirota is the best-selling author of “Hostile Takeover” (Crown, 2006). He is a senior fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future and a board member of the Progressive States Network, both nonpartisan research organizations. His daily blog can be found at www.credoaction.com/sirota.

© 2008 Creators Syndicate Inc.

The Reagan era in American politics is about to end, and we have George W. Bush to thank for its demise.

In this respect, it doesn’t matter who wins the Democratic nomination or even who wins the general election in the fall. I was going to try to write this column without using the word paradigm, but already I’ve failed: Regardless of who takes the oath of office in January, the paradigm that reigned for nearly three decades-the notion that government is useless, if not inherently evil-is no longer operative.

All three of the remaining presidential candidates propose a far more activist role for government. Even John McCain, who tells conservatives he’s a Reagan disciple, proposes far-reaching government action on issues such as climate change, high energy prices and the mortgage crisis — problems that are supposedly better left to the cruel genius of free markets, according to the old paradigm that Bush has pushed to absurd extremes.

It took a leader of the Decider’s uncommon gifts to kill the philosophy he worships. To be fair, there is one area in which he has been the most proactive of presidents, to our nation’s lasting discredit: violating the basic rights of citizens and noncitizens alike in the name of his “war on terrorism.”

Otherwise, he has interpreted Reagan’s small-government mandate as an excuse — or an instruction — to abdicate government’s most fundamental responsibilities. Anyone who wants to argue this point need simply remember the “heck of a job” our government did in handling the devastation from Hurricane Katrina.

Almost every day, there’s more evidence that 2008 is turning into one of those watershed years in American politics — 1980, say, or 1968, or even 1932. You can start with the fact that the Democrats are poised to nominate the first African-American major-party candidate for president.

Even more telling, though, are the polls showing that soaring numbers of Americans believe the country is heading in the wrong direction — more than eight out of 10, according to a new Washington Post/ABC News poll — and that Bush’s popularity has fallen to historic lows.

The grinding occupation of Iraq is only partly responsible for the nation’s discontent. Decades of government inattention have allowed chronic problems to grow and fester and putrefy and … well, we’ll abandon that metaphor lest it turn into something that no one wants to read over breakfast, but you get the idea.

It turns out that Americans don’t want their leaders to simply shrug, as George Bush shrugs, at the fact that 47 million citizens do not have health insurance. It turns out that Americans don’t want their leaders to simply tsk-tsk, as George Bush tsk-tsks, at the wrenching economic dislocations that stem from globalization.

It turns out that if government declines to adequately regulate or even monitor the financial system, unfettered markets can make catastrophic blunders. When Joseph Schumpeter wrote admiringly of how capitalism was buffeted by the “perennial gale of creative destruction,” I doubt he was talking about exotic mortgage-backed securities so complicated that nobody really understood how much risk was being undertaken, or by whom. I also doubt that families facing foreclosure are much comforted by being told that they’re playing an essential role — that of loser — in classical free-market theory.

Evidence suggests that Americans are tired of a government that is slavishly beholden to a rigid do-nothing ideology — and that they’re ready to punish the president’s party for its ineptitude and lassitude. Republicans have gone 0 for 3 in special elections this year for House seats, most recently losing a Mississippi district that gave Bush a 62 percent landslide margin in 2004. What a difference four years can make.

Throughout the year, the Democratic primaries have drawn far more voters than the Republican contests. Democratic coffers are brimming and the party is bringing in millions of new voters. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are glamorous and exciting candidates, but this Democratic surge isn’t all about them. It’s also about the Republican Party’s utter exhaustion. Since Ronald Reagan’s first term, Republicans have set the nation’s ideological agenda. This was true even during the Clinton years. But it’s not true now.

Party leaders speak of the need to refurbish the “Republican brand.” The problem goes far beyond packaging, though. It’s not that the box needs to be more colorful, it’s that the ideas inside have long since gone stale.

–Eugene Robinson

© 2008, Washington Post Writers Group

When tens of thousands of people staged demonstrations in Mexico last year to protest a 60 percent increase in the price of tortillas, many analysts pointed to biofuel as the culprit. Because of US government subsidies, American farmers were devoting more and more acreage to corn for ethanol than for food, which sparked a steep rise in corn prices. The diversion of corn from tortillas to biofuel was certainly one cause of skyrocketing prices, though speculation on biofuel demand by transnational middlemen may have played a bigger role. However, an intriguing question escaped many observers: how on earth did Mexicans, who live in the land where corn was domesticated, become dependent on US imports in the first place?

The Mexican food crisis cannot be fully understood without taking into account the fact that in the years preceding the tortilla crisis, the homeland of corn had been converted to a corn-importing economy by “free market” policies promoted by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and Washington. The process began with the early 1980s debt crisis. One of the two largest developing-country debtors, Mexico was forced to beg for money from the Bank and IMF to service its debt to international commercial banks. The quid pro quo for a multibillion-dollar bailout was what a member of the World Bank executive board described as “unprecedented thoroughgoing interventionism” designed to eliminate high tariffs, state regulations and government support institutions, which neoliberal doctrine identified as barriers to economic efficiency.

Interest payments rose from 19 percent of total government expenditures in 1982 to 57 percent in 1988, while capital expenditures dropped from an already low 19.3 percent to 4.4 percent. The contraction of government spending translated into the dismantling of state credit, government-subsidized agricultural inputs, price supports, state marketing boards and extension services. Unilateral liberalization of agricultural trade pushed by the IMF and World Bank also contributed to the destabilization of peasant producers.

This blow to peasant agriculture was followed by an even larger one in 1994, when the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect. Although NAFTA had a fifteen-year phaseout of tariff protection for agricultural products, including corn, highly subsidized US corn quickly flooded in, reducing prices by half and plunging the corn sector into chronic crisis. Largely as a result of this agreement, Mexico’s status as a net food importer has now been firmly established.

With the shutting down of the state marketing agency for corn, distribution of US corn imports and Mexican grain has come to be monopolized by a few transnational traders, like US-owned Cargill and partly US-owned Maseca, operating on both sides of the border. This has given them tremendous power to speculate on trade trends, so that movements in biofuel demand can be manipulated and magnified many times over. At the same time, monopoly control of domestic trade has ensured that a rise in international corn prices does not translate into significantly higher prices paid to small producers.

It has become increasingly difficult for Mexican corn farmers to avoid the fate of many of their fellow corn cultivators and other smallholders in sectors such as rice, beef, poultry and pork, who have gone under because of the advantages conferred by NAFTA on subsidized US producers. According to a 2003 Carnegie Endowment report, imports of US agricultural products threw at least 1.3 million farmers out of work — many of whom have since found their way to the United States.

Prospects are not good, since the Mexican government continues to be controlled by neoliberals who are systematically dismantling the peasant support system, a key legacy of the Mexican Revolution. As Food First executive director Eric Holt-Giménez sees it, “It will take time and effort to recover smallholder capacity, and there does not appear to be any political will for this — to say nothing of the fact that NAFTA would have to be renegotiated.”

Creating a Rice Crisis in the Philippines

That the global food crisis stems mainly from free-market restructuring of agriculture is clearer in the case of rice. Unlike corn, less than 10 percent of world rice production is traded. Moreover, there has been no diversion of rice from food consumption to biofuels. Yet this year alone, prices nearly tripled, from $380 a ton in January to more than $1,000 in April. Undoubtedly the inflation stems partly from speculation by wholesaler cartels at a time of tightening supplies. However, as with Mexico and corn, the big puzzle is why a number of formerly self-sufficient rice-consuming countries have become severely dependent on imports.

The Philippines provides a grim example of how neoliberal economic restructuring transforms a country from a net food exporter to a net food importer. The Philippines is the world’s largest importer of rice. Manila’s desperate effort to secure supplies at any price has become front-page news, and pictures of soldiers providing security for rice distribution in poor communities have become emblematic of the global crisis.

The broad contours of the Philippines story are similar to those of Mexico. Dictator Ferdinand Marcos was guilty of many crimes and misdeeds, including failure to follow through on land reform, but one thing he cannot be accused of is starving the agricultural sector. To head off peasant discontent, the regime provided farmers with subsidized fertilizer and seeds, launched credit plans and built rural infrastructure. When Marcos fled the country in 1986, there were 900,000 metric tons of rice in government warehouses.

Paradoxically, the next few years under the new democratic dispensation saw the gutting of government investment capacity. As in Mexico the World Bank and IMF, working on behalf of international creditors, pressured the Corazon Aquino administration to make repayment of the $26 billion foreign debt a priority. Aquino acquiesced, though she was warned by the country’s top economists that the “search for a recovery program that is consistent with a debt repayment schedule determined by our creditors is a futile one.” Between 1986 and 1993 8 percent to 10 percent of GDP left the Philippines yearly in debt-service payments — roughly the same proportion as in Mexico. Interest payments as a percentage of expenditures rose from 7 percent in 1980 to 28 percent in 1994; capital expenditures plunged from 26 percent to 16 percent. In short, debt servicing became the national budgetary priority.

Spending on agriculture fell by more than half. The World Bank and its local acolytes were not worried, however, since one purpose of the belt-tightening was to get the private sector to energize the countryside. But agricultural capacity quickly eroded. Irrigation stagnated, and by the end of the 1990s only 17 percent of the Philippines’ road network was paved, compared with 82 percent in Thailand and 75 percent in Malaysia. Crop yields were generally anemic, with the average rice yield way below those in China, Vietnam and Thailand, where governments actively promoted rural production. The post-Marcos agrarian reform program shriveled, deprived of funding for support services, which had been the key to successful reforms in Taiwan and South Korea. As in Mexico Filipino peasants were confronted with full-scale retreat of the state as provider of comprehensive support — a role they had come to depend on.

And the cutback in agricultural programs was followed by trade liberalization, with the Philippines’ 1995 entry into the World Trade Organization having the same effect as Mexico’s joining NAFTA. WTO membership required the Philippines to eliminate quotas on all agricultural imports except rice and allow a certain amount of each commodity to enter at low tariff rates. While the country was allowed to maintain a quota on rice imports, it nevertheless had to admit the equivalent of 1 to 4 percent of domestic consumption over the next ten years. In fact, because of gravely weakened production resulting from lack of state support, the government imported much more than that to make up for shortfalls. The massive imports depressed the price of rice, discouraging farmers and keeping growth in production at a rate far below that of the country’s two top suppliers, Thailand and Vietnam.

The consequences of the Philippines’ joining the WTO barreled through the rest of its agriculture like a super-typhoon. Swamped by cheap corn imports — much of it subsidized US grain — farmers reduced land devoted to corn from 3.1 million hectares in 1993 to 2.5 million in 2000. Massive importation of chicken parts nearly killed that industry, while surges in imports destabilized the poultry, hog and vegetable industries.

During the 1994 campaign to ratify WTO membership, government economists, coached by their World Bank handlers, promised that losses in corn and other traditional crops would be more than compensated for by the new export industry of “high-value-added” crops like cut flowers, asparagus and broccoli. Little of this materialized. Nor did many of the 500,000 agricultural jobs that were supposed to be created yearly by the magic of the market; instead, agricultural employment dropped from 11.2 million in 1994 to 10.8 million in 2001.

The one-two punch of IMF-imposed adjustment and WTO-imposed trade liberalization swiftly transformed a largely self-sufficient agricultural economy into an import-dependent one as it steadily marginalized farmers. It was a wrenching process, the pain of which was captured by a Filipino government negotiator during a WTO session in Geneva. “Our small producers,” he said, “are being slaughtered by the gross unfairness of the international trading environment.”

The Great Transformation

The experience of Mexico and the Philippines was paralleled in one country after another subjected to the ministrations of the IMF and the WTO. A study of fourteen countries by the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization found that the levels of food imports in 1995-98 exceeded those in 1990-94. This was not surprising, since one of the main goals of the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture was to open up markets in developing countries so they could absorb surplus production in the North. As then-US Agriculture Secretary John Block put it in 1986, “The idea that developing countries should feed themselves is an anachronism from a bygone era. They could better ensure their food security by relying on US agricultural products, which are available in most cases at lower cost.”

What Block did not say was that the lower cost of US products stemmed from subsidies, which became more massive with each passing year despite the fact that the WTO was supposed to phase them out. From $367 billion in 1995, the total amount of agricultural subsidies provided by developed-country governments rose to $388 billion in 2004. Since the late 1990s subsidies have accounted for 40 percent of the value of agricultural production in the European Union and 25 percent in the United States.

The apostles of the free market and the defenders of dumping may seem to be at different ends of the spectrum, but the policies they advocate are bringing about the same result: a globalized capitalist industrial agriculture. Developing countries are being integrated into a system where export-oriented production of meat and grain is dominated by large industrial farms like those run by the Thai multinational CP and where technology is continually upgraded by advances in genetic engineering from firms like Monsanto. And the elimination of tariff and nontariff barriers is facilitating a global agricultural supermarket of elite and middle-class consumers serviced by grain-trading corporations like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland and transnational food retailers like the British-owned Tesco and the French-owned Carrefour.

There is little room for the hundreds of millions of rural and urban poor in this integrated global market. They are confined to giant suburban favelas, where they contend with food prices that are often much higher than the supermarket prices, or to rural reservations, where they are trapped in marginal agricultural activities and increasingly vulnerable to hunger. Indeed, within the same country, famine in the marginalized sector sometimes coexists with prosperity in the globalized sector.

This is not simply the erosion of national food self-sufficiency or food security but what Africanist Deborah Bryceson of Oxford calls “de-peasantization” — the phasing out of a mode of production to make the countryside a more congenial site for intensive capital accumulation. This transformation is a traumatic one for hundreds of millions of people, since peasant production is not simply an economic activity. It is an ancient way of life, a culture, which is one reason displaced or marginalized peasants in India have taken to committing suicide. In the state of Andhra Pradesh, farmer suicides rose from 233 in 1998 to 2,600 in 2002; in Maharashtra, suicides more than tripled, from 1,083 in 1995 to 3,926 in 2005. One estimate is that some 150,000 Indian farmers have taken their lives. Collapse of prices from trade liberalization and loss of control over seeds to biotech firms is part of a comprehensive problem, says global justice activist Vandana Shiva: “Under globalization, the farmer is losing her/his social, cultural, economic identity as a producer. A farmer is now a ‘consumer’ of costly seeds and costly chemicals sold by powerful global corporations through powerful landlords and money lenders locally.”

African Agriculture: From Compliance to Defiance

De-peasantization is at an advanced state in Latin America and Asia. And if the World Bank has its way, Africa will travel in the same direction. As Bryceson and her colleagues correctly point out in a recent article, the World Development Report for 2008, which touches extensively on agriculture in Africa, is practically a blueprint for the transformation of the continent’s peasant-based agriculture into large-scale commercial farming. However, as in many other places today, the Bank’s wards are moving from sullen resentment to outright defiance.

At the time of decolonization, in the 1960s, Africa was actually a net food exporter. Today the continent imports 25 percent of its food; almost every country is a net importer. Hunger and famine have become recurrent phenomena, with the past three years alone seeing food emergencies break out in the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, and Southern and Central Africa.

Agriculture in Africa is in deep crisis, and the causes range from wars to bad governance, lack of agricultural technology and the spread of HIV/AIDS. However, as in Mexico and the Philippines, an important part of the explanation is the phasing out of government controls and support mechanisms under the IMF and World Bank structural adjustment programs imposed as the price for assistance in servicing external debt.

Structural adjustment brought about declining investment, increased unemployment, reduced social spending, reduced consumption and low output. Lifting price controls on fertilizers while simultaneously cutting back on agricultural credit systems simply led to reduced fertilizer use, lower yields and lower investment. Moreover, reality refused to conform to the doctrinal expectation that withdrawal of the state would pave the way for the market to dynamize agriculture. Instead, the private sector, which correctly saw reduced state expenditures as creating more risk, failed to step into the breach. In country after country, the departure of the state “crowded out” rather than “crowded in” private investment. Where private traders did replace the state, noted an Oxfam report, “they have sometimes done so on highly unfavorable terms for poor farmers,” leaving “farmers more food insecure, and governments reliant on unpredictable international aid flows.” The usually pro-private sector Economist agreed, admitting that “many of the private firms brought in to replace state researchers turned out to be rent-seeking monopolists.”

The support that African governments were allowed to muster was channeled by the World Bank toward export agriculture to generate foreign exchange, which states needed to service debt. But, as in Ethiopia during the 1980s famine, this led to the dedication of good land to export crops, with food crops forced into less suitable soil, thus exacerbating food insecurity. Moreover, the World Bank’s encouragement of several economies to focus on the same export crops often led to overproduction, triggering price collapses in international markets. For instance, the very success of Ghana’s expansion of cocoa production triggered a 48 percent drop in the international price between 1986 and 1989. In 2002-03 a collapse in coffee prices contributed to another food emergency in Ethiopia.

As in Mexico and the Philippines, structural adjustment in Africa was not simply about underinvestment but state divestment. But there was one major difference. In Africa the World Bank and IMF micromanaged, making decisions on how fast subsidies should be phased out, how many civil servants had to be fired and even, as in the case of Malawi, how much of the country’s grain reserve should be sold and to whom.

Compounding the negative impact of adjustment were unfair EU and US trade practices. Liberalization allowed subsidized EU beef to drive many West African and South African cattle raisers to ruin. With their subsidies legitimized by the WTO, US growers offloaded cotton on world markets at 20 percent to 55 percent of production cost, thereby bankrupting West and Central African farmers.

According to Oxfam, the number of sub-Saharan Africans living on less than a dollar a day almost doubled, to 313 million, between 1981 and 2001 — 46 percent of the whole continent. The role of structural adjustment in creating poverty was hard to deny. As the World Bank’s chief economist for Africa admitted, “We did not think that the human costs of these programs could be so great, and the economic gains would be so slow in coming.”

In 1999 the government of Malawi initiated a program to give each smallholder family a starter pack of free fertilizers and seeds. The result was a national surplus of corn. What came after is a story that should be enshrined as a classic case study of one of the greatest blunders of neoliberal economics. The World Bank and other aid donors forced the scaling down and eventual scrapping of the program, arguing that the subsidy distorted trade. Without the free packs, output plummeted. In the meantime, the IMF insisted that the government sell off a large portion of its grain reserves to enable the food reserve agency to settle its commercial debts. The government complied. When the food crisis turned into a famine in 2001-02, there were hardly any reserves left. About 1,500 people perished. The IMF was unrepentant; in fact, it suspended its disbursements on an adjustment program on the grounds that “the parastatal sector will continue to pose risks to the successful implementation of the 2002/03 budget. Government interventions in the food and other agricultural markets… [are] crowding out more productive spending.”

By the time an even worse food crisis developed in 2005, the government had had enough of World Bank/IMF stupidity. A new president reintroduced the fertilizer subsidy, enabling 2 million households to buy it at a third of the retail price and seeds at a discount. The result: bumper harvests for two years, a million-ton maize surplus and the country transformed into a supplier of corn to Southern Africa.

Malawi’s defiance of the World Bank would probably have been an act of heroic but futile resistance a decade ago. The environment is different today, since structural adjustment has been discredited throughout Africa. Even some donor governments and NGOs that used to subscribe to it have distanced themselves from the Bank. Perhaps the motivation is to prevent their influence in the continent from being further eroded by association with a failed approach and unpopular institutions when Chinese aid is emerging as an alternative to World Bank, IMF and Western government aid programs.

Food Sovereignty: An Alternative Paradigm?

It is not only defiance from governments like Malawi and dissent from their erstwhile allies that are undermining the IMF and the World Bank. Peasant organizations around the world have become increasingly militant in their resistance to the globalization of industrial agriculture. Indeed, it is because of pressure from farmers’ groups that the governments of the South have refused to grant wider access to their agricultural markets and demanded a massive slashing of US and EU agricultural subsidies, which brought the WTO’s Doha Round of negotiations to a standstill.

Farmers’ groups have networked internationally; one of the most dynamic to emerge is Via Campesina (Peasant’s Path). Via not only seeks to get “WTO out of agriculture” and opposes the paradigm of a globalized capitalist industrial agriculture; it also proposes an alternative — food sovereignty. Food sovereignty means, first of all, the right of a country to determine its production and consumption of food and the exemption of agriculture from global trade regimes like that of the WTO. It also means consolidation of a smallholder-centered agriculture via protection of the domestic market from low-priced imports; remunerative prices for farmers and fisherfolk; abolition of all direct and indirect export subsidies; and the phasing out of domestic subsidies that promote unsustainable agriculture. Via’s platform also calls for an end to the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights regime, or TRIPs, which allows corporations to patent plant seeds; opposes agro-technology based on genetic engineering; and demands land reform. In contrast to an integrated global monoculture, Via offers the vision of an international agricultural economy composed of diverse national agricultural economies trading with one another but focused primarily on domestic production.

Once regarded as relics of the pre-industrial era, peasants are now leading the opposition to a capitalist industrial agriculture that would consign them to the dustbin of history. They have become what Karl Marx described as a politically conscious “class for itself,” contradicting his predictions about their demise. With the global food crisis, they are moving to center stage — and they have allies and supporters. For as peasants refuse to go gently into that good night and fight de-peasantization, developments in the twenty-first century are revealing the panacea of globalized capitalist industrial agriculture to be a nightmare. With environmental crises multiplying, the social dysfunctions of urban-industrial life piling up and industrialized agriculture creating greater food insecurity, the farmers’ movement increasingly has relevance not only to peasants but to everyone threatened by the catastrophic consequences of global capital’s vision for organizing production, community and life itself.

Walden Bello is senior analyst at and former executive director of Focus on the Global South, a research and advocacy institute based at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. He is the author or co-author of many books on politics and economic issues in the Philippines and Asia, including, most recently, Deglobalization (Zed), and recipient of the 2003 Right Livelihood Award, also known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize.” In March he was named Outstanding Public Scholar for 2008 by the International Studies Association.

Copyright © 2008 The Nation

During an April 22 interview with ABC’s Chris Cuomo, Hillary Clinton vowed to attack Iran and “totally obliterate” the majority of the Persian race in a furnace of primordial fire should the Iranian government attack Israel with nuclear weapons, which they do not now possess.

Missing in Clinton’s campaign trail pandering to America’s pro-Israel lobbies and the mushrooming evangelical Christian Zionist movement is the “inconvenient truth” that Israel has the most modern and most deadly military in the Middle East thanks to an annual $3.5 billion in American aid — one third of the U.S. aid budget.

Israel is a major nuclear power in the region, with up to 200 nuclear warheads and the missiles to deliver them. Israel can and will “pre-emptively defend” itself against Iran, the country that a February International Atomic Energy Agency report concluded has not diverted nuclear material to non-peaceful purposes.

So the real truth behind Hillary Clinton’s “Dr. Strangelove” shtick or John McCain’s “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, Iran” off-key hyperbole is a cynical exploitation of the unholy marriage of convenience between fanatical Jewish Zionists and fanatical Christian Zionists. The former want a Muslim-free Israel in order to fulfill Old Testament prophecy and bring about the first coming of their Messiah, and the latter want the entire Mideast in flames to fulfill New Testament prophecy and bring about the Second Coming of their Messiah.

Jewish Zionists need the money and the political clout of the Christian Zionists. Christian Zionists need the Semitism and the chutzpah of the Jewish Zionists. Politicians need the votes and campaign contributions that both groups can deliver, which in religion-drenched America is a hefty consignment.

Depending on which poll is the most accurate, there are between 105 million and 135 million evangelical and born-again Christians in the U.S. Of these, a 2004 International Fellowship of Christians and Jews poll found that 31 percent identified U.S. support for Israel as their “primary consideration” in selecting a presidential candidate, while 64 percent cited it as an “important factor.”

Predictably then, when Hillary Clinton and John McCain threaten to obliterate Iran with nuclear weapons, their primary audience is not the Muslim “evildoers” but is, instead, the pro-Israel lobby and the Christian Zionist muscle in America, which are willing to see the “ultimate evil” committed to further their ideological agendas.

Nowhere does the “ultimate evil” play a more prominent role than in the machinations of two well-connected Christian Zionists, Tim LaHaye and John Hagee.

Tim LaHaye is best known as the co-author of the blockbuster Left Behind series, which is based on apocalyptic prophecy in the Book of Revelation. He is least known as the founder and first president of the secretive Council for National Policy. Formed in 1981, the CNP was described by the New York Times as consisting of “a few hundred of the most powerful conservatives in the country” who meet “behind closed doors at undisclosed locations to strategize about how to turn the country to the right.”

Though the membership of the CNP is a guarded secret, a list of those known to have been associated with it reads like a who’s who of Christian Zionists and neocon ideologues whose passion is to see the Mideast in flames and in chains.

John Hagee, televangelist and pastor of the 19,000-member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, is the founder of Christians United for Israel. Hagee formed CUFI in 2005 following the publication of his book, “The Jerusalem Countdown: A Warning to the World,” which sports a mushroom cloud on its cover and argues for a pre-emptive nuclear strike on Iran to fulfill God’s plan for both Israel and the West.

Christians United for Israel is the evangelical equivalent of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the powerful pro-Israel lobby courted by every American politician who has national aspirations. John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama have each pledged their fealty to AIPAC.

When Christian Zionists with the stature of LaHaye and Hagee shill for Jewish Zionists who are promoting the ethnic cleansing of Israel or the pre-emptive “defensive” nuking of Iran, politicians with the stature of Hillary Clinton and John McCain, along with a hefty consignment of the electorate, are their willing dupes. It’s just the politics of religion as usual in America.

But Jewish Zionists should never forget that Christian Zionists have no intention of being around when the sands of the Mideast are turned to glass in a furnace of primordial fire. They will have been Raptured and out of harm’s way in Paradise. Their Bible tells them so.

Robert Weitzel of Middleton writes frequently for newspapers, magazines and Web sites. He is a contributing editor to Media with a Conscience.

© 2008 Capital Newspapers

“Green-collar jobs” are a hot topic these days. This is good news, certainly, for those who seek to alter our present course toward climate catastrophe. Greater awareness of the promise of a green economy allows us to challenge the too-familiar framing of “jobs vs. the environment” that has defeated so many attempts at environmental protection. Washington State Governor Christine Gregoire tapped into the power of reframing with the Climate Action and Green Jobs Bill, which combines a framework to reduce greenhouse gas emissions with a green jobs initiative. After she announced it in her 2008 budget request, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s headline read: “Gov. Gregoire announces bill to fight climate change, create jobs.”

Such reframing will be key to the coming fights over legislation to cap and reduce carbon emissions in this country and the international negotiations over a successor to the Kyoto climate accords. Certainly, we can expect the arguments of opponents that any serious attempt to reduce carbon emissions will cripple the global economy. (We’ll need to resist the satisfying yet insufficient response that in the absence of such an attempt unregulated financial markets seem to be doing that job just fine).

Our counter-argument will have to begin with the increasingly apparent point that the global economy will be devastated by doing nothing. The Stern Review released in 2006 by Sir Nicholas Stern, former Chief Economist of the World Bank, estimated that the cost of extreme weather events could reach 0.5-1% of GDP by the middle of the century. An increase in temperature of 2 to 3 degree Celsius could reduce global production by 3%.

But it won’t be enough to summarize the escalating depredations of the devil we are coming increasingly to know. We’ll need to show convincing evidence that green jobs hold enormous promise for significant employment domestically and globally; and that this promise will be unfulfilled if we do not make a decisive shift to a clean energy economy.

Employment Opportunity

In the United States, green-collar jobs offer new opportunity for low-income and working class people who have been at the short end of persistent and increasing inequality in this country. Despite significant boosts in worker productivity over recent decades, median wages remain stagnant. The decline in manufacturing jobs over the last decade gathered steam with an 18% national job loss after the 2001 recession, plummeting with particularly devastating consequences in the industrial heartland, which bore up to a third of the national job loss recorded between 2000 and 2005. Nationally, median family income has not recovered to the pre-recession levels of 2000, and job insecurity threatens workers at all levels. This trend toward greater inequality, wage stagnation, job loss and insecurity stems from many factors, not least economic and trade policies that have encouraged offshoring, real and threatened, and wage triage on a global scale.

The new energy economy will not solve all of the problems of economic inequality, environmental degradation, and energy insecurity. But it can contribute mightily to a resurgence of the American middle class and a sustainable environmental ethos. By expanding existing industries and creating new ones, the emerging green sector can retain and create significant numbers of domestic jobs.

What are these green-collar jobs? We define the core of this sector as family-supporting, middle-skill jobs, most of them in the primary sectors of a clean energy economy — efficiency, renewables, and alternative transportation and fuels. There are many ways to count them, none perfect. One respected source, using a broad set of parameters, estimates that the renewable and efficiency sectors may account for as many as 1 in 4 jobs by 2030. (This projection includes both the full range of jobs in these industries - from accountants to mechanics — and those created indirectly by them.) Whatever the relative merits of such approximations, even the most modest modeling indicates that the green economy holds much promise for urban and rural revitalization.

A large part this promise is based on the reality that green-collar jobs are community-based: because they focus on transforming the immediate natural and built environment, they are harder, in some cases impossible, to offshore. No one will ship a building from Chicago to be retrofitted in China. The energy efficiency industry provides perhaps the most exciting opportunity. Substantially reducing energy waste through systematic retrofitting and upgrading of residential and commercial buildings is a key area where environmental and equity agendas can come together to create good jobs in plentiful numbers. The work requires a multi-skilled, local workforce, and it feeds a building-materials industry that is still largely domestic.

Make no mistake: we are talking about a lot of jobs here. The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) estimates that for every giga-watt hour saved, the agency’s programs create or retain 1.5 jobs. A recent report for the American Solar Energy society counts 8 million jobs created in the U.S. energy efficiency industry in 2006 alone (3.7 million directly in efficiency).

Offshoring Resistant

But building trades jobs are not the only green-collar occupations resistant to offshoring. The manufacturing sector, which has borne the brunt of job loss in this country could receive a substantial job creation boost from a substantial shift to renewable energy. The Renewable Energy Policy Project (REPP) has published a series of reports identifying the potential for states with existing industrial infrastructure and skilled labor to become component manufacturing leaders for the wind industry. If the country can muster the $62 billion investment required to expand wind capacity by 125,000MW over the next ten years — the amount needed to stabilize U.S. carbon emissions — the wind energy sector could create nearly 400,000 domestic manufacturing jobs. And the top twenty states that stand to benefit are some of the most populous and hardest hit by recent manufacturing job loss. California and Texas lead the list, followed by the Great Lakes states: New York Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

Industrial capacity and transportation networks are key assets to turbine production. Wind turbines are massive and extremely heavy machines. The towers alone are up to 250 feet tall, 16 feet in diameter and weigh more than 100 tons. An assembled nacelle — the fiberglass case that sits on top of the tower and houses the gearbox and generator — weighs around 70 tons, and the rotor assembly with blades, each of which can be up to 200 feet long, weighs in at around 40. It is no surprise that most new facilities in the U.S. are sited close to water and rail, like the Gamesa plant on the Delaware River in Fairless Hills, PA, or the Siemens factory on the Mississippi in Fort Madison, Iowa.

The United States is playing catch-up to others, especially the Europeans and the Japanese, who have invested heavily in developing the expertise and manufacturing base for this production. But there are good reasons to believe we can and should catch up. Transporting huge turbines overseas is unsound from a carbon perspective; with oil periodically breaching $100/barrel, it is financially irrational as well. Soaring shipping costs (and a foundering dollar) are already driving greater domestic production. Some of the key wind turbine manufacturers serving the U.S. market — Vestas (Denmark), Siemens (Germany), Gamesa (Spain), Mitsubishi (Japan), and Suzlon (India) — have already started to produce turbines locally.

The siting by foreign companies of manufacturing facilities in the United States — and the potential of U.S. manufacturers to be the links in a supply chain for the wind industry — are signs of progress. They should not obscure the additional promise that U.S.-based green industries hold to be globally competitive sectors. With the right policy supports, U.S.-based renewable energy and energy efficiency industries can capture large shares of these rapidly expanding global markets and export their products - from solar cells to energy efficiency appliances — to consumers around the world.

Sound National Policy

The possible future, then, is compelling, as long as we demonstrate the policy smarts and political will to achieve it. This means crafting sound national policy to create stable domestic markets for renewable energy and using related energy standards as green job creation tools. It also means promoting green industry clusters in which networks of firms can pool resources for coordinated strategies that include joint marketing, commercializing and diffusing new technologies, and workforce training and recruitment. And it requires the development of a coherent green manufacturing agenda that helps firms convert to the most energy efficient technology while also realigning supply chains in declining industries to feed emerging green ones. Finally, all of these policy strategies will require forging solid links between economic and workforce development efforts, and constructing clear and accessible pathways out of poverty for American workers. For example, Washington State’s Climate Action and Green Jobs Bill creates ‘green industry skill panels,’ broad public-private partnerships that are charged with identifying good career-track green jobs and ensuring that pipeline exist to connect workers — particularly low-income or dislocated workers — to those jobs.

The United States needs to think strategically about its emerging green economy, and not just assume that clean energy programs will generate jobs, or that they will be good jobs. A greener vision for the future can be a more inclusive vision as well, but only if we consciously design it to be so. In the coming years, massive green investment and policy innovation need to be wedded to an opportunity agenda that extends the greener pathways to all.

And the extension of these greener pathways cannot be limited to U.S. workers alone. Neither global warming nor capital respects national borders. A serious effort to transition to a green economy — and to connect good green jobs to the people who most need them.– must cross borders, as well. The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) in collaboration with the International Labor Organization and the International Trade Union Confederation, has begun an initiative “to assess, analyze and promote the role of employment in climate change.” Their preliminary report, “Green Jobs: Towards Sustainable Work in a Low Carbon World” defines and analyzes green jobs in a range of industry sectors in the global economy. It provides the first estimate of global employment in the renewable energy sector; in countries where data is available the number of people employed in this sector is around 2.3 million, which is a conservative figure given gaps in information. By way of comparison, total employment in the oil and gas and oil refining sectors (in 1999) was just over 2 million. Given the strong and necessary growth of the renewable energy sector in the coming years, the report suggests that total employment for renewables could exceed $20 million by 2030.

But as with domestic strategies, smart policy choices will be required to make such job growth possible globally and to ensure that these jobs are accessible to those who need them. This will have to involve good development policy by advanced economies as well as in the developing world and a clear focus on inclusive green economic development by multilateral institutions like the World Bank. On both national and international fronts, the principle should be the same: we need to build a green economy strong and equitable enough to lift people out of poverty and into prosperity.

Jason Walsh is National Policy Director for Green For All. Sarah White is a Senior Policy Associate with the Center on Wisconsin Strategy. Both are contributors to Foreign Policy In Focus .

Copyright © 2008, Institute for Policy Studies

PHILADELPHIA - It’s U.S. National Bike to Work Day on Friday and Americans are facing record high gasoline prices, but most commuters will stick to their cars.

The combination of gas near $4 a gallon and the annual campaign to get people to pedal to work may prompt a few more people than usual to commute on two wheels.

But the majority won’t consider the bicycle as a regular means of transport because they simply have too far to go and feel nervous about riding on traffic-choked streets, bicycling advocates and dedicated motorists say.

“It’s never just a matter of picking up a few things you could carry on your bike,” said Crystal Kelson, 33, a nurse and mother from North Philadelphia. “You need a car.”

Kelson said there was no real alternative to her Dodge Charger — which now costs her $65 a week in gasoline — even for short trips to the supermarket.

According to the National Sporting Goods Association, the number of Americans who bike “frequently” — 110 days a year or more — fell almost 10 percent in 2007 to 3.7 million people.

Similarly, the number of people who ride bikes at least six times a year fell to 35.6 million in 2006, the lowest since the survey began in 1984, from 56.3 million in 1995.

Thomas Doyle, vice president of information and research at the association, said the decline was probably due to the aging population, reluctance by parents to allow children to ride bikes and more children using wheeled toys such as scooters and skateboards.

The proportion of personal trips made by bike is less than 1 percent, according to the League of American Bicyclists, a Washington-based advocacy group.

That compares with 27 percent in the Netherlands and 18 percent in Denmark, both of which have networks of bike-only paths, bike lanes and calm streets where people of all ages can feel safe riding.

SIGNS OF A TURNAROUND

Still, American bicycle advocates said there are signs the trend could be reversed, prompted most recently by gas prices, and by concerns over climate change, air pollution, energy security and personal health.

“All the indications are that people are looking at cycling and other transportation alternatives, and gas prices are pushing them to do that,” said Andy Clarke, executive director of the League of American Bicyclists.

Some American cities including Portland, Oregon, and Washington have higher rates of bike use than the national average thanks to bike-friendly infrastructure.

In Philadelphia, the jump in gas prices has become the “tipping point” for getting more people on their bikes, said Alex Doty, director of the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia.

He said bike use in the city rose 25 percent in 2007 and is up 6 percent this year, but only 1.4 percent of personal trips in Philadelphia are made by bike, compared with 30 percent in Amsterdam.

Jesse Gould, a salesman at Assenmacher’s Cycling Center in Flint, Michigan, said more people are buying bikes for commuting.

“Gas prices give them a kick, but the big thing that makes them start riding to work is that they see their friends doing it,” Gould said.

Edgar Gil bikes seven miles to work in Washington from his home in Arlington, Virginia, every day. He will be making the trip — about 60 percent of which is on traffic-free bike paths — on Bike to Work Day to show seven coworkers how he does it.

Gil, 35, said biking saves about $100 a month in bus fares, and, despite the traffic and pollution, he simply likes to ride.

“You enjoy it more, you get to work relaxed,” he said. “You have a better day.”

Catherine Williams, a retiree, filled her Cadillac with $3.77 gasoline at a BP station in North Philadelphia for a 50-mile (80-km) roundtrip to the doctor’s office. She said she uses public transportation when she can, but wouldn’t feel safe on a bike.

“This is the U.S. and people will kill you out there riding your bike,” she said. “I would not take my life in my hands and ride a bike.”

Editing by Doina Chiacu

© 2008 Reuters

Thursday night, the Senate cast a near-unanimous vote to reverse the Federal Communication Commission’s December 2007 decision to let media companies own both a major TV or radio station and a major daily newspaper in the same city.Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), who introduced the rarely used “resolution of disapproval,” said last night that “the FCC is supposed to be a referee for the media industry, but instead they’ve been cheerleaders in favor of more consolidation. … We already have too much concentration in the media.”

Senator Barack Obama added his support to the resolution saying, “I urge my colleagues in the House of Representatives to expeditiously pass the legislation.”

The Senate vote is good news for everyone who is fed up with a media system, that, in the words of Jon Stewart, is “hurting America” with propaganda pundits, embedded journalists, horse-race election coverage, and celebrity gossip posing as news. It reflects growing awareness — in Congress and with average Americans — of the perils of concentrated media ownership. Namely, insatiable profit pressures that gut newsrooms, replace labor-intensive investigative news with salacious, cheap-to-cover stories, and encourage the dumbing-down of the most pressing issues into 30-second sound bites and partisan shout-fests.

Media concentration is also central to the rise of extremists like Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, who overwhelm the dial on conglomerates owned and run by businessmen with far-right politics.

Back in 2003, Senator Dorgan and then-Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) passed a similar resolution of disapproval to overturn the last effort by the Bush FCC to loosen ownership limits after 3 million Americans - both liberal and conservative - decried the FCC’s handout to the largest media companies. That resolution languished in the GOP-controlled House of Representatives, and the proposed rules were later rejected by a federal court.

The “newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership ban” that the FCC is trying to get rid of has been in place since 1975. It keeps media outlets from merging already stripped-down local newsrooms in the name of “synergy” and protects diversity of viewpoints in the local press, something the Supreme Court has recognized is critical to the health of our democracy. Thursday’s vote sends a clear message to media executives and the FCC that further media consolidation will not be tolerated.

The resolution of disapproval now moves to the House, where it already has bipartisan support. President Bush has threatened to veto the measure. A statement from the White House yesterday called the FCC’s new rules the product of “extensive public comment and consultation” but failed to mention that only 1 percent of the public that testified at public hearings or sent letters to the FCC supported the administration’s position.

Typical of most Bush appointees, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin disregarded the will of the American people and granted another handout to the largest companies. A veto-proof majority in Congress supporting the resolution would stop Bush from doing the same.

The fight is far from over. But last night’s vote is a historic victory for the public interest over one of Washington’s most powerful lobbies.

Josh Silver is the Executive Director of Free Press a national, nonpartisan organization that he co-founded with Robert McChesney and John Nichols in 2002 to engage citizens in media policy debates and create a more democratic and diverse media system.

Copyright © 2008 HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration is on the verge of implementing new air quality rules that will make it easier to build power plants near national parks and wilderness areas, according to rank-and-file agency scientists and park managers who oppose the plan.

The regulations, which are likely to be completed this summer, rewrite a provision of the Clean Air Act that applies to “Class 1 areas,” federal lands that have the highest level of protection under the law. Opponents predict the changes will worsen visibility at many prized tourist destinations, including Utah’s Zion, Virginia’s Shenandoah and Colorado’s Mesa Verde national parks.

Nearly a year ago, with little fanfare, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed changing the way the government measures air pollution near Class 1 areas on the grounds that the nation needed a more uniform way of regulating emissions near protected areas.

Jeffrey Holmstead, who now heads the environmental strategies group at the law firm of Bracewell & Giuliani, helped initiate the rule change while heading the EPA’s air and radiation office. He said agency officials became concerned that the EPA’s scientific staff was taking “the most conservative approach” in predicting how much pollution new power plants would produce.

“The question from a policy perspective was: Do you need to have models based on the absolute worst-case conditions that were unlikely to ever occur in the real world?” Holmstead said in an interview Thursday.

The initiative is the latest in a series of administration efforts dating to 2003 to weaken air quality protections at national parks, including failed moves to prohibit federal land managers from commenting on permits for new pollution sources more than 31 miles away from their areas.

For 30 years, regulators have measured pollution levels in the parks, over both three-hour and 24-hour increments, to capture increases in emissions during peak energy demand. The new rule would average the levels over a year so that the increases would not violate the law.

A slew of National Park Service and EPA officials have challenged the rule change, arguing that it will worsen visibility in already-impaired areas, according to internal documents obtained by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

The EPA’s computer modeling staff wrote that the proposal “would allow for significant degradation” of the parks’ air quality. An e-mail from National Park Service staff called aspects of the plan “bad public policy” that would “make it much easier to build power plants” near Class 1 areas.

When committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) asked the EPA whether the rule would facilitate construction of more power plants near protected areas, Robert Meyers, principal deputy assistant administrator for the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, replied in an April 24 letter that this was not the intention but he could not rule it out.

“We developed this proposal based on the need to clarify how increment consumption must be addressed, and not whether or not it would be easier to build power plants,” Meyers wrote. “In the absence of any data or evidence provided by the National Parks Service, we are unable to conclusively confirm or deny their suggestion.”

On Thursday, the National Parks Conservation Assn., an advocacy group, issued a report estimating that the rule would ease the way for the construction of 28 power plants within 186 miles of 10 national parks. In each of the next 50 years, the report concludes, the new plants would emit a total of 122 million tons of carbon dioxide, 79,000 tons of sulfur dioxide, 52,000 tons of nitrogen oxides and 4,000 pounds of toxic mercury into the air over and around the Great Smoky Mountains, Zion and eight other national parks.

“It’s like if you’re pulled over by a cop for going 75 miles per hour in a 55-miles-per-hour zone, and you say, ‘If you look at how I’ve driven all year, I’ve averaged 55 miles per hour,’ ” said Mark Wenzler, director of the National Parks Conservation Assn.’s clean air programs. “It allows you to vastly underestimate the impact of these emissions.”

© 2008 The Washington Post

Like many African Americans, I’ve been waiting all my life to see this country have a serious conversation about race. I even helped start a year long national race dialogue on an island out in the Atlantic Ocean last year, so that actually had me believing it might be possible here.

But now that the Obama candidacy has the US talking race, I’m confounded and profoundly depressed. At best, the conversation is shallow and mired in looping sound bites and stereotypes, sadly revealing how little most white Americans know about their own history, the black experience, their neighbors, or themselves.

I’ve been “doing race” since long before I left my all-black segregated life in the US apartheid South of 1960s Charlotte, NC; long before I ended up in the Land of the White People — i.e., the one beyond where I was born and bred. So where race-talk is concerned, I feel like a post-doc surrounded by a nation of pre-speech toddlers. And chief among these race babblers are the paid political analysts who claim they know more about this mess than the rest of us.

Following Obama’s poor showing in Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, the TV explodes with heads talking about his “problem with Blue collar whites,” ignoring the fact that he did fabulously well with the same demographic in Wisconsin, Iowa, and many other states. They heard the governor of Pennsylvania describe his state as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in the middle, but they failed to understand or acknowledge what he meant.

Obama only has problems in the same places where any Black man in a BMW would expect to have problems — the same places that fought longest and hardest to keep the country segregated — mainly, the Deep South and Appalachia. Oh, yeah, and add to that every other place wealthy powerbrokers and their functionaries manipulate resources to keep the war going between blacks and whites with little to nothing.

Obama got the same percentage of the white votes in WVA as he got in Mississippi. The fact that John Stewart on the Comedy Central Network is the only person on TV I’ve seen make such a connection should be shocking. Instead, it’s par for this course.

The flaw is not with Obama the candidate, but with the people — specifically, white people.

No intelligent Democrat thinks Obama believes the Government started AIDS, but more than half the voters in WVA think he shares Rev Wright’s beliefs. Does this willingness to believe the Republican-Hillary line mean they are racist? Certainly some of them are. Their state may have fought for the North in the civil war, but historically, white West Virginians hated the rich slave-owners and their slaves equally. That’s why virtually no blacks live there. But even those who are not racists are more likely to believe the crap that gets thrown at them and I suspect they are also more likely to listen to right wing talk radio, which is a 24/7 Obama hate fest.

Just as Rush gets them to vote against their own interests and support Bush, he and his clones never let up on the Rev Wright story, never pass a half hour without questioning Obama’s patriotism.

So why have I yet to hear a single one of these paid political geniuses make any of these points?

It’s clear to me that white commentators, like most Americans, black and white, really just want racism to go away, so they ignore it even when it’s all up in their faces. If you are white, you have that option. If you are Black, you have to deal with the reality, which is that white people, like all people, are complex. They can like you, work with you, play with you and then, like Barack’s grandma, say or do some stupid crap that makes you wonder how you can speak civilly to instead of straight out pimp-slapping them.

Still, it is infuriating to see all the cable networks fall in line and play race poker using Hillary and McCain’s stacked card deck. Every story about Obama’s “problem” with white voters reinforces the false assertion that he has a problem with all blue collar whites, rather than just the Southern and Southern-thinking ones. Whether they do this from ignorance or with malice makes no difference. When they say it the same way Rush Limbaugh says it, they have even more impact than he does, because, hey, it’s The Mainstream Media and it’s supposed to be Liberal.

This lack of sophistication or studied ignorance makes the media into pawns, just like the poor white men Bob Dylan sang about in 1963 in his aptly titled “Only a Pawn in Their Game”: And the Negro’s name is used, it is plain, for the politician’s gain as he rises to fame. And the poor white remains on the caboose of the train.

Hello, West Virginia, look around you. Dylan wrote about you 45 years ago. So, how’s that caboose thing working for you?

You are one of the whitest states and one of the poorest. Yet, twice you voted for an idiot who pins a flag on his lapel while he sends your blindly patriotic boys off to die for no good reason, and ships your jobs off to dictatorships like China and Burma. Maybe you can be forgiven because you are less educated and more isolated from America’s racial reality. But CNN, MSNBC and the rest should know better. If they act no better than Fox, you think maybe, just maybe, they share the same agenda?

Hello, TV pundits, look around you. When are you going to start talking about the white folks’ problem with Obama — which is also your problem with accurately analyzing his candidacy: r-a-c-i-s-m?

That’s a hard fact to own, right? Absolutely. I’ve seen some of the most fervently radical, avowedly antiracists crumple like tinfoil when they have to stare down their own deeply embedded white supremacist reality. Really rough stuff.

But if not now, when? If not now, why?

Bernestine Singley is an activist lawyer, author, and conversationalist whose award-winning, critically-acclaimed 2002 book, When Race Becomes Real: Black and White Writers Confront Their Personal Histories, will be republished this fall by Southern Illinois University Press.

President George Bush lavished anniversary praise on Israel yesterday, as Palestinians commemorated the “Nakba” or “catastrophe” when 700,000 were forced from or fled their homes 60 years ago.

In a special address to the Israeli Knesset, Mr Bush declared that the US was proud to be the “closest ally and best friend in the world” of a nation that was a “homeland for the chosen people” and had “worked tirelessly for peace and… fought valiantly for freedom.”

And in a speech that linked together Hamas, Hizbollah and al-Qa’ida, the President likened those - including “good and decent” people - who urged negotiations with “terrorists and radicals”, with supporters of appeasing the Nazis before the Second World War.

On Iran, Mr Bush said that permitting “the world’s leading sponsor of terror” to possess “the world’s deadliest weapon” would be “an unforgiveable betrayal of future generations”.

Mr Bush’s speech was notable for only one reference to Palestinian aspirations for a state. He did not allude to the current negotiations between the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, and the Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, on the outlines of two-state solution that he himself helped to kick-start at the Annapolis conference last year.

Instead, his only mention was in a passage envisaging Israel’s 120th anniversary - 60 years hence - in which Palestinians would have “the homeland they have long dreamed of and deserved - a democratic state that is governed by law.” By that time, he prophesied, the Middle East would consist of “free and independent societies”, and Hamas, Hizbollah and al-Qa’ida would have been defeated “as Muslims across the region recognise the emptiness of the terrorists’ vision and the injustice of their cause”.

Nor did Mr Bush make even an oblique reference to the fact that he was delivering his speech on the day that Palestinians annually commemorate the “Nakba” in the 1948 war that left a victorious Israel in control of 78 per cent of mandatory Palestine.

As sirens sounded and thousands of black balloons were released across the West Bank, several thousand Palestinians gathered in Ramallah’s main Manara Square to hear a taped address by Mr Abbas urging reconciliation and an end to Israeli settlement building in the West Bank to facilitate negotiations on a future state. “Sixty years have passed,” he said. “It’s time to end the Nakba for the Palestinian people.”

But a Nakba day message from Hamas, which controls Gaza, called on Palestinians to continue “resistance” and urged the Palestinian President to “abandon the illusion of negotiations.”

At least one Palestinian youth was injured in Gaza after several dozen teenagers broke away at the end of a Hamas-organised protest near the northern Erez crossing. As youths threw stones, Israeli forces fired live rounds and tear gas.

Three Arab Knesset members were led away before the President’s speech by security guards after unfurling a banner saying “We shall overcome.”

Mr Bush repeated the symbolic oath traditionally uttered by Israeli soldiers at Masada, the fortress where 960 Jews in the first century rebellion against Roman rule committed suicide rather than surrender, and which he had visited yesterday: “Masada shall never fall again”. He added to a standing ovation: “And America will be at your side.”

But his speech did not mention the occupation of Palestinian territory since the 1967 war or restate US and international stances critical of Israel - such as demands for settlement outposts to be removed or for expansion of settlements to be halted. Nor did he mention that those calling for some engagement with Hamas include some former Israeli military and intelligence figures.

Mr Olmert told parliamentarians that he was confident that a peace agreement would “be approved in the Knesset by a large majority and… supported by the vast majority of the Israeli public”.

* Reuters news agency renewed its demand yesterday for a prompt explanation of why the Israeli military in Gaza fired on one of its cameramen, Fadel Shana, who was killed a month ago today.

© 2008 The Independent

The second casualty of Election 2008 will be the regressive right movement that has done so much damage to the United States and the world these last decades. The Republicans lost another bi-election this week in a district that should have been a cakewalk for them. That makes three of late, including the former seats of Speaker Dennis Hastert and Trent Lott. (The latter race was in Mississippi, y’all, and even featured use of the entire Republican playbook of liberal- and race-baiting — prominently featuring Obama and Reverend Wright, of course — to no avail. Did I mention it was in Mississippi?)

Hurricane Bush has done a 180, and is circling back on Washington with an angry vengeance, building up a furious force as it nears land, hunting for anything and everything that moves and has an ‘R’ following its name. The GOP and their regressive agenda will be the second casualty of Election 2008, and it’s going to be a blowout the likes of which we’ve not seen since 1932.

But, even before that happens, the first casualty will be the enablers par excellence of that regressive movement all these years, the Clinton Family. Indeed, they’re already finished, and all that remains is for them to further humiliate and ostracize themselves by refusing to let go, a project they seem only too willing to pursue to their own destruction.

I like 2008.

People like me get a lot of grief from other folks for being supposed Clinton-bashers. But, then, some of us also got a lot of grief (sometimes from a few of the same people) for being Bush-bashers in 2001 and 2002. I would submit that the reason is the same in both cases. We refused to buy into the mythology of the post-9/11 presidency, or of the wonderfully empathetic one which preceded it, and we were right not to. We just got there a little earlier than other folks. By 2007, just about everybody had figured out what a disaster George W. Bush was. Now they’re finally starting to grok the Clintons as well.

Some people also accuse those of us who despise Hillary of being biased, or worse, against a female candidate, and Mrs. Clinton (the former Ms. Rodham, mind you — some feminist she) has more than once hinted at playing that convenient card. Talk about hiding behind a skirt. I resent that presumption, especially as a feminist (though I never particularly liked that appellation, for the same reason that I wouldn’t want to be labeled a ‘blackist’ because of my support of racial equality), and as a progressive who is anxious to broaden the ranks of those participating in American politics well beyond the class of straight, white, rich males who’ve been mucking it up for over two centuries now. For the record, I loathe Hill, but I also loathe Bill at least as much. Thatcher disgusted me, but no more or less than Reagan. I admire Eleanor Roosevelt deeply, rather much like I feel toward what’s-his-name?, that guy she was married to. In short, when it comes to politics, I don’t really care what you’re packin’ in your undies, but rather what you stand for and how willing you are to fight for it.

Watching Hillary in action lately, I am reminded of nothing so much as her husband’s disorientation during his White House years, when everything came a cropper. You could see that Billbo assumed all along that he, like his hero JFK, would be getting laid two and three times a day during his presidency, without anyone knowing. That just seemed like one of the built-in perks of the job! You know, Air Force One, Secret Service, tons of babes. Like that. He seemed completely unprepared for the concept that neither the Republicans (themselves even more promiscuous) nor the media would wink and nod and keep his dalliances secret, as they’d done for every other American president.

Similarly, Hillary now seems startled to have played by all the traditional rules of presidential politics, only to be denied that to which she most surely is entitled. She’s like Prince Charles. Or maybe Go