When I think of why Barack Obama was helped into office against all odds, I think of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. The wizards and elves in the film know the backstory and this pushes the plot along. However, while Lord of the Rings is fantasy, Obama’s election as the first (known, after all there was Warren Harding) black president of the United States was fantastic as well as a shock to the political system. And the villains trying to prevent his second term are even more fantastic.
THE NAZIFICATION OF AMERICA
No authors and texts explain why Obama got “helped” into Office than John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt in The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (2007), and Richard J. Evans in The Third Reich In Power 1933-1939 (2005).
Mearsheimer and Walt describe how the Israel Lobby moved to the Right by stating that most American Jews have long supported liberal causes and the Democratic Party, and a majority of them favor a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestine conflict. Nonetheless, some of the most important groups in the lobby—including AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents—have become increasingly conservative over time and are now led by hard-liners who support the positions of their hawkish counterparts in Israel. As J.J. Goldberg chronicles in his important book, Jewish Power, the Six-Day War and its aftermath brought into prominence a group of “New Jews” drawn disproportionately from hardline Zionist, Orthodox, and neoconservative circles. “Their defiance was so strident, and their anger so intense,” he writes, “that the rest of the Jewish community respectfully stood back and let the New Jews take the lead. The minority was permitted to speak for the mass and become the dominant voice of Jewish politics.
Evans describes how Germany became Nazified. He states that the Third Reich came to power in the first half of 1933 on the ruins of German’s first attempt at democracy, the ill-fated Weimar Republic. By July, the Nazis had created virtually all the fundamental features of the regime that was to govern Germany until its collapse almost twelve years later, in 1945. They had eliminated open opposition at every level, created a one-party state, and coordinated all the major institutions of German society with the exceptions of the army and the churches.
Many people have tried to explain how they managed to achieve such a position of total dominance in German politics and society with such speed. One tradition of explanation points to long-term weaknesses in the German national character that made it hostile to democracy, inclined to follow ruthless leaders and susceptible to the appeal of militarists and demagogues. But when one looks at the nineteenth century, one can see very little evidence of such traits. Liberal and democratic movements were no weaker than they were in many other countries. More relevant perhaps, was the relatively late creation of a German nation-state.
Following on the heels of the Second Reich, which Evans says in many ways was a modern state: it had a national parliament that, unlike its British counterpart for example, and elected by universal manhood suffrage; elections attracted a voter turnout of over 80 percent; and political parties were well organized and an accepted part of the political system. The largest of these by 1914, the Social Democratic Party, had over a million members and was committed to democracy, equality, the emancipation of women and the ending of racial discrimination and prejudice, including anti-Semitism.
Germany’s economy was the most dynamic in the world, rapidly overtaking the British by the turn of the century, and in the most advanced areas like the electrical and chemical industries, rivaling even the Americans. Middleclass value, culture and behavior were dominant in Germany by the turn of the century. Modern art and culture were beginning to make their mark in the paintings of Expressionists like Max Beckmann and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, the plays of frank Wedekind and the novels of Thomas Mann.
Of course, there was a down-side to the Bismarckian Reich. Aristocratic privilege remained entrenched in some areas, the national parliament’s powers were limited and the big industrialists, like their counterparts in the USA, were deeply hostile to unionized labor. (2-3)
If you compare the silencing of the German people by the Nazis to the silencing of the Jews by the Neocons and the resemblance between Germany and America, some familiar patterns can be drawn. And then too remember, the United States did not become a democracy until 1965 with the signing of the Voting Rights Act. However, with the aid of the Neocons ensconced in the Reagan White House, both Civil Rights and democracy began to erode.
THE ROLE OF THE NEOCONS IN NAZIFYING AMERICA
Mearsheimer and Walt declare that the lobby’s drift to the right has been reinforced by the emergence of the neoconservatives. The neoconservative movement has been an important part of American intellectual and political life since the 1970s, but has drawn particular attention since September 11. This group has been prominent in shaping the Bush administration’s unilateralist foreign policy, and especially the ill-fated decision to invade Iraq in March 2003.
Neoconservatives tend to be skeptical of international institutions (especially the UN, which they regard as both anti-Israel and as a constraint on America’s freedom of action) and wary of may allies (especially the Europeans, whom they see as idealistic pacifists’ free-riding on the Pax Americana). Viewing U.S. leadership as “good both for America and the world,” to quote the website of the neoconservative Project for New American Century (PNAC), neoconservatives generally favor the unilateral exercise of American power instead.
Very importantly, neoconservatives believe that military force is an extremely useful tool for shaping the world in ways that will benefit America. If the United States demonstrates its military prowess and shows that it is willing to use the power at its disposal, then allies will follow our lead and potential adversaries will realize it is futile to resist and will decide to “bandwagon” with the United States. Neo-conservatism, in short is an especially hawkish political ideology.
NEOCONS ROLL CALL OF POWER BROKERS
Mearsheimer and Walt name names and organizations that dominate U.S. politics. They write that neoconservatives occupy influential positions at a variety of organizations and institutions. Prominent neoconservatives include former and present policy makers like Elliott Abrams, Kenneth Adelman, William Bennett, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, the late Jeanne Kirkpatrick, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, James Woolsey, and David Wurser; journalists like the late Robert Bartley, David Brooks, Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Bret Stephens, and Norman Podhoretz; academics like Fouad Ajami, Eliot Cohen, Aaron Friedberg, Bernard Lewis, and Ruth Wedgwood; and think-tank pundits like Max Boot, David Frum, Reuel Marc Gerecht, Robert Kagan, Michael Ledeen, Joshua Muravchik, Daniel Pipes, Danielle Pleka, Michael Rubin, and Meyrav Wurmser.
The leading neocon magazines and newspapers are Commentary, the New York Sun, the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, and the Weekly Standard. The think tanks and advocacy groups most closely associated with these neoconservative are the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Center for Security Policy (CSP), the Hudson Institute, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), the Middle East Forum (MEF), the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP).
Knowledge of this Jewish elite’s intentions led Michael Lerner in Jews and Blacks Let the Healing Begin (1995) to predict that by the time these right-wing Jews realize what they’ve wrought; America may be plunged into a resurgence of hatred and reaction far more pernicious than anything we’ve experienced since the thirties. Although they represent only a small percentage of American Jews, their impact is magnified because they represent the worldview of the riches Jews, they can fund their magazines and political organizations, their circles have disproportionate access to the most influential media, and they are overly represented among orthodox Jews and Jews in positions of leadership in organized Jewish community. (79) The major event of the 1930s was the Nazi takeover of the German government.
Mearsheimer and Walt write that virtually all neoconservatives are strongly committed to Israel, a point they emphasize openly and unapologetically. According to Max Boot, a leading neoconservative pundit [and left over Marxist], a position he attributes to “shared liberal democratic values.” Actually, Neocons embraced Ronald Reagan’s “hardline anticommunism” because they saw it as a “political movement that would guarantee Israel’s security. (129-30)
Eight neoconservatives led by Richard Perle and including Douglas Feith and David Wurmser that drafted the 1996 “Clean Break” study for incoming Likud Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The study advocated that Israel abandon the Oslo peace process and use bold measure—including military force—to topple unfriendly Middle Eastern regimes and thereby “transcend” the Arab Israeli conflict.
BBCWORLD NEWShttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-15350137
Gilad Shalit's father on his return home
NEW 7 hours ago
Gilad Shalit's father, Noam Shalit, is expected to speak outside the family home in Mitzpe Hila after his son was released from five years' captivity…
Netanyahu says release of Shalit came at a high price
NEW 10 hours ago
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says meeting freed soldier Gilad Shalit and returning him to his family was a "very exciting moment".
Wall Steet arrestsCNN / 16 October 2011
http://edition.cnn.com//2011/10/16/us/occupy-wall-street/index.html
… marking the 30th day since the outcry over income disparities started. Occupy Wall Street protesters spilled into nearby streets as riot police…
THE LOBBY’S SOURCE OF POWER THE CONTROLS CONGRESS
Many neoconservatives are connected to an overlapping set [or network] of Washington based thin-tanks, committees, and publications whose agenda includes promoting the special relationship between the United States and Israel.
Mearsheimer and Walt tell why the Israel lobby so effective. One reason is the wide-open nature of the American political system. The United States has divided form of government, a well-established tradition of free speech, and a system in which elections are very expensive to run and where campaign contributions are weakly regulated. This environment gives different groups many different ways to gain access or influence policy. Interest groups can direct campaign contributions to favored candidates and try to defeat candidates whose views are suspect.
They can also lobby elected representatives and member of the executive branch, and they can try to get their own supporters appointed to key policy-making positions. Moreover, there are numerous ways for interest groups to mold public opinion: by cultivating sympathetic journalists; writing books, articles, and op-eds; and working to discredit or marginalize anyone with different views. For a group that is highly motivated and has sufficient resources, there is no shortage of ways to influence public policy.
As Michael Lerner pontificates, “The power of these Neocons is increased the more the Jews tend to think of themselves and interests as indistinguishable from that of the majority of American middleclass, suburban whites.”
LESSONS ON HOW TO DESTROY A LIBERAL DEMOCRACY
Evans writes that as the elections of September 1930 and July 1932 showed, were a catch-all party of social protest with particularly strong middle-class support and relatively weak, though still very significant, working-class backing at the polls. They had broken out of their core constituency of the Protestant lower middle classes and farming community. This had nothing to do with specific polices, much more with the image of dynamism that the Nazis projected. The hated, calamitous Weimar Republic had to be got rid of, and the people united once more in a national community that knew no parties or classes, just as it had been in 1914; Germany had to reassert itself on the international scene and become a leading power again: that was more or less what the Nazis’ program amounted to.
Helped Into Office
In May 1932, Bruning was forced to resign and replaced by Franz von Papen, a personal friend of President von Hindenburg. Papen’s advent to power sounded the death-knell of Weimar democracy. He used the army to depose the Social Democratic state government in Prussia and prepared to reform the Weimar constitution by restricting voting rights and drastically curtailing the legislative powers of the Reichstag. He began to ban critical issues of daily newspapers and to restrict civil freedoms. Papen’s attempt to enlist Hitler and the Nazis in support of his government failed when Hitler insisted that he and not Papen had to head the government. Lacking support in the country, Papen was forced to resign when the army lost patience with him and put its own man into office. The new head of government, General Kurt von Schleicher, did not better at restoring order or co-opting the Nazis to give the semblance of popular backing to his policy of creating an authoritarian state.
After the Nazis had lost two million votes in the Reichstag elections of November 1932, their evident decline and their obvious lack of funds created a serious division in the Party’s ranks. The Party’s organizer and effective second man after Hitler, Gregor Strasser, resigned from the Party in frustration at Hitler’s refusal to negotiate with Hindenburg and Papen. The moment seemed right to take advantage of the Nazi’s weakness. On 30 January 1933, with the agreement of the army, Hindenburg appointed Hitler as head of a new government in which all the other posts bar two were held by conservatives, with Papen as deputy Chancellor at their head.
In reality, 30 January 1933, marked the beginning of the Nazi seizure of power, not of a conservative counter-revolution. Hitler had avoided the mistakes he had made ten years previously: he had achieved office without formally destroying the constitution, and with the support of the conservative establishment and the army. The question now was how to convert his position in yet another Weimar coalition cabinet into a dictatorship in a one-party state.
The Third Reich’s elaborate apparatus of policing and repression was directed in the first place at hunting down and apprehending Nazism’s enemies within Germany. Organized opposition to Nazism was offered only by the Communists and the Social Democrats in the early years of the dictatorship. The left-wing political parties had won 13.1 million votes in Germany’s last fully free election, in November 1932, to the Nazis’ 11.7 million. They represented a huge chunk of the German electorate. Yet they had no effective means of standing up to Nazi violence. Their entire apparatus, along with that of their paramilitary wings, the ‘Red Front-Fighter’ League’ and the Reichbanner, and associated organizations such as the trade unions, was ruthlessly swept aside in the first months of 1933, their leaders exiled or imprisoned, their millions of members and supporters many of them look back on a lifetime’s commitment to the cause, isolated and disoriented.
Former activists were placed under more or less permanent surveillance, shadowed, their correspondence and contacts monitored. Divided, mutually hostile and taken by surprise at the speed and ruthlessness of the Nazi seizure of power, they were initially helpless and uncertain how to act. Reorganizing to form an effective resistance movement seemed out of the question.
The Neoconservative Mafia at Work
Americans of Jewish faith, who understand the danger that this small minority of ultra conservative Jews is to the Jewish community and express it, are vilified. One of the most prominent is Norman Finkelstein.
Mearsheimer and Walt that in addition to targeting academia for its pro-Israel propaganda by targeting faculty and hiring on campus, a number of pro-Israel academics and groups have tried to suppress publication of scholarly works that challenged their particular views. In 1998, they targeted Norman Finkelstein and his and Ruth Bettina Birn’s A Nation on Trial to halt its release.
A Nation on Trial is a sharply worded critique of Daniel Goldhagen’s controversial best seller Hitler’s Willing Executioners, which argues that the Holocaust was not simply the product of Nazi beliefs and Hitler’s own madness but also was rooted in a pervasive “eliminationist ideology” [a theory which historian Michael J. Evans has also disputed], in German society that predated the Nazi period. Like the Goldhagen book, A Nation on Trial elicited both praise and criticism from respected scholars. Yet ADL head Abraham Foxman [the Jewish mafia’s enforcer] said A Nation on Trial should not have been published, insisting that the issue was not “whether Goldhagen’s thesis is right or wrong but what is ‘legitimate criticism’ and what goes beyond the pale.”Again in 2003, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz threatened the University of California Press in an attempt to halt publication of Finkelstein’s book Beyond Chutzpah, an extended critique of Dershowitz’s own The Case for Israel. Dershowitz went so far as to write then California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger as part of his campaign against Finkelstein in an effort to suppress the publication of the book, Dershowitz subsequently claimed that he was not trying to suppress publication, but that is certainly how officials at UC Press interpreted his actions. They resisted these pressures and issued Finkelstein’s book any way.
No students were safe from pro-Israel propaganda, not even at the high school level. In 2005, Columbia University professor and Palestinian scholar Rashid Khalidi was involved in a lecture program for high school teachers sponsored by New York City’s department of Education. Besides trying to get him fired, he was also vilified in the Sun and by some local politicians, one of which was Anthony Weiner (D-NY) [who posted his private parts on Facebook and wrote lewd message to underage females, eventually resulting in a Republican claiming his seat in a special election]. This lynch mob of American Zionists soon organized into Pro-Israel groups and individuals to battle students, professors, and the curriculum itself—to shape discourse on campus to favor Israel. Their efforts have not been as successful in academia as they have been on Capitol Hill or even in the media, but their work has not been in vain. Despite the continued turmoil in the region and Israel’s continued expansion in the Occupied Territories, there is less criticism of Israel on college campuses today than there was five years ago. (184-5)
THINGS FALL APART THE CENTER CAN NO LONGER HOLD AND WHY
ON POINT RADIO
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2011
Occupy Wall Street protestors march towards Wall Street after being heartened by the postponement of a scheduled cleanup of their camp at Zucotti Park that many protestors saw as a de facto eviction, Friday, Oct. 14, 2011, in New York. Some arrests have occurred after a few hundred protesters left Zucotti Park and marched to the area around the New York Stock Exchange. There are barricades and mounted police around the exchange. (AP)
They’re arresting Occupy Wall Streeters for trampling grass in public squares. But the finance titans who trampled the U.S. economy in the collapse of Wall Street, says my guest today, have gone scot free.William Black is a warrior on finance ethics and legality. He was in the thick of the slew of prosecutions after the 1980s S&L scandal. It’s not too late, he says, to prosecute over the 2008 collapse and its run-up. And we should. Occupy Wall Street protestors march towards Wall Street after being heartened by the postponement of a scheduled cleanup of their camp at Zucotti Park that many protestors saw as a de facto eviction, Friday, Oct. 14, 2011, in New York. Some arrests have occurred after a few hundred protesters left Zucotti Park and marched to the area around the New York Stock Exchange. There are barricades and mounted police around the exchange. (AP)For justice and the future of the country. All the way to the top.
This hour On Point: the unfinished call to prosecute Wall Street.
-Tom AshbrookGuests
William Black, University of Missouri Kansas City School of Law. He was a senior federal financial regulator during the Savings and Loan crisis.
Lynn Stout, Professor of Law, University of California, Los Angeles. She’s the author of Cultivating Conscience: How Good Laws Make Good People.
From Tom’s Reading List
The New York Times “Late last week, word leaked out that Mr. Mozilo, who had co-founded Countrywide Financial in 1969 — and, for nearly 40 years, presided over its astonishing rise and its equally astonishing fall — would not be prosecuted by the Justice Department. Not for insider trading. Not for failing to disclose to investors his private worries about subprime loans. Not for helping to create a culture at Countrywide in which mortgage originators were rewarded for pushing fraudulent loans on borrowers.”
International Herald Tribune “It is a question asked repeatedly across America: Why, in the aftermath of a financial mess that generated hundreds of billions in losses, have no high-profile participants in the disaster been prosecuted?”
Huffington Post “What exactly is the function of the financial sector in our society? Simply this: Its sole function is supplying capital efficiently to aid the real economy. The financial sector is a tool to help those that make real tools, not an end in itself. But five fatal flaws in the financial sector’s current structure have created a monster that drains the real economy, promotes fraud and corruption, threatens democracy, and causes recurrent, intensifying crises.”
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