Category Archives: U.S. Politics

AIPAC, Iran, nuclear Iran, U.S. Foreign Policy, U.S. Politics

An Iranian View of an Unsavory Las Vegas Tycoon………

Shuwaikh-school1 RattleSnakeRidge Sharqeya-Baneen-15

“Nearly one-third of anti-Iran pressure group United Against Nuclear Iran’s 2013 budget came from the country’s foremost Republican megadonor, a man who invested a reported $98 million to defeat Barack Obama in the 2012 election, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. Adelson routed his $500,000 donation to UANI through his family foundation, according to tax documents. Over the past six months, a number of unanswered questions have swirled around UANI. The Justice Department continues to shield information about the group’s internal workings from coming to light; the group hasn’t accounted for a mysterious funder who stands to profit from a confrontation with Iran…………”

Apparently the Iranians also believe that Sheldon Adelson is at it again: that he is funding a mysterious new anti-Iranian group. A major Iranian news site writes about the American right-wing moneybag Sheldon Adelson.

The conservative Las Vegas gambling tycoon and part-owner of many Republican Party politicians once fully owned Newt Gingrich during his hopeless attempt to start running for the party nomination in 2012. The site reports that Adelson is the largest contributor to the GOP and spent 98 million of his own money to defeat Barack Obama in 2012 (it was probably pure politics, not related to race).
Mr. Adelson, who reportedly has very close connections to the Israeli right-wing parties had publicly proposed once in 2013 that Mr. Obama should launch a nuclear attack on Iran. The Iranians remember that he was kind enough to specify a nuclear attack on “sparsely populated” areas of Iran.
Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum                          Follow ArabiaDeserta on Twitter

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Economics, Finance, U.S. Congress, U.S. Politics

New Age Heroes: Financial Opportunists, Lobbyists, and Rogue Crusaders………

Shuwaikh-school1 RattleSnakeRidge Sharqeya-Baneen-15

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“Haym Salomon funded not only the Revolutionary War but several leading politicians, yet passed on claiming huge debts. On January 6, 1785, Haym Salomon, the Polish-born immigrant to colonial New York who is revered in American history as the financier of the Revolutionary War, died. He was all of 44 years old — and he was bankrupt………….”

They have a picture of a 10 cent U.S. stamp from 1975 calling Haym (Haim) Salomon a “financial hero”. It says somewhere that he ran a “brokerage business” as well, but apparently he had nothing to do with Salomon Brothers firm that came later. Mr. Salomon died bankrupt, but only because he lived in a different era.

Speaking of financial heroes, I fully expect the new U.S. Congress (both houses) to start creating new “financial” heroes. I expect some top lobbyists to be named, as well as CEOs of Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase and Mr. Blankfein of Goldman Sachs. For their role in the crash of 2008 that required government funds to bail all these geniuses out. The Koch Brothers and Sheldon Adelson of Las Vegas gambling, financial godfather of the New New Republican Party, will surely be on the list. Not to ignore some other likely candidates: famous anti-tax, anti-affordable universal healthcare, anti-affordable higher education, and anti-welfare ‘crusaders’.

The New New Democrats, led by you-know-who-she-is, should they win the White House in 2016, will likely not only follow the same path, but revert to their old habit of appointing top bankers as top financial officers of the U.S. government.
As for myself, I would suggest an economist like Paul Krugman or even Robert Reich for treasury secretary. But that would limit the New New Democrat president to one term. Unless she or he is impeached and convicted first by an uncharacteristically outraged Congress.

Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum                          Follow ArabiaDeserta on Twitter

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Economics, Finance, Globalization, Pacific, U.S. Politics, US Foreign Policy

Corporation Democrats and Globalization from Obama to Clinton: TP the TPP?……..

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“President Barack Obama is ready to buck his liberal base in order to advance the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the pro-corporate international trade deal currently being negotiated in secret by the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim countries……..”

It is the corporations, stupid.
There was a time when it was true that what was good for corporate America was good for mainstreet America. Not so much anymore. Now what is good for corporate America is mainly good for the large shareholders and for the club of CEOs of America in this age of bonus-hunting by management. The real shareholders matter, not the average Jane with an IRA, as they try to tell us on the financial networks.

If you want to know what American corporations probably prefer the ideal state of American labor to be, look at China, India, and some Latin American countries. Well, a mild exaggeration to make the point perhaps, but not by much. A huge lower lower middle class enshrined in a permanent American class society the like of which has not been seen in more than a century.

Mr. Obama is in many ways like ALL other American presidents since Ronald Reagan. He is a corporation president, even though the U.S. Chamber of Commerce strongly campaigned for his Republican rivals (that was just a matter of comparative preference). His party aspires that he will be followed into the White House by the two most corporatist Democrats available in decades: Hillary and Bill Clinton.
Given the country’s well-financed shift to the right, those two might be the only Democrats who have a chance to keep the White House for their party two years from now.
Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

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Human Right, Justice, Racism, U.S. Politics, Uncategorized

America Divided over New Lynchings, but the Song Remains the Same……..

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It is a common headline, it has been for some time. The new media and technology makes it impossible to cover up most of it. A black teenager or a black man, almost always unarmed, is shot or killed otherwise by the police who are on-duty or off-duty. It is never one bullet, it is never two bullets. Mostly a whole magazine of a gun is emptied in a living body, sometimes more. Occasionally some civilian idiot takes the law into his own hands and follows and shoots an unarmed black man for being in the ‘wrong’ neighborhood. Or a black child is riddled with many police bullets while playing with a toy gun in a park.
In all cases, at least those cases that are publicized, the killer(s) get off free. Always. We are told that ‘race’ has nothing to do with it. So what then? Is it the economic class that dehumanizes some? Which brings us to the same point.
Soon after every killing, Republicans, at least those who express an opinion, and their media side with the police or with the vigilante who killed the unarmed black boy or man. Democrats wait briefly before jumping in by obliquely criticizing the police. There are protests, complaints, handwringing, bluster, investigations, even some singing of kumbaya………
Then bang! It happens again, the widely-accepted modern equivalent of lynching………

The beat goes on. The song remains the same………
Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

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U.S. Politics, Uncategorized, US Congress

U.S. Elections: It Is the Money, Estúpido……….

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Abe Lincoln would probably tear up the old draft, rewrite his Gettysburg Address. He would see it nowadays as not “government of the people, by the people, for the people“. He would probably see it now more as “Government of the Moneyed Interests, by the Moneyed Interests, for the Moneyed Interests“. And that is largely bi-partisan, although it leans more one way. 

He would be amused by the uninspiring and possibly harmful oratory of his successors. They gave us gems like: “defeat the terrorists by going out and shopping” (that one by W contributed to the 2008 economic crash), and “corporations are people, my friend” (That one by the Least Interesting Man in Politics  in 2012. The fallout from that one is building up as I write).

The people still make their free choices. But they don’t have a chance to make real ‘choices’ while bombarded with so much money and all the misleading distortions that it can buy and sell. So they vote for candidates who are openly against what they stand for, against what the polls tell us most Americans support. Which elicits a loud WTF, but politely expressed, from the media pundits who scramble to explain it with prepared plan A or plan B explanations.

It is the money, estúpido……….

Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

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Elections, History, Sectarianism, U.S. Politics, US Congress

Ebola and American Sectarianism: the Politicization of Everything……..

_9OJik4N_normal Sharqeya-Baneen-15    DennyCreek2

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“We buy shit we don’t need, with money we don’t have, to impress people we don’t like….” George Carlin

In these divisive and divided times there is hardly anything, any event, or any phenomenon that is not politicized in America. It is almost like the country is reliving the 1860 campaign of Lincoln: it is deeply divided along political, economic,and cultural lines. That makes the politics venomous in election years, almost sectarian, to use a Middle Eastern reality that many Americans have discovered in the past decade or so. It continues in other years which are not election years but have become pre-election and post-election years. There is so much fuel, so much money to spend on politics: buying candidates, buying expensive airtime on the Boob Tube, and effectively buying voters by financing their favorite television shows.

People here are so busy defeating the terrorists by overworking in order to keep up and to buy more goods and gadgets (some call it more stuff, others call it more shit). That was how George W. Bush succinctly expressed one part of his strategy to defeat terrorism after September 2001: go shopping. So between work and other distractions the people have no time to think politically. They emulate corporations that have outsourced their jobs, factories and customer services, mostly to Asia. Many American voters have now outsourced their political thinking to the television sound-bite industry. I suspect that in many cases the last catchy sound bite on the last weekend before the election wins it all.

As per a decision of the Supreme Court of the USA, money has more than equal freedom of speech and political expression (Citizens United). “Corporations are people, my friend” intoned the Least Interesting Man in the World during the 2012 presidential campaign. So, the politics go viral, more than ever before: the country is divided and money is not a constraint anymore.
Some state governors, ambitious and/or terrified of looming elections, decide that Ebola suspects should be completely quarantined in their states. Other politicians, many from the party that is out of the White House, talk of banning flights from West Africa. Then they wait for their rivals to supply the wrong sound bite and provide a political edge.

In this era, nothing is sacred: from God to National Security to Death. Everything is being politicized: first God, then War, then health care, and now Ebola. Even the HIV/AIDS scare was never so politicized in its heyday. Only sports seem to have stayed above the fray, so far………

Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

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Caliphate, Elections, U.S. Politics

Caliph Abu Al-Baghdadi and Dukakis and a Foxy Zombie in Kentucky……….

_9OJik4N_normal Sharqeya-Baneen-15    DennyCreek2

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Election time in the United States has become silly time. The discourse in recent years has focused on the candidates distorting and trying to trap each other. In trying to do so, they show what they truly think of their constituents: that the voters are too stupid for clean debate.

U.S. media Tuesday was full of excerpts and reports and soundbites and video clips of a senate race debate in Kentucky (hmm, a race in Kentucky, get it?). I watched some excerpts on Morning Joe and another news program. Alison Grimes, the challenger to Senator McConnell was asked several times who she voted for in the last presidential election. It was a silly, meaningless, gotcha question since everybody ‘knows’ who she voted for. She is a Clinton Democrat who almost certainly voted for Obama, if that matters. The moderator was trying to trap her into an embarrassing answer (embarrassing by Kentucky standards), or maybe he wanted his Bernard Shaw and Dukakis moment of glory. Very likely both.

Anyway, the lady candidate almost squirmed, hemming and hawing, and avoided a direct answer. She rightly pointed out that the country has secret ballots for a reason, but nobody was paying attention. McConnell looked waxen but also poised to strike, almost like a ‘foxy zombie‘, if there is such a thing.

Which made me think of ersatz Caliph Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi Al Samarrai. I mean they were talking about the elected president of the United States, not the Caliph of ISIS. From the debate and the media reaction later on, you’d think she may have voted for the silly but murderous gang-banging Wahhabi Caliph of Mosul and Al Raqqa. Or maybe Satan himself.

Silly season for nearly another month, but then it will continue for two more years. Oy vey, as we say in the Middle East………..
Cheers
MHG

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Caliphate, Iraq, Jihadis, Syria, U.S. Foreign Policy, U.S. Politics

1. Blame Game Saga from the Caliphate to the U.S. Congress………

_9OJik4N_normal Sharqeya-Baneen-15    DennyCreek2

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The Middle East Iraq-Syria blame game has gotten frantic in the past few months, since the fall of Mosul. Yet almost nobody in the region between the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean is innocent of blame. First, the American stance:

  • American politicians have shifted the blame for the Iraqi mess to Iraqis themselves, which is fair enough but up to a point. Keep in mind that almost everybody else in the region is meddling in Iraqi affairs and should get some of the blame.
  • Over the past few months, American blame has focused on former prime minister Al Maliki. If only Al Maliki would/could do certain things, then everything would be fine in Iraq. Now he is out of his old office.
  • Americans also blame other Americans, a favorite political pastime. President Obama is handed the biggest share of the blame. Mainly for failing to keep U.S. troops in Iraq beyond 2011, which is the date agreed to between Al Maliki and George W Bush.
  • Republicans especially prefer to blame Obama for the mess in Iraq, but in fairness they also blame him for everything else under the sun. Including possibly the Ebola epidemic as well as Benghazi, Benghazi. On the up side, they don’t blame him for global warming, because they don’t believe in it.
  • Democrats prefer to blame Al Assad, Al Maliki, and the Republican House of representatives.
  • Speaking of Benghazi, Hillary Clinton is edging toward blaming Obama as she weighs her options for 2016. She would rather not travel anywhere near the Middle East these days, not for another two years.
  • Jingoists like John McCain and his allies blame it all on the reluctance of the Obama administration to join the Syrian civil war. It is this ‘wussiness’, they assert, that has led to the emergence of the Wahhabi-Baathist Caliphate across the Iraqi-Syrian border.
  • Fox News blames the whole mess on the elections of 2008.
  • It looks like America is edging back into Iraq, kicking and screaming. Nobody wants to be seen between now and 2016 as punting on ISIS.
  • FYI: the U.S. Congress is punting on Iraq, since they refuse to vote on it before the 2014 elections. Before elections: Democrats are scared of voting for war, Republicans are terrified of being seen to vote ‘yes’ for anything that Obama supports. No Profiles of Courage there. Courage, courage, as Dan Rather used to shout inexplicably on TV .

Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

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CIA, Cyber Security, Espionage, U.S. Politics

A Tale of Two Whistleblowers: From Snowden to Panetta, How to Do It Right……..

_9OJik4N_normal Sharqeya-Baneen-15    DennyCreek2

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Interesting the reactions of the political elites, classes, and opinion-ators in the United States to two different famous whistleblowers:

  • Edward Snowden was a young techie contracted by the NSA to handle secret data and information.
  • Leon Panetta is a former Democrat Congressman, former White House Chief of Staff under Bill Clinton, former head of the CIA, and former Secretary of Defense. Former jack of all trades in the Democratic Party.
  • Both men had access to top secret information. Panetta also had access to detailed ‘elite’ information and insight about the inner workings of the intelligence and national security apparatus.
  • Edward Snowden was  a mere grunt. He swore an oath to keep the information he handled secret. Being young and not glib with no access to high-powered legal counsel, he leaked the shocking information he had access to. Technically he broke the law, no doubt. Morally, many people believe he did his countrymen a great service and opened millions of eyes (he did open millions of eyes for sure). Either way, he did a version of “kiss and tell”, although unlike Panetta he did not do the kissing. So far all Snowden has gotten from his disclosure and flight is grief and exile.
  • Leon Panetta, the more mature more glib man, waited until he left office, then he struck: he published a book and hit the TV trail. No doubt some of his accommodating former colleagues have approved his book. He is pushing his book all over the media, hoping to make a small fortune from it. I have not read the book, but reportedly he talks critically of American policy in Iraq and Syria. He is divulging information and insight he had heard and read during National Security sessions to make his political points. He is also doing a “kiss and tell”.
  • Snowden was not involved in politics, as far as I know. Panetta is suspected by at least one person of being a Clinton partisan and of awaiting the restoration of Hillary to the White House. Someone wrote recently that he is trying to rewrite history.
  • Oh, I left out that other confidante of presidents, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and his “kiss and tell” book.
  • So the moral is? If you want to blow the whistle on your employer, make sure you rise high enough within the hierarchy, then quit and do it.

Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum

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Afghanistan, U.S. Foreign Policy, U.S. Politics

Bergdahl Controversy: Profiles in Courage, Profiles in Afghan Food…….

      

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“Soldier: ‘Ludicrous’ To Lay 100 Percent Of Blame At Bergdahl’s Feet..” 


“Hillary Camp Distances… After Defending Days Ago!….” 

“Republicans Delete Digital Praise of Bowe Bergdahl Release….” 

“GOP Strategists Are Arranging Media Interviews To Attack Bowe Bergdahl…..” 

“The Hero Who Died Looking for Bowe Bergdahl…..” 

“Hillary Clinton Was Skeptical of Taliban-Bergdahl Swap…..” 

“Bergdahl was unpopular with fellow troops” (He read books about Afghanistan!)

Those were some of the headlines this week on the Bergdahl-Taliban exchange. So:
  • Many Republicans praised the deal then saw an opportunity to benefit politically……….
  • The Clintonistas, Hillary et al, praised the deal then it got warm in the kitchen. They saw a pitfall, let it know Hillary MAY have been skeptical……
  • What next? That Obama was skeptical but went along with Smiling Joe Biden?
  • Either way, Susan Rice has had her last official government job: she is the fall girl, has been since before Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi (John McCain can manage to look dignified as he whistles that tune to sound like Maria, Maria, Maria)……..

Oh courage, courage or lack thereof and the soundbite and the video clip without consent. And don’t forget the spin for 2014 and 2016. The early bird gets the spin. That is what defines American politics these years.

Now for the main event, Bowe Bergdahl: 
  • The kid was held in captivity among the cutthroat Taliban for five years! Imagine one of the sanctimonious fat senators, or Rush Limbaugh or Hannity, or a Clinton adviser being in his place. 
  • Notice that in almost every video clip we see of him in captivity he is stuffing his face (as in eating)? Do you think the Afghans may have lured him with promises of better food than the pink slime and the SRE or whatever they serve in those outposts? 
  • The guy looked skinny and starved before his captivity, but we won’t know what he looks like now until he is shown on the inevitable TV circus. It shouldn’t be long now.
Cheers
mhg

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