US, Israel condemn Russian missile deal with Iran

Bill Van Auken

Both Washington and Tel Aviv have condemned the decree signed Monday by Russian President Vladimir Putin lifting a ban on the delivery to of advanced S-300 air defense missile systems to the Iranian government.

The action by Moscow is seen by both the Obama administration and the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as cutting across US and Israeli threats to carry out air strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities.

The Israeli government has repeatedly threatened unilateral military action against Iran, while Washington has maintained that military action is an option that remains “on the table” should Tehran be deemed in violation of a nuclear agreement it is currently negotiating under the umbrella of the P5+1 grouping—the US, Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany.

Amid the controversy over the revived Russian missile deal, the White House announced that President Barack Obama was prepared to sign the version of an Iran nuclear bill approved unanimously Tuesday by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee after the measure appeared to win sufficient Democratic support to override a presidential veto.

While the legislation would grant Congress the right to review any Iran nuclear accord, it explicitly recognizes that it does not have the right to approve or reject a deal reached by the US and the other major powers. It does provide a procedure for Congress to vote for or against lifting unilateral US sanctions that it legislated in the first place. Agreement on the bill could, however, fall apart in the face of Republican amendments linking the nuclear deal to Iran’s recognition of Israel or its ceasing of alleged support for “terrorism.”

Moscow imposed the voluntary ban on the shipment of the surface-to-air missile batteries in 2010, responding to heavy pressure from both the US and Israel.

The missile deal, signed in 2007, was worth $800 million to Russia’s state-controlled arms dealer, Rosoboronexport. Iran has in the meantime brought a $4 billion lawsuit before the Geneva arbitration panel over Russia’s failure to fulfill the contract.

The Pentagon condemned Russia’s decision on the contract Monday. “Our opposition to these sales is long and public. We believe it unhelpful,” US military spokesman Col. Steve Warren told reporters. Asked whether Putin’s decree violated international sanctions against Iran, the Pentagon spokesman responded: “This is for our lawyer to really look through. Any sale of advanced technologies is cause of concern to us.”

A State Department spokesperson reported that Secretary of State John Kerry raised US concerns about the air-defense missile sale in a phone conversation with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov Monday.

“We don’t believe it’s constructive at this time for Russia to move forward with this, but we’ve worked very closely with the Russians on the P5+1 negotiations,” said the spokesperson, Marie Harf. “We don’t think this will have an impact on unity in terms of inside the negotiating room.”

Asked if the missile deal would violate UN sanctions against Iran, she said flatly that it would not.

The head of the US negotiating team in the P5+1 talks, Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman, told the Israeli media Monday that, while the US maintained its military “alternatives” for dealing with Iran, bombing nuclear facilities would be only a short-term solution.

“A military strike by Israel or the US would only set back the nuclear program by two years,” she said. “You can’t bomb their nuclear know-how, and they will rebuild everything. The alternatives are there, but the best option is a diplomatic negotiated solution.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who spoke by phone with Putin Tuesday, railed against both the lifting of the ban and the move toward an agreement on Iran’s nuclear program.

“The sale of advanced weapons to Iran is the result of the dangerous agreement that is emerging between Iran and the [P5+1] powers,” Netanyahu said. “After this arms deal, is there anyone who can seriously claim that the agreement with Iran will increase the security in the Middle East?”

Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov defended the decision to go ahead with the missile delivery, stressing that the antiaircraft missile system “is purely defensive in nature, is not suited for the purpose of attack, and does not jeopardize the safety of any state in the region, including, of course, Israel.”

Lavrov noted the voluntary character of the previous ban on the delivery, stating that it was put in effect to “stimulate progress in the negotiations,” which, with the reaching of a framework agreement on Iran’s nuclear program, was no longer necessary.

The Russian foreign minister also noted that as the result of the contract’s suspension, “Russia has not received large sums that are owed to us. We do not see the need for this anymore.”

Virtually simultaneously with the lifting of the ban on the delivery of the S-300 batteries, Russian officials announced the initiation of an oil-for-goods barter deal under which Russia will ship grain, equipment and construction materials to Iran in exchange for crude oil. The deal is said to be worth some $20 billion.

Russia’s actions have clearly provoked concern in Washington and among its European allies. German Chancellor Angela Merkel Tuesday declared that countries that had imposed sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program should “lift those sanctions together, as far as possible.” She was speaking for German capitalist interests concerned that Russia is stealing a march on their plans to reap super-profits by reentering the Iranian market.

The decisions taken in Moscow are also, no doubt, meant to counter Washington’s own strategic calculations in pursuing the nuclear deal with Iran. To the extent that it can achieve an effective rapprochement with Iran, US imperialism can shift a greater share of its military might from the region and direct it against both Russia and China.

UN imposes arms embargo on rebels as Yemen slaughter continues

Niles Williamson

The UN Security Council voted on Tuesday to impose an arms embargo on leading members of the Houthi militia as well as Ahmed Ali Abdullah Saleh, the son of former longtime dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh. The resolution was passed with 14 votes in favor and Russia abstaining.

The text of the embargo was drafted by Jordan, a nonpermanent member of the Security Council. The Jordanian monarchy is actively participating in the anti-Houthi air assault in Yemen being spearheaded by Saudi Arabia.

The Salehs have given support to the Houthi militia that seized control of Yemen’s capital in September, ousting President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi and placing him under house arrest. Hadi fled for the southern port city of Aden in February before leaving the country in March for Saudi Arabia in the face of a Houthi-led assault on his compound.

While the Security Council resolution calls for the Houthis to “immediately and unconditionally end violence,” it says nothing about the airstrikes being carried out on a daily basis by a coalition of Arab Gulf States headed by Saudi Arabia.

Since March 26 Saudi coalition air forces have launched more than 1,200 airstrikes against targets throughout Yemen, with some strikes killing scores of civilians. A bomb dropped on the Al Mazraq refugee camp in northern Yemen on March 30 killed at least 30 civilians. An airstrike on a dairy factory in the port city of Hodeida on April 1 killed at least 37 workers.

The Saudi monarchy, with US backing, has launched a widespread air assault against Houthi-controlled military targets as well as major urban areas. Street fighting in Aden between Houthi forces and armed forces opposed to them has left hundreds dead and hundreds more wounded, littering the streets with corpses.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, released a statement Tuesday warning about the destruction of infrastructure and the high rate of civilian casualties in the three-week-old campaign. “Every hour we are receiving and documenting disturbing and distressing reports of the toll that this conflict is taking on civilian lives and infrastructure,” he said. “Such a heavy civilian death toll ought to be a clear indication to all parties to this conflict that there may be serious problems in the conduct of hostilities.”

Hussein noted that coalition airstrikes have hit residential areas and homes throughout the country, including in the provinces of Taiz, Amran, Ibb, Al-Jawf and Saada. An airstrike that hit a residential area in Taiz on Sunday killed ten civilians and injured seven others.

Schools and hospitals throughout the country have been damaged or destroyed by airstrikes. Eight hospitals in the provinces of Aden, Dhale, Sanaa, and Saada have been hit by coalition bombs.

Speaking to Al Jazeera on Monday, Ivan Simonovic, UN Deputy Secretary General for Human Rights, warned about the growing humanitarian crisis in Yemen, saying that a majority of those killed so far have been civilians. “Over 600 people killed, but more than half of them are civilians.” Of the civilian deaths counted by the UN, at least 84 have been children and 25 were women.

While the United States has provided intelligence and logistical support to the Saudi coalition from the onset of the assault, it has been gradually increasing its involvement in the conflict. American imperialism has long sought to maintain its control over Yemen, which lies next to the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, a major oil choke point.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the Obama administration has a direct hand in the selection of targets for airstrikes. Pentagon war planners at a joint operations center are directly approving every target selected by the Saudi military. The US military planners also provide the Saudis with the specific locations where they should drop the bombs.

“The United States is providing our partners with necessary and timely intelligence to defend Saudi Arabia and respond to other efforts to support the legitimate government of Yemen,” Alistair Baskey, White House National Security Council spokesman told reporters on Sunday.

US warships stationed off the coast of Yemen in the Red Sea have also begun assisting the Saudi-led coalition in enforcing a blockade of the country. On April 1, US sailors boarded a Panamanian-flagged ship in the Red Sea in search of weapons supposedly bound for the Houthis. The search did not turn up any weapons.

American drones continue to fly over Yemen in support of Saudi operations against the Houthi militia and the targeting of members of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

An apparent drone strike on the southeastern port city of Mukalla Sunday killed senior AQAP leader Ibrahim Al Rubaish and as many as six other people. Rubaish, a Saudi national, had been held at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp from 2002 until his release back to Saudi Arabia in 2006. He reportedly fled to Yemen in 2009 and joined AQAP, and the US recently placed a $5 million bounty on his head.

While neither the CIA nor the Pentagon have claimed responsibility for the attack, it was likely carried out by the US, since Mukalla, which was seized by AQAP fighters earlier this month, has yet to be targeted by Saudi airstrikes. If confirmed, the attack would mark the first US drone strike in Yemen in nearly six weeks.

It has been three weeks since US Special Forces evacuated the Al Anad airbase north of Aden. Al Anad had served as the main hub for the officially secret American air war, which has killed more than 1,000 people in Yemen since 2009.

Meanwhile, both Saudi Arabia and Egypt are actively preparing a possible ground invasion of the country. The Egyptian military dictatorship reported that it and the Saudi monarchy are discussing a “major military maneuver” along with other Gulf states in the coming days.

Judge hands down brutal sentences in Atlanta test “cheating” case

Jerry White & Kranti Kumara

A Fulton County superior court judge on Tuesday handed down severe prison sentences to 10 former school administrators, principals and elementary school teachers for their role in a citywide test cheating scandal at the Atlanta Public Schools.

The educators and one other teacher were convicted April 1 for inflating test scores in 2009. The case has highlighted the relentless promotion of standardized tests by the Obama administration and both big business parties to justify the attacks on the jobs, living standards and work conditions of public school teachers along with the further diversion of resources to for-profit charter operations.

The case was brought by county prosecutors in what the Atlanta Journal-Constitution—which backs the vendetta—called a “novel use” of state racketeering laws normally reserved for organized crime activities such as such as prostitution, counterfeiting or illegal drugs and weapons trafficking.

To the gasps of courtroom onlookers on Tuesday morning, Judge Jerry Baxter announced maximum 20-year sentences for three former school administrators—Tamara Cotman, 44; Sharon Davis-Williams, 59; and Michael Pitts, 59—that include seven years in prison, 13 years on probation, fines of $25,000 each and 2,000 hours of community service.

Dobbs Elementary School teacher Angela Williams, 49, and assistant principal of Deerwood Academy Tabeeka Jordan, 43, were sentenced to five years, including two years in prison, three years probation, 1,500 hours of community service and a $5,000 fine.

Former principal of Dobbs Elementary School Dana Evans, 48; testing coordinator at Benteen Elementary Theresia Copeland, 58; and former Dunbar Elementary teacher Diane Buckner-Webb, 53, were sentenced to five years with one in prison, the balance on probation, 1,000 hours of community service and a $1,000 fine.

Another Dunbar Elementary School teacher, 31-year-old Shani Robinson, only escaped sentencing because she gave birth over the weekend. She faces sentencing in August with the threat of being separated from her newborn child hanging over her head.

An investigation by the Georgia governor’s office acknowledged that the Atlanta educators were subjected to a “culture of fear, intimidation and retaliation” in the school district, overseen by then-Superintendent Beverly Hall. Teachers faced humiliation, demotion and even dismissal if they did not meet student achievement targets measured by tests.

Hall was awarded the 2009 National Superintendent of the Year by the American Association of School Administrators (AASA) for “transforming the 102-school system through a comprehensive reform agenda.” She was convicted in the testing scandal but died of breast cancer last month.

Judge Baxter was visibly enraged by the public sympathy for the educators whose families and friends packed the courtroom Monday to demand leniency. When spectators reacted with horror to his sentencing, the judge angrily blurted, “Everyone starts crying about these educators. There were thousands of children harmed in this thing. This is not a victimless crime…When you are passed and you can’t read, you are passed and passed on, there are victims that are in the jail that I have sentenced, kids.”

The argument that unaltered test scores would have led to immediate intervention to help at-risk children with expanded services is an utter fraud. Like public school districts across the country, the Atlanta schools have slashed thousands of jobs, shut dozens of schools and cut essential programs. In 2012 alone, APS wiped out at least 350 teaching and support staff positions.

The testing regime that has been at the center of Atlanta’s “school reform”—financed through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—has one purpose only: to scapegoat teachers for educational problems caused by decades of budget cuts and an increasing proportion of students suffering from poverty, and to justify the further privatization of public education.

Last week, attorney Sanford Wallack who represented now retired special education teacher Dessa Curb—the only defendant acquitted of all charges in the case—likened the years-long probe by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to the Salem witch-hunt trials.

In an email statement to the World Socialist Web Site after the sentencing, Wallack said, “I am greatly disappointed that both the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office and the Court felt that any period of incarceration was an appropriate sentence for any of the defendants in this case.

“Based on my experience as a criminal defense attorney for over 20 years and in my opinion, the facts and circumstances of these individuals and in this case—the same factors that courts routinely consider in determining sentences in criminal cases throughout the State of Georgia on a regular basis—do not warrant any term of incarceration, but rather warrant sentences of probation at worst. I am thankful, however, that the Court ultimately relented in granting appeal bonds and look forward to the appellate courts’ review of the case.”

Well aware that the case is a damning condemnation of the Obama administration’s anti-education policies, sections of the political establishment cautioned Judge Baxter to avoid prison sentences. This includes former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, who said 20 years of emphasis on testing had warped public schools’ mission and set a “trap” for the educators.

In an opinion piece in the April 12 Atlanta Journal-Constitution, two of the judge’s predecessors on the Fulton County Superior Court bench, wrote, “Judge Baxter should exercise his tremendous discretion in imposing sentences which reflect that any conspiracy involves our entire educational system in the high-stakes testing arena. These educators did not create the system in which schools have been corrupted across this nation by making standardized tests the chief measure of school, teacher and student performance. Certainly, incarceration is neither mandated nor appropriate in this case.”

Nevertheless, Baxter pressed ahead, saying there was “a faction of the community that wants me to throw the book at them” and “just max ‘em out.” After prosecutors sought to blackmail the educators with promises of lighter sentences if they accepted guilt and waived the right to appeal their convictions, Baxter reacted angrily, saying, “I’ve got a fair sentence in mind and it involves going to jail. Everybody.”

However, only two of the ten bowed to the pressure. A defiant Dana Evans told the judge Monday, “I have been arrested, shackled, spent the last two weeks in jail. I have been punished. I am broke now. I have no retirement. All of it is gone… I know you want to hear an admission of guilt, but I can’t say that because it is not the truth.”

With virtually uncontrollable rage Tuesday, Judge Baxter made it clear he was handing down the savage sentences—even more egregious than those demanded by prosecutors—as retribution against those who had the audacity to uphold their rights to appeal their convictions.

“Yesterday, I said to everyone, this is the time to search your soul and we could end this and the punishment wouldn’t be so severe,” Baxter bellowed in the courtroom. “I was going to give everyone one more chance, but no one took it. All I want for many of these people is to just take some responsibility, but they refuse. They refuse.”

After meting out the brutal punishments to the first three educators, the judge said, “I just wanted them to get a taste of it,” referring to the others awaiting his sentencing. “Apparently, that didn’t quite move them.”

This is class justice. While police can get away with murder and the real racketeers who are conspiring to destroy public education or who wrecked the economy and waged wars based on lies are never held to account, the full weight of the capitalist courts is levied against the working class. Particular vindictiveness is reserved for any section of workers who dare defy the state and uphold their democratic rights.

The two educators who accepted the deals were hit with stiff punishments in any case. Testing coordinator Donald Bullock was ordered to spend six months of weekends in county jail, plus five years of probation, fines and community service. Former teacher Pamela Cleveland of Dunbar Elementary was sentenced to five years, including one year of home confinement from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., 1,000 hours of community service and a $1,000 fine.

Far from defending the persecuted educators, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten joined the witch-hunt. The AFT, which also received millions from the Gates Foundation, is an active partner in Obama’s corporate-backed “school reform.” The AFT boasted as early as 2005 that the local union reported allegations of cheating to then superintendent Beverly Hall.

A Rain Coat For A Cuban woman

Farooque Chowdhury

A woman in Cuba, as was told, needs a rain coat. Rain drenched her. A kind hearted lady, not from Cuba, donated a rain coat. This is a tale of “benevolence”, of a “kind” heart. This is part of a tale that describes a lot – a lot of “love” for the Cuban people, a lot of “love” from non-Cubans, a lot of “poverty”, a lot of “failure”.

The story begins with Rebecca Barger, a wedding photographer (“Wedding photographer Rebecca Barger looks at Cuba”). However, street photography is always her first love. Rebecca, from suburban Philadelphia, was a photography student in South Florida in the 1980s. She was fascinated by culture of Latin America, and she went to Argentina, Brazil, and Peru with her photographic adventures. However, Cuba, until her visit, was an elusive country.

In February 2015, Rebecca spent a week exploring Havana, and she photographed everything along the way.

Enchanting Havana streets are full of photographic possibilities, writes Rebecca. She found a few more facts. Rebecca writes:

“Havana … boasts amazing architecture — however, most of it is literally falling to pieces. The buildings and plumbing are in terrible disrepair. The sidewalks are in such poor shape that I gave up my walking clogs, switched to sneakers and still tripped and fell, cracking a camera lens. Two handsome men picked me up and were gone before I could even mumble ‘gracias.’”

She stayed with a family. She “was presented a set of five keys to help” her “navigate the elaborate maze of doors, iron gates, and locks needed to enter and exit.” Her “fire escape plan consisted of jumping from” balcony of the building she was staying to a neighboring balcony. The family was lovely and the 21-year-old son was a Santería priest. She “hired him to secure enough bottled water for the week, since that project would’ve taken” her “an entire day.”
She found the bus system in Havana “shuts down during the rain.” Rebecca’s other findings include:

“The prevalence of autos from the 1950s in Havana is a cliché familiar to Americans. It’s estimated that 60,000 vintage cars are still in use on the island.”
“[I]t’s not just the cars that show off Cuban resourcefulness — disposable lighters are not tossed out but refilled; flan is ‘baked’ in beer cans; and palm fronds are fashioned into brooms.”

Despite all these not-so-good findings she felt:

“The most surprising thing about my visit was my feeling of safety. Walking around with my expensive camera gear, I felt more secure than in most of Philadelphia.”

She “hadn’t considered bringing” her 13-year-old daughter along for the first trip as she “felt it couldn’t possibly be safe enough”. But after her visit to Cuba, Rebecca is “planning another trip to Cuba, and this time” she’ll “be taking … teenage daughter”.

The brief description tells:

(1) Most of Havana “is literally falling to pieces”;
(2) The buildings and plumbing are in “terrible disrepair”;
(3) The sidewalks are in “poor” shape;
(4) No fire escape;
(5) Rain shuts down bus system in Havana;
(6) Prevalence of cars from the 1950s;
(7) Disposable lighters are reused.

The tale: The “poor” state of the proud country!

Caption of a photograph by Rebecca describes further:

“As the rain slowed, [a] beautiful young woman stopped me in the street to investigate my raincoat, apparently, an unknown piece of clothing in Cuba. I didn't give her my coat, but I did have a bag of clothing I was planning to donate so I gave it to her. Two days later she recognized me on the street and stopped to say thank you, and she was wearing the clothes I donated! (Photograph by RebeccaBarger/RebeccaBarger.com/blog)”
Many Cubans “haven’t” come across a rain coat! And, many of them don’t have clothes! Great facts! What a “poor” country! So, the donation! So, the “benevolence”!

Captions of a few other photographs (ibid.) by her say:

(1) A boxer trains at a gym;
(2) Many things are recycled and repurposed;
(3) An angler fishes;
(4) Boats are scarce in Cuba to keep people from exiting the country;
(5) People sale lumber, sand and other building products in a market;
(6) At least an alley in Havana hosts art studios and galleries, and drummers and dancers celebrate different spirits from a western Africa religion, there on Sundays;
(7) There’s at least a chapel in a Havana neighborhood;
(8) Very animated game of dominos is played at least at a card table set up at least on a Havana street;
(9) People can stroll on at least a road in Havana on weekends and evenings;
(10) At least there’s a tobacco farmer, Pedro, 82, owning a barn in an area, a three-hour drive from Havana;
(11) At least one farmer is there in Cuba owning cattle;
(12) Rosary hangs from the rear view mirror in a car;
(13) At least a matriarch dances in her cement living room during a Santeria celebration for her grandson;
(14) The main religion in Cuba is a combination of West African Yoruba and Catholicism;
(15) Many families keep a chicken or two;
(16) Some women hang in Havana streets watching the early afternoon activity; and
(17) The island is safe even for strangers.

So, in Cuba, it’s found from the captions:

(1) Religion has not been banned and banished;
(2) All liberties in Cuba have not been vanquished as the “poor” Cuban people have time and liberty to train boxing, fish, dance, celebrate, play, stroll, buy and sale, leisure time to hang and watch;
(3) All private properties have not been confiscated;
(4) It’s not a prison as the “poor” citizens have time to play, to visit art galleries and chapels; and
(5) The “poor” society has the capacity to support studios and art galleries;
(6) The “poor” make less carbon foot print as they recycle and reuse even negligible commodities.

However, they don’t have the liberty of paddling boats to Florida, a region gleaming with American dream.

All the “poor” Cubans in the photographs had smiling faces, and good health.

A few American Dream stories help comprehend the “poor” state of “poor” Cuba with its “failed” system of governance and economy.

Darlena’s dream

Darlena Cunha is a former television producer turned freelance journalist. She writes for Time magazine, the Washington Post, the Atlantic and the Gainesville Sun, among others. Following is an excerpt from her narration headlined “I Achieved the American Dream — and It Was Awful” (Daily Worth, March 25, 2015):

The year was 2008. I was 25, pregnant with twins… And we had just hit the quintessential American rite of passage: We bought our first home.

The large, open floor plan beckoned us. …

A month later, my husband brought home a pink slip and the housing market died a fiery death — both results of the economic crash.

Overnight, instead of a homeowner’s blissful daydream, the house became a nightmare we couldn’t afford. We’d purchased the house for $240,000. Just weeks later, it was worth less than $150,000. Our mortgage stood at $1,200 a month, plus utilities, taxes, insurance, and everything that goes with the American Dream.

And before we could even process all this (and figure out how to move forward on my meager $40,000 salary), the twins came early. We found ourselves trapped in a hospital for 10 days while my tiny babies struggled to live and get bigger. In just two months, we’d gone from two people on the brink of traditional adult life to four people unable to afford the most basic necessities.

We struggled to feed our children and make ends meet, delving into our savings to cover the mortgage and other bills until that was totally depleted. Then we moved on to the life-saving state and federal programs available to people who have fallen on hard times.

And then things got worse. Our beautiful new-to-us home in Connecticut, built in 1987, needed more than updated cabinets. …

One freezing day in late October, when my babies were just 2 months old, our furnace broke. … Nothing cements the fear of poverty and the shame of helplessness like looking at your two newborn children swaddled in six layers crying in the cold of your home. [Cunha’s Washington Post essay about that fear and shame -- headlined “This is what happened when I drove my Mercedes to pick up food stamps” -- rocketed around the Internet last year.]

We paid for a new furnace, having no other choice — the cheapest on the market. Then another thing broke, and another. We patched and fretted and waited, filling out our sentence in that now dreary and dismal house until my husband found work again. A full two years later.

With nothing left, we moved across the country, rented a condo for the cheapest price … and tried to start a new life. The house remained. We tried to rent it, but being so far away made closing a deal difficult. When we finally found tenants, it wasn’t enough to cover our costs. We still had to pay $300 a month on the mortgage for at least a year … Then the tenants left and we were back at square one.

We tried to sell it, but no luck. The economy hadn’t improved enough to get even half of what we paid for it. By the grace of the universe, we managed to get the bank to give us a deed in lieu of foreclosure, and we simply walked away. All that time, sweat, and money wasted, and we got off lucky. Because of the emergency programs in place at the time, our credit was ruined only for a few years and we never had to declare bankruptcy.

And I felt free. We could finally start to live a new dream. …

It’s been six years. Our credit is clear. We’re renting a house, but soon the rent will go up to an amount we can’t afford. My husband suggested we buy another house so as not to throw our money away. But I’m still suffering from the trauma and extreme stress of it all. I’m still suffering from that old American Dream.

However, there is the American Dream, alive, un-assailed, unbroken, bright. Forbes’ list of America’s richest families is one of the nice places to have an idea of the American Dream turning real for a few. They include the Bechtels, the Du Ponts, the Fords, the Hearsts, the Kennedys, the Kochs, the Rockefellers, the Waltons. The 185 dynasties’ total worth is $1.2 trillion. (“America’s richest families: 185 clans with billion dollar fortunes”, July 21, 2014)

They don’t get pink slip; crash of finance world and death of housing market don’t shatter their life; their houses don’t turn into a nightmare; they can afford all the wishes they like to purchase; they don’t feel trapped in hospitals; their babies don’t struggle to live and get bigger; they don’t fail to afford the most basic necessities; they don’t have to struggle to feed their children and make ends meet; their savings don’t evaporate; they don’t have to move on to life-saving state and federal programs; their furnaces don’t break down on any freezing day. The American Dream owners never experience the fear of poverty and the shame of helplessness. Their newborn children never cry in the cold of home. They never pick up food stamps. They don’t have to wait for work for years; they don’t have to rent in cheapest condo. Their lives are always new. Their American Dream is renewed all the time. It’s unbroken all the time.

With billions of dollars they virtually own everything: needle, car, tooth paste, airplane, newspaper, food, bank, warm home in winter, games and gambling, fame, TV channel, shop, happiness and honor, magazine, and all and everything.

They dug goldmine, pumped out oil, established alcohol empire, built up finance kingdom, and networked politics. Their connections to American politics were and are integral. Mayor, ambassador, member of state House of Representatives and state Senate, Congress member, senator, governor, vice president, president, virtually every political office they held, and virtually all the dignity money can buy.

This is, broadly and basically, the story of fortune in all countries conquered by capitalism. Bangladesh is no less bright in this galaxy of power and property for a few, where 88% of the total loan disbursed by banks is in the pocket of only 4% and 70% of the borrowers could “pocket” only about 2% of the bank loans. (bdnews24.com, April 6, 2015) Diamond shops are coming up in the city. But that’s not for all the citizens. That’s for the few. The same with good food, fashion, fun and flower. Nigeria or Ukraine or the Philippines or any distant or any closer land in the East or the West is no exception. All are in the same orbit.

Does Cuba, where a woman needs a raincoat experience these “gracious” facts of life? Does the island-country bring any child struggling under a shadow of uncertainty and poverty? Does any child there need the “luxury” of struggling in an adverse weather? Does any couple having babies fail to afford the most basic necessities of life in the “failing” system? Is Cuba that society that generates frustration and despair among famous artists – singers and actresses among others – committing suicide? Does the “despised” economy invest billions of dollars in porno industry while homeless thousands languish in cold? All – news, data, reports, experiences narrated by people visiting the country have the answer to the questions: No.

Have not the country made amazing advancements in medical science? What’s the health condition of its population? Hasn’t the country made startling advancement in the area of ecological agriculture? Does mainstream reports the advancements and the country’s achievements with its people’s health? How the “misgoverned” country, the way mainstream strives to depict, achieved the advancement, and why mainstream “forgets” to report these? But wasn’t mainstream busy with repeatedly reporting vintage cars dominating Havana-streets since US’ Cuba initiative? The questions aren’t riddle. The questions show some straight truth: Ridicule a people’s struggle to survive with dignity and with its own choice. It’s a question of freedom and liberty.

There is a vital question: the boats or as few boats as possible in Cuba. There are individuals yearning for “freedom and liberty”. They prefer to leave the country they hate. Their dreamland is in the north. No doubt, the country they live in doesn’t attend to their interest and facilitate their aspiration. They imagine the northern neighbor will fulfill their dream – a liberty to earn a lot, to have a lot of property.

Is it a fact that a number of individuals, super-rich, in the northern dreamland are giving up their citizenship and leaving the country? They feel: The land of “liberty” is “burdening” them with tax that is, “squeezing out” their most dear property.

How it sounds? A few individuals plan to move to a land that they imagine can make them rich and provide them endless opportunity to gather property while a few rich persons in that land of opportunity leave the land as they are not happy with the property arrangement in the country – an invasion of tax! Or, does the definition of liberty differ depending on socioeconomic context, on historical period?

Liberty is not absolute anywhere. Neither it’s equal for all classes. Neither it’s uniform and same in all ages. Perception of liberty of a person holding billions of dollars is different from the perception of a pauper muscling through poverty. Perceptions and illusions are not absolute and permanent as practice in practical life shape those. Mirage turns false after a long journey.

Ancient Greece propagated slaves inferior than freemen, and feudal Europe propagated ruling class-privileges permanent! Conflicts in those societies and ages shattered those illusions into pieces. Roman illusions are now part of history only. Even dusts don’t carry those as dusts are output of real actions in real time. Withered away illusions that only a few years ago inspired many in the eastern and central Europe is now well recognized. But those were propagated as facts and truths and absolute.

It’s not logical to make a comparison between an island-country, Cuba, going through decades of economic blockade and a continent-sized country commanding unimaginable amount of natural and human resources, the US. It’s not logical to compare a country trying to establish its own way of democracy with a country having its system of governance that serves a minority part of society. The first one is making the endeavor for a few decades while the other one is having the system for more than two centuries. Shall it be logical to assess the first one with an eye and viewpoint of the second one? Definitions will be different; meanings will differ; explanations will vary, and so, the conclusions shall err.

This error is prevailing in cases of other countries that experience imposition of yardsticks of governance, democracy, accountability, participation, human rights by dominant powers. It’s not preaching of democracy as the dominant powers propagate. It’s imposition of a choice of the powers, and the choice is for securing interests of the powers. The interests are in the areas of free flow of capital, trade and profit, transferring carbon-burden, tapping cheap labor, and compelling to become “His Master’s Voice” – toe with geopolitical steps.

But the imposition is not always possible. It’s not always possible whenever:

(1) The dominant power goes through a declining process;
(2) People in many dominated societies aspire and strive for a dignified life with liberty;
(3) There emerges a bargaining space for the dominated.
Today’s world is witnessing the trend. It’s an emerging trend.

The Rise Of Biocultural Rights

David Bollier

Can law be used to protect and advance the commons? One of the most promising new developments here is a new jurisprudence of “biocultural rights.” Biocultural rights represent a bold new departure in human rights law that recognizes the importance of a community’s stewardship over lands and waters. Instead of focusing on individual rights and private property, biocultural rights explicitly recognize a community’s identity, culture, governance system, spirituality and way of life as embedded in a specific landscape. In other words, it recognizes the existence of a commons.

The history and character of biocultural rights are wonderfully explained in a recent law review article in the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment. The article, “Community Stewardship: The Foundation of Biocultural Rights,” is by Kabir Sanjay Bavkiatte, a cofounder of Natural Justice, an international collective of environmental lawyers, and Thomas Bennett, a professor at the university of Cape Town, South Africa. (Vol. 6, No. 1, March 2015, pp. 7-29)

Here’s an abstract of the article:

The term ‘biocultural rights’ denotes a community's long established right, in accordance with its customary laws, to steward its lands, waters and resources. Such rights are being increasingly recognized in international environmental law. Biocultural rights are not simply claims to property, in the typical market sense of property being a universally commensurable, commodifiable and alienable resource; rather, as will be apparent from the discussion offered here, biocultural rights are collective rights of communities to carry out traditional stewardship roles vis-à-vis Nature, as conceived of by indigenous ontologies.

Certain core principles lie at the heart of biocultural rights, write Bavkiatte and Bennett. These include “non-discrimination, protection of cultural integrity, self-government, title to lands and natural resources, together with social welfare for economic well-being.”

The authors concede that “international lawyers have undertaken little or no research into the development of biocultural rights” – something that this article sets out to rectify. They argue persuasively, however, that these rights have clearly surfaced in a variety of international covenants, declarations, conventions and codes of conduct.

Biocultural rights as a new field of law have not emerged magically on their own, but through the convergence of four interrelated movements that have contributed important ethical principles, legal concepts and political advocacy. Together, these movements have brought the idea of biocultural rights into sharp focus.

The four movements identified by the authors consist of:

>> “post-development” advocates who are articulating a vision for human society beyond the discredited neoliberal paradigm;

>> the commons movement that rejects the “tragedy” fable and empirically demonstrates the effectiveness of local self-governance;

>> the movement of indigenous peoples asserting their right to self-determination, cultural heritage and stewardship of the land; and

>> the push for a “third generation” of environmental human rights that go beyond basic civil and political rights (first generation) and socio-economic and cultural rights (second generation), to recognize community rights to self-determination, economic and social development, cultural heritage and a clean and healthy environment.

Biocultural rights provide a powerful way to challenge technocratic governance – “an expertocracy imposing non-consultative, top-down solutions, resulting in the delegitimation of local knowledge and decisionmaking,” write Bavikatte and Bennett. Such technocratic approaches are harmful because they “lock in” a set of alien rules and technologies, and prevent people from developing their own, more locally appropriate and more effective rules.

In this sense, biocultural rights can be an important tool in challenging the standard models of “development” and all their ethno-centric, top-down limitations. Biocultural rights also help validate traditional cultural practices that have adapted to local ecosystems and that reflect a particular way of being in the world. The idea helps open up a whole new set of solutions beyond the monoculture of neoliberal economic and policy.

In wildlife sanctuaries in India, commons scholars have confirmed that “a protectionist approach that excluded local communities was likely to fail unless governments were prepared to invest heavily in the initiative. The same projects also showed, on the one hand, that conservation was likely to fail if outsiders (or dominant insiders) imposed rules on a community’s use of resources, and, on the other hand, that forest resources were more effectively managed if community members were genuinely involved in decisionmaking and developing rules for use of the resources.”

Of course, bureaucracies like to issue universal rules, not ones that are locally specific. They also tend to prefer “market-based solutions” that favor private property rights.Neoliberal jurisprudence focuses on the individual as the most meaningful “juridical subject,” usually ignoring the community and its biocultural relationships. So there are some formidable barriers.

Still, the idea of bioocultural rights provides a powerful legal framework for reclaiming land, culture, traditional knowledge and self-governance. These things should not be driven by markets, but by a deeper set of values, including ecological imperatives. It will take a great deal of bottom-up political and legal action to win recognition for biocultural rights. But I think it holds great promise for giving commons-based governance a new foundation in law.

Secrecy, Intransigence and War

Jeffrey St. Clair & Alexander Cockburn

Last of a three-part series.

Hillary Clinton’s propensity for overkill earned her and Bill the enmity of people capable of inflicting serious damage, as the Whitewater and Cattle Futures scandals duly attested. And soon, as they embarked on the 1992 presidential campaign, the same overkill reflex produced a perfect storm of bad publicity that came within an ace of finishing Clinton off altogether.

In January 2002, America was introduced to the Gennifer Flowers scandal, courtesy of the National Enquirer. Flowers was a former Little Rock newscaster with whom Governor Clinton had an extended love affair for five years in the 1980s, as pleasingly chronicled in Flowers’ entirely credible memoir, Gennifer Flowers: Passion and Betrayal.

After the Enquirer broke the Flowers story while Clinton was campaigning in New Hampshire, his campaign advisors went into crisis mode, trying to figure out the best defense. Seasoned tacticians like Betsey Wright and David Ifshin suggested that the best course would be to shrug the story off as unsubstantiated gossip mongering by a supermarket tabloid. The national press corps was already taking this tack, since the reporters on the campaign bus were loath to admit they had been scooped by the Enquirer – whose story was in fact a piece of well-researched investigative reporting, backed up by taped phone calls and messages to Gennifer from Bill.

It was Hillary who instructed the campaign to put the ruthless private investigator Jack Palladino on the case. In her memo to Palladino, she ordered him to “impeach Flowers’ character and veracity until she is destroyed beyond all recognition.” Thus primed, Palladino went into action, seeking to portray Flowers as a prostitute, a shakedown artist and career scamster.

While Palladino was trying to finish off Flowers, Hillary urged Bill to follow the high-risk strategy of both of them going on CBS’s 60 Minutes for an interview conducted by Steve Kroft. In front of a vast national audience Bill, visibly ill at ease, admitted to causing pain to his family while denying that their marriage was merely an arrangement. “This is a marriage” he asserted. Hillary broke in. Years of effort in burnishing Bill’s image as a Son of the South went up in smoke as she declared, “You know, I’m not sitting here like some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette.”

The polls promptly showed Bill’s numbers plummeting south of the Mason-Dixon line. An affair with Flowers was one thing, but insulting Tammy Wynette? The nation’s number one country star had been watching the program and was furious. She immediately called her publicist to vent her outrage, and the publicist relayed this to the press. For three days the Clinton campaign tried to talk to Wynette. She declined all calls until finally they got Burt Reynolds to call her, and she relented, releasing the news she would accept Hillary’s apologies.

The next storm the Clintons had to face was the matter of his avoidance of the draft during the Vietnam War. James Carville, the campaign manager, advocated forthright admission that this is what he had done. Clinton agreed with Carville’s plan to go on ABC’s Nightline with Ted Koppel, bringing with him his famous letter to Colonel Eugene Holmes frankly discussing the conflict between his desire to go and fight in Vietnam and his concomitant eagerness to “maintain my political viability”. But Hillary was adamant. He should not admit that he wanted to avoid the draft. On the other hand, he should not be forced to apologize for being against the war. The entire file of documents and letters should be concealed. Her view prevailed, and the inevitable consequence was the draft-dodging issue stayed alive as a steady stream of compromising documents was leaked to the press over the next five months.

The desire for secrecy is one of Mrs. Clinton’s enduring and damaging traits, which is why these campaign imbroglios are of consequence. Clinton dug himself into many a pit, but his greatest skill was in talking his way out of them in a manner Americans found forgivable. Befitting a Midwestern Methodist with a bullying father, repression has always been one of Mrs. Clinton’s most prominent characteristics. Hers has been the instinct to conceal, to deny, to refuse to admit any mistake. Mickey Kantor, the Los Angeles lawyer who worked on the 1992 campaign, said that Hillary adamantly refused to admit to any mistakes.

It’s clear from Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr.’s very revealing Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton that Mrs. Clinton played a major role in driving White House lawyer Vince Foster to suicide. After the Clintons arrived in the White House, it became Foster’s role to guard their secrets. It was one thing to lock documents into a secret room during the campaign. It was quite another to play
hide-and-seek with files in the White House, as Mrs. Clinton required Foster to do. Now there weren’t nosy reporters but special prosecutors with subpoenas, looking for documents relevant to Whitewater, to Mrs. Clinton’s billing records at Rose Law, her tax records relevant to the commodity trades. Foster was tasked with hiding all these documents: some in his house, some in his office and some – the most damaging files – back in his Little Rock house.

There were additional burdens for Foster. He was trying to douse another fire started by Mrs. Clinton. This was her instruction to fire the White House travel staff, on a trumped-up rationale. There were six separate investigations into these firings, all of which Foster had to deal with. Finally, the wretched man had to listen to Mrs. Clinton publicly blame the whole “Travelgate” mess on him, even as he was concealing documents making it clear she had been the person initiating the mess. On top of that, Mrs. Clinton demanded Foster be the principal liaison with Congress on her health reform plan. For the last month of his life, she refused to communicate with him, even though their offices were thirty feet apart.

Health reform was Mrs. Clinton’s assignment in her husband’s first term. The debacle is well known. In early 1993, 64 per cent of all Americans favored a system of national health care. By the time Mrs. Clinton’s 1342-page bill, generated in secret, landed in Congress, she had managed to offend the very Democratic leadership essential to making health reform a reality. The proposal itself, under the mystic mantra “Managed Competition”, embodied all the distinctive tropisms of neoliberalism: a naïve complicity with the darker corporate forces, accompanied by adamant refusal to even consider building the popular political coalition that alone could have faced and routed the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbies – two of the most powerful forces on the American political scene. Mrs. Clinton’s rout on health reform remains one of the great avoidable disasters of the last century in American politics, and one with appalling human and social consequences

This disaster was compounded by the fact that after the collapse of health reform, on the advice of Dickie Morris (summoned by Mrs. Clinton), the Clintons swerved right, toward all the ensuing ghastly legislative ventures of their regime – the onslaughts on welfare, the crime bill, NAFTA. With Morris came the birth of “triangulation” – the tactic of the Clinton White House working with Republicans and conservative Democrats and actively undermining liberal and progressive initiatives in Congress. Money that could have given the House back to the Democrats in 1996 was snatched by the White House purely for the self-preservation of the Clintons.

After health care went down the tubes, Hillary adopted a very low-key political profile, in part because Leon Panetta, the new White House chief of staff, banned her from political meetings. She outflanked him in two ways: by secret strategizing with Morris every two weeks and by nightly strategy sessions with Clinton and Al Gore. She swung back into a crucial public role with the Lewinsky affair, ironically enough, standing by her man. Gerth and Van Natta establish that she knew the full extent of her husband’s relations with the woman she called “Elvira” (the mid-’90s horror queen) on January 21, 1998, eight months before the official narrative claims that Bill informed her of his treachery the night before he gave his deposition. She ordered a full-bore attack on Lewinsky as “a stalker with a weight problem” and shoved Bill toward the doomed posture of total denial. He himself had initially been trending toward a stuttering half-admission that hanky-panky might have taken place. But after he returned from the Lehrer show where he had taken this non-combative route, Hillary lashed him into the categorical denial – “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky” – that exploded so disastrously in the months and years ahead. (Only months earlier, Hillary had been the one who insisted that no deal be made with Paula Jones, who could have been bought off with the modest settlement her lawyer was requesting. Hillary said she didn’t want Jones to get “a single dollar”.)

Bill had his Tammy, and he knew the price. “Whatever Hil wants, Hil gets,” he told his staff in 1998, and he began to read books about the campaigns of successful female politicians – Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto, Golda Meir. As Clinton headed toward impeachment, Hillary set her course for the New York Senate seat.

Since Vietnam, there’s never been a war that Mrs. Clinton didn’t like. She argued passionately in the White House for the NATO bombing of Belgrade. Five days after September 11, 2001, she was calling for a broad war on terror. Any country presumed to be lending “aid and comfort” to al-Qaeda “will now face the wrath of our country.” Bush echoed these words eight days later in his nationally televised speech on September 21. “I’ll stand behind Bush for a long time to come”, Senator Clinton promised, and she was as good as her word, voting for the Patriot Act and the wide-ranging authorization to use military force against Afghanistan.

Of course she supported without reservation the attack on Afghanistan and, as the propaganda buildup toward the onslaught on Iraq got underway, she didn’t even bother to walk down the hall to read the national intelligence estimate on Iraq before the war. (She wasn’t alone in that. Only six senators read that NIE.) When she was questioned about this, she claimed she was briefed on its contents, but in fact no one on her staff had the security clearance to read the report. And her ignorance showed when it came time to deliver her speech in support of the war, as she reiterated some of the most outlandish claims made by Dick Cheney. In this speech, she said Saddam Hussein had rebuilt his chemical and biological weapons program; that he had improved his long-range missile capability; that he was reconstituting his nuclear weapons program; and that he was giving aid and comfort to Al Qaeda. The only other Democratic senator to make all four of these claims in his floor speech was Joe Lieberman. But even he didn’t go as far as Senator Hillary. In Lieberman’s speech, there was conditionality about some of the claims. In Senator Clinton’s, there was no such conditionality, even though a vehement war hawk, Ken Pollack, advising Senator Clinton prior to her vote, had told her that the allegation about the al-Qaeda connection was “bullshit”.

Later, as the winds of opinion changed, Senator Clinton claimed – and continues to do so to this day – that hers was a vote not for war but for negotiation. In fact, the record shows that only hours after the war authorization vote she voted against the Democratic resolution that would have required Bush to seek a diplomatic solution before launching the war.

In 2007, Hillary Clinton endorsed Bush’s desperate “surge” in Iraq and claimed that it was working. From candidate, and maybe president Hillary Clinton, Iran can expect no mercy.

Click here to read Part Two: The Seeds of Corruption.

The Seeds of Corruption

Jeffrey St. Clair & Alexander Cockburn

Second in a three-part series.

In 1990, the National Law Journal ran profiles of “the 100 Most Influential Lawyers in the United States”. Hillary Clinton was on the list, and for years she would publicly boast that the Journal had named her one of “the nation’s 100 top lawyers”. Finally, the editor of the National Law Journal, Patrick Oster, wrote to Arkansas’ first lady–as she still was in 1991–testily pointing out that the word “influential” is not synonymous with “top” or “best”–the latter two words used by Mrs. Clinton interchangeably.

By “influential” the Journal’s profile writer, Peggy Fisk, had meant a lawyer plentifully endowed with corporate and political connections, which Mrs. Clinton certainly enjoyed in Arkansas where she had become a partner of the Rose Law Firm in 1977, amid the dawn of her husband’s political career as he began his terms as governor of the state. By the late 1980s, Hillary Clinton was sitting on the board of Wal-Mart, with the rest of Arkansas’ business elite crowding her Rolodex. Hillary ignored Oster’s letter of correction, instructing her staff to continue to use the word “best” in invoking the Journal’s profile. She continued to do so for years. Oster was still writing her a decade later about her misuse–including an editorial column in the Journal in 2000, when she was running for the U.S. Senate.

In fact, Mrs. Clinton was not a particularly good lawyer and would have had trouble making any honest list of the 100 best lawyers in Little Rock. In their political biography, Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr. tell the story about the National Law Journal and also probe her lawyerly skills when she was at Rose Law. She only tried five cases and confided to Vince Foster–another Rose Law partner–that she was terrified of juries. So Foster had to accompany her to court. Because of her lack of prowess in the courtroom, she had to make her way at Rose Law by working her connections as the State’s first lady to bring in clients, and even then her annual partner’s share was mostly below $100,000–the lowest in the firm and very small potatoes for one of the hundred most influential lawyers in America.

The Clintons’ joint income–at least the visible portion–was not substantial: the state paid Bill $20,000 a year, no doubt under the assumption he’d even up the score with kickbacks. So money was on Mrs. Clinton’s mind. Her search for extra income led her into associations that were later to cause endless trouble.

First came the ties with Jim McDougall that were to flower into the Whitewater property speculation and later a huge federal investigation into that deal, unprofitable to the Clintons who had hoped–like many Americans–to make a big score in real estate and solve their money problems at a single stroke.

When things were looking bleak for the Clintons after the Arkansas voters threw Bill out in 1980 after his first term as governor (Arkansas had two-year gubernatorial terms until 1986), she fanned her friendship with James Blair, general counsel of Tyson Foods. Bill Clinton’s Little Rock chief of staff, Betsey Wright, recalled that Hillary “loved Jim Blair. Blair was her money man”. It was Blair who set up an account for Hillary Clinton with Refco, a small brokerage firm run by Robert “Red” Bone, Don Tyson’s former bodyguard and a professional poker player. “Red” Bone got her into cattle future trades. She put up $1,000 and left the trading to Mr. Bone who’s often assumed to have arranged the trades with Blair, to Mrs. Clinton’s advantage. Nine months later, the $1,000 had swollen with miraculous speed into a profit for Mrs. Clinton of $99,000.

When Bill Clinton ran for the presidency in 1992, reporters noted a mysterious spike in the couple’s net worth in the early 1980s and quizzed Mrs. Clinton about it. Her first untruthful explanation was that there had been a windfall in the form of an unexpected gift of cash from her parents. But, aware that the questions wouldn’t stop, she issued ferocious order to her staff about any leakage of her tax records. She told them that if they released the tax records showing the commodity trades, they’d “never work in Democratic politics again”.

The records were stored in the Clinton Campaign headquarters in Little Rock, in a locked room for which only Hillary, Bill and Betsey Wright had keys. Also in “the Box Room” under lock and key were details of Bill’s sexual capers and Hillary’s dealings at Rose Law. An internal ’92 campaign memo, quoted by Gerth and Van Natta, cited 75 “problem files” in the materials in the Box Room, two-thirds of which related to them as a couple or to Hillary alone. When David Ifshin, the campaign’s legal counsel, asked for the key to the room to assess the likely problems, Bill Clinton told him: “We can’t open our closet, we’ll get crushed by the skeletons”.

But two reporters in particular kept pressing: Gerth of the New York Times and James Stewart of the Wall Street Journal. Gerth finally got evidence of the $99,000 profit on a $1,000 trade and confronted Mrs. Clinton. Shorn of the family gift story, Mrs. Clinton avowed that she’d spent her days poring over cattle prices in the Wall Street Journal, that the $99,000 was the fruit of these studies and that she’d quit commodity trading in 1980, after she’d got pregnant with Chelsea, because the trading “was too nerve-wracking”. Unfortunately for this story, details later surfaced amid prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s investigation during the Clinton presidency, showing that in 1981 Hillary had made a trade netting her $6,500 and she hadn’t reported the profit to the IRS.

Amid the Starr probe, the Clintons encouraged the Wall Street Journal’s Stewart to do a book on what they saw as their unfair persecution on the Whitewater deal. As he researched this work, published as Blood Sport, Stewart took a hard look at the commodity trades and pressed Mrs. Clinton for an explanation for all the contradictory stories. Hillary blamed everything on her staff and told Stewart that her own statements should simply be “accepted at face value”.

In the mid-1990s, federal special prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s investigative team in Little Rock was headed by a veteran of the courtroom, Hickman Ewing Jr. Grilled by Ewing before a grand jury on July 22, l995, Mrs. Clinton used the words “I can’t recall” in answer to 50 questions. Later, Ewing told Starr that he rated Mrs. Clinton’s testimony as deserving an F Minus, and he wanted to indict the nation’s first lady. He was contemplating a number of counts, headed by two major lines of enquiry. First came her handling of the commodity trades and her failure to report her profits to the IRS. Second came her conduct amid the collapse of Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan, owned by Jim McDougal. Relevant to this affair were Hillary Clinton’s billings as a legal counsel to Madison Guaranty. These were germane to the question of whether Hillary was being truthful in denying she’d done any legal work for the bank. After many adventures, the records finally came into the hands of Starr’s team and showed that Hillary Clinton had billed Madison Guaranty at the rate of $150 an hour, with a total of 60 hours of supposed work on the Castle Grande deal. The prosecutors had the billings but were never able to look at Hillary’s time sheets. Her secretary removed them from the Rose Law Firm in 1992, and it’s generally assumed the first lady destroyed them.

Webb Hubbell, a partner at Rose Law and one of Hillary’s closest friends, fell from his eminence as deputy attorney general in Clinton’s first term and was convicted and imprisoned on charges of padding by $394,000 his legal billings at Rose Law. Ewing was convinced that Hillary had been doing the same thing. He prepared an indictment. It was the most serious brush with disaster that Hillary ever faced. Paradoxically, she was saved by the indiscretions of her faithless mate. Even as Ewing was urging Hillary’s indictment, Starr was delightedly fingering what he conceived to be the object that would doom Bill Clinton, the semen-stained dress retrieved from Monica Lewinsky’s closet by Starr’s team. The only thing the prurient Starr cared about was nailing Clinton for sexual misconduct, and so he told the disappointed Ewing that there would be no indictment of Hillary.

Even as Hillary Clinton was making trouble for herself and Bill in her legal and business dealings, she was reinventing Bill as a politician. Defeat in 1980 after his first two-year gubernatorial term was a cataclysmic event. Bill called it a “near death experience”. According to Gerth and Van Natta, it was “the only time anyone has seen Hillary Clinton cry in public”. Bill was inclined to throw in the political towel and go back to being a law professor in Fayetteville, where he would doubtless be roosting in tenured bliss to this day, plump and pony-tailed, fragrant with marijuana and still working his way through an endless roster of coeds. But in 1980, over a funereal breakfast of instant grits, Vernon Jordan brokered a deal: Bill Clinton would give up being a southern populist in the mold of Orval Faubus, six-term governor of Arkansas. Southern populism involved offending powerful corporations. Bill lost in 1980 because not only had he taken the un-populist course of hiking the rate on car registration, he’d angered Weyerhaeuser and Tyson Foods. So, for his comeback he would remake himself as a neoliberal. Hillary Rodham would give up insisting on keeping her maiden name and become Hillary Clinton. The man charged with supervising the Clintons’ makeover was selected by Hillary: Dick Morris, a political consultant known for his work for Southern racists like Jesse Helms. Morris ultimately guided President Bill Clinton into the politics of triangulation, outflanking the Republicans from the right on race, crime, morals posturing and deference to corporations. As Hillary said in 1980, “If you want to be in this business, this is the type of person you have to deal with”.

Bill Clinton duly pushed aside the Playboy centerfolds and pored over Dick Morris’ polling data, trimming his positions to suit. He recaptured the governorship in 1982 and as a reward appointed his wife to head a special task force charged with reforming Arkansas’ education system, at that time widely regarded as the worst in the country. The plan Mrs. Clinton came up with showcased teacher testing and funding the schools through a sales tax increase, an astoundingly regressive proposal since it imposed new costs on the poor in a very poor state while sparing any levies on big corporations. The plan went through. Arkansas’ educational ranking remained abysmal, but Hillary won national attention as a “realistic Democrat” who could make “hard” choices, like taxing welfare mothers.

While enjoying this limelight, Mrs. Clinton was invited onto the board of Wal-Mart as the first woman director, the only Rose Law partner at that time to have accepted an outside position. She was also asked by Robert Mac Crate, the president of the American Bar Association, to head up a commission on how to implement a resolution by the ABA to increase the profile of women and minorities in the legal profession. Mac Crate told Gerth and Van Natta that Mrs. Clinton declined, saying that she didn’t want gender equity to be linked with race. She prevailed. Two years later, she agreed to head an ABA commission examining the status in the legal profession. Issues of race were not to be scrutinized.

By 1987, Hillary was wearying of life as first lady of Arkansas and began to press her husband on the 20-year plan they had made long before, whose consummation would be a successful run by Bill for the U.S. presidency. Dick Morris was assigned the task of running polls on Bill’s chances. Betsey Wright was charged with sizing up the “problems”. Morris’ news was grim. The Democratic Party was not sold on the prospect of the governor of Arkansas as their nominee in l988. Betsey Wright sat down with Bill and Hillary and read out to both of them a list of dozens of women Wright believed Bill had had some kind of fling with during his gubernatorial years. Bill’s head sank into his hands, and he mumbled, “I’m not going to run for president and I don’t want to run for re-election as governor either”. As Wright recalled later, Hillary stood up and cried, “If you’re not gonna run for re-election, I’m gonna run”. “Okay”, said Bill, he’d run again. It was Hillary’s call.

The next four years were spent gearing up for the White House run and trying to bury Bill’s past. Amid these efforts Hillary made two huge mistakes, which haunted the Clintons throughout the 1992 campaign and their White House years. Clinton’s opponent in the 1990 governor’s race was Sheffield Nelson, a Little Rock lawyer. Nelson had accumulated a dirt file on Bill, detailing his sexual escapades and the couple’s Whitewater real estate transactions. But he never used this material in the campaign. Nonetheless, in 1990 Hillary Clinton publicly excoriated Nelson, calling him “a vindictive and very bitter man”. The reason for Hillary’s assault was that Nelson, in the climactic weeks of the race, had saturated the airwaves with a series of campaign ads charging Clinton with being a tax-and-spend Democrat. The ads had some effect, and the Clintons had to borrow $100,000 from the Jackson Stephens-controlled Worthen Bank to mount a counteroffensive ad campaign of their own. Nelson, seething at Hillary’s onslaught, duly became bitter and vindictive and, as Clinton’s presidential campaign got under way, he began to leak ripe details from the file he had kept closed in l990.

Her second mistake also came in 1990, when Jim McDougal was facing trial over the collapse of Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan. In his hour of need, he asked Bill to testify as a character witness in his trial. Though Bill was willing to do so, Hillary was adamant that he should avoid any association with McDougal. She successfully persuaded Bill to decline. McDougal was acquitted, but he never forgave the Clintons for their disloyalty. He too began to leak damaging stories about Whitewater to Gerth and other reporters from his rusting trailer in Arkadelphia. Thus, even as she kindled her husband’s presidential bid, Hillary helped spark the fires of financial and sexual scandal that almost destroyed his presidency.

The GOP’s Female Ticket

Binoy Kampmark

“Hillary [Clinton] likes hashtags. But she doesn’t know what leadership means.”
-Carly Fiorina, Feb 26, 2015

Carly Fiorina is doing her bit to make things on the GOP side of politics interesting for the White House contest. She has been deemed an “underdog,” which, in political circles, is somewhat better than being seen as a stellar prospect even before the sun has risen. Fiorina lacks the boom element of fellow Republican candidates, but that may well be to her advantage.

The Republicans are hoping that she will be able to put the wind up Hillary Clinton’s sails. According to Craig Robinson, the former political director of the Iowa Republican party, “She’s the most aggressive Republican candidate when it comes to someone attacking Hillary Clinton” (The Guardian, Mar 31). There are no gender divides, no risks of falling into the chasm of sexist denigration here. Hillary against the men is one thing; against a female GOP opponent, quite another matter.

A recent move is afoot to heap much upon the former First Lady’s efforts to make it to the White House, with the heavy artillery being directed by Fiorina. “Yes, she’s had a lot of impressive titles, but a position is just a position – it’s all about what you do in it, and I think her time in the position of secretary of state is demonstrably one that lacks accomplishment but that it also has some real blemishes on it.”

The traditional ground here is what Clinton supposedly did – or did not do – in a range of areas. There was the Benghazi incident, which always seemed to jar with the GOP. There was the misunderstanding about Vladimir Putin (“there no way a red reset button is going to work”), which is hardly improved upon by Fiorina’s odd reflections on colour, buttons and a supposed understanding of the Slavic inner beast. Clinton is also accused of letting the relationship with Israel slide into discomfort and suspicion.

Then there are various instances of hypocrisy, of which the Clinton Foundation is rather good at. Explain, Fiorina challenged at the Conservative Political Action Conference held in February, “why we should accept that the millions and millions of dollars that have flowed into the Clinton Global Initiative from foreign governments doesn’t represent a conflict of interest.”

Well, that’s all rather understandable, if you reflect upon the vast creation of the Clinton political machinery, fuelled for decades on double-speak, contradiction and dirty money. At least Fiorina picks up on the antics of Clinton, tweeting on the one hand “about women’s rights in this country” while taking “money from the governments that deny women the most basic rights.” A somewhat dishonest way of pocketing the proceeds, with Fiorina sounds almost envious.

What ideas of novelty will Fiorina be offering? Well and good to be the nagger of the political scene, the negative critic, the savage counter, but platforms and self-reflection also count in the policy stakes. Potential zingers are already being readied for firing.

Fiorina, for one, has her own eye towards emancipating a few more Wall Street wolves, wishing to abolish reforms of the financial sector while paying tribute to the God of the invisible yet rather aggressive hand. The 2010 Dodd-Frank legislation is the satanic spawn of a regulatory mind, and she wishes to neuter it by way of swift abolition. Showing that history is not necessarily important for anybody in particular, notably the GOP, Fiorina ignores the reason the rules were introduced to begin with, and argues that they do not work. Forget any preventive measures regarding a financial crisis, or a meltdown inflicted by roguish carelessness. White collar criminals, convicted or otherwise, will be rejoicing.

“Let’s start by making sure that the 26 regulatory agencies that were supposed to be overseeing the financial system that were supposed to be predicting the financial crisis – 26 of them all missed it. We haven’t even started to look at that problem.” Fine stuff, till you realise that advice, warnings and concerns about an imminent crisis during the first decade of 2000 were treated as Cassandra-like evocations of a disturbed, killjoy mind.

Fiorina attempts some understanding of how best to combat “crony capitalism” but struggles to understand its links to the US political system. The connections between government and the private sector are matters of record in Washington, D.C., with the latter sinking spreading its octopi like influence across a range of corporate, military and financial deals. There is no cleaning up to be done, because there is a general feeling that all functions smoothly in a republic that has seen better days.

Interestingly enough, Fiorina is right to suggest that, “Bigger government creates more crony capitalism” but that is to miss the point that all governments since Clinton have expanded even as they have been condemned. Under Bush, government hardly shrank, and sweet deals were done between officials and private sector interests. Attacking small government remains a fashionable nonsense.

Shrinkage – at least an inflicted variant of it on the workplace – is certainly something Fiorina believes in. Her six-year tenure at Hewlett-Packard was marked by savage cuts – the laying off of 30,000 employees provided Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) ample ammunition in her re-election campaign in 2010. In 2005, she was ousted by the company’s disgruntled board. An air of ecstatic relief pushed shares of HP (Research) up 6.9 per cent. “The stock is up a bit on the fact that nobody liked Carly’s leadership all that much,” suggested analyst with Fulcrum Global Partners, Robert Cihra. This may prove that Fiorina has more in common with Clinton than she wishes to admit. Both risk doing well in the anti-popularity stakes.

Sexist forays of the sort The New Republic has dabbled in, calling Fiorina “Sarah Palin 2.0,” are misguided. But Fiorina is not, for all her underdog credentials, a vast improvement upon candidates in the GOP flock. She is certainly no Sarah Palin, but she may well prove to be another scarecrow in the realm of dull-witted Republican policy. The sell, in the end, is what will matter.