Will Congress Put Useless Fighter Jets Above America?

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Jon Soltz
June 22, 2009 - Huffington Post

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Let me get this straight. The latest polls say three-quarters of the American people want a public option in health care, yet it's in question. But, Congress is about to throw $369 million (on a down-payment of $2 billion) for a dozen F-22 fighter jets that even the Pentagon doesn't want. Oh, and the money for it? It's coming out of funds that were set aside to clean up dangerous nuclear waste in the U.S.

Only in Washington.

For those not familiar with the F-22 and why it's a waste, let me explain. It's one of the most - if not the most advanced air-to-air fighters in the world.... To fight the Soviet Union's next generation fighters. That's right, that's why it was developed. The fighter has limited air-to-ground capabilities, which renders it pretty much useless in the wars we're fighting right now, and might be fighting well into the future. President Obama and Secretary Gates have rightly decided to shift our procurement to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, which we could actually use, because of its air-to-ground and stealth capabilities.

Nevertheless, to play it safe, we've got 187 of the obsolete F-22s on-hand or in the pipeline already, just in case the Soviet Union ever comes through with their next-generation fighters. Secretary Gates asked for only four more, to complete what the Pentagon said it could use. After that, the military doesn't want any more of them. Air Force Secretary Michael Donley and Air Force Chief of Staff General Norton Schwartz have publicly withdrawn support for it saying, "The time has come to move on."

Apparently not those looking out for defense contractors, though.

And so, Congress is about to use the Defense Authorization Bill to pay for fighters we don't need from Lockheed-Martin, while taking money from cleaning up nuclear waste. Six decades of U.S. nuclear weapons research, testing, and production activities have left dozens of Department of Energy sites contaminated by radioactive and hazardous waste. The contamination threatens workers, communities, and the environment, including major water supplies.

Now, other veterans and I aren't for cutting the Pentagon budget in a way that would hurt our troops in the field, or hurt our ability to defend America now or in the future. But, our money is best spent on equipment that is so desperately needed in Iraq and Afghanistan - items like the Stryker armored vehicle, which the troops and veterans of VoteVets.org have almost unanimously raved about, for its ability to maneuver while protecting them from IEDs. That helps us a lot more than planes sitting idle somewhere.

So, a warning. To any in Congress who vote to keep this money for the F-22 in, don't try to present it as a pro-military vote. The military doesn't want it. Troops can't use it. Most veterans would say they're not for it. And none of us are for letting dangerous nuclear waste continue to seep into our land and water. So don't try to tie this pork to troops and veterans.

In fact, those who really care about the military, troops, veterans, and America will vote to strip the money for the F-22 out. We'll be watching.

Obama's Health Reform Waterloo

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Dave Lindorff
June 21, 2009 - ThisCantBeHappening.net

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The Obama administration and the Congressional Democrats are finally hitting the inevitable wall that was bound to confront them because of the president's congenital inability to be a bold leader, and because of the party's toxic decades-old decision to betray its working class New Deal base in favor of wholesale corporate whoredom.

The wall is health care reform, which both Barack Obama and the Democratic Party had hoped would be the ticket for them to ride to victory in the 2010 Congressional elections and the 2012 presidential election.

But you cannot achieve the twin goals of reducing health care costs and providing access to health care to 50 million uninsured people, while leaving the profit centers of the current system--doctors, hospitals and the health insurance industry--in charge and in a position to continue to reap profits.

Watching President Obama address the American Medical Association was a cringe-inducing experience as he assured the assembled doctors he was not going to expand Medicare payments "broadly" to cover all patients, or end the current "piece-work reimbursement" system that has so enriched physicians, or as he told them that savings would "not come off your backs." It was particularly cringe-inducing when he told the AMA that he knew that making money was not why its members were in the profession, saying, "That is not why you became doctors. That is not why you put in all those hours in the Anatomy Suite or the O.R. That is not what brings you back to a patient's bedside to check in or makes you call a loved one to say it'll be fine. You did not enter this profession to be bean-counters and paper-pushers. You entered this profession to be healers--and that's what our health care system should let you be."

Oh please. I know there are plenty of wonderful doctors who are dedicated to their patients and to patient care. But I also know plenty of doctors who have told me how half their classmates in medical school were mainly in it for the money, and that study halls and cafeterias of American med schools echo with the conversations about what can be made working in particular specialties. Not to mention the corrupt and insidious profit-sharing arrangements doctors enter into with labs, CAT-Scan and MRI test centers, pharmaceutical companies and other businesses, to earn profits by sending patients for unnecessary tests and treatments.

One can only imagine what he would be saying to insurance industry executives about his "reform" plans.

Because Obama and Congressional Democrats are unwilling to cut themselves off from the lucrative campaign-funding bonanza that is the health care industry, they cannot address seriously either the cost or the access crisis that plagues health care in the US, and that makes health care in this country cost 20 percent of GDP--twice what it costs in any other modern nation on a per capita or GDP basis, and that still leaves one in six Americans without ready access to even routine health care.

The answer to this crisis is obvious: a single-payer "socialized" system, in which you still have private doctors, and private or publicly run hospitals, but where the government sets the payment rates for treatment, and provides all compensation to health care providers.

If Democrats in Congress were serious about health care reform, they would immediately order the Congressional Budget Office to conduct a cost study of instituting such a program--a study that would include an estimate of the savings to individuals and employers if health care costs were lifted entirely off their backs (because obviously it would require considerable new government revenue to fund a single-payer program, but that's only half the equation--the other half, the savings, is simply ignored by critics and doomsayers on the right and in the health care industry). Instead, Obama and the Democratic Congress are studiously avoiding even allowing any mention of the single-payer option. (A New York Times report today on the various health care plans working their way through Congress, and coming out of the White House, completely blacked out any mention of a single-payer bill in the House authored by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), chairman of the House
Judiciary Committee, which the House leadership has prevented from even getting a token hearing.)

Obama's unwillingness to lead on this issue will doom his health care plan. There is obviously no way Congress is going to shake off its corrupt leech-like attachment to corporate sponsors and their cash-spreading lobbyists, but had the new president wanted to make a historic mark and cruise to victory in 2012, he could have, like President Lyndon Johnson before him in his campaign for Medicare in 1965, put himself solidly behind a single-payer plan and made the case that it could cut America's collective health bill in half while opening the door to every American.

Instead, he's likely to end up with worse than nothing--that is with even more uninsured Americans come 2012, and with health care costs moving up as a share of GDP--and could well find himself out of a job. The policy that his handlers, like White House Chief-of-Staff Rahm Emanuel, had conceived of as Obama's ticket to re-election, health care reform, could well prove instead to be his Waterloo.

That is if his adoption of a policy of expanded war in Afghanistan--another example of a failure to lead--doesn't prove to be this president's bigger policy disaster.

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Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. He is author of Marketplace Medicine: The Rise of the For-Profit Hospital Chains, and his latest book "The Case for Impeachment". His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Barack the Zionist

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Why President Obama's approach to settlements is better for Israel than Benjamin Netanyahu's is.

Gershom Gorenberg
June 17, 2009 - Slate

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It took Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu 10 days, but he has finally responded to President Barack Obama's speech in Cairo. On June 4, Obama challenged both Israelis and Palestinians to work toward a two-state solution. On Sunday, Netanyahu responded with an assent wrapped in so many preconditions as to render it virtually meaningless. Obama also demanded that Israel freeze the growth of its settlements in the West Bank. To this Netanyahu responded with defiant rejection.

Diplomatic entreaties over the two-state solution will continue in closed rooms. The dispute over the settlements, however, is likely to remain public. In that dispute, Obama is working for the classic Zionist goal of a thriving democratic state with a Jewish majority. Netanyahu is undercutting that strategic goal by sticking to a Zionist tactic that became obsolete decades ago.

A look at the history of settlement shows why. Before 1948, settling the land was one method used by Zionists in building a new Jewish society and working toward independence. "Settlement" normally referred to an agricultural community. The idea was that Jews must return not only to their homeland, but to the soil itself. The intellectuals sent themselves to the countryside. Most settlements were either communes—kibbutzim—or cooperative farming villages—moshavim. Both were intended to be the foundation of a socialist society.

Settlement was also—perhaps primarily—a tool in the struggle between two national movements, Jewish and Palestinian Arab, over one homeland. Particularly after the first proposal to partition Palestine between a Jewish and an Arab state, in 1937, the placement of new settlements was intended to stake a claim to more of Palestine and to determine the borders of the Jewish state-to-be. In the 1940s, kibbutzim also served as the base for the Palmah, the nascent Jewish army. Settlement was the tactic of a revolutionary movement.

In 1948, the revolution succeeded, and the state of Israel was established. Settlement, like the secret weapons caches under kibbutz cowsheds, became an anachronism. The state had an army. Its borders were set by armistice agreements. Romantic ideals notwithstanding, Israel developed as an urban, industrial society. The elected government set economic policy and eventually left socialism behind. The state's pressing challenge was not to extend Jewish hegemony over the land but to integrate the Arab national minority into its democracy.

And yet, in the words of Jared Diamond in Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail or Succeed, "The values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those … that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs." Diamond's dictum was born out after Israel's conquests in the unexpected war of June 1967.

Israeli leaders deadlocked on what to do with the newly occupied territories, especially the West Bank. They regarded it as part of the Jewish homeland and valued it for making Israel more defensible. Yet some officials warned from the start that giving citizenship to the Palestinians of the West Bank would turn Israel into a binational state—and that ruling them without giving them rights would be seen as colonialism. "My government has decided not to decide," Prime Minister Levi Eshkol told President Lyndon Johnson in 1968.

In the absence of considered policy, leaders and activists fell back almost reflexively on the obsolete tactic of settling the land. With no agreed overall plan, each new settlement asserted a permanent claim to rule a bit more territory. Initially, Labor Party governments established kibbutzim and moshavim. When the right-wing Likud party took power in 1977, it jettisoned that approach. Instead, it subsidized bedroom communities in the West Bank.

Thus did the suburban dream replace the socialist dream. Some politicians opposed settling in a particular area, but virtually none rejected settlement as such. It was, after all, a Zionist value.

This time, though, settlement did not build the state. It undermined the state. In October 1967, the government stopped printing maps with the prewar borders. In the countryside portrayed by those maps, settlements blurred the border between Israel and occupied territory. Legal changes allowed settlers to live under Israeli law while Palestinians lived under the law of military occupation. Whatever it is called, this two-tiered legal system undercuts democracy.

The settlements became Israel's largest ongoing public project. But the costs are scattered through the national budget, woven into outlays for the ministries of Defense, Housing, Education, Interior, and others. There is no overall total available. The lack of transparency not only prevents informed debate of the costs, it is another blow to democracy.

From the start, settlement activists and supportive officials have put their cause above the law. A Cabinet minister funded the very first settlement in occupied territory—in the Golan Heights in 1967—with money designated to give jobs to the unemployed. A recently leaked Israeli army database shows that more than 30 government-approved settlements are built partly on privately owned Palestinian land. Since the mid-1990s, in a massive rogue operation, more than 100 so-called "outpost" settlements have been established without legally required government approval—but with funding and other assistance from multiple government agencies.

Through settlement, the state of Israel has reverted to an acre-by-acre struggle between Jews and Palestinians for control of land. The settlement enterprise has reversed history, turning Israel from a state into a national movement. And the dilemma remains: Israel cannot be a democracy with a Jewish majority and at the same time rule the West Bank. The solution today, as it was when the United Nations debated the Palestine question in 1947, is partitioning the land between two states.

Netanyahu, looking backward, does not see this. Settlers, he said Sunday, are a "pioneering, Zionist community with values." His choice of language is revealing: It was during the pre-independence struggle that "pioneering" was the highest ideal. Obama, looking forward, recognizes that an end to settlement growth is an essential step toward division of the land. When that division takes place, it will not only bring the establishment of a Palestinian state. It will bring the re-establishment of Israel.

Whale meat trade increases, despite ban

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Jun 21, 2009 - AFP

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Oslo, Norway – Despite being officially illegal, the international trade in whale meat between the whale-hunting nations is quietly picking up again, say enviromental campaigners.

The issue has already become one of the flashpoints between pro- and anti-whaling campaigners in the run-up to the five-day annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission, which opens Monday.

Delegates at the conference, which this year will be in the Portuguese island of Madeira, will also debate the issue.

Japan, Norway, Iceland -- the main whaling nations -- all want to lift the ban on the trade, which is outlawed under the terms of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).

Despite the 1986 international moratorium on whale-hunting, Norway and Iceland have resumed whaling, having reserved their position on the moratorium. Japan uses an opt-out that allows whaling for scientific purposes.

After a gap of two decades, Japan started importing whale meat in 2008: a few tens of tonnes of Iceland whalemeat and less than 10 tonnes from Norway.

This year, the Nordic nations want to increase that amount. One Norwegian firm, Lofothval, has obtained export licences for 47 tonnes of whale meat.

Iceland plans on exporting half its quota of 100 small Minke whales or 150 Fin whales.

For Truls Gulowsen, the head of environmental campaigners Greenpeace in Scandinavia, it is a sign of their desperation.

"That shows the despair of the whaling industry, that can't sell its products in Norway and so is trying to get rid of them abroad at any price," he said.

"But the Japanese eat less and less whale meat and their warehouses are alreday full of products that the local hunters can't get rid of."

Industry professionals reject that argument. For them, the Japanese market is a promising new market offering higher prices -- even if they will not discuss the precise figures.

"Japan, that's more than 120 million inhabitants," said Rune Froevik of Lofothval.

"Certainly, some of them still have to get their palates accustomed to a product that they haven't all tasted, but they are receptive because a large part of their diet already comes from the sea.

And the Japanese consume the fat of the whale, which in Norway is considered a waste product.

"Each catch becomes more profitable because a small Minke whale contains 1.5 tonnes of meat and 500 kilos of blubber," said Froevik.

As well as their reservations over the 1986 whaling moratorium, Japan, Iceland and Norway have also questioned the need for having whales on the CITES list of endangered species.

That position leaves them free to trade among themselves in the meat.

"We have certainly tried to get the whale off this list but we have come up against political obstruction," said Oeystein Stoerkersen, who heads up Norway's Directorate for Nature Management.

"The experts, including those abroad, agree that the species we are hunting are not under threat, but certain decision-makers in the United Sates, Britain and in Germany or France are trying to scrounge votes by pandering to ill-informed public opinion," he said.

According to the International Whaling Commission's scientific committee, the North Atlantic has 30,000 Fin whales and 174,000 Minke whales.

For Norway that is enough to all the harpooning of about 1,000 whales a year.

Neo-Zen Moment of the Day