In order for Occupy Wall Street (and all existing and soon-to-come replicas of this movement) to achieve a cohesive (and thus successful) movement, the protesters must unite on a single message that encompasses all of their/our problems, personified by one man, the ousting of which would become the first step to solving all our socio-politico-social problems.

Obama isn’t the source of those problems, neither are any politician, government official or candidate. Sure, they are corrupt, the majority of them, but if we go after their head; that one man who runs the show, and demand his fall, we can have real change. If Obama taught us anything, it is that the government is inept and incapable of solving anything.

The person I’m talking about is the corporation (legally, a corporation is person and citizen). For what is the difference between a corporation and a partnership? The difference is one word: liability. In a corporation (aka limited liability company), the owner(s) are not liable for the failure or bankruptcy of the corporation, since the corporation is legally a person who can sue and be sued. And when a corporation goes bankrupt, the owner(s) owe the world nothing.

A corporation only exists on paper. And when the true owners (the largest share holders) receive privileged information about the upcoming collapse and bankruptcy of the corporation, they immediately and secretly sell their shares and come off clean, only to restart or join another corporation, on paper, and sell its stocks to easy-money-craving, speculative investors, and let it grow until it reaches its growth climax, only to find the owners selling their shares and escaping once again unharmed.

The reason why they cannot be caught or indicted is because they have previously paid corrupt government officials to change the laws, mostly removing laws (deregulation), in their favor so that now everything they do is completely legal. I strongly believe that the one key regulation that we need to implement in order to begin the process of fixing our socio-economy, and in turn the world’s socio-economy, is to make company owners, profiteers, and speculative investors liable.

In other words, when an unlimited liability company fails, all share holders are personally responsible to pay off the company’s standing debts or they’d face bankruptcy themselves. This risk factor alone, reintroduced into the system, would encourage company owners to become more risk-averse and more conscientious towards the public and the integrity of their business, and it would dissuade speculative investors from speculating. It would also curb the imperial-like expansion of companies throughout the world that have today earned more money than entire nations.

The impact of outlawing corporations from existence would ripple throughout the system. Consider the following bouquet of consequences:

1 – With no corporations, there would be no more stock markets that can get affected by “investors’ speculation” and threaten an economic melt-down. Petrol, for instance, will return to being priced like a water or soda pop, the price of which is determined by supply and demand, not by pseudo-factors like market expectations and the weather!

2 – When a company owner screws up, it would be their ass on the hot seat at court, not some imaginary “legal person,” which means company owners would become way more responsible and careful.

3 – With no more gigantic corporations, small businesses can finally compete more fairly and we would get closer to what capitalists, classical and neo-classical economists refer to as “the most efficient economic system possible,” that is, towards perfect competition.

4 – There would be no more oligopolies initiating price wars or engage in price fixing that, unintentionally, lead to unwanted inflation rates beyond our capacity to consume (what capitalists refer to as inefficiency in the distribution of resources; inefficiency means resources are being needlessly wasted).

5 – The country’s wealth would be more spread out, i.e. the inequality gap would shrink, without having to abandon the capitalist system.

6 – The number of wars would substantially decrease, since there would be no huge corporations trying to impose trade agreements on poorer countries. There would be no large corporations with enormous leverage powers to bribe (or “negotiate” business deals with) politicians overseas. And when that is gone, the US government will no longer be required to pursue predatory tactics, i.e. bullying other countries into agreeing to open their markets for our gigantic corporations to enter and destroy their local economy.

7 – The World Bank and IMF might finally go back to doing what they were originally designed to do back in 1944. With no corporations around, the World Bank and IMF would no longer require from the countries receiving the loans to draw contracts with US firms like Bechtel and Haliburton, rather they would choose trust-worthy and responsible companies to fulfill their major construction projects to build their poor nations in the same way that Japan and Germany (and the rest of Europe) were rebuilt.

So, to summarize: the reason why we can’t get anything changed is because our government in the United States, and all its client governments around the world, have become vessels emptied of their flesh – us the people – and replaced with corporate parasites. As things stand today, we vote between the Republican and Democratic candidates that the corporate media approves of, both with campaigns funded by corporations, followed by corporate lobbying to get congress to pass the laws corporations want.

Our democracy has become meaningless, since the real power is in the hands of a bunch of unelected corporate owners who are the true dictators – they dictate the future of our economy and the distribution of wealth and resources (more for them, less for everybody else); they dictate which country we invade and which country we pull out of; and they dictate which advertisement to watch and where to watch it, all paid for by tax cuts and subsidies which the corporate media deceptively conceals from the public.

Very few Americans know, for example, that city and state local governments compete with one another in who provides the lowest taxes to attract corporations to move their “job-creating” asses to those cities and states, while making up for that lost income by raising the sales tax and income tax on individuals and small businesses.

The corporate media’s brainwash is not just in what they show, but in what they don’t show. Thus, the only way to make the media tell the truth is to become incapable of avoiding the occupation movements — we who occupy Wall Street today, and shall occupy corporate buildings all over the country in the near future.

To succeed, the protesters must unite under one flag; one message, as the Egyptians have done. Eight million (of 80 million) Egyptians chanted in the streets: “The people demand the fall of the regime.” And our message should go one step further. What we should demand is the fall of the actual regime in charge: the corporation. Let us unite our message to the world. Let us chant: “The people demand the fall of corporations. The people demand the fall of Wall Street.”

The documentary, keeping in line with the running theme in all of Moore’s works,  looks at the relationship between the Big Man and the Bigger Man Known as the Government. This time, however, it’s kinda saucy as the film looks at the the passionate and lustful romance between two, which seems to go beyond the simple relationships of convenience which he’s explored before. Capitalism looks at the events leading up to recent “Global Financial Meltdown” and the stimulating aftermath. Moore does the usual obnoxious harassing and poignant questioning which has become iconic of his work.  

Truth be told, after watching the trailer about five times, the only thing that got me going was the use of M.I.A’s Paper Planes. Best use of a gun as an instrument since Bone Thugs and Harmony’s Thug Lyf.

I’m personally torn when it comes to Michael Moore. While he’s definitely a Leftist sensationalist with a knack for convenient manipulation and good song choice, this controversy has helped bring otherwise forgotten perspectives on important issues to the mainstream. Roger and Me brought to light the individual and collective economic devastation which raged in Flint, Michigan following the closure of several GM auto plants during the 1980s. Bowling for Columbine looked at one of the most sensitive moments in American history, begging the American audience to look beyond the actions of the individual perpetrators towards the social, historical and political promotion of violence within American culture. Fahrenheit 9/11 touched countless nerves, focusing on the events and relationships leading up to the September 11th attacks as well as the ensuing political and social chaos. While this particular film received the most flack, out of all of Moore’s films, it did bring into popular American discourse the questioning of America’s interventionist role and the actions of the increasingly neo-Conservative Republican party. My only complaint, other than the sensationalism, was that it became an equivalent to an academic source for anyone looking for ammo against the Bush administration. Seriously. That was annoying as hell.

Then there was Sicko, which looked at the American healthcare system and questioned its self-acclaimed greatness. The film looked at again the relationship between the Big Man and the Bigger Man, and asked critical questions regarding the treatment of American citizens, including those who risked their lives to help in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on site, by a healthcare system run on private insurance companies. There were definitely major issues with the film, but it nevertheless brought into the mainstream the plight of millions of individual Americans who have unfortunately had to choose sometimes between life and death on issues where there should not have to be any such choice. 

So now, we’re at Capitalism: A Love Story, which is already receiving a lot of YouTube flack. I’m sure it will be entertaining and I’m sure it’ll anger a lot of people as well as highlight key points and issues which are often overlooked in the mainstream American media. There is far more to the Global-Judgement-Day-Is Here-Financial-Crisis than AIG, foreclosures and stimulus packages and for that I’m glad Moore, as much as he irks me at times, has come out with this film.

That being said, however, I’m probably not going to check it out, unless Will pays me for being a film critic.

“Every policy the Palestinians are now enduring was practiced on the American Indian,” Means said on the Blog Talk Radio show, hosted by Brenda Golden, Muskoke Creek. “What the American Indian Movement says is that the American Indians are the Palestinians of the United States, and the Palestinians are the American Indians of the Middle East,” Means said. Further, he points out that the Zionists who control Israel now control the United States. “The power of the US in world politics diminishes every day.”

“Now they have found a house servant by the name of Obama.” Means said Obama was selected as a “man in charge to take the heat,” because of the “bad cop” image that Bush put forth in the world. “Now, all of a sudden, it is, ‘We’re so great. We elected a black man to be president.’”

Means added that Obama is a black man who was raised by his white grandmother and has appointed Zionists to key positions and that the US is headed for a new era of menial jobs. On Indian lands, Means reminds us, the only people who get ahead are those who sell out to the colonial system. Now, there is massive and sophisticated propaganda by the Zionists and the U.S. Both countries, he said, are liars. In the US, American Indians have been shut out of history, philosophy and the arts, in a “total blackout.” The United States does not want to be reminded of the smallpox blankets, theft, colonialism and mistreatment of the American Indian, he said.

Read the full article on Counterpunch.

The current global economic crisis has all the earmarks of an epoch-defining event. Mainstream economists — not usually known for their exaggerated language — now openly employ phrases like ‘systemic meltdown’ and ‘peering into the abyss.’ On October 29, for example, Martin Wolf, one of the top financial commentators of the Financial Times, warned that the crisis portends “mass bankruptcy,” “soaring unemployment” and a “catastrophe” that threatens “the legitimacy of the open market economy itself… the danger remains huge and time is short.”

There is little doubt that this crisis is already having a devastating impact on heavily-indebted American households. But one of the striking characteristics of analysis to date — by both the left and the mainstream media — is the almost exclusive focus on the wealthy countries of North America, Europe and East Asia. From foreclosures in California to the bankruptcy of Iceland, the impact of financial collapse is rarely examined beyond the advanced capitalist core.

The pattern of capitalist crisis over the last fifty years should alert us to the dangers of this approach. Throughout its history, capitalism has functioned through geographical displacement of crisis — attempting to offload the worst impacts onto those outside the core. This article presents a short survey of what this crisis might mean for the Global South.

World trade drops
This crisis hits a world economy that — for the first time in history — is truly global. Of course exports and the control of raw materials have always been important to capitalism. But up until the 1970s most capitalist production was organized nationally. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s both production and consumption began to be organized at the international scale. Today, all markets are dominated by a handful of large companies operating internationally through interconnected chains of production, sub-contracting and marketing. Almost every product we consume has involved the labour of thousands of people scattered across the globe — from the production of raw material inputs, research and development (R&D;), assembly, transport, marketing, and financing. At one level this interconnectedness of production expresses the fact that human beings have become one social organism. At the same time, it continually runs up against a system organized for the pursuit of individual, private profit.

This interconnectedness has taken a very particular form over the last couple of decades. The world market has been structured around the consumption of the American (and, to a lesser extent, European) consumer. Goods produced in low-wage production zones such as China and India — using raw materials mostly sourced from other countries in the South — are exported to the U.S. where they ended up in the ever expanding homes of an overly-indebted consumer. Control of this global chain of production and consumption rests in the hands of large U.S., European and Japanese conglomerates.

This structure helped to fracture and roll-back national development projects across the globe. Coupled with the debt crisis of the 1980s, export-oriented models of development were imposed by the International Monetary Fund and other financial institutions on most countries in the South. Many of the elites of these countries bought into this development model as they gained ownership stakes in newly privatized companies and access to markets in the North.

The ever-expanding consumption of the U.S. market was predicated on a massive rise in indebtedness. U.S. consumers were encouraged to take on vast levels of debt (through credit cards, mortgages, ‘zero-down’ financing, etc) in order to maintain the consumption levels that underpinned global demand. The dollars that enabled this growth in debt came from financial instruments that were purchased by Asian central banks and others around the world. These institutions lent dollars back to the U.S. where they were channeled to consumers through banks and other mechanisms.

The U.S. real estate market was just one of the financial bubbles that permitted this treadmill of increasing indebtedness to continue. People could continually refinance their mortgages as real estate prices went up. But with the collapse of this bubble global world demand is suddenly drying up. Because of the interconnectedness of world trade, this will have a very severe impact on every country across the globe, particularly in the South.

One measure of this is shown by a relatively obscure economic indicator, the Baltic Dry Index (BDI). The BDI measures the cost of long-distance shipping for commodities such as coal, iron ore and steel. From June — November 2008, the BDI fell by 92%, with rental rates for large cargo ships dropping from $234,000 a day to $7,340. This massive drop reflects two factors: the reduction in world demand for raw materials and other commodities, and the inability of shippers to have their payments guaranteed by banks because of the credit crisis.

Falling commodity prices also demonstrate this drop-off in world trade. Copper prices, for example, have fallen 23 per cent in the past two months. Chinese consumption of the metal, critical to much industrial production, has fallen by more than half this year. ArcelorMittal, the world’s largest steelmaker, stated on November 5 that its global output would decline by more than 30 percent. The World Bank (which has consistently underestimated the severity of the current downturn) is now predicting global trade volumes to shrink for the first time since 1982.

Social dislocation
This drop in world trade will have a particularly devastating impact on those countries that have adopted ‘export-oriented’ models of development. This model was heavily promoted by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and most economists over the last couple of decades. As global demand shrinks, countries reliant on exports will be faced with collapse of their core industries and potential mass unemployment. This will place further pressure on wages as new labour reserves augment already large levels of unemployment.

Standard and Chartered estimate, for example, that Chinese exports could tumble to “zero or even negative growth” in 2009. JP Morgan Chase is predicting that Chinese exports will fall 5.7 percent for every one percent drop in global economic growth. This is not just a matter of getting by on smaller levels of still positive growth. China needs to create 17 million jobs a year in order to deal with the large numbers of farmers moving from the countryside to urban areas. This means that the country must maintain high rates of growth. Even if growth drops from 11-12% annually to 8% the country faces potentially huge social dislocation. Already, workers in China are protesting in the millions as their factories close and owners abscond with unpaid wages.

A collapse in world trade is not the only potentially devastating threat this crisis presents to the global periphery. Like the 1997 Asian Crisis, the rapid withdrawal of foreign funds from stock markets and other investments in the South could cause the meltdown of currencies and the collapse of industries already reeling from slowdowns in trade. A quick survey of a few countries demonstrates the deadly mix of capital outflows, high inflation and drops in export earnings:

In Pakistan, foreign-currency reserves have dropped more than 74 percent in the past year to about $4.3-billion (U.S.). The country is teetering on the edge of total collapse and urgently requires $6-billion in order to pay for imports and service its existing debt. The dire situation of foreign outflows led the German foreign minister to state on 28 October that the “world has just six days to save Pakistan” (at the time of
writing it looks like Pakistan will get this money in the form of loans from the IMF and/or countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council).

Sri Lanka has lost nearly 25% of its foreign reserves since the beginning of August as foreign investors repatriate their dollar holdings from the country. Nearly 50 percent of Sri Lanka’s textile and garments exports (accounting for some 43 percent of total foreign exchange earnings) went to the U.S. in 2007, while another 45 percent went to the EU. These exports will likely be decimated by a generalized collapse in demand. The weakening of the Sri Lankan rupee over the last few years has contributed to a 20% increase in inflation, with high food prices hitting the poorest most heavily.

India has seen its foreign exchange reserves drop by 17% since March 2008. Over $51-billion (U.S.) left India during the third week of October, the largest fall in eight years. The Indian textile industry, which makes up the second largest component of the country’s labour force after agriculture, exports 70% of its product to U.S. and European markets. It is expected that textile and garment orders will decline by at least 25% over winter and mass lay-offs have already begun. On October 29, the Association of Chambers of Commerce and Industries predicted that companies in seven key industries (steel, cement, finance, construction, real estate, aviation, and information technology) would need to cut 25% of their workforce. This at a time when the country struggles with an immense gap between rich and poor. The wealth of the richest 53 people in India is equivalent to 31 percent of the country’s GDP, yet according to the World Bank 42 percent of the population lives below the official poverty line of $1.25 a day.

These patterns are repeated across the globe. Countries including Mexico, Turkey, Indonesia, Brazil, Argentina, South Korea as well as the poorer countries of Eastern and Southern Europe are faced with collapsing growth rates, capital flight, and declines in the value of their currency. In many cases, these problems have been exacerbated due to a proliferation of low-interest loans taken by individuals and companies that were denominated in foreign currency (such as Swiss Francs, Euros, and Dollars). These loans initially offered a better rate of interest than the domestic currency, but, as local currencies have dropped in value, the amount of money
required to be repaid has increased dramatically. Business Week estimates that borrowers in so-called ‘emerging markets’ owe some $4.7-trillion (U.S.) in foreign-denominated debt, up 38% over the past two years. This is the reassertion of a debt crisis from the 1980s that never really went away, but only partially subsided.

The IMF returns
This unfolding social crisis has returned the IMF to center stage. Typically, the IMF lends to those countries facing potential collapse and, in return, demands the fulfillment of stringent economic conditions. The scale of borrowing is already immense: Iceland ($2.4-billion), Ukraine ($16.5-billion), and Hungary ($15.7-billion) have been extended loans with Pakistan, Serbia, Belarus, and Turkey likely candidates in the near future.

The conditions that come with this latest round of IMF lending have been particularly opaque. The policies that Ukraine is expected to pass, for example, are not yet known despite the fact the country has essentially agreed to take a $16.5-billion loan from the IMF. Hungary has agreed to cuts in welfare spending, a freeze in salaries and canceling bonuses for public sector workers yet the final details have not been made public. Iceland was required to raise interest rates to 18% with the economy predicted to contract by 10% and inflation reaching 20%.

We can certainly expect that the conditions attached to loans in the poorer countries in the Global South will be much more stringent than those imposed on these European countries. There is little doubt that these countries will face massive job losses, intense pressure to privatize public resources, and slashing of state spending on welfare, education and health in the name of ‘balanced budgets.’ Whether these attacks on the social fabric are successful, however, will ultimately depend on the level of resistance they face.

Authoritarian state
On 11 October, a meeting of progressive economists in Caracas, Venezuela, issued a statement warning that the dynamic of this crisis “encourages new rounds of capital concentration and, if the people do not firmly oppose this, it is becoming perilously likely that restructuring will occur simply to save privileged sectors.” This is an important point to understand. Capitalist crisis doesn’t automatically lead to the end of capitalism. Without effective resistance and struggle, the crisis will eventually be resolved at the expense of working people — particularly those in the South.

This could be one of the most serious crises that capitalism has faced in living memory. But we should not be fooled into thinking that the system will somehow be reformed or its contradictions solved through peaceful and orderly means. The most likely immediate outcome is a hardened, more authoritarian state that seeks to restore profitability through ratcheting up repression and forcing people to accept the loss of jobs, housing and any kind of social support. In the South, this will inevitably mean more war and military repression.

If this is not prevented then the system will utilize this crisis to restructure and continue business as usual. This is why resistance — both at home and abroad — will be the single most important determinant to how this eventually plays out. In Latin America, for example, attempts to restrict capital flight, place key economic sectors under popular control, and establish alternative currency and trade arrangements are important initiatives that point to the necessity of solutions beyond capitalism. In the Middle East, popular resistance to the political and economic control of the region has undoubtedly checked the extension of U.S. power.

Any displacement of crisis onto the South means playing different groups of people against one another. For this reason, the ideological corollary of war and military repression abroad is likely an increasingly virulent racism in the North — directed at immigrants, people of color and indigenous populations. This means that for activists in North America the question of global solidarity and resistance to racism must be placed as a central priority of any effective fightback. Any attempt to turn inwards, or dismiss international solidarity as less important in this phase will be disastrous for all working people — across the globe.

Tarboush Tip: Centre for Research on Globalization

In response to greater international calls for more aid and assistance to Gazans, many of whom suffer from mal nutrition, Israel granted two popular food chains, Krispy Kreme doughnuts (KKD) and Burger King (BKC), permission to open franchises in the Gaza Strip. This move was warmly received by the teenagers, prospective Big and Tall shop owners, cardiologists and dermatologists of Gaza.

On the same day, the Israelis denied three trucks of fresh produce at the Rafah crossing. An Israeli statement linked the two as acts of solidarity with Gaza’s children.

“As kids we never liked to eat greens” the official statement read. “And not even the so-called Palestinian Resistance can resist those fine maple donuts.”

The Gaza government, a government Israel and many western governments label as militant, called on international pressure when it discovered the Burger Kings, unlike those in America, would not carry their famous gold, cardboard King’s crowns usually given out to children. A spokesman decried this as “one more example of the western conspiracy to keep us powerless and weak.”

Tom Levitt, communication coordinator for Krispy Kreme, told reporters, “We are glad that our donuts are well received by both Palestinians and Israelis.”

When questioned about the impact on traditional sweets-makers, he replied, “as my Lebanese sister-in-law taught me, there is only so much Baklava one can take.” He added that the chains would cater to local tastes, “the donuts will come from Israeli dough and will be topped with crunched Palestinian nuts.”

Ari Mirt’z, an amateur poet and spokesperson for the right wing Israeli group “Killing Them Softly,” protested the opening of these chains. He told Israeli Army radio “Palestinians who do not recognize our right to exits should not get to enjoy the broiled succulance of a Whopper, nor the explosive sweetness of a Boston Crème-filled doughnut.”

Palestinian civil society groups were angered. Mr. Jehad Qader, a local activist educated in Serbia, complained that Burger King’s fish sandwich was vastly inferior to McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish sandwich. “when the Israelis let us go fishing off our coast, we eat fishes so much, even in our maqlooba. The McFish is better for Gaza because it does not have that fishy taste of the BK Big Fish.”

Burger King was only proposed after a fierce debate in the pages of the New York Times. The influential writer Thomas Friedman argued that McDonalds should not be given a license. It would only further disprove his crackpot theory that countries with McDonalds do not fight each other. This convinced his friends in the Arab League to propose Burger King as a substitute, which Israel accepted. This was the greatest diplomatic victory by the Arab states in recent times.

In the meantime, Mr. Mirt’z and his group are partnering with American Soy Bean producers to “supply Palestinians with soy milk and other soy products.” Mr. Mirt’z called this a solution to the demographic threat. “It’s a fact that Soy milk lowers sperm count” he said.

This gesture has given the two chains a new international prominence. In some circles, this represents how corporations can promote peace between peoples. To show his appreciation, former President Jimmy Carter planned a high profile visit to a Krispy Kreme in Georgia. It was thwarted by Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz’s threat of a lawsuit against the Doughnut maker. The professor later went on CNN to praise his show of chutzpah.

[Tarboush tip: Will]

WILL: I have several million dollars in a drug-human trafficking-prostitution-day care center ring. How will this investment be effected?

MOHAMMAD: Normally such loot remains safe from macro economic fluctuations. However, judging by your inability to spell affected, I think your cash-money is at a great risk of being lost due to your own incompetence.

WILL: Good point. “Macroeconomic” is one word, though, so check yourself. Be careful, my friend, you are talking to the runner-up of the 1991 city of Dearborn spelling bee.

NABEEL: i have 25 bicycles stored and ready to go for when the shit hits the fan. i’m ready for this madmax shit to go down. i’ll be trading my extra bikes for grain and antibiotics.

WILL: When the madmax shit does go down, I invite you all to seek refuge in the Arab enclave state of Dearborn if you can make it there. It will be run as a shia’ fundamentalist state though. So ladies, bring your burkas; men, grow your beards.

Images like these, on the front pages of major news sites for the past few weeks, are rarely accompanied by captions.

So I have to create my own, and I always assume that sad stock traders must be thinking something like:

“Fuuuuuuuck…. there goes my seven figure bonus this year.”

I wish someone would interview these guys.

I’d really like to know if they are about to lose things that actually matter. That way, I can at least pretend to feel bad for them. Except, it’s kind of hard right now.

I’m fairly well traveled and I’ve rarely taken in sights like this outside the US. Of course, there are fat people all over the world, but they eat so much shit in this country that it’s no wonder obesity is the second leading cause of preventable death in the US. The fast food culture we live in is largely responsible for that. We can find these ever-growing portions of nastiness wherever we turn. If there isn’t a Jerry’s at that Exxon or a Taco Bell around the corner, there’s likely to be some billboard reminding us what we’re missing out on. Most of us don’t live on the same block as a fast food ‘restaurant’ but we have TVs that show commercials of colorful looking foods that can be prepared/bought in a matter of minutes.

Anyone who has ever eaten fast food after being fooled by one of these advertisements has surely been disappointed by what they got after forking over their money. For starters, it never looks as good as it does in the commercials. My personal experiences have always been laden with a heavy serving of regret that comes in two stages – the first immediately after finishing my meal (or throwing some of it away), the second a physical type of regret on which I’ll spare you the details.

I’d take a shawarma sandwich (prepared with unwashed hands in sweltering heat) over a Volcano Taco or BigMac any day. In fact, I’d kill for some Arab-style fast food right about now…  If I’m in a hurry to eat something back in Beirut, I have a plethora of choices to satisfy my palate and stomach without wasting time or money. In most places in the US however, our choices are severely limited.

I hate seeing American fast food chains in the Middle East, not only because it’s a sign of the bad side of US-culture invading ours, but because people actually give them business. There are more and more marketing campaigns back home convincing us to eat shit instead of good food. Still, most people who can afford that junk shun it in favor of the more traditional fast food.  I sincerely hope that doesn’t change.

A GOP delegate from Colorado who ranted to media about the need to bomb Iran to protect Israel got a little taste of what it’s like to be a third world country.

Gabriel Nathan Schwartz (no relation to the famous rap duo), an attorney, thought he was going to neek a hottie he met at a hotel bar. When he got her up into his pricey suite, she slipped a drug into his drink as he undressed.

He woke up several hours later butt nekkid and missing all the pricey crap he thought would get the ladies: “a $30,000 watch, a $20,000 ring, a necklace valued at $5,000, earrings priced at $4,000 and a Prada belt valued at $1,000″ (since he’s a lawyer, I am sure these are inflated figures).

He was on the receiving end the personal equivalent of US foreign policy. Still, he likely will not see the irony in this. In an earlier interview, he advocated taking Iran’s wealth:

We should plant a flag. Take the oil, take the money. We deserve reimbursement.

Don’t worry Gabriel, she may have stolen ornaments, but she did not take away your $120,000 legal education.

[tarboush tip: Indecision 2008 blog via Sharen]

I gotta say, academics haven’t really had any interest in borders until recently. Shameful. Symptomatic of their golden passports? Perhaps that, combined with the border proliferation across the globe as immigration is at its highest levels in history.

The academic literature that does critique borders almost always does so in the capitalist context, almost never in the colonial one. For me, this doesn’t pose much of a problem as far as my literature review is concerned as I don’t see much of a difference between colonialism and capitalism. In the final analysis, Marxist examinations are less about capitalism in and of itself and more about the social relations produced by it. When abstracted up to the level of Modernity, Reason, Enlightenment, etc, etc, the justifications and processes for both are similar. At the very least both colonialism and capitalism thrive off of inequality, are characterized by differentiation of space, are expansionist in nature, produce subjects for its own maintenance and legitimacy and, ultimately, articulate their existence through the threat and use of violence. Such have been Israel’s characteristics since its creation in 1948 and, as is the focus of the paper I’m currently penning, its relationship with the land, people and resources of the Golan Heights since its violent occupation in 1967.

A gem of a writer I recently found out about is Egyptian Marxist scholar Samir Amin who has gone as far as saying that colonialism and capitalism are not only inseparable, colonialism’s “economic and social logic… must be called by its real name: capitalism” [See interview in L'Humanite].

And another jewel I stumbled across in the Winter 1980 issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies was a reprinted piece written by none other than Fredric Jameson addressing Zionism specifically in an article entitled “Capitalism, not Zionism is the Problem”. Here, Jameson makes the case that the conflict is intractable as long as there is no radical social transformation within Israel.

Both of these pieces are worth the read. Jameson’s I’ve reprinted here as it’s not available anywhere easily accessible. The article is long (for a blog post; short for academic writing), but worth reading. Don’t miss his take on Edward Said’s (then) new books Orientalism and The Question of Palestine.

(His was a particularly scathing piece and because he’s so damned famous, I think he needs to be encouraged to talk about Israel like this more often.)

“‘But Their Cause Is Just’: Capitalism, not Zionism, is the Problem’s Real Cause,”
- Fredric Jameson, September 28, 1979

The PLO has made it very clear that it would “accept” an independent Palestine on the West Bank of the Jordan River, connected to the Gaza Strip (only some twenty miles distant) by an appropriate corridor. PLO spokespeople don’t say it quite this way, and their formulation is ingenious: We are willing, says Abu Jihad, one of the PLO’s top military leaders, to establish a Palestinian state on any territories evacuated by the Israelis. Recognition of Israel? “It is a card I have,” says Arafat. “The Israelis have many cards to play. When will they play them? For now I am waiting for the right time to play my card.”

“Ther is no such thing as a Palestinian.”
- Golda Meir, 1969

“We have nothing whatsoever to talk to them about on the two basic issues they want to raise: (1) the creation of a Palestinian state; (2) the fate of Palestinian refugees.”
- Moshe Dayan, October 1977

“We don’t want the PLO to recognize us.”
- Ezer Weizman, Israeli Defence Minister, July 1979

The intransigence of the Israeli position masks increasingly complex attitudes toward the PLO. A decade ago it was perhaps possible for the majority of Israelis to believe that providentially the Jews, a “people without a land” had found themselves “a land without a people.” (Local Arabs, being Arabs, ought to feel equally at home anywhere in the Arab world.) The shift in awareness is exemplified in the words of a young Israeli woman on military service in Upper Galilee, front line in the Israeli struggle against war-torn South Lebanon: “Arafat is a murderer. I hate the Palestinians and everything they’re doing, but their cause is just.” It is equally apparent in a recent poll showing that 89 percent of the Israelis are against the creation of a Palestinian state, whose eventual existence 50 percent of Israel’s population believes “inevitable.”

Israeli broodings about the justice of Arafat’s cause, about the inevitability of a Palestinian state, plainly reflect a growing appreciation of Palestinian “identity.” That five-year-olds in Lebanese refugee camps are raised to understand that they “come from” this or that village in pre-1948 Palestine (as likely as not long since bulldozed out of existence by Israeli authorities) is a fact whose implications Israelis at all levels of society have come to grasp. Not, of course, in such a way as to render any less rigid their hostility to the creation of a Palestinian state.

Quite the contrary. A well-informed Israeli (an ex-leftist who once opposed the Vietnam war and has since gained top-level experience in journalism and the military) confided his sudden illumination on the matter of Palestinian identity. “PLO prisoners never answered our routine question, ‘Where do you come from?’ by mentioning where they were living or training,” he said. “It was always, ‘I come from Safad,’ or ‘I come from Jaffa,’ or some other town where their families had lived before 1948.” Then, he went on to draw that what is apparently a widespread moral: “There is no solution possible, these people want our homes. Our backs are to the wall, and if our throats are going to be cut, we’ll take everything with us. The Palestinian state wil never be a solution for them. It will only be a beginning, the first step toward repossessing all the rest of so-called occupied Palestine.”

So, despite an appreciation of Palestinian identity and despite the well-publicized claims of the leading theoreticians within the umbrella organization which is the PLO that “armed struggle as such will cease with the creation of a Palestinian state on the West Bank,” the Israelis remain as instransigent as ever.

On the surface this persistent inflexibility can seem a bit of rational realpolitik. But matters are complex. Listen to the further remarks of our ex-leftist Israeli informant: “It is better to live thirty, fifty, even one-hundred years like this, on a constant war footing, than to live five years in a concentration camp or ten years in an Eastern European ghetto or fifty years in an anti-Semetic US small town… Actually, the best way to get rid of Arafat, though, is to give him his state! Look at the violence of Arab politics; those people will start to kill each other off. With the enormous and insoluble problems of a Palestinian state on the West Bank, Israel will have ten years of peace.”

On the one hand, an anxiety-ridden sense of powerlessness and victimization: We’re absolutely alone, abandoned by everybod
y, surrounded by 100,000,000 enemies. On the other hand, supreme confidence; the PLO is absolutely insignificant as a military force, hopelessly confused, unable in the end to do any better than they have done before.

It is these contradictory attitudes which at the moment underlie Israeli intransigence. And, any understanding of the Middle East situation that avoids the classical conclusion of exposure to Middle East politics — the whole thing is hopeless, both sides are right (or wrong) — must temporarily bypass the temptations of diplomatic suggestions for boundary lines and formulas acceptable to both sides to examine the “psychological” import of the new Palestinian sense of “identity.”

No one can doubt that the Arabs, the Arab world and Islam, are frequently the objects of a kind of racism. What Edward Said shows, in his recent book Orientalism, is that this racism is no mere matter of individual bigotry or prejudiced opinion. It is a system for thinking about the Islamic “Other,” which organizes the very academic disciplines of “Oriental studies” and “Middle Eastern Studies” themselves. Not merely a set of offensive thoughts, “Orientalism” is a conceptual system designed to control and to repress this alien reality, a conceptual system intimately related throughout its history with the actual political control over Arab lands by the European imperialist powers.

The core of Said’s most recent book (The Question of Palestine) appeared in the new Marxist periodical Social Text. It ran under the title “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims.” And, true to this title, Said’s complex arguments explore the dialectic between the view of the dominant Israeli powers — their subjects are (undifferentiatedly) “orientals” — and the view of those oppressed subjects who cannot help but see their masters exclusively in terms of a global, monolithic identity — Zionism.

As thus perceived, Zionism (and it is this “Zionism,” not the multifaceted historical movement, that the PLO so vociferously promises to annihilate completely) is a specific historical variant of classical late-nineteenth century imperialism, of “Orientalism,” a complex apparatus designed to implement and enforce control over a colonial population (the Palestinians) in a colonial space (Israel).

Said, of course, is well aware that Zionism as perceived by its victims is woefully unfaithful to the real nature of Jewish men and women and even to Israeli society with its undoubted democratic tradition and varied currents, including the recent peace movement. But Said’s aim is to allow us to hear the voices of people who have not been able to speak. And Zionism for them is a matter of their experience of the Israeli state — forced exile, systemic expropriation of their lands, discrimination in education and social services, the awesome might of the Israeli Army, and (as abundantly documented by the report of the National Lawyers’ Guild) police brutality and torture. Zionism has thus produced “Zionism” — an understandably horrific image of itself — and an anti-Zionism that mirror exactly the strategies of Zionism’s originators.

Thus, Zionism, ironically in view of its roots, comes to generate a mirror image of itself. Terrorism? The life of the prime minister of Israel is the greatest success story of terrorism in modern history. It is this terrorism which Palestinian terrorism mirrors. And with uncanny accuracy. The two facets of Begin’s terrorist heritage, IRA-type terror against the foreign oppressor (the bombing of the King David hotel) and its more grisly acts against an indigenous civilian population (the infamous Deir Yassine massacre) — are faithfully reproduced in Palestinian terrorism, with its romantic commando-suicide raids, and its very different acts of individual protest and desperation by a people living under military occupation, as when an anonymous Arab workman throws a grenade into a bus full of people on the West Bank.

Collective identity? The glorious reaffirmation of an authentically Jewish and Zionist identity spells out in advance all the dynamics that the reawakening of properly Palestinian identity will undergo in the years after 1967: Mystique of the homeland; mirage of a history of past grandeur; the financial tithes of a wealthy diaspora, as well as the virtually inalienable political backing of powerful foreign states (in the one case, the United States; in the other, the Arab bloc); virtual unanimity of internal public opinion against the enemy; the (sometimes doubtful) ideological strength of a unique religious orthodoxy; the authority of incalculable collective suffering; the list could be indefinitely extended. It should not be taken as fuel for more endless, undecidable, and sterile judgments as to what came first and who bears the “ultimate” responsibility. Rather, it should mean something quite different: That those who have been able to grasp and feel profound sympathy for the sufferings and struggles of the Jewish people are paradoxically also in the very best position of all to understand the sufferings and the struggles of the Palestinians.

Indeed, once the objective situation which has generated anti-Zionism is grasped, it’s clear that what is at stake is far from a matter of anti-Jewish racism. Just as “diplomatic” solutions must inevitably dead-end in the Middle East, so too must those which overemphasize the “psychological” — pitting Palestinian “identity” against Jewish “identity.” The problem can only be solved by considering the social relations in which the anti-Zionism of the PLO is rooted.

Israel — this lush and beautiful place, the California of the Middle East, with its glittering hotels along the gorgeous beaches of Tel Aviv, its fertile and prosperous kibbutzim, its fruit farms and extraordinary light, the liveliness of its citizens and the well-nigh of Tuscan beauty of the ancient city of Jerusalem — Israel lives in an anxiety deeper than that of foreign intervention by inefficient Arab armies or insignificant handfuls of Palestinian freedom-fighters. It lives the anxiety from within: the anxiety of class conflict — fear, not of external enemies, but of the sullen and menacing presence of a Palestinian underclass in its own midst, a class socially manageable only because so many of its numbers have been driven out into the refugee camps beyond the border. The Palestinians are the Blacks and Chicanos of the Israeli capitalist system. “What do these people want?” the Israelis ask themselves. “Do they want to come into our luxury hotels or be able to buy posh houses in our neighbourhoods or maybe even to take over our own houses for themselves?”

The problem’s real name, in other words, is not Zionism, but capitalism. For a genuine solution to the Middle East “problem” to be thinkable, the possibility of radical social transformation within Israeli society would have to become a real one. This is the sense in which the familiar slogan — anti-Zionism means anti-Semitism — is to be rejected. Anti-Zionism in this sense is rather to be understood as opposition to a whole unjust social system, that of the United States fully as much as that of Israel. It means, not hostility to a people or a religion, but resistance to racism, oppressive social relations, imperialism, monopolies, consumerism — resistance, in short, to an enemy that the American Left has long since identified here at home.

- Fredric Jameson