Israel's wages a holocaust..a shoah against Hamas

A few years ago the UN abrogated a vote which it had passed in the General Assembly equating Zionism with racism. This rankled Israel's overlord the US as much as it unsettled Israeli's and Jews in the Diaspora, claiming as they do special privilege as a people almost exterminated by the Nazis.
Today can Tel Aviv under Olmert proffer such a claim? Can Israel under Olmert wear the badge of sorrow and the sanctity and the exceptionalism that the Holocaust confers on Israelis? How can Olmert seriously remind the world of Jewish suffering in the 20 century when he himself boldly announces a holocaust or ha shoah against Hamas and the Palestinians in Gaza? Sorry to say, he cannot, for he is the heir and willing descendent of the logic of Zionism which is racialist to the core. Olmert and his Kadima party are the fruit of right wing Zionism which claims a land which was 'empty before the yishuv or the implantation of Jewish settlers at the turn of the 20 century. No one is fooled by the very misused biblical analogy that Israel is a young David, unarmed but walking in the glory of god, facing a heavily armed Goliath Arab. That doesn't fare well. Israel is the Goliath in today's Middle East, armed to the teeth and possessor of hundreds of nuclear weapons; it's an aggressive and expansive state, funded and backed by Washington. It is turning Palestine or the Samaria and Judea as Israeli love to call it into bantustans, hardly viable but enfueodated to the Israeli army and subject to its dranconian will. It's murderous policy towards Hamas, which, by the by it funded heavily as a foil to the then much hated Yasir Arafat, dared to not recognise the Zionist state and dared to riposte against Israeli agression against Gaza. We shouldn't forget the blowing up of the Zionist wall, a Warsaw ghetto like tactic which had but one aim to enslave and to starve the people of Gaza. It didn't work. Olmert and even the wolf in sheep's clothing the soft spoken Shimoun Peres believe in the Zionist ideology of if not driving Palestinians off the land to enslave them in a 21 century way that has an echo of the bondage the Hebrews bore in Pharoah's Egypt. Hamas, and to its credit has much in common with Judah Maccabee for its fierce and daring resistance to a racist state with imperial pretension and the unwaving support of US taxpayers monies. Yes, read Jabotinsky, yes read even Herzl...Israel is a rabid racist state that has run amok!

William F. Buckley

The granpappy of America's modern conservatism is dead. He who thought of himself as a re incarnation of Gilbert Keith Chesterton is no more. His fingers will no long grace the harpsichord, nor would his honeyed false words resound in the media. Today he's thought of as cutting an avuncular figure, but despite his growing old till his early 80's, scratch the surface, well, the hate of his younger years remains...the insinuated racialism, the anti Semitism, the appeal for the authoritarian. And his fear of his own sexuality threatening to punch that queer Gore Vidal in the face in 1968.
The press cry at his passing but Buckley was a willing tool of the FBI and espoused the arch conservatism of his oil baron father who followed in the footsteps of a Father Coughlin, and admired Spain's Franco and stood as a bulwark in funding and ideas against the godless.
Buckley got one thing right. He was against Herr Bush's war in Iraq. He remained loyal to the Roman church of his birthright, and this could be clearly seen as he welcomed week after week on the public telly audiences who turned into to see Evelyn Waugh's ho hum novel 'Brideshead Revisited'. He now joins his likes in a circle in Dante's Hell.

Washington hits a sour note

No one can deny the significance and the high musical quality of the New York Philharmonics concert in Pyongyang. No one but Herr Bush & co. The Philharmonic maestro Loren Maazel hit all the high notes in his conducting and in his few, but savvy phrases in Korean. He says he was not engaging in politics but he needn't have said this. Everything carried the weight of a political and cultural breakthrough, even at one point during a 'master's class' with superbly trained North Korean musicians, he had the group of Americans and Koreans played unrehearsed a composition by a 12 year old New York school girl Farah Taslima, who had offered her music as a gift from a child's heart to overcome the barrier of hostility and discord between the US and North Korea.
The sour note Washington played, was its unwillingness to welcome the North Korean Philharmonic to play in the US. The New York based Korea Society has done much to midwife better relations with Pyongyang. Its influence reach to the highest instance of government, the intelligence community, business and high finance, and yet, it is strange, this society which has found funding for North Koreans to come study computer science at Cornell, has not the clout to raise money or matching funds for the North Korea's excellent classical orchestra to tour America. This orchestra mere presence on US soil would be well received, the hostile hecklers notwithstanding. It would draw the Americans of Korean origin and other Americans the melomane and the curious to see live and in human form Korean from the North which the US has long demonised.
Obviously Herr Bush hasn't the courage of his conviction, for the sending of the New York Philharmonic had at least his tacit approval. He always does things halfway, and as a result, he looks inept and a bumbler, to be charitable. Yet, he had the opportunity to mark the right beat but instead he settled for a false note.

Yet another waste of ratepayers money on why Johnny cannot learn

A panel of the learned carried out a study on why young Americans know little or nothing about history or literature. A lot of taxpayer monies have gone down the drain to fund a blue ribbon panel to state the obvious. Yes, brothers and sisters the word has come down from on high about the sorry state of education in an America which proclaims to the world that there won't be one child left behind. And yes, survey after survey, dollars misspent, draw the same conclusions. In fact some say, cirricula favour more time for reading and for mathematics, and yet on the whole in math Americans fare worse than Asians and Europeans. As for reading, don't get 18Brumaire started. Newspapers, the boob tube aka the television...the media in general dumb down. Reading books is not a top priority if we judge by the stinginess of the public purse for libraries. Publishers looking for unrealistic returns on a us$ spent shot for a profit margin of say 30 per cent when 3 per cent would make an old fashioned bookseller's day. Of course Americans do read, but read what is the question which is not truly answered. Casting an eye on a broad range of vision reveals an historical short term memory for history...it's unimportant...and as such, misreading or ignorance of Clio's art sinks the US into foreign wars without issue. Look at Herr Bush's lying war in Iraq. And speaking of Herr Bush, he may be a closet reader, but he puts on an image that brains and thinking are of a single thread. He projects a 'What me worry' persona, so why should anyone give a tinker's damn when the country's powerful show a disdain for learning and reading but for children's books...remember Bush reading about a goat to a kindergarten class whilst the World Trade Centre towers were collapsing. And he a proud Eli who got into Yale on the shirt tails of the Bushes who went before him to that Ivy League school, and which gives preferential treatment to the offsprings of alumni. As for literature post modernism partly shares the blame for dampening the art of reading; pomo showed a disdain for the classics by labelling them the works of dead white European males, and by definition worthy of our disgust and our willful righteousness by casting them on the dung heap. So education is cheapend...but there's more which has to do with the change in capitalist economics which hold a dictatorial grip on streaming education. Gone is vocational training; gone is serious learning period. The market rules all save when a national disaster or shame happens. Remember Sputnik! Then the US forced march the training of engineers, scientists, Russian language and area studies...and so the old music keeps playing on, and the country may be turning out 'smart' businessmen and women but on a more general level, the patch of ignorant cabbages extend to the horizon and is symptomatic of the decline of America's leading role in world affairs.

Condelezza Rice misses a step

Condelezza Rice has bad timing. She was in Seoul for the inauguration of the new president Lee Hyung-bek. She's now in Beijing trying to soft soap China into applying more pressure on Kim Jong-il to give a full accounting of North Korea's nuclear programme which is now two months overdue. Like a timid child hovering in the background, with eyes wide open in amazement, she took refuge in Herr Bush's on again off again engagement with Pyongyang at the very moment the New York Philharmonic with Loren Maazel baton in hand were about to perform an 'American' programme including the clash of cymbals and loud roar of bombs bursting in air of musical instruements of the Star Spangled Banner in North Korea. She kept her distance and thus once again missed a breakthrough in diplomacy with a country the US is technically at war with.
So here we are, yet another example of the split personality of the Bush administration. A carrot and a stick which has on one hand brought more flexibility in approaching North Korea, and on the other, a harshness which drives it back into its tough carapace of a turtle's defence.
By distancing herself from the negotations the US government allowed for this music interlude of cultural diplomacy, Herr Bush & co. have shown for the nth time its true colours...like a hollow drum, it booms loudly, but for results, it sets itself up for failure. Even the 'New York Times' which never misses an opportunity to lambaste Kim Jong-il's Korea, if the reader has the courage to wade through its concrete prose and read to the very end of its reporting on Pyongyang, will have an epiphany as to why North Korea is dragging its feets on fully complying with an agreement it put its chop on. An agreement in this case is with two parties. North Korea met its obligations for the most part, but Herr Bush tried his old scam by trying to weasel out of his. He & his gang never caught the drift of dealing with a proud, fiercely nationalist North Korea. It believes in a quid pro quo, to wit, you do this, we do that. Washington promised aid which Washington stinted on; Herr Bush gave the impression that he would take North Korea off the terrorist list he keeps in his desk top draw; he didn't. So it is easier to understand Pyongyang's stalling, yet openness to the visit of the New York Philharmonic. Had secretary Rice got on an aeroplane to Pyongyang to be on hand for America's finest orchestra, she would've signalled that Herr Bush was open for a breakthrough. He isn't, nor is she. Given how insouciante is she when she was his national security advisor, she dismissed out of hand the danger of a terrorist attack in 2001 in the US, as well as her joining the bandwagon for a dumb war in Iraq which is bringing America to its knees financially.
Kim Jong-il is biding his time for a change of the guard at the White House for a better ear to speak to. He's not sitting on his hands either. Today's 'Financial Times' [26 February 2008] had a front page account of an invitation Eric Clapton has accepted to come and play in the 'hermit kingdom of the Kims' next year. Not only that the British will hear North Korea's national orchestra perform in London. One wonders why the dead weight of frozen American diplomacy hadn't thought of inviting that orchestra to come play in the US. It doesn't take much imagination to guess why. Herr Bush has what in Spanish is called 'huevos secos', meaning he has no balls.

Idle mutterings about the Oscars

This year's 80 Oscar presentation showed how dull Jon Stewart can be without writers. The strike has left him poorer in material. Yet, 18Brumaire in a coffee shop this morning heard a chorus of moiling and roiling by the man on the high street that foreigners have taken over our industry. And the voices broke in accented English which all goes to show how quickly the US absorbs immigrants who then wrap themselves in the American flag. Two Brits, a Spaniard, and a French actor coped the top acting awards, yet the best film, best director, and best producer Oscars went to the American film makers the Coen Brothers and Mark Rudin a well known producer for the realisation on the screen of Cormac McCarthy's 'No country for old men'. The disconnect should offer little surprise since the provinciality of the ordinary guy and gal in America is almost legendary.
Today's mutters had nothing untoward to say against the Irish Daniel Day Lewis nor the British Tilda Swinson but oh the poor Spanish Javier Bardem and the French Marion Coutillard got it in the neck! Give me a break! The members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences which are overwhelmingly American voted them top honours. But that meant nothing for these coffee drinkers to turn a voice of dissatisfaction against the foreigner and not at the causes of the country's discontent--the war in Iraq and the subprime scandal and the bad behaviour of Herr Bush & co.

The New York Philaharmonic in Pyongyang

Ping-pong diplomacy it ain't! But it will do very well, thank you very much. Tomorrow evening [26 February 2008] in Pyongyang and on the television screens of public television in the US, viewers will be witnessing history in the making. For the first time since the armistice which put war in Korea on a hold in 1953, the presence of a world class American orchestra will play in North Korea. Zubin Mehta, interviewed by the BBC reporter who is part of a bevy of 50 journalists who came with the New York Philaharmonic, has gracefully dismissed the political import of the event. We play music, not politics. That is the alpha and the omega of his words. We will hold workshops with North Korean musicians. Music is an international language which speaks above and beyond politics. And yet, his words belie the obvious. Tight negotiations have worked out a strictly American like programme. It is bruited that the Starspangled Banner, the American national anthem will be played along with the North Korea's. Dvorak's 'New World Symphony' followed by Gershwin's 'American in Paris', ending with a distinctly un American note of Wagner's 'Lohengrin'. Kim Jong il will attend but will he be in the vast auditorium for American's national hymn?
Plain as the nose on one's face, the orchestra's physical presence in the North Korean capitol says something of how far diplomatic negotiations are in Washington's quest to silence Pyongyang's nuclearn programme, and Pyongyang's desire to renew ties and diplomatic recognition by Washington.
Are we to believe secretary of state Condelezza Rice's dismissive comment that playing Dvorak will not lead anywhere. It might, and probably shall. Will she turn up in Pyongyang for the concert?
Protracted, face to face negotiations have made a good deal with North Korea by that country's leader Kim Jong il willingness to shut down Yongban, the site of its nuclear industry and where a nuclear device was exploded! And yet, Washington is reluctant to go a step further in pursuing a denouement of the crisis by a political solution which will put an end to the state of war between the US, South Korea, China, and North Korea, and extending diplomatic relations with Pyongyang. Herr Bush decisive in his public utterings is a timid in resolution of the Korean problem. Whatever transpires hereafter, the ice has been broken, and like Humpty Dumpty the war factions in Herr Bush's circle can never put a broken policy together nor can they turn the clock back.

China and the Sudan and Dafur

China bristles at the mention of Dafur. It disdains any hint that it is supporting directly or indirectly Sudan's punative war against its own Muslims in Dafur. It is going to great length to show that it isn't. But it is now matter which way they cut the deck of what's happening in the Sudan. Beijing is there with the aims of any imperialist nation, greedy for resources and markets and influence. Nominally China is a Communist country, but subjectively and realistically it is capitalist to its soul. It is behaving, as its economy is red hot, in a manner which V.I. Lenin wouldn't find out of the ordinary. Has it forgotten the lessons of his 'Imperialism: the highest state of capitalism'? Apparently, it has. China's hunger for raw materials and markets make Africa the gods' given gift to the Chinese. Hitching its wagon to the global economy based on oppression and plunder, China has found Sudan a good partner for there it is developing and funding its oil wealth, and by doing so, arms Khartoum in ways many and multiple, in its 'genocidal' war against the people of Dafur. In consequent, having a heavy hand and presence in Sudan, unwittingly Communist China is fragilising the instability that war is causing not only in the Sudan but in its neighbours to its southeast. So in true capitalist fashion, Xinhua or New China is nothing but an old capitalist whore and exploiter tarted up in gaudy new dress and red lipstick but conveying the veneral diseases of capitalism.

Waterboarding--as American as mom's apple pie!

'The New Yorker' has a feature 'annals of American history'. In the current issue [25 February 2008], appears Paul Kramer's instructive article on 'the water cure'. It has nothing to do with the current contraversy in the courts about America's use of waterboarding in Guantanemo or Iraq or Afghanistan or numerous black holes of prisons the CIA maintain in friendly countries. It clears away the cobwebs about a slice of America's imperialist past. And the use of the water cure or torture in the US war against Filipino guerrilla fighting for independence and against America's eagle's talon grip on the Philippines as a colony.
Kramer's story is something out of America's shameful past which is hardly ever mentioned in history texts, and never in polite company. He documents the uproar the use of the water cure on Filipinos which has a contemporary flavour to it. The arguments the government and military used back then are the same old twaddle that Herr Bush's minions use today, and the uproar of protest recycle the same old humanitarian concerns. And there it lies this sad story which is hardly resolved today. That waterboarding violates the Geneva conventions has no buyers with Herr Bush, but the brutality of the American military and the effect it has on troops and how it affects the public's psyche remain under the surface. Americans like to be loved, to be cosseted abroad, but they are increasingly disliked if not hated for the punch 'em in the face policies of a little man who shirked his duties to his country during America's war in Vietnam.
So saying this, it would do readers a good turn to buy a copy of this week's 'New York' and turn to page 38 and begin reading this sorry cut of history from America's past, which is no moment or shouldn't be of great pride. For the pattern there was set for America's war in Vietnam and Iraq.

Hillary Clinton

Bill O'Reilly is not a lovable man; he's strong views; he's a big mouth, some say. Nonetheless he may peddle bad breath, he does some things at times that make good sense. On a Jay Leno show he stated the obvious which bears repeating: Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama have very similar views, and the meteoric rise of Obama and the declining fortunes of Hillary show the seesaw effect of a populartiy contest. And a popularity contest the race to the Democratic party's nod for the presidency, it has become. Yet, Hillary Clinton is riding a ebb of a bad mouthing. No one cuts her slack, it seems. On a listner sponsor radio station in New York on Saturday morning [22 February 2006], a programme host suggested, she withdraw from the race in Obama's favour. He put it terms that were condescending in the extreme, suggesting as a woman she has made her mark on history. She stands as a model for little girls and young women who may want to become an astronaut, a prison warden!, a politician, so on and on. Well this snotty little man who would bristle were the same said of a 'person of a duskier hue' as he would put it, is talking to the wind. Doesn't he know that there are women prison wardens, women astronaut [hasn't he heard of Sally Rudd?], women politicians? and the like? Well yes, let's give him the benefit of the doubt, but he harbours the typical male chauvinist view that a strong woman in any field should retire in favour of a man!
This host would deny it; he would read off a long laundry list of liberal causes he defends, but subjectively, he reflects what a legion of men and yes women too say when it comes to Hillary Clinton. They wear no velvet glove these high minded folk, they simply transmit the centuries old prejudice against ambitious women, and in Hillary Clinton's case they think they've the freedom to smear her or whack her where it hurts at every turn in the press, over the air waves, through rumour, and grafetti on walls. And they do it with a clear conscience of the righteous who have a place in a ring in Dante's Hell.

McCain and the lobbyists

It makes one despair that the media dwell on the 'cherchez la femme' aspect of the 'New York Times' scoop that the senator from Arizona and shoe in for the Republican nomination for the presidency schagged Vicki Iseman, leaving the meat of McCain's troubles aside. It is a sad commentary on the press. It throws sand in viewers or readers eyes, blurring issues. Many in the press thought that it was distasteful to go after McCain for playing in someone else's bed, yet the 'Washington Post', 'Newsweek', 'The New Republic', among others, were hot on the senator's trail of a soiled passed. What is undeniable although McCain is on high moral horse of indignation, is that he dances to the tune of lobbies and powerful corporations who use elected official, willingly elected officals, for private gains. Had the press taken a leaf out of Ida Tarbell's book, it would have brought back to the laser eye of public scrutiny McCain's involvement with Charles Keating and the savings & loan scandal of the 1990's which almost cost this 'squeaky clean', 'straight talking' man his seat in congress. You've to look into the inside pages of newspapers to find proof positive that McCain wrote letters, strong letters with a not so shaded hint of threats, that he would fight any tightening of loopholes which wouldn't allow Paxson Communications its way in enlarging its growing grip on the public airwaves. McCain is now treading water to save himself, and the press is a willing accomplish for it talks endlessly on his May September frolic with Vicki Iseman but not really on the powers behind her to bribe a besotted senator now running for the presidenct of the US.

Plagarist Dr. Madonna G. Constantine of Columbia Teachers College keeps her post

Madonna G. Constantine is not quite an unfamiliar name in the New York press. She's a tenured professor of education at the esteemed Columbia Teachers College on the upper west side's Morningside Heights. Dr. Constantine found a noose hanging on the door of her office a few months ago. A hate crime. And soon enough copycats hanged nooses here and there around the US.
Columbia found no one to fit this crime although university authorities had tapes of the incident.
Now professor Costantine has been accused of being a plagarist. There is proof enough in her papers that she lifted textually from her students papers, claiming for her own, their words. Now, Constantine is black and so the school authorities have given her a slap on the wrist lest the famous Ivy League school be accused of giving the appearance of racial bias. So under the guise of tenure the good professor will keep her post, but will students want to have her as a teacher let alone as an advisor on their MA or Ph.D. theses?
Dr. Constantine cannot have it both ways. She's committed a high crime in the ethics of the academy, but she has not walked away unstained.

Obamamania

No doubt about it, Barak Obama has magnetism. He's intelligent and an interesting person and has the preacher's easy with words, his own or those he borrows from others without attribution. The crowds love him to a fault. He blows his nose in public, and they roar. He sips water from his water bottle and they cheer. Yet such adulation of the masses should the junior senator from Illinois and perhaps a future president make a mistake that adoration would spin on a dime's thin hair to recrimination and hate.

September romance--McCain's dalliance

John McCain the Republican's likely candidate for his party's run for the presidency is in high dudgeon. Protests too much he about his very close relationship with a female lobbyist representing the very powerful telecommunications industy a Vicki Iseman. T'was a Spring Fall 'romance', which the Arizona senator hotly denies. He who held the reins of the Senate committee on telecommunications at a time when Herr Bush & co. lost no time in turning over the public airwaves to the mighty media corporations.
In a rush to trump its competitors, read, 'Newsday' and 'The New Republic', the 'New York Times' rushed its sorry on McCain to grab headlines and headlines and the buzzing of the rumour mill began with a bang. McCain was not happy, nor his wife who like all good spouses stands behind him.
There is no getting around it, McCain wrote letters pushing for Paxson Communications which lady bountiful Iseman fronted for with a lavishness which seduced the aging lothario from Arizona. He invited her to fly with him; she bent him to her demands for Paxson, and he delivered grandly like the thief in the night. McCain's staffers say, he had a roll in the hay with Iseman but that remains in the limbo of he says, she says. Iseman ain't talking, McCain is denying.
But what is undeniable is that Mr. Squeaky Clean has left a paper trail of his strong intervention in pleading Paxson's cause, and that payed off. How does this affect our lothario's chances as the front runner for the Grand Old Party? His missteps with Vicki Iseman fuels the flames of those who think he's not conservative enough or is a faux Republican posing as a member of the clan. Republicans who are never shy of pointing the high moral finger at fallen Democrats see no cause to blame him yet. However if the sensational press would do more homework of their own, they would drag up McCain's cavorting with special interests and in the banking sector. His closeness to a failed bank during the saving & loan scandal in the 1990's almost cost him his seat. So, Mr. Clean and Spiffy midshipman McCain has a strong odour of scandal to his name. The 'New York Times' scoop has made the round of the world and will die not a firefly's death but will get lost in the shuffle for more scandal and sensationalism which America's media love. McCain is damaged goods. Mitt Romney whose Bain Capital is fronting for the Chinese government in a sale of some us$3bn for 3Com which makes military software for the American government is waiting in the wings. So one way or the other these representatives of moral decency and rectitude are venal as the day is long on any 21 June!

Hasta el luego Castro

The news of Fidel Castro's stepping down as 'el lider supremo' has grown stale a day after his letter appeared on line in 'Granma', the Cuban Communist Party's newspaper. 'The Christian Science Monitor' published an edited version of it, and a headline put Castro's resignation in a true light. Dr. Castro left office on his own terms, not feet first which exiles in Miami had fervently prayed for, nor a bullet from a hired CIA assassin. A series of stomach operations have left the 81 Castro looking frail and worn out. And he's the first one to admit that, yet fighter that he is he will continue to exhort his fellow countrymen and women to continue the work he has done to reshape today's Cuba since taking power in 1959. Raul Castro who temporary was filling in for his brother has offered a hand to Herr Bush, to end the US' cold war against the island of Cuba, but Herr Bush refused it. The handwriting is on the wall changes are coming to Cuba, and the US once again is missing an opportunity. The changes won't please Washington nor the large exile community in Miami or New Jersey, but at least it's an opening which short of armed struggle which they cannot or are unable to accomplish, Havana is reaching out for a new beginning. Cuba of today isn't the Cuba of yesteryear, most of its people are born after the revolution and they have a sense of self and identity which they won't be willing to trade for the mess of potage that Herr Bush and the rapacious exiles in Miami are offering. Obama who says he's willing to go anywhere and talk with leaders of countries Washington won't, is not courageous enough to say once elected he'd hop on the next plane to Havana or have the new Cuban president for talks in the Oval office. It's too extreme a gesture for the moment. But sooner or later the US will have to come to terms with Castro's Cuba, and peacefully.

Just when you thought subprimes troubles were over, there's mono bond insurance

You ain't see nothing yet, folks! Just when you thought you had heard the subprime mess had hit rock bottom, it has fallen out revealing a stratum much deeper. The mono bond insurance racket! Yep, gone is the fine line between private and municipal bond markets. The schemers in the insurance industry now are in a fix, they've not enough capital to stroke the billions if not trillions in debt on their books. The feisty governor of the state of New York Eliot Spitzer who should know something about commerical bonds and public debt, has blown the whistle on yet another fraud perpetrated on the public, Gone is the distinction between public and private, so do not be surprised folks should a state or a municipality can fund schools or hospitals or rebuild infrastructure or save a bridge from collapsing under your feet. You can bet on it that these insurance lackeys will not eat up the debt even in little teaspoon filled drops. Legislators with the mentality of broom sweepers have done the work of insurance lobbists, and the beaucrats have signed off of bills blurring if not erasing walls of protection for the tax or ratepayers; they have wantonly swept away the pillars of protection against a financial meltdown. And what a fine mess they've made! The spiralling and seemingly out of control debt in all markets are straining the US and to some extent the world's economy. Herr Bush & his storm troopers in government haven't a klew as to what to do. Lower interest rates at the Fed are proving inadequate, if not meaningless. Have they forgotten Japan reduced loans to a zero per cent rate and that did not break the country of deflation? No the times are calling for radical measures--some of which you lift textbook like out of FDR's handbook on dealing with a world depression. The virus of liberal economics and greed which the sainted Ronald Reagan ushered in has infected everyone including Obama and Clinton Hillary...what can they do? Perhaps not much, but they better start thinking fast of staunching the deepening recession, which no one but the rare few, is denying...America is in deep do do to slip into the peurile language of papa Bush, and paralysis has set in among the ruling classes...where are the fresh ideas? Will necessity prove mother of invention? The US is ready for a new direction and to the electorate they are willing to follow any voice which calls for a change however inchoate the message...Now stagflation which Reagan sent the country into is resurfacing in the printed medium at least...terrible times call for desparate measure, but no one is desperate enough to call for radical reform!

Dis 'n Dat--Maureen Dowd, China, Barak, Hillary & the like

Maureen Dowd has two op-ed columns a week in 'the New York Times'. No Irish Rose is she for she's prickly than a pear. She has an unhealthy dislike for Hillary Clinton and for Bill Clinton, too. No Republican can match her for the bile she spews on Mrs. Clinton.
China has had a word or two about Spielberg's distancing himself from the summer Beijing olympics owing to Beijing's uncritical support of the Islamic republic of Sudan's war games in Darfur. The English translation calls the American cineaste 'naive', but you can bet a dime to a shrinking dollar that in Chinese the language stoops to the gutter, for Spielberg is the fly in China's olympic ointment. It should come as no surprise that the presence of troops and police will be doubled or tripled this summer to crush any demonstrations against China's Darfur hanky panky. China's rule of thumb in its foreign policy follows the tried and true formula--if it's good for China, screw everything else. Beijing won't recognise the self proclaimed republic of Kosovo, for the simple and plain reason were it to acknowledge its existence it would knock the pegs under its repressive rule in Xiajiang and Tibet. China, nominally a Communist country pays lip service to the Leninist dictum of the right of self determination and violates it in the letter of the law.
Barka Obama has upped the ante in election promises. He's the momentum, and to mate his challenger Hillary Clinton's campaign, he is broadening his appeal. And his oratory is paying off. It is attracting Mrs. Clinton's constituency. Which all goes to show how the 8 years of Herr Bush has pushed the American electorate away from the fantasies of a harsh class rule of the rich and the famous, towards a centre or left of centre desire to return the US to a more balanced class society where the ladders of opportunity that mini mouse Bush & co have kicked away from the wall for the majority of Americans.
Yet Obama has but a 100 delegate votes more than Hillary, his 10 state primary or causus wins nothwithstanding. The Democrats might want to avoid a split so it would and should surprise no one that at the last might John Edwards of South Carolina who suspended his run for the presidency might be drafted as the party's candidate!
The subprime cancer spreads more widely. Credit Suisse has had to write off more than us$3bn this time around. The subprime Ponzi scheme's collapse is forcing the banks to restructure 'sotto voce', but as far as 18Brumaire is able to make out, they're not doing enough. The 1998 Asian collapse should hold a lesson for them. But will they take that to heart? It remains to be seen!

Drinking at the government's trough

Quietly like thieves in the night, US banks are drawing billions from the Federal Reserve, thanks to a two month old programme the bathroom attendant Bernanke helped set up to ease the credit crunch which has put a half nelson hold on their operations and have accelerated write off, drops in their stock, and ground some transactions to a halt. Secrecy is called for the more especially since stories in the press would depress their holdings more and nurture great unease in the market. What we want to know is how fast are these bloodsuckers coming up with plans of restructuring, slashing top salaries and perks of venal senior managers or simply showing them the door for incompetency, restoring fiscal discipline?
The subprime cancer is deeper than we hear, and out of fear no one is moving bolding to shore up structures and brace up market discipline and responsibility...like rats on a sinking ship which they cannot abandon, they look to the government which before their current ills was a monkey on their collective back, for a big handout, and a handout they are getting on the qt. The financial squalor they created is driving the rest of us to ruin.

The epitome of decadence

Seoul National University is taking us$150.000 from a grieved woman from California who recently lost her beloved pitbull Booger. She wants him cloned, and the university is willing to indulge her fancy. You may snicker. You may laugh. You may mock this woman. Yet she does represent the self-indulgence of America's decadence and boredom and barrenness and the lack of connexion with other fellow human beings.
Anyone who knows English fairly well, knows what a booger is. In fact, Booger is a character in the spoofs Hollywood churned out in a series about a bunch of goofey recruits at a police Academy in sunny California. A booger is a congealed bit of snot or mucus which little children have an odd habit of eating! So Booger's mum wants a clone of her dear departed pit bull.
This exercise in money and cold humanity is not something new. Tinseltown adapted with wry humour Evelyn Waugh's acid biting 'The Loved One', which put up to the light of ridicule pet cemeteries in California. But he was a foreigner and a nasty man, so Americans can dismiss him with a flick of a flyswatter. But Booger's mum is an echt American and so her indulgence cannot!
Hollywood has also recorded on celluloid and with great humour and a deep cut of disdain especially in films about the Great Depression the rich who coodle and primp poodles and dogs in a way that they wouldn't throw a bone to the starving poor. Even the Israeli's used Jewish humour to that effect about a poor Sephardic man looking to cash in a reward rounds up stray dogs. He lives in a slum not unlike the ones we see in Parisian suburbs...and has a large family to feed...so he knocks on the door of a comfortable, middle class couple with a dog any dog...they open the door and by the look of horror on their European faces, they recoil in horror and slam with a thud in the man's face. Okay he had a mutt, they lost a poodle, but the facial expressions said it all---they had see 'vermin' and they didn't want anything to do with it...And in her own way, Booger's mum lonely as she is without her Booger has no consciousness of the poor within her town or the struggling needs of her neighbours in these brutal economic times...she wants but one thing...her Booger as a clone. Here we go again, and it was said more than a century ago by America's own and not widely read economist Thorstein Veblen in his 'Theory of the Leisure Classes'...so as the economic crisis deepens in the US and recovery is not for tomorrow, Booger's mum is a poster gal for the decadence which defines Herr Bush's America.

Alms for the love of America's poor

It doesn't much imagination to say that the years of Herr Bush in the White House have brought more and more hardship to America's hardworking poor and made more and more shakier the pins on which keep its middle classes from slipping down the class hierachy! Aid and some comfort are coming and from the Third World. Venezuela's Chavez the man mini mouse Bush loves to hate owns Citigo which sells oil & gas in the US. Anyone who is not blind nor deaf and is semi literature can find some ad in the media extolling Citigo's programme for delivery gas to America's poor at rate they can afford in these times of hugh price gouging by Big Oil & Gas. Go to the barrios and the ghettos and the slums in the Bronx, for example, to verify what 18Brumaire is saying. Read back issues of that old grey lady of American jouralism 'The New York Times' which have written long articles in the Metro pullout about Citigo's energy relief to New York City's poor and downtrodden. Thanks to Chavez homes are heated in winter at reduced rates which would and should put the so called public utilities to shame for the high rates they are charging! And now microeconomics has come to the US in the form of Grammen Bank whose founder Muhammad Yunnus, winner of the Nobel prize in Economics. Yunnus is from Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries in the world. There he lent money to poor women turning them into entrepreneurs, thereby pulling them out of base poverty. Now, he's on a mission to help America's poor victims of the Ponzi schemes and the endless 'faux frais' America's big banks are ripping off customers. He sees an opportunity to help the richest country in the world, the US' poor to seize a lifeline and begin slowly but surely to deal with crushing debt that the subprime cancer and a tax system which dumps on their shoulders and drains purses of money so that the rich bloodsuckers can live high off the hog. Grameen has begun lending in New York for here is a city of immigrants with a thurst to succeed. It intends to lend at first some us$176m, a modest sum, comparied to the billions the big banks have lifted from our pockets with the greatest of ease and from laws they bribed lawmakers with gifts or threats to pass in their favour. The small amount notwithstanding, Gameen's entry into the financial fray should be a warning to the Big Boys in banking that change is in the air and borrowers will go to this lender willing to shepard them to financial discipline and with a track record of success.
It speaks badly for Herr Bush...or does it? He who doesn't give a rat's buggery about anyone or anything but his own selfish class interests that he is incapable and how! of governing for the people who like it or not, have been saddled with his incompetence, corruption, croneyism, and giant rip off for the last 8 year. Jackarse Bush thinks history will judge him more kindly than some do today, but will his god who speaks to him daily? Doubt it!

The banks are looking for an out

The big banks in the US are in a bad way. Easy money and loose discipline have landed them in deep doo doo. The monies flowing in from Singapore, Abu Dhabi, and China won't bring them relief. They're scrambling for an out, and guess what they're doing. They combing scholarly articles and the pundits pronouncements in the written media, to boost up morale by saying, no, there's no recession; the fundamentals are good; and at the end of the year, although growth will creep along, the gang's all here and in good shape, more or less. Flummery, Freud would call it. Voltaire's Dr. Pangloss is what they are looking for. They see no further than the fat wallets they're sitting on. Inflation is a taboo although it is proven that some inflation spurs on economic growth...but they relie on consumerism, but the public is in a huge pool of debt...so the sponge is being squeezed tight to keep these scam artists from a gotterdaemmerung. They're bankrupt in ideas but in shucking and sliding and cooking up Ponzi schemes...Yes, narrowed minded, savants idiots of bankers, you're in trouble and the shame of it all is that you're bringing all of us down.

The washroom attendant at the Fed and the grand guignol at Treasury stumble badly

Ben Bernanke chief bathroom attendant at the Fed stumbled once again. He's not sanguine about the US economy. His prognosis is bleak, very bleak, indeed! His remedy: more cuts in the prime rate, and that will give another shot of vitamin B to an economic America. Eyewash. The grand guignol Paulson at the Treasury is no better. He knows how to make money in investment banking for clients and coupon clippers but he cannot do squat to relieve the onerous load the ordinary rate or taxpaying American bears to keep his friends in the manner bloodsuckers on the US economy have come to think their right.
They've no imagination beyond the fat wallets that they sit on. Bernanke from his aery academic perch and Paulson from the high office on Wall Street fought for their class of thieves and tax evaders. They have no idea of what it means to struggle for a living everyday, to survive. They believe in the free market who as the father of economic twaddle Adam Smith loftily put it, 'corrects itself' in crisis.
Well the cancer of the subprime scam is spreading fast and furious and the ball of string of 'prosperity' is unravelling madly. The revolution the sainted Ronald Reagan brought us meant more taxes for the little man, exemptions for the rotting barrel of fish called the rich and the super rich and their hanger ons and combers of the fine hairs in the ruling class' collective anus. Steep cuts in funding for schools, roads and bridges, and healthcare and all the means that make life in the loudly proclaimed most powerful economy and country in the world bearable and more. It went far in militarising the economy and with Herr Bush it meant war, war, and more war, and incompetence, and even more myopic vision and more and more debt and great impoverishment. So it has come to pass these free marketeers who believe in the market are fat cats who mouth market discipline but don't practise it for themselves, but tell us all to snap to it. But for them use the whip of more consumerism, more easy money, more market hedonism...which landed us in the matatisising cancerous economy we are in now.
Had they an ounce of historical vision they would look back at the fall of the baht in Thailand in 1998 and what mess that causes in east Asia. Today Asia is awash in cash and buying our banks and businesses and anything else they can lay their hands on. They could look to FDR's new deal for consolidating bad mortgage in order to bring relief to those facing foreclosures, high debt, and the means streets of poverty. But no, they have lost touch with the ordinary folk, and we are their cannon fodder... McCain looks as though he has a good chance to win the presidency, and if he does, god help us, for it would mean more of the same and incompetence a la Herbert Hoover. Should Obama or Hillary win, well, they won't have time to breathe as the mountain of problems mini mouse Bush and his storm troopers of Republicans in the houses of Congress are bequeathing them, either may not find a way out of the mess if they have to rely on the same old crowd who believes in radical free trade and open markets.

No one understands China. Sniff, sniff, sniff

Steven Spielberg's resignation as a advisor to China on the Summer Olympics in Beijing has poked a finger in the eye of its puffery as a gentle, growing economic giant. Spielberg cited the Chinese support of Sudanese government 'genocide' against Dafur as his reason for resigning. China's immediate response: foreigners cannot nor are able to understand us. Yet anyone who reads the daily press should not be surprised at this little boy hurt response. Beijing cares not a whit of what others think of her. She operates on a simple rule of thumb: is it good for China! Sudan has oil, and China needs oil, so let high winds and tides come, it wouldn't let support for the repressive government in Khartoum falter one bit.
China's disregard for standards of any sort is legend. Look at the poisoned cough medicine and the dead that it left behind in Central America; look at the poisoned dumplings sold in Japan; look at the lead paint in toys sold in the US and elsewhere. Look at the pollution its smoke stacks belch out thereby exacerbating global warming. Look at the repression of Tibetans and of the Ouigar minority in Xiajiang. Look at the repression of its own rural population. The laundry list of ills and complaints and misdemeanors and felonies is long. Beijing stands before the court of public opinion and is found guilty and wanting in contrition and reform. So do shed crocodile tears China but don't expect sympathy!

Fare thee well Kon Ichikawa

Ichikawa Kon has died at 93. Gone to the other side of the mountain, is one of the last great Japanese film makers of the 20th century. Although not as much a household word as Kurozawa Akiria, Ichikawa was a great cineaste. There once was a time in the West when his films had currency of the realm. Not anyone. And more the pity! Known for the 'Harp of Burma' and 'Fire on the Plain' bitter tales of the Japanese war in Asia, he also brought to the screen the great works of Japan's great writer, Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, 'Odd Obsession' [Kagi] and 'the Makioka Sisters' [Sasame yuki]. A restored version of 'Sasame-yuki' [Gently falling snow] had a showing in late 2007 in an art cinema in New York. One showing a day for a week. Poor attendance sad to report. At a moment in his career almost a half century ago, the critics dealt harshly with his 'oeuvre', but the master had tasted the wine of revenge in his 'Actor's revenge', which is highly recommended.
Ichikawa Kon is dead but lucky us are left with a rich trove of his 60 years in making good films.

Signing away our liberties. It does happen here!

75 years ago Herr Hitler came to power. He and his gang of thugs set about to dismantle Weimar Germany's constitutional framework. And we know what that meant if we read even a little history. Upton Sinclair whose 'Oil' is now a top honoured art film, wrote 'It could happen here' in 1936 as a call to order that in the US authoritarism's jack boot could tramp, tramp, tramp down America's main streets. And the popularist Louisiana Huey Long put it blountly, 'if fascism came to America, it would come wrapped in the American flag'. And Nathaniel West in his own way wrote about it in his 'Balso Snell'.
Well, guess what, after much dithering and dickering, the US senate voted to enlarge Herr Bush's power to spy more broadly on US citizens through wire tapping without the courts' permission, and allowed the feckless Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, among other carriers, to escape prosecution for violating a citizen's constitutional right by complying with Herr Bush out of control wiretapping, tampering with the mails under the guise of his misplaced war on terrorism. The vote in the senate saw 16 Democrats cross over to the Republicans to approve of the bill of theirs by a vote of 68 to 29. The hope in making at least the utility companies liable to the power of the law in fines and imprisonment, lies with the house of representatives who thought that these spaghetti spined comanpies deserve the full weight of the law. Yet that remains to be seen. It is bad enough that our mails and e mails and telephone conversation are collected and trolled illegally by the government. It's a sweep like those the US troops carry out in Iraq or used to in Vietnam. Anyone caught in this net is presumed guilty. The object all sublime of government spying on its citizenry and constitutional guarantees be damned! is to fish out of the sea of people the moles of Al Qaeda. Fat chance! If anything it is to control the American citizenry. It takes a leap of faith to believe in the benign intents of mini mouse Bush. His track record rates a triple d minus in respecting rights and telling the truth. As the evidence before us the court of public is definitely a verdict of guilty on all counts in Herr Bush's case. To think otherwise is an exercise in flummery and sanctimonious twaddle.
And if matters were not bad enough, you've that arch Thomist and supreme court judge Antonin Scalia who in one of his pronouncement 'urbi & orbi' does sees a role for physical interrogations. Although he qualifies his arguments with that and that, his mere approval of such physicality in interrogations opens the Pandora Box up and down the line to the torturing of prisoners. Does he not know what happened at Abu Gharib? or at Guantenamo? Well 18Brumaire suggest that he see Alex Gibney's 'Journey to the Dark Side'!
So yes it can and is happening here. Not as brutally or in your face as Herr Hitler's Germany but the erosion of civil liberties is continuing and with the aid and approval of our houses of congress, in fear that one doesn't think them testicle less fops! Few do remember that the law which put American Japanese into internment camps is still on the books, and that that supreme transvestite J. Edgar Hoover had petitioned president Dwight Eisenhower to allow him to round up un Americans during the Korea War and lock them up in such camps and throw the key away! Herr Bush & co. haven't such scruples.

A breakthrough with Pyongyang?

North Korea is not news these days. Last year, that wasn't the case. How can we explain this? Reading the foreign press might shed light on the matter. A high level delegation made up of senior US congressional aides and nuclear experts are or will be flying off to Pyongyang, to meet their North Korean counterparts. Among its member, you will find Keith Luse a senior staffer of Republic senator from Indiana Richard Lugar, Joel Wit, a former state department official and framer of the US North Korea Agreed Framework which froze Pyongyang's nuclear program, and Siegfried Hecker, ex director of the Los Alamost Nuclear Laboratory. Discussion will centre on an American programme on dismantling weapons of mass destruction which North Korea has expressed an interest in. This confab may accelerate the disabling of Pyongyang's nuclear reactor[s], and mark a breakthrough in US North Korean relations.
On the heels of this group comes the New York Philharmonic Orchestra on 26 February for an historic two day concert in Pyongyang.
These two events may or may not be related, yet they indicate that out of the public ear, the name calling is absent, and in the corridors of Washington and Pyongyang quiet diplomacy has the upper hand in order to close down North Korea's nuclear weapons factory. The reader can draw his own conclusions.

Good times or Recession?

Even by mini mouse Bush's standard, his signing of the stimulus packet to kick start a sagging, lackluster economy and his hailing of the historic cuts in the Fed's prime rate to inject vitamin B into the nation's economic blood stream are signs of self deception, and hardly a cause for joy for millions of Americans. For they are done to rescue the capitalists who threw out of the window market discipline and engaged in a love fest of making money recklessly for themselves and their coupon clippers and bloodsuckers on the body of the poor and middle classes. Now that things have turned for the worse, the freeloaders who loudly proclaim themselves free marketeers, are running for cover, and with a tin cup looking for a bailout at the rate or taxpayers expense!
Herr Bush says, 'there is no recession'. Technically, there isn't, but he hasn't heard from Goldman Sachs or Lehman or Merrill analysts who say that the country indeed is in recession. More, the subprime cancer is matasercising rapidly. It is spreading to home loans, auto loans, and credit cards at an alarming pace. Already the 'Financial Times' of London is putting the subprime write offs close to a half trillion us$, which is a conservative figure. And now with the consumer falling behind on loans, this will push the debt outstanding to beyond the trillion us$ mark!
The banking system is in turmoil. The American economy is very weather beaten, but blockhead Bush wears his rose coloured specs which like the simple minded sees the world as a wonder and a blessing and with Panglossian assurance that this is the best of all possible world.
Go tell it to the Marines! as the American saying goes. A war in Iraq which seems never ending; a failed foreign policy; a road map to peace in Israel and Palestine which has hit a brick Israeli wall and won't go nowhere. A good third of the US population living below the poverty line...and that number is increasing. Yet, there is no recession for the rotten fish that make up 1 per cent of the population which to itself owns as much in us$ terms as more than half the Americans living in the land of the free, home of the brave.
A pox on Bush & his barrel of rotten apples

Republican election plan

Although it's the economy, stupid!, polls tell us, the Republican attack strategy for the upcoming run for the White House, is spread over headlines and radio and television sound bytes. 9/11 is being served up again by an administration which did heed warnings, we have learnt, of a terrorist attack on American soil. Suddenly almost 7 years after the tragedy at the WTO and the Pentagon and the downed plane in Pennsylvania, Americans and the world are going to be treated to a show trial by the good offices of the Pentagon in Guantanemo. You've have to scratch your head hard to wonder why Herr Bush didn't go after Osama bin Laden or cosied up to Pervez Mushareff whose very military offered aid and comfort to bin Laden and mullah Omar and the dregs of the defeated Taliban and in whose northwest frontier offered training to future Islamic fundamentalists. Now suddenly a trial...and a show trial..shades of Breaker Morant! The outcome is a foregone conclusion...execution based on testimony extracted by the fine art of America's torture chambers. The accused may very well be guilty, but we offer them no rights but the right to jury by officers and gentlemen and without protection of constitutional rights which Herr Bush has flouted and bashed and thrown on to the trash heap.
Mini mouse Bush has written the script should Barak Obama be the Democratic candidate for the presidency. It is a replay of the LBJ/Goldwater 196 campaign but this time the roles are reversed. The junior senator from Illinois is either soft on terrorism -- isn't he willing to go shake hands with the devil himself Mohmoud Ahmedinejad? or he's crazy enough to unleash a nuclear war by nuking Al Queda strongholds in northern Pakistan. And this from a party whose president has sent a gentle letter to Kim Jong il whom he qualified as 'evil'? Hypocrisy knows no name but the Republicans have taken out from the closet drums of panic and hysteria to bring us 4 more years of woe but for the rotten class of the rich and super rich who have benefitted from their years in office and for open the public coffers serve but one purpose to enrich them further or to rescue them from their incompetence as captains of industry.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that the US is weakening as a world power and others are waiting in the wings to take its place. A Republic victory in the November elections will tear asunder the rents in the US' consensus and rape the ordinary rate or taxpayer. We cannot say that we were not forewarned!

The archbishop of Canterbury's aberrant ideas

Rowan Williams the current archbishop of Canterbury is proof postive of the saying, 'the road to hell is paved with good intentions'. Inspired by god knows what paraclete he proclaimed 'ubi et orbi' in a vision of the unwise that sha'ariahlaw be introduced as a supplement to English law. In utterly this judgment he betrays his absolute ignorance about Islam and the meaning of sha'ariah. It's a good idea, methinks says he, in playing to the stalls of muslim public opinion in Great Britain the more especially since its youth and old men wear Britishness uncomfortably, and find an outlet for fustration in radical, political Islam. What does he know about Islam? or about Sha'ariah? Absolutely nothing. His hope is vain and deluded and self indulgent. Had he not read up on the awful horror of the Aghani under the rule of the Taliban and its straight jacket application of Sha'ariah? Or the beheadings and throat slitting or the stoning to death of adultress or the bullet in the head for openness that the FIS or now the Salifist Taliban in northern Africa carry out? Not! His eminence seems or seemed determined to circle over the carrion of Sha'ariah's victims.
His conceit and that is what his words are in the conceit and brackish tones of the condescending have raised a firestorm of protest. As it ought to and should be!
Archbishop Williams has enough trouble on his plate among the fractious parties in his own Anglician communion worldwide. Instead of healing divisions within his own choir, he bolding ventures in feudalism and the medieval territory of Islam and Sha'ariah. No one has told this bearded prophet to mind his own business nor to shut up on matters that he knows nothing or little about. But this false prophet of multiculturalism and fake interconfessional harmony offers up a meal of rotting ignorance and false solutions for a crisis within today's Britain. The successor in a long line of archbishops from the sainted Thomas a Beckett down till Williams...this man should offer an apology, don burlap and ashes and go through the streets of England, Scotland, Wales, and northern Ireland, beating his breast and begging for forgiveness for the harm he wishes upon women, the infirm, men by calling for the recognition of parallel systems of religious law in a secular state. He should read Voltaire's 'Philosophical Letters' to learn something about his own country!

The economic package to save the US economy

Congress which usually moves with the pace of a snail, quickly voted the us$168bn injection of vitamin B money to boost the sagging US economy. Mini mouse Bush will sign the bill for it is more or less everything he wanted to rescue his class, his cronies, and the corporations. So concerned are the Congress and Herr Bush that they neglected [of course, there was a fight to bring relief to working poor and floundering middle class, but the reactionary Republicans and their Democratic allies put the kabosch on any amendment to 'water down' the bill] aid and succor for the growing army of the unemployed, food stamps for the growing number of Americans, adult and child, who go to bed hungry at night or spend life on the street or in the mean rooms of temporary shelters. It is an anarchonism to repeat that America has shift to the right and more. The free marketers rule the roost even though what they put on our economic has failed time and time again. Without strong protest from below and a movement to throw the bums out, 18Brumaire fears that the appeal to patriotism--the refuge of fools to quote Samuel Johnson--and the beating of war drums and the demoralising effects of poverty and impoverishment, the US may very well have McCain as president, a warmonger of the first water and a darling of the neo cons, or Obama whose economic advisors are on the right and are cheerleaders for free markets and will be more to the right then any of his supporters suspect who will become the cat's paw of the Pentagon and Wall Street.

Wrapped in Old Glory Romney falls on his own sword

In a scene worthy of Corneille, Wilbert 'Mitt' Romney, wrapping himself in the Stars and Stripes, has suspended his run for the White House on the Republican ticket for the good of the country and from fear that either Hillary or Obama who beat a hasty retreat from our war in Iraq. And thus in grand tones and cheap dramatic effect, Romney fell on his sword, withdrawing his run for his party's nominee for presidency. It was a scene of flea bag theatrics. Romney as we all know is a pettifogger; there is nothing so low that he won't stoop to to win. He flip flops, he waffles, he'd even sell his arse for the presidency. And he lost in his bid. A bid which cost him dearly, for he had to dig deep into his multi millionaire pockets to fund his own campaign, which he undoubtedly write off thereby putting the burden on the American rate or taxpayer! He is no Brutus elogising a fallen Caesar; he is Moliere's Tartuffe. And in the grand crescendo of his peroration, he has put his country first in time of war, to clear the Republican field for McCain's
triumph. Let's look closer at this summer soldier's lament. He feels for our guys and gals fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan so much that he is willing to sacrifice safely and at great distance his own personal ambitions. And yet, he has 5 healthy, strapping sons who remain safely under his protective wing. Let's not forget that when asked early in his run for the Republican nomination, by a reporter as to why none of his sons had donned the military khaki, picked up the rifle to defend America from terrorists, he cynically quipped that they were fighting for their country by trying to have him elected president! Ain't that a kick in the head. That says more about this hypocrite who is ringing the tocsin again and again and again that he is dropping out of the campaign so that we can be better ready, able, and alert for the next ben Ladin attack on the US. Oy vey! What brackish blige! What smoke and blue mirrors! It all goes to show you that America in its decline is in the age of the demogogues! Lord help us all! And good riddance to this piece of bad rubbage!

A word or two on McCain, Huckabee, and Romney

It's doesn't a rocket scientist to see that underneath the soft spoken words of John McCain, he's a hawk. He has no ideas about how to rescue the economy from the disaster that Herr Bush is leaving us with, nor how to jaw, jaw, jaw, since he is of the war, war, war party. Huckabee is folksy but has eccentric ideas on taxes and the economy. He has the touch of a popularist snake oil salesman and as an evangelical Christian who lets his warts hang out for all to see since it is in the nature of his belief that no matter how often he strays from the righteous path his saviour will forgive and redeem him and Huckabee strumming not on a lyre but a banjo will be reborn. Romney is Mr. Corporate raider himself. He will flip flop, twist himself into a pretzl to get elected. He is bereft of ideas but sees merit in continuing Bushonomics and the war and the assault of America's ideals and liberties.

Obama's funds, Hillary's debt

Yesterday 18Brumaire poked a finger in the eye of Barak Obama's puffery. Unlike Hillary Clinton, he is not beholden to corporate funding, but to the humble us$ that the ordinary Joe or Jane contribute to his campaign through the internet. Eyewash pure and simple. Others might go as far as accusing the junior senator from Illinois of demagogery. The run for the White House has a little less than 10 months to go, and already, funds spent by the candidates running for America's highest office has gone over a half-billion us$. Obama's words begs belief. The ordinary guy or gal on the street has not enough werewithal to raise the hundreds of millions he needs for his campaign. So a keen eye would scratch beneath his words to find the mother lode of his campaign funding, and yes, ladies and gentlemen, it comes from corporate funding. Hillary Clinton who never denies funding from the fat cats has had to lend her own campaign us$5m from her own purse. The big money is rolling into Obama's pockets because the special interest smell a winner! We all know that Goldman Sachs has Obama in its Wall Street wallet; the nuclear power industry glows with his support; the assurance companies chirp at Obama's Bush lite plan for healthcare. He may be bright and handsome and brilliant as Oprah proudly proclaimed but Obama knows by class and education which side his bread is buttered.

What to do with North Korea?

Christopher Hill, the US' chief negotiator with North Korea, is appearing before a senate committee. He's being question[n]ed on whither North Korea? Despite the breakthrough with Pyongyang on denuclearising Yongban, there has been little progress on more concession from Kim Jong-il's regime. Little wonder! Has it ever occurred to the sages who throne in the upper house of the American congress that the US, too, has made commitment which they are dragging their feet on? Maybe yes, but more likely, no! Long negotiations with North Korea have left little impression on America's negotiators. As in all negotiations each side tries to tilt concessions in its favour, yet in the end, a balance is re established by which feelings do not remain hurt. Unless of course, it's a peace of the victors! Which is not the case in the face to face meetings of Washington and Pyongyang. Let's recall that mini mouse George Bush sent a letter to Kim Jong il expressing the hope that talks might result in a deal and soon. But Bush has not lived up to this hope, and in consequent, Kim reverts to the long established North Korean tactique which we know as stalling. The senators wanted to know if Kim is waiting till another president is in the White House to go on with negotiations. Perhaps yes, perhaps no. A settlement is within reach if Bush had the political will. He doesn't, and so, Jay Lefkowitz, his aide on human rights in North Korea, is given wide birth to torpedo whatever good Hill has done at the conference table. In a way, Bush's inaction is the Trojan horse for the likes of Lefkowitz and the late but unlamented US ambassador to the UN John Bolton, he of 'surrender is no option' to assail the talks with Pyongyang. More likely than not, Bush won't budge until he's brought screaming and kicking to concessions to save his mark on the presidency which has an awful smell to it. The time is ripe to come to terms with Pyongyang, but like the traveller who tarries, mini mouse Bush looks as though he's going to miss his train.

Bush's us$3 trillion dollar budget

Bush's proposal for a us$3 trillion dollar budget shows how much the United States is on the slippery slope towards becoming a second rate nation like the UK or France. In the details, mini mouse Bush is impoverishing future his people, whilst turning America into an armed fortress, but judging by its military adventures and its ill conceived war against terrorism [why is Osama ben Laden still uncapturedd?], Herr Bush is strangling the US economy. Of course there are endless examples of the decline of the American empire...but one thing is certain, god help us all!

Syria's nuclear power plant

Lord bless Seymour Hersh. In his 'A strike in the dark' in the current double issue of 'The New Yorker' [11 & 18 February 2008], he debunks the crude propaganda Tel Aviv and Washington put out about Syria's building a nuclear power installation, and with the assistance of those naughty North Koreans. On 6 September 2007, let's recall, Israeli jets penetrated Syrians airspace and flew deep into the country to bomb a military installation that Tel Aviv and Washington claimed was the site of a nuclear reactor. The story made headlines but did not fly well, for no one, judging by Israel's failed war against Hizbullah in Lebanon, and Bush's trumped up war in Iraq bought it. Nonetheless the story was broadcast worldwide and had the effect of 'where's there's smoke, there's fire'. Well Hersch has definitely put tonnes of water on these smouldering embers of rumours and half truths and downright lies. Syria wasn't building a nuclear reactor. And that's that. The object all sublime of the Israeli menacing raid was not Damascus but Teheran. Iran is the last country to tremble at Israeli and Bushite bluster. Short of staring a nuclear war in the Middle East, Tel Aviv and Washington can do nothing but issues threats and pound a shoe like Khrushev on the UN table. Olmert and Bush may shudder in self rightteous anger but since Washington's own Defence Department's report saying that Iran had not continued a nuclear bomb programme 5 years ago, Bush had his own pins knocked out from under him, and the only thing left to this blockhead was fulmination and petuluant, peurile foot stamping. Teheran knows how to tweak the bull elephant's tail in Tel Aviv...it challenges 'Ha Shoah' which it knows did happen, but to deny it sends the Jewish state into a range and treats Israel in the same manner it treats the Palestinians. And Israel can do nothing. Seymour Hersh has put another nail in the Israeli American coffin of lies and war like posturing. And a good thing that is!

Obama's slips are beginning to show

Barak Obama's an inspirational speaker, no one denies. The crowds of the young and the middle aged and the old shout as though they were in a revival meeting, 'Yes, we can!' It is an impressive sight to see so many happy, cheering faces of the choir. Yet in his pep talk last night after winning small states, senator Obama strayed from the path of the righteous, in his attempt to distance himself from the old politics and usher him into the White House as the knight in shining armour. 'I don't take corporate contribution' or that effect says he, but the humble donations from people like you. And the crowd roared with self satisfaction. Obama never stops of short of self idolatry! Well, we do know that he is in the pocket of Goldman Sachs who are heavily funding him. And he does hop to the tune of the nuclear industry ever so eager to build nuclear power plants and inject nuclear waste into the economy. We do know his associations with slumlords, and his unwillingness to say when and how we're going to get out of Iraq. And then, there is his healthcare plans...Voluntary let it be says he as he echoes mini mouse Bush's line and makes the assurance vampires happy to collect premiums and short change those of us with their assurance plans on care and payment. No, Barak Obama has much to explain...but will his feet be held to the fire to say what he really believes? 18Brumaire is not holdings its breath!

Va, vis, et deviens...Live and Become

New York has two Israeli film playing in small art cinemas these days. One, 'A band's visit' has come back to Manhattan screen being shown a week in late December 2007 to qualify for the Oscars in the best foreign film category; the second, 'Va, vis, et deviens' or 'Live and Become' is being shown uptown and downtown. 18Brumaire already reviewed 'A band's visit' in December, so good reader please look for it in the 2007 postings. 'Live and Become' is the work of a Roumanian film maker who looks at Israeli society through the gathering of Ethiopian Jews or Falasha who were transported on the wings of an eagle [see Exodus for the quotation] were brought home to Eretz Israel. 18Brumaire won't give the hook of the film away, but recommends that you see it. It touches on many of the themes which post modernist love to wax long and confusedly on, but 'Live...' does not. The return to 'la terre sainte' by long lost Jews who practised pre rabbinic Judaism touched a nerve in Israel. The orthodox rabbis tried to circumcise them symbolically, to 'convert' them to the faith that they rigidly interpreted. This aroused resistance and brought shame on orthodoxy. Yet the presence of blacks within a primarily white, European Israel tested Israel far more than the Jewish state bargained for. 'Live and Become' is the bittersweet story of an Ethiopian mother in the refugee camps of Sudan, with deep pain in her busom, pushed her only surviving son to join a Falasha woman whose only son had just died, so that as she says that he can 'live and become' a human being. The boy's foster mother dies of tb, but she has him repeat the long line of her forefarthers so that the Israeli authorities won't return the boy to the life in a camp. Ultimately a left wing, secular Sephardic family adopts him...Schlomo...and therein turns the tale. At school, no one wants to sit with him; a classmate rubs his skin in order to see if his blackness rubs off like dirt; the parents in the boy's elementary school try forcing his withdrawl out of fear that he would infect children of theirs [translation, he would transmit among other diseases the horrible AIDS]. A girl from an orthodox family falls for him but her father out of prejudice threatens him if he ever sees his daughter again, on one hand, and on the other suspects being black he is not a Jew, but a freeloader who has come to eat from the rich Israeli trough. In order to gain the father of this girl's acceptance, he throws himself into interpreting the Torah. The father is on the jury, and choses 'blindly' the subject of the contest. What is the colour of God and Man? The Hassid rival chooses White, but Schlomo is a better exegete and he uses his skills to thwart the racism that is at the heart of Israeli society. 18Brumaire won't go into the in's and out's of the film, but the longing of the boy for his mum left in Sudan haunts him. He finds a sympathetic Falasha rabbi to help him send letters to her, for he is illiterate in his own Amharic. This kindly rabbi teaches him Amharic and truly blessed that he is, he shepard's Schlomo through his Judaism although he knows the boy's secret. In this, he earns a 'mitzvah' a blessing from on high. 'Va, vis, et deviens' says it all in the title...Jews toast life and here is a tale of life and life giving. Yet, underneath it all, it hits all the right keys on assimilation, the longing for safety yet the wrenching for one's homeland; it touches on the deep racism within Israeli society, whereby the Sephardic and Falasha and the Jews from India are less than welcome into a Jewish state in spite of the millenia of observing Jewish ritural and tradition. It captures of the colonialism of mind and the spirit which is ever unbeatable and in small ways triumphant.

Suicide bombing in Dimona

The suicide bombing in Dimona [sic] bodes ill for Israel. Dimona as everyone knows is the centre of Israel's nuclear arsenal. If Palestinians can penetrate so near the underground bunkers filled with atomic bombs what does say for Tel Aviv's warfare state and its own security?
The worldwide media paint as is their wont the Palestinians as terrorists, but hardly any see the suicide bombing after a year's lull in Israel, as an act of desperation and retaliation for the undeclared war against Hamas and for that matter any Palestinian group that opposes Tel Aviv's hegomony. Since Hamas blew up the wall of the prison that Israel had locked Gaza into, Tel Aviv has suffered one giant defeat, a loss of face equal in weight to the beating Hizbullah and the gave them in the pre emptive war of theirs in Lebanon. In fact, the Vinograd Commission's report blamed Israeli leaders...Olmert & company for waging a reckless war without fully blaming them for it. For to do so, we think, would put a brand of Cain on Israel and bring to the reins of government the fascist minded Likud party. Additionally, the suicide bombing in Dimona is yet another signpost that Israel policy of killing children and the civilian population will not dampen the resistance of the Palestinians one whit. If anything it will fan its flames and increase its heat.
After almost 41 years of occupying the west bank, Israel is no more secure in its selfhood than it was after the big hoopla of triumph following the Six Day war.
Time is no long on Israel's side.

Jia Zhang ke's 'Still Life'

Jia Zheng-ke is hardly a household word. The jury at the 2007 Venice Bienniale conferred on his film 'Still Life' the high honour of best film. Beijing has banned the film. The jury in Venice may have found influences of Antonioni in Jia's film, wot, with its long passages of feet leading here and there. It is unsentimental albeit nostalgic about two dramas with little to connect them other than the man who is looking for his daughter after 16 years, and a woman who is looking for a divorce from her husband who has little time for her. The two are from China's Shanxi province, and thus the connexion. The pace of the film is slow and trying on the viewer, but socialogically speaking, it is a telling tale of the effect of the 3 Gorge Dam's effect on the lives of the ordinary Chinese. Mao's dream, spurred on by Deng Xiao Peng's fast, short march on the capitalist road, has turned China on its ear. 'It's alright to get rich', says he, and the rush for the almight renminbi yuan becomes a torrent of corruption, greed, and onerous burden for the poor peasant and worker who once the Communist Party took care of after its own fashion. As Lenin remarked the loosenly of socialist praxis gives once again birth to petty bourgeois production...and how and more! And the attraction of Hong Kong cinema stars like Chow Young Fat offer a model of the streetwise and smart hero, and the CantoPop songs which offer up sugar plum dreams of romance and longing and rejection in love...to lessen the drabness and the brutality of everyday existence. As we see through 'Still Life' the older reflexes of fuedal China re emerge with vengeance...and this is no better illustrated than the meeting of the coalminer from Shanxi who is looking for his daughter meets his wife who is a debt slave to a boat captain because he brother owes him 30.000 yuan!
How does one interpret the title? is it a 'Still Life' as we think of a painting? or is it an affirmation that in spite of life's vicissitudes life still goes on? That is up to the man or woman who pays for his seat to see this stark, sober film to make out for himeself

Uncensored history of the 9/11 commission

The publishers Twelve have put out Philip Shenon's 'The Commission', the uncensored history of the 9/11 Commission. Shenon the New York Times man in Washington has done his homework well. The book makes for fascinating reading. It describes the bumbling team which surrounds an incomptent president Bush. It does not make for happy reading. How could it? The Commission found no one guilty for the tragedy of 9/11. The fault lay in the system or in the stars, dear Brutus! Yet Shenon pins the tail of ineptitude and ignorance and 'je m'en foutisme' or who gives a flying rat's f--k on the tail of the arch arse kisser Condy Rice, the careerist George Tente, and the singing attorney general Ashcroft, among others. It's enough to make one sick that such people run this country. It is to Shenon's credit that he could and did write this book. And it is 18Brumaire's hope that it will be widely read for the lessons that it teaches!

Another installment of the Lone Star-Korea Exchange Bank Saga

It is an anarchonism to say that the financial pages make for interesting reading. On Friday [1 February 2008] a Seoul court found the American equity firm Lone Star Capital Fund guilty of stock manipulation and put in the slammer for 5 years the head of the Fund's Korea set up Paul Yoo. South Korea has turned out to be a thorn in Lone Star's backside ever since it bought up a majority interest in the Korea Exchange Bank on the heels of the Asian financial crisis ten years ago. That financial downturn offered America's venture capitalists a golden opportunity to penetrate closed door banks to foreign capital, and a chance to tap huge reserves of private capital wealth. Lone Star's majority shares then became a cause for scandal as we are going to see. They were going to HSBC Holdings for the gold ringing sum of us$6,3bn, an almost sixfold increase of the money Lone Star plonked down on the barrel head when they bought into the KEB. And what's more it was us6,3bn without paying a won of tax on the deal. How could that be you quizzically ask? Well, that happened because of a small Malaysian island called Labuan which is a tax haven for deals and agreements by which one nation absolves another nation's business of paying taxes on the sales of properties in one or the other nation. The news spread like wild fire through Korea that Lone Star was leaving with bags full of cash and without paying a cent in taxes. The government stepped in and the deal remains in limbo. [Yoo's sentencing has to do with Lone's Star's purchasing of KEB's credit card unit which it enfolded under its name. Yoo bit the bullet for Lone Star for rumour mongering which lowered the stock price to a bargain basement price so that the American venture capital firm could pick up the shares for a song. In short, Yoo goes to gaol, and the Lone Star fund's KEB pays a fine of some us$26,5m. A footnote, 18Brumaire stands corrected: through the manipulation of foreign laws, Lone Star's KEB, is a company domiciled in Belgium!]
South Korea has opened its markets to foreign ownership and capital, although you would not believe it were you to listen to the tedious tirades of venture capitalists and bankers who have dealings in Korea. They harp on a tiresome one note for the plain and obvious reason that they cannot do business the way they do in the US or are able to bamboozle their way into plums of deals as they do in poorer or less sophisticated markets. South Korea is a ripe apple...it is awash in cash which since the election of Lee Myung-bek as president will be beating a path back to Korea from the self imposed exile when Roo Myun-hoo succeeded Kim Dae Jung in the Blue House. American bankers salivate at the huge amount of won that private citizens have accumulated in South Korea. They want to manage it, and if they do, the income in any number of highly complicated tables of fees, make cash registers ring cheerfully and the sound of gold coins bring music to bankers' ears.
But the tricky financial manipulations put a black mark against Lone Star's name, and they are chomping at the bit the more especially the free cash that they had hoped to walk away with from the HSBC deal is more an illusion than reality. Well, in a way, the Lone Star has been caught in the South Korean hen house...and is paying for it, regardless the rightness of its claim!

Year of the Rat

A new year is a time for reflexion and resolutions. The pictures of the crush of Chinese waiting for Godot's trains which are never coming so that they can journey back to home towns and villages, or from towns and villages to see family settled in larger cities, have been flashed on the television and printed daily in the world press. Patiently and not so patiently these hundreds of thousands stand in rain and snow and in sub zero temperatures nuturing the hope that they will find the warmth of friends and family as the Year of the Rat begins on its eve on 6 February 2008.
18Brumaire doesn't believe in reading the tripes of a cow, and is far away from the oracle at Delphi, so it did the next best thing, it consulted a shaman who had long ago set up shop in the neighbourhood. The shaman sat and hummed to himself as we asked him to read the future in this the year of the Rat. He demurred saying that the fog of confusion is hovering over China, yet he did see much nervousness among the Chinese Communist technocrats who are ruling with a tight leash China's future. Was this divine retribution, we asked, because Deng Xiao Ping had read too closely Milton Friedman thereby setting China on the rapid road to capitalism, a booming economy, and a recreation of a class society where the rich enjoyed life and the poor in the hinterlands struggled earnestly to eke out a bare existence? The shaman remained silent. Was the CCP's nervousness the reason Hu Jin tao has gone twice to Shanghai to calm the restiveness of those packed like sardines waiting for trains that are never coming? Is rising inflation, the spike in food prices, the heavy stones of runaway capitalist growth weighing more and more on the disinherited, on the wretched of the earth which the Chinese sing of when they intone 'L'internationale'? Was that the reason the Party marshalled soldiers to bring aid and comfort? The little that they can? And did the Party throw up hands in despair that they knew nothing of the severe toll of the weather in the countryside? Have they become like the emperors of old so distant and cyncial about the billions of Chinese lives they hold in the balance? Are they paralysed by the impotence of the powerful who see no way out of this crisis? Are they equally troubled that older reflexes the current crisis arouses, see the Party's weak response is a rebuke from the heavans, and that these very heavens are withdrawing from them the mandate of power? The shaman smiled, but remained silent. Is the year of the Rat, regardless of the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics, ushering in 7 fallow years? Is it the harbinger of the a weakening of the CCP's hold on China? 18Brumaire's handphone rang incessently; it was an urgent call, and off we went without any answers...