January 31, 2020

Roaming Charges: The Steal of the Century

by Jeffrey St. Clair

Street mural, East Hollywood. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

+ An impeached president meeting in the White House with a Prime Minister indicted for corruption and bribery to pitch a giant land swindle in the Middle East, which they market to a gullible press as a “peace plan.” Is there a more precise image for the current state of our political condition?

+ The best thing you can say about the Kushner/Netanyahu land theft plan is that all pretense of the US ever having been an “honest broker” in the Middle East has now been dropped. To quote Denny Green: “They are who we thought they were…”

+ Kushner: “The White House’s Middle East plan is a great deal and if Palestinians reject it, they’re going to screw up another opportunity, like they’ve screwed up every other opportunity that they’ve ever had in their existence.”

+ If there’s one thing Jared Kushner knows, it’s how to kick current tenants out of their homes and pull off a real estate heist…

+ Rarely has a crime (land theft) been so premeditated and brazenly documented and publicized by the perpetrators…

+ The Kushner/Netanyahu land grab plan gives new meaning to ghost-writing, since it seems to have been drafted by Andrew Jackson…

+ How Jared became the Expert-Texpert on the Middle East…

+ Nancy Pelosi on the Kushner/Netanyahu Land Swindle Plan: “There are some areas of common ground here.”

+ Usually, David Ignatius columns in the Washington Post are boring and tedious reads. Occasionally, he writes something that is boring, tedious and also morally repugnant, like this one: “The Trump Peace Plan is a Squeeze Play Against the Palestinians. It Might Work.”

+ Trump and Kushner have no more right to draw the maps of Palestine than did Sykes and Picot, Balfour, Allenby, Harry Truman, Ben Gurion, the UN, Anwar Sadat or Jimmy Carter…

+ Ilan Pappe: “Most Zionists don’t believe that God exists, but they’re quite certain that He promised them Palestine.”

+ Palestinian protester reenacts the Bush shoe toss during Trump’s speech on his Swindle of the Century…

+ A few hours later, the Palestinians issued their official response…

+ There is no viable and sustainable two-state solution. There never has been. But credit the Kushner/Netanyahu land grab plan for making that clear to almost everyone…

+ Are there any transcripts of White House phone calls, locked in that secret vault, making US aid to Israel contingent on cleaning up corruption?

+ Did Bolton tell the “truth” about Iraq, Chuck?

+ Lou Dobbs says the darnedest things…

+ Sorry Dershowitz, you don’t need to commit a crime to be impeached. The most serious offenses a president can commit are against the Constitution itself: waging unauthorized wars, assassinating political leaders, droning American citizens, taking money from projects Congress authorized and using it to fund projects Congress forbid, engaging in torture, refusing to enforce health, safety and environmental laws putting the lives of 10s of thousands of people at risk, using the power of the government to enrich yourself. Too bad Congress has turned a blind eye to these kinds of transgressions for decades.

+ It would be amusing to watch Dershowitz and Starr cross-examine Bolton in a battle of the former FoxNews blowhards…

+ On November 21, 1974, as the Watergate trials of Nixon’s henchmen were getting under way, Alan Dershowitz told the Associated Press: “I’m not happy seeing Nixon’s gang being tried by blacks and liberals in the District of Columbia.”

+ Tim Wu, author of The Curse of Bigness: “When Dershowitz taught me professional ethics at Harvard, his overriding message was that there is almost no such thing as unethical conduct when it comes to the zealous defense of a client. The whole semester was a prolonged exercise in self-justification for low behavior.”

+ Six years ago, Rand Paul received the Pillar Human Rights award from a whistleblower advocacy group. On Thursday, he publicly revealed the name of the alleged whistleblower in the Ukraine scandal.

+ Should I feel any pride in the fact that Trump has pilfered my “MSDNC” moniker?

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1221079753760833536

+ Joke heard this morning at Belle’s Bakery and Cafe in Studio City: Trump could shoot someone in the Senate and still get acquitted 53-47. Unless he shot a Republican, then it would be 52-47.

+ Elizabeth Warren may have submitted the best made-for-TV question (assuming there was anyone left watching this tedium on TV) for Chief Justice John Roberts to read aloud: “Does a trial presided over by the Chief Justice without witnesses further undermine public confidence in institutions like the Supreme Court?”

+ 18 years after the Bush administration went to war in Afghanistan against a terrorist group financed by the Saudis, the US is now “dropping” more bombs than ever. Isn’t this an admission of colossal failure? Who are we bombing? Why? What will it yield but more war?

+ Meanwhile, in Syria US combat missions are on the uptick. They can check out, but they’ll never leave…

+ So as Bernie gets closer to winning the Democratic nomination will the party elites screw him over the way they did: a) Eugene McCarthy, b) George McGovern, c) Jesse Jackson or d) Sanders 2016?

+ It’s going to get uglier and uglier for Sanders. A group called Democratic Majority for Israel is running $680,000 worth of attack ads against Sanders in Iowa, some of them raising questions about his physical health by highlighting his heart attack.

+ Is this a case of Israel meddling US elections, trying to subvert the campaign of a Jewish candidate?

+ David Frum, who was given a second act in American political life by MSDNC, is one of the crazier neocons, right out there with Richard Perle and Frank Gaffney. Here’s From writing in The Atlantic, now edited by another Iraq War hawk, Jeffrey Goldberg: “The members of the team around Bernie Sanders are about to experience what happens when a militia faces off in on an open field against a ruthless modern army armed with cluster bombs and napalm. They will be shredded and torched.”

+ Hillary says she still has the “itch” to run for president again and that she’d win in 2020 if she did. Bill may not have inhaled, but Hillary sure bong-sucking her own fumes…She also took time out to smear Sanders (who did 58 campaign events for her), saying “no one likes him, no one wants to work with him.”

+ Trump is the undisputed master of projection, but, tutored by Roy Cohn, he often does it tactically. Hillary, on the other hand, is psychologically incapable of facing any of her own flaws and compulsively accuses others of her own malignant character defects.

+ I agree, of course, with the thrust of Ralph Nader‘s counterpunch to Hillary. I would just note for the record that far from opposing the Libyan coup, Sanders not only supported the Senate Resolution calling for UN intervention, he co-sponsored it.

+ In 1972, Bernie Sanders sat down for an interview with the Brattleboro Informer. Sanders was 31-years-old and making his first run for office as gubernatorial candidate for the Liberty Union Party. The topic turned to George Wallace, the segregationist Governor of Alabama, who was mounting a bid for president as a Southern populist. “Wallace,” Sanders said, “advocates some outrageous approaches to our problems, but at least he is sensitive to what people feel they need. What we need are more active politicians working for the people.” The interview was unearthed and ruthlessly de-contextualized this week by the Washington Examiner, a few days before the Iowa caucuses.

+ So it’s the year 2020 and it turns out that the two leading Democratic Party candidates for president, Biden and Sanders, have both praised hardcore segregationists and are old enough to have known them in the flesh. And the previous Democratic Party nominee was a Goldwater Girl. Tell me again why we need a Republican Party, when we’ve got the Democrats? Anyone who wants a vivid portrait of who George Wallace was in his prime should read Robert Sherrill’s Gothic Politics in the Deep South, which came out in 1968 but remains as relevant to our politics now as it was then…

+ It should be noted that Jesse Jackson sought George Wallace’s support during his 1988 campaign. But the Wallace of 1972 was not the Wallace of 1987. After he was shot and paralyzed by Arthur Bremer in a Laurel, Maryland parking lot, Wallace had a coming-to-Jesus moment & by the late 70s he had apologized for his segregationist past and had sought redemption, a spiritual cleansing the Rev was willing to help facilitate…

+ Whether Bernie’s praise, faint though it may have been, of the segregationist George Wallace will help or hurt Sanders in all-white Iowa and New Hampshire is, of course, an open question.

+ It’s questionable how much real appeal Wallace had for working class voters. In 1976, running as a full-throttle populist, he only managed to win three southern states: AL, SC and Mississippi and garnered less than 2 million total votes, in a party that was still hospitable to many blue dogs. Jerry Brown, whose campaign was championed in the Village Voice by Alexander Cockburn and James Ridgeway, entered that primary very late (mid-May) and only really contested in 5 states. Still Brown won 500,000 more votes than Wallace and earned 301 to Wallace’s 57 delegates.

+ Biden keeps telling people, especially environmentalists and anti-war activists, to vote for someone else. I assume they’ll all take his advice…

+ Remember when Hillary cried on the eve of the 2008 New Hampshire primaries against Obama, claiming has campaign had maligned her in Iowa. It worked for her, she won in NH. If Joe sheds a snowflake/tear, he’ll end up like Ed Muskie…

+ Biden, who has just accused Sanders of not being a member of the Democratic Party, is the only candidate who has said he’s willing to consider picking a Republican as his running mate.

+ In attacking Sanders, Biden says “I’m a Democrat” like it’s a badge of honor instead of ignominy. Were Hubert Humphrey, Gene McCarthy or Paul Wellstone “Democrats”? They were members of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, who, like Sanders, caucused with the Democrats and, to varying degrees, voted with them…

+ Biden and the pre-teen “Super Predators”: “In the 1998 address, [Biden] went on to give his support for the ability to try “these 100,000 bad kids” in the adult criminal justice system rather than a separate juvenile system. (It’s not clear exactly where the 100,000 number came from, but in a 1997 press release, Biden said: “About 3,000 kids were arrested for murder in 1995, and a total of about 100,000 arrested for other serious, violent crimes — clearly these are the ‘lost’ children, all are not irretrievable, but plainly all must be subject to serious punishment.”)”

+ Social Security is the most common source of income for black women aged 62 and older, received by 49 percent of black women aged 62–64, 83 percent of those aged 65–74, and 88 percent of black women aged 75 and older. Why would any older black woman support Joe “the Slasher” Biden?

+ How “electable” is Biden if he can’t win the Iowa caucus or New Hampshire primary?

+ Mayor PeteBot blew off meetings on police oversight in South Bend to attend fundraisers and events across the country. Of course, his input would have been entirely counterproductive…

+ My money was on Manchin or Doug Jones as the first Democratic Senator to fold on impeachment. But never, EVER, underestimate DiFi‘s ability to muck things up…

+ Think how many food banks and shelters this could fund…Ad spends by 2020 candidates (includes future bookings, since 1/1/19):

Bloomberg: $270.4 million
Steyer: $156.8 million
Trump: $52 million
Sanders: $28.3 million
Buttigieg: $26.6 million
Warren: $20.9 million
Yang: $12.1 million
Biden: $11.6 million
Klobuchar: $7.3 million

+ News comes from Brazil that Glenn Greenwald has been hit with trumped up charges of “cybercrimes” by the Bolsonaro regime. One by one, the fascist thugs who run the planet are going after the journalists who expose their crimes and far too many other journalists sit in self-condemning silence as it happens…

+ Silly Pompeo. The way to get NPR to soften its coverage of your villainy is not to publicly berate its reporters but to become a corporate sponsor, like Monsanto, Boeing and the Koch Brothers…

https://twitter.com/davidgura/status/1221202464931749888

+ Thanks to Pompeo’s crack-up, NPR hasn’t been this relevant since Nina Totenberg snagged that interview with Anita Hill…

+ After Pompeo gets cheers at the Steal of the Century event, Trump said, “That reporter couldn’t have done too good a job on you yesterday, right? Think you did a good job on her, actually. That’s good. Thank you, Mike…Are you running for Senate? I guess the answer is no, after that.”

+ Trump’s approval rating by gender via new ABC/Post poll:

Men
57% approve
39% disapprove

Women
33% approve
62% disapprove

+ More than 50 US troops suffered from brain trauma after a couple rounds of Iranian rocket attacks in Iraq. Imagine the number of brain traumas inflicted on the citizens of Gaza, after three weeks of nonstop bombing during Operation Cast Lead…

+ Trump was today why he said no Americans were hurt after Iran retaliated for the Solemaini assassination even though more than 50 US service members were airlifted out for treatment. He said he heard they had “headaches,” but doesn’t consider potential traumatic brain injuries to be serious compared to losing limbs.

+ Trump told a soiree of mega-donors at Mar-a-Lago that Soleimani was “saying bad things about our country” before the strike, which led to his decision to authorize his assassination. “How much of this shit do we have to listen to? How much are we going to listen to?” Will he drone Kaepernick or Chomsky next?

+ New York Times called the Venezuelan pretender Juan Guido a “man whose moment has passed.” But did Guido even have a subliminal moment?

+ Trump in NJ: “Mexico is in fact — you will soon find out — paying for the wall. OK? You know?…No, the wall is ultimately, and very nicely, being paid for by Mexico.” Has anyone told AMLO?

+ The Pentagon made $35 trillion in accounting adjustments last year alone, a total that’s larger than the entire U.S. economy.”

+ Last week Gitmo torture shrink James Mitchell described taking Abu Zubaydah’s diaper off because he was worried feces would drip into his leg wound & cause infection during interrogations. This week Mitchell contradicted his previous testimony: “I don’t recall ever being in a situation where anyone used diapers except in renditions”

+ Corey Pein: “Maybe the CIA shouldn’t be running America’s wars and maybe mobsters shouldn’t be running the President and maybe Republicans shouldn’t be running the Democratic Party. Forgive me, I know how unreasonable this sounds.”

+ In 2016, it won almost twice the share of votes in the nation’s most destitute counties — home to the poorest 10 percent of Americans — that it won in the richest. And the more poor the GOP create through their savage economic and social policies, the bigger their base becomes! Voodoo Economics works!

+ Trump’s always talking about “human scum”. There’s a virulent strain of it sitting right next to him most mornings…Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross proclaimed this week that coronavirus will be good for American jobs: “I think it will help to accelerate the return of jobs to North America.”

+ The latest from the man who saw the inner goodness in the maniac who ran down Heather Heyer…

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1220463728535252992

+ The starting salary for a judge on the California Court of Appeal is $249,700. And it goes up with each appeal they deny…

+ A judge in Ohio has been calling ICE on defendants he “has a hunch” might be undocumented immigrants…

+ I was driving back from Long Beach on the 405 yesterday and if I’d been going faster than 3 MPH I’d have wrecked my daughter’s Prius when I saw that this mutant has a huge billboard near Century City exit promoting his noxious drivel…

+ On the side of the Nazis at the beginning of WW 2? That would more accurately describe the position of Henry Ford, Prescott Bush and Fred Trump, wouldn’t it, Ben?

+ In the name of diversity, Indonesia has just introduced a new all-female flogging squad. “I think she did a good job. Her technique was nice,” Banda Aceh Sharia police chief investigator Zakwan, who uses one name, told Agence-France Press.

+ JP Morgan supremo Jamie Dimon went on CNBC to warn that socialism will lead to an “eroding society.” Of course, mere “erosion” would be a helluva improvement over the wholesale strip mining of society (and nearly everything else) that Dimon and his fellow predators are so ruthlessly engaged in…

+ Among 41 countries, only the U.S. lacks paid parental leave.

+ Under Trump’s new healthy food pyramid for school lunches, pasta has been reclassified as a vegetable. Put some Reagan-era ketchup on it and you’ll have a complete vegan meal…

+ If Mel Brooks had made a mafia movie, the dialogue would have gone something like this…

Lev Parnas:  …A lot of the European countries they’re backstabbing us basically and dealing with Russia. That’s why you’re having such difficulty. I think if you take a look, the biggest problem there I think where you need to start is, we’ve got to get rid of the ambassador. She’s still left over from the Clinton administration.

Donald Trump:  Where? The ambassador where? Ukraine?

Lev Parnas:  Yeah. She’s basically walking around telling everybody, “Wait, he’s going to get impeached. Just wait.”

Donald Trump:  Really?

Lev Parnas:  It’s incredible.

Donald Trump: He’ll be gone tomorrow.

Lev Parnas:  Yeah.

Donald Trump:  What’s her [crosstalk]?

Speaker 12:  I don’t remember.

Lev Parnas:  I don’t have a name off back.

Speaker 6:  So one of the things that will be, now that we have a Secretary of State-

Donald Trump:  Get rid of her. Get her out tomorrow. I don’t care, get her out tomorrow. Take her out, okay? Do it.

Lynn:  Take a note.

Lev Parnas: Excellent.

+ Trump on AOC: “an embarrassing, barely-literate moron.”

+ AOC: “They can’t figure out if I’m a know-nothing or I’m a mastermind controlling the party. They can’t figure out if I’m an elitist or I’m embarrassingly poor. There’s no such thing, by the way.”

+ Kellyanne Conway explaining how Trump marked MLK Day…

+ Berkeley Law School’s Boalt Hall has been renamed simply “The Law Building,” a recognition of how its namesake, John Boalt, zealously argued, in the context of Chinese immigration, in favor of “extermination”–not “reconciliation”–of different races.

+ Rosemary’s Baby, the White House Version…

+ So much for these zealots being right-to-lifers…

+ Federal minimum wage:
2009: $7.25
2010: $7.25
2011: $7.25
2012: $7.25
2013: $7.25
2014: $7.25
2015: $7.25
2016: $7.25
2017: $7.25
2018: $7.25
2019: $7.25

Number of US billionaires:
2009: 359
2010: 403
2011: 413
2012: 425
2013: 442
2014: 492
2015: 526
2016: 540
2017: 565
2018: 585
2019: 609

+ The 22 richest men in the world have now amassed more wealth than all of the women in Africa…

+ Hey, Boris, you Brexit, you own it.

+ Anaïs Nin: “All of America is still in elementary school.”

+ Trashing giant saguaros for Trump’s vanity wall…

+ I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll BLOW your wall down. It wouldn’t take much lung-power, Mr. Wolf. A mere 37 MPH gust of wind sent the wall tumbling down in El Centro…(Buildings in the Portland area are required to withstand 137 MPH winds.)

+ And the hits just keep coming for America’s most ludicrous construction project. It also turns out that Trump’s border wall is vulnerable to flash flooding, and will require the installation of hundreds of large storm gates that will remain open for months every summer to prevent the structure from being damaged or toppled…

+ Meanwhile, the Del Puerto Canyon Reservoir, a key feature of Big Ag’s California water grab, would inundate active landslides, creating the risk of a lake tsunami, which could trigger the collapse of the dam.

+ Oceolots are cool as hell and will probably be doomed in the US by Trump’s Extinction Wall on the border…

+ Give us your white, your rich, your well-nourished..

+ Seems like old times…E. Jean Carroll, the writer who claims that Trump raped her in Bergdorff Goodmans back in the 90s, has collected “genetic material” from the dress she wore that day and, as part of her lawsuit against Trump, is requesting a DNA sample from the president to see if there’s a match.

+ There’s a forest version of Tea Pot Dome scandal unfolding on the Tongass National Forest in southeast Alaska, where the Forest Service is paying the timber industry to mark the trees it wants to log in one the largest timber sales ever offered by the agency….”Documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act reveal a series of agreements linking the federal agency, the Alaska Forest Association, and the Alaska Division of Forestry in a public-private partnership arrangement that ultimately grants logging companies first pick in the largest timber sale undertaken in any national forest in more than 30 years. The timber sale, dubbed the Prince of Wales Landscape Level Analysis (POWLLA), will take place over an area spanning roughly 1.8 million acres.”

+ Researchers working on the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica, an ice-mass the size of Florida, recorded water temperatures at the base of the glacier of more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above the freezing point. Critically, the measurements were taken at the glacier’s grounding line, the area where it transitions from resting wholly on bedrock to spreading out on the sea as ice shelves. In other words, the Antarctic ice sheets are melting from the bottom up…

+ According to a research paper published this week, “If temperatures rise by 2 degrees C, the regions of the world that are suitable for growing wine grapes could shrink by as much as 56%, according to a new study. And with 4C of warming, 85% of those lands would no longer be able to produce good wines.”

+ Trump in Iowa: “They want to kill our cows. I love cows. But they want to kill our cows. And that means you’re next.”

+ I drove by the Harris Feed Lot a couple of weeks ago. It’s in the San Joaquin Valley, off I-5 near Coalinga. You can’t miss the place. The stench is overpowering. The vast killing operation, in the heart of California Trump country, slaughters nearly 1000 cows a day. Who will tell, Donald?

+ William Gibson talking about his new near-future novel Agency: “Even before we became as aware as some of us now are of climate change, and of the fact that our species has inadvertently caused it, we seemed to be losing our sense of a capital-F Future. Few phrases were as common throughout the 20th century as “the 21st century,” yet how often do we see “the 22nd century”? Effectively, never.”

+ The “former” clients of Interior Secretary David Bernhard have invested $29.9 million in lobbying the Trump administration since January 2017 and they’re getting some big returns on their investment.

+ The environmental activists who live in Idaho are some of the most courageous people I know and they deal on a daily basis with depraved shit like the new plan to institute a year-round wolf hunting season with the objective of creating “wolf-free zones” ..

+ A swan slaughtering bill has just been introduced into the sadistic Idaho legislature…

+ Whenever I hear about an explosion that levels huge buildings and small towns, I just assume it happened in Texas and that the response will be to gut whatever health, safety and enviro regulations are still on the books…

+ Mega (L41), the oldest male Southern Resident orca, hasn’t been seen since August and researchers now believe he’s probably dead. Mega, who was born in 1977, frequently traveled with his sisters Matia (L77) and Calypso (L94), as well as Lolita’s presumed mother Ocean Sun (L25).

+ The Trump administration falsified the data after the California wildfires in order to promote more logging of public forests: “The emails show officials seeking to estimate the carbon emissions from devastating 2018 fires in California so they could compare them to the carbon footprint of the state’s electricity sector and then publish statements encouraging cutting down trees.”

+ Brian Moynihan, CEO of Bank of America, said banks need to be lending more money to fossil fuel companies not divesting from them. His logic seems to be: We need to put the planet out of its misery as fast as possible. It’s inhumane to allow it to linger…

+ Canada’s shame: “Indigenous people account for roughly five per cent of the population in Canada, but when it comes to federal custody Zinger said they now account for more than 30 per cent of the federal inmate population, up from 25 per cent four years ago. Indigenous women now account for 42 per cent of women in federal custody.”

+ On the very same day I wrote a short photo essay (“Who Cares If It Leaks?”) for CounterPunch on Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House in Los Angeles came the distressing news from Taliesin that after 88 years, the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture is closing…

+ How much money does Donald Fagan really need? Doing a “Steely Dan” tour after Walter Becker’s death is like marketing a Crosby, Stills and Nash tour without Stills and Nash (which, of course, I think David Crosby should do for pleasure of pissing people off)…

+ Many of the Washington Post’s best reporters (Wesley Lowery, Gene Scott, Juliet Eilperin, Ashley Parker, Phil Rucker, Monica Hesse) signed this letter of protest against the suspension of Felicia Somnez for Tweeting out a link to story exploring the Kobe Bryant rape case…and one of their worst, Craig “Prop or Not’ Timberg, didn’t…

+ Here is a cringeworthy sentence written about Elizabeth Warren in The Nation by DD Guttenplan: “And Warren’s policy chops and personal warmth and cold intellectual fury at the same bankers and billionaires and predatory monopolists targeted by her rival….” This language disturbed many readers and prompted a request for a prosecutorial ruling against further use of the phrase “policy chops.” The tribunal has deliberated on the matter and speedily concurred. Escort it to the tumbrils and don’t worry about being too rough with it along the way…

+ Our position at CounterPunch has always been that the NYT runs the occasional correction in order to make its readers believe that everything else in the paper is true. But this is one for the ages…

+ Trump Koan of the Week: “We have to protect all of these people that came up with, originally, the light bulb and the wheel and all of these things.”

Goo Goo G’Joob, Goo Goo Goo G’Joob…

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America
Philip Rucker and Carole Leonnig
(Penguin)

Transcendence: How Humans Evolved Through Fire, Language Beauty and Time
Gaia Vince
(Basic Books)

Processed Cheese: a Novel
Stephen Wright
(Little Brown)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

Is That So?
John McLaughlin, Shankar Mahadevan & Zakir Hussain
(Abstract Logix)

Mind Hive
Wire
(Pink Flag)

Football Money
Kiwi Jr.
(Persona Non Grata)

Democracy for Some, Dispossession for Others

“In the end, my desire to live in Gaza stemmed neither from adventurism nor from insanity, but from that dread of being a bystander, from my need to understand, down to the last detail, a world that is, to the best of my political and historical comprehension, a profoundly Israeli creation. To me, Gaza embodies the entire saga of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; it represents the central contradiction of the state of Israel – democracy for some, dispossession for others; it is our exposed nerve.” (Amira Hass, Drinking the Sea at Gaza)

Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3.