[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Change, What Change?

[Bill Totten]

CounterPunch Diary

by Alexander Cockburn

www.counterpunch.com (June 13-15 2008)


On Tuesday June 3 Barack Obama claimed the greatest prize the Democratic
Party can offer, namely his nomination as its candidate for the
presidency. The very next day the salesman of "change" raced from
Minnesota back to Washington and publicly abased himself at the feet of
an organization whose prime mission is to ensure that change unpalatable
to the state of Israel will never be pressed by the United States
government. The terms of Obama's surrender exploded like rhetorical
cluster bombs across the Middle East. To Israel and its Arab neighbors
it surely signaled that whoever moves into the White House next January,
there will be no swerve from Bush's role as guarantor of Israeli
intransigeance.

The conferences of the American Israel Public Committee have become
showcases for the political clout of this lobbying group. The clout is
real . A politician angering the Lobby can see campaign funds dry up and
surprise challenges by well financed opponents. Back in September, 1991
President George Bush Sr, took on the Lobby pointing out that the US
spends nearly $1,000 a year  for every Israeli and suggested this was
extortion at the hands of AIPAC. "I'm up against some powerful forces",
he said at his press conference. "They've got something like 1,000
lobbyists on the Hill working the other side of the question. We've got
one lonely little guy here doing it." He want [sic] that particular
battle, but some count the resultant enmity of AIPAC as a serious factor
in his defeat by Clinton the following year. If so, George Jr took the
lesson to heart.

As US representatives and senators and their staffs crowded the back of
the convention center, the audience of 7,000 from across the US cheered
as politician after politician marched to the rostrum for the
politically rewarding declarations of loyalty to Israel.

Before he began his drive to the nomination Obama took good care to get
the support of influential American Jews in Chicago like the Crown
family, associated with the aerospace firm, General Dynamics.

As I wrote here back in February, a notorious scandal of the Kennedy
years was JFK's defense secretary, Robert McNamara, overruling all
expert review and procurement recommendations and insisting that General
Dynamics rather than Boeing make the disastrous F-111, at that time one
of the largest procurement contracts in the Pentagon's history. The
suspicion was that Henry Crown of Chicago was calling in some chits for
his role in fixing the 1960 JFK vote in Cook County, Illinois, to the
impotent fury of the teenage Hillary Clinton, who was a poll watcher for
Nixon. Crown, of Chicago Sand and Gravel, had $300 million of the mob's
money in General Dynamics' debentures, and after the disaster of the
Convair, General Dynamics needed the F-111 to avoid going belly-up,
taking the mob's $300 million with it.

Henry Crown has passed on to the great pork barrel in the sky, but his
descendants in the Crown clan are devoted contributors to Obama, giving
him tens of thousands of dollars, as a glance at the website of the
Center for Responsive Politics swiftly attests. The Crown family is
still deeply involved in the affairs of General Dynamics. Lester and
James Crown have both had seats on the company's board in recent years.
General Dynamics has ties to Israeli military contractors. A 2003
General Dynamics corporate handout cited by Chicago Indymedia proclaimed
"a strategic alliance with Aeronautics Defense Systems, Ltd", an Israeli
firm based in Yavne. Aeronautics Defense Systems Ltd is the firm that
developed the Unmanned Multi-Application System (UMASa) aerial
surveillance tool which the Israeli military uses to "provide a
real-time 'bird's eye view' of the surveillance area to combatant
commanders and airborne command posts". The Indymedia story quoted
then-Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, as saying the agreement
between General Dynamics and Aeronautics Defense Systems to bring
together "both companies' state-of-the art technologies in defense and
homeland security" was "additional proof of the technological and
commercial benefits that alliances between industries from the US and
Israel can produce". An eye in the sky over Gaza ends up as a dollar in
Obama's war chest.

On January 11 of this year, hot on the heels of an editorial praising
Obama as a Friend of Israel in the rabidly Zionist New York Sun, Lester
Crown circulated a testimonial through the Jewish community, expressing
his eagerness "to share with you my confidence that Senator Barack
Obama's stellar record on Israel gives me great comfort that, as
President, he will be the friend to Israel that we all want to see in
the White House - stalwart in his defense of Israel's security, and
committed to helping Israel achieve peace with its neighbors. Few public
figures inspire as much hope and optimism as Barack Obama. Please pass
on this message to all who are interested."

Worried about rumors fanned by the Clinton campaign that he was still a
secret Muslim, Obama insisted that before the April 22 primary in
Pennsylvania, a state with a politically significant Jewish vote, his
campaign start a Hebrew-language blog in Israel.

So Obama came to this year's AIPAC conference determined  to dispel all
remaining doubts that he's a Friend of Israel. "We will also use all
elements of American power to pressure Iran", he assured AIPAC". I will
do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear
weapon. Everything in my power. Everything and I mean everything."  He
swore he wouldn't talk to the elected representatives Palestinians,
Hamas. To thunderous applause he declared, "Jerusalem will remain the
capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided".

As Uri Avnery, the veteran Israeli writer and peace activist
expostulated here furiously in the wake of this last sentence: "Along
comes Obama and retrieves from the junkyard the outworn slogan
'Undivided Jerusalem, the Capital of Israel for all Eternity'. Since
Camp David, all Israeli governments have understood that this mantra
constitutes an insurmountable obstacle to any peace process. It has
disappeared - quietly, almost secretly - from the arsenal of official
slogans.  No Palestinian, no Arab, no Muslim will make peace with Israel
if the Haram-al-Sharif compound (also called the Temple Mount), one of
the three holiest places of Islam and the most outstanding symbol of
Palestinian nationalism, is not transferred to Palestinian sovereignty.
That is one of the core issues of the conflict. On that very issue, the
Camp David conference of 2000 broke up".

Obama's foreign policy advisors were tearing their hair out and the next
day his campaign issued a clarification. "Jerusalem is a final status
issue, which means it has to be negotiated between the two parties" as
part of "an agreement that they both can live with". All the same, they
insisted, Jerusalem in Obama's eyes must be the capital of Israel.

Obama's most egregious talent is the ability to adapt his rhetoric with
ominous speed, to allay any suspicion among the powerful, that he really
will rock the boat in a way they might not care for. Earlier in the
campaign he was criticized for not wearing the American flag as a lapel
pin. At the AIPAC event he wore a double lapel pin, with both the US and
Israeli flags. Is there a "real Obama" waiting to emerge, once the messy
business of pleasing the voters is over? Not really.The making of the
"real" Obama is an ongoing project, ad the AIPAC  an important marker in
the evolution of "change".

Although Obama's groveling got wide coverage across the Middle East, the
press here, from the New York Times to Amy Goodman's "Democracy Now"
(see Muhammad Idrees Ahmad's piece on this site last week) kept silent.
It was evidently taken as a given, unworthy of editorial remark, that a
man  who might very well be the next president, was de-activating the
policy of "change" precisely where it is most needed at the behest of
the men Jon Stewart edgily derided on his show as "the elders of Zion".
 Stewart fired off some pretty sharp comments about AIPAC, on the
grovelfest, somewhat to my surprise, since I'm not a big Stewart fan,
having found that it has become a cultic affair, devoted to the greater
glory of Stewart, somewhat in the same manner as  "Democracy Now" for
Goodman's devotees, who approach her broadcasts as yet one more  variety
of religious experience.

The sequestration of the American people from important world news is
one of the prime tasks of the press here. A couple of weeks ago Patrick
Cockburn had two very important scoops -
www.counterpunch.org/patrick06052008.html and
www.counterpunch.org/patrick06062008.html - outlining the precise terms
of the secret "agreement" the US is trying to ram down the throat of the
Iraqis on permanent military bases. It was a huge political story in the
Middle East, particularly in Iraq. It was covered in Europe. I found a
detailed account of Patrick's scoops, with intelligent comment, in
Trinidad's leading paper. But I found almost nothing here. Not in the
New York Times, not in the Washington Post, not on the networks.  On
June 12 Goodman and Gonzalez did have Patrick on "Democracy Now" and did
a useful interview with him.  And on Friday June 13, CSPAN had Patrick
on its Washington Journal program and CSPAN's viewers learned what their
government is up to.


Asian Fury at Laura Bush

First Ladies are expected to pick an issue and make it their own.
Ladybird Johnson toiled to make America more beautiful. Nancy Reagan
said No to drugs. Laura Bush has taken Myanmar, aka Burma, to her heart.
But now she's put her foot in it.

In the wake of the terrible cyclone the First Lady said the United
States would consider sending relief assistance to Burma only if the
Burmese military junta accepts a US disaster assistance response team to
assess the scope of the devastation caused by Cyclone Nargis.  Many in
the region think the prime role of such a team would be to prep
international opinion for "humanitarian intervention". "'The US first
lady's political demands were inappropriate', said Aung Naing Oo, an
exiled Burmese political analyst. 'This is a time when people are dying
and suffering to a horrible degree, so if the US really wants to help,
it can help without making political demands'."

The cynical way the US has responded to the killer cyclone and the
resentment this has caused in Asia is the subject of Peter Lee's
fascinating report in the new crackerjack edition of our newsletter.

Here also are terrific pieces by Kevin Alexander Gray and Jeffrey St Clair.

A taster from Kevin, on "Why Blacks Keep Quiet About Obama":

"Black people always have to navigate race fear; the long Democratic
primary season has just underlined that. Joking, comedian Jon Stewart
asked Obama, if elected, "Will you pull a bait and switch and enslave
the white race?" Kinda funny. Except that's precisely the sentiment that
underlies white race fear. I've heard the same thing said in seriousness
by more than one white person. "If Obama gets the White House what will
they want next?" Or, "if Obama wins, blacks will think they're running
things" ... Give a listen to the corporate media, and it's pretty clear
what tune black voices are supposed to be singing. Obama is constantly
called on to swear allegiance to America - to prove he isn't swearing
allegiance to blacks. The other way to say that is he's supposed to
swear allegiance to white, not black, America. Meanwhile, the back end
of that deal is that black Americans are required to substitute Obama
for real structural racial progress. As in, "You got your nominee. See,
we're not so racist or bad after all. Now shut up!"

Jeffrey St Clair writes on Los Angeles'  weapon of mass destruction:
air. By the time average LA-born kids reach eighteen, they will have
breathed enough toxic air to place them 344 times over what the EPA
considers an acceptable lifetime exposure to these contaminants.

All this in the new CounterPunch newsletter, for subscribers only.

Footnote: A shorter version of the first item in this Diary ran on The
First Post last Friday. Alexander Cockburn can be reached at
alexandercockburn at asis.com

http://www.counterpunch.com/cockburn06132008.html


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