Bill Van Auken: Israel Calls Up 75,000 Troops for Gaza

The Israeli military boasted Friday afternoon that it had carried out more than 500 air strikes against the densely populated territory of Gaza, since launching its latest offensive, dubbed Pillar of Defense. The escalating air war is unfolding amid growing signs that the Israeli government is on the brink of launching a ground invasion of Gaza, that would spell a huge increase in the bloodletting. The relentless bombardment has resulted in widespread destruction and carnage, with the official death toll rising to 29 on Friday night and the number of wounded climbing to 300. Among the latest to be killed was a two year old Palestinian boy. The majority of the dead and wounded are civilians, including eight children and a pregnant woman. The Israeli government and military have incessantly declared that the strikes on Gaza are aimed solely at "terrorists" and that any civilian casualties are the fault of Hamas for "hiding" among the people. The reality, however, is that the bombs and missiles are destroying homes, schools, workplaces, government office buildings and police stations. It was confirmed Friday that the Israeli military sent text messages to at least 12,000 cell phones inside Gaza, issuing warnings to stay away from anyone connected to Hamas, which runs the government of the 25 mile long territory, or face possible death. Among the targets demolished on Friday was the civil affairs department of the Ministry of the Interior in Gaza City, which houses 70 years' worth of records of the Palestinian civil registry. Also hit were a family owned textile factory that employed 20 people and a food store. In response to the Israeli assault, Palestinian resistance groups fired rockets into Israel. Though largely ineffectual, one of them struck the Tel Aviv area Friday, while another landed near Gush Etzion, an illegal Zionist settlement near Jerusalem in the occupied West Bank. On Wednesday, a rocket struck an apartment house in the southern town of Kiryat Malachi, killing two Israeli women and one man. There is every indication that the first three days of terror unleashed by the Israeli state on Gaza is only the beginning. "We are going to significantly aggravate the operation," a senior official told the Israeli media.

Thom Hartmann: Give BP the Death Penalty!!

What does it take for a foreign corporation to get the corporate death penalty in America? That's a question we need to ask ourselves, after news broke yesterday of BP's legal settlement over its Gulf oil spill disaster in 2010. Eleven workers were killed when their oil rig exploded, and for three months five million barrels of toxic crude gushed in the Gulf of Mexico, as BP, which never made contingency plans for this sort of obvious crisis, tried to find a way to plug the hole. That oil killed marine life, blanketed coastlines, and put Gulf Coast small businesses out of business. To this day, we still don't know the long term effects of this catastrophe on the ecosystem or our food chain, which is now contaminated with eyeless shrimp, clawless crabs, and other oil mutated aquatic freak shows, not to mention the human cancers that will show up in future decades. Now, the foreign corporation responsible for all this, BP, will just cut a small check, and then go back to business as usual, punching holes in the Gulf. It pled guilty to 14 felony and misdemeanor charges, and agreed to pay a $4.5 billion fine, the largest criminal fine in our nation's history. But for a corporation that just announced it earned $5.4 billion in three months, BP knows it got off easy. The organization Public Citizen notes, "Claims arising from the Gulf disaster, which killed 11 workers and did untold damage, put the company's liability at a maximum of $51.5 billion." That's more than ten times what BP will end up paying to settle. As part of the settlement, the government still reserves the right to charge two BP employees for manslaughter. It will likely be two low level workers, who'll have to take the fall for an entire corporation, and industry, that repeatedly ignored regulations and cut safety corners, just to maximize their quarterly profits. Because of our two tiered justice system, rarely do corporate suits go to jail. Altogether, this settlement will do very little to change the corrupt scam oil barons are running on the American people. As spokesperson for Public Citizen said: "We're stunned. This settlement is pathetic. The point of the criminal justice system is twofold: to punish and to deter. This does neither." In a tragic irony that proves Public Citizen's point, news broke on Friday of another oil-rig exploding off the coast of Louisiana. Early reports indicate two workers are dead, and another two workers are missing. Perhaps if our criminal justice system had taken swifter action against BP and followed through by banning the company from doing business in the United States, the entire industry might shape up, and maybe,just maybe, a group of oilmen in Louisiana would still be alive today. Our nation has a long history with the corporate death penalty. Beginning in the early 1800's, laws were passed in several states to make it easier for legislators to revoke corporate charters if businesses are operating against the public's interest, and this routinely happened. In Ohio,, Mississippi, and Pennsylvania, banks were shut down for being "financially unsound." In New York and Massachusetts, corporations that ran the turnpikes were given a corporate death sentence for not keeping the roads in good repair. By 1825, 20 states had amended their constitutions to make it easier for the state to "revoke, alter, or annul" corporate charters whenever a corporation, "may be injurious to citizens of the community." In just one year, 1832, the state of Pennsylvania sentenced ten corporations to death, revoking their charters for "operating contrary to the public interest."        

Chris Hedges: Elites Will Make Gazans of Us All!

Gaza is a window on our coming dystopia. The growing divide between the world's elite and its miserable masses of humanity is maintained through spiraling violence. Many impoverished regions of the world, which have fallen off the economic cliff, are beginning to resemble Gaza, where 1.6 million Palestinians live in the planet's largest internment camp. These sacrifice zones, filled with seas of pitifully poor people trapped in squalid slums or mud walled villages, are increasingly hemmed in by electronic fences, monitored by surveillance cameras and drones, and surrounded by border guards or military units that shoot to kill. These nightmarish dystopias extend from the sub Saharan Africa to Pakistan to China. They are placed where targeted assassinations are carried out, where brutal military assaults are pressed against peoples left defenseless, without an army, navy or air force. All attempts at resistance, however ineffective, are met with the indiscriminate slaughter that characterizes modern industrial warfare. In the new global landscape, as in Israel's occupied territories and the United States' own imperial projects in Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and Afghanistan, massacres of thousands of defenseless innocents are labeled wars. Resistance is called a provocation, terrorism or a crime against humanity. The rule of law, as well as respect for the most basic civil liberties and the right of self determination, is a public relations fiction used to placate the consciences of those who live in the zones of privilege. Prisoners are routinely tortured and "disappeared." The severance of food and medical supplies is an accepted tactic of control. Lies permeate the airwaves. Religious, racial and ethnic groups are demonized. Missiles rain down on concrete hovels, mechanized units fire on unarmed villagers, gunboats pound refugee camps with heavy shells, and the dead, including children, line the corridors of hospitals that lack electricity and medicine. The impending collapse of the international economy, the assaults on the climate, the resulting droughts, flooding, precipitous decline in crop yields and rising food prices are creating a universe where power is divided between the narrow elites.  

Bill Van Auken: Israel Calls Up 75,000 Troops as Bombing Continues in Gaza

The Israeli military boasted Friday afternoon that it had carried out more than 500 air strikes against the densely populated territory of Gaza since launching its latest offensive, dubbed Pillar of Defense. The escalating air war is unfolding amid growing signs that the Israeli government is on the brink of launching a ground invasion of Gaza that would spell a huge increase in the bloodletting. The relentless bombardment has resulted in widespread destruction and carnage, with the official death toll rising to 29 on Friday night and the number of wounded climbing to 300. Among the latest to be killed was a two year old Palestinian boy. The majority of the dead and wounded are civilians, including eight children and a pregnant woman. The Israeli government and military have incessantly declared that the strikes on Gaza are aimed solely at "terrorists" and that any civilian casualties are the fault of Hamas for "hiding" among the people. The reality, however, is that the bombs and missiles are destroying homes, schools, workplaces, government office buildings and police stations. It was confirmed Friday that the Israeli military sent text messages to at least 12,000 cell phones inside Gaza, issuing warnings to stay away from anyone connected to Hamas, which runs the government of the 25 mile long territory, or face possible death. Among the targets demolished on Friday was the civil affairs department of the Ministry of the Interior in Gaza City, which houses 70 years' worth of records of the Palestinian civil registry. Also hit were a family owned textile factory that employed 20 people and a food store. In response to the Israeli assault, Palestinian resistance groups fired rockets into Israel. Though largely ineffectual, one of them struck the Tel Aviv area Friday,while another landed near Gush Etzion, an illegal Zionist settlement near Jerusalem in the occupied West Bank. On Wednesday, a rocket struck an apartment house in the southern town of Kiryat Malachi, killing two Israeli women and one man. There is every indication that the first three days of terror unleashed by the Israeli state on Gaza is only the beginning. "We are going to significantly aggravate the operation," a senior official told the Israeli media.

The Economist: Israel and Gaza, Edging closer to war!

If the latest round of violence between Israel and Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist's who run Gaza, were to end this weekend, everyone involved, except for the families of the score or more people who have been killed or maimed in the destruction, could claim to have come out ahead. But it is possible that the bombing and rocketing will drag on into next week, with the threat growing of a full scale ground assault by Israel and the inevitable carnage and destruction that that would entail. For Israel and Hamas, the key question for each is, did it win in the eyes of our public opinion? For Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, with a general election looming on January 22nd, that question is particularly acute. The assassination on November 14th of Ahmad Jabari, the military commander of the Hamas, was widely welcomed by Israelis. The air force's subsequent elimination of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of long range Iranian made Fajr missiles stockpiled by Hamas and Gaza's more extreme group, Islamic Jihad, was a feat of intelligence and execution that drew kudos from across the Israeli political spectrum. Mr Netanyahu can notch up his credit too, the news that his would be rival, Ehud Olmert, postponed his planned announcement on November 15th, that he would stand against the prime minister in the upcoming election. Hamas and its prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, will vaunt its now proven ability to strike at Tel Aviv.Three rockets are believed to have landed near Israel's main center of population, two on November 15th and the third the next day, this despite Israel's deployment of of its Iron Dome anti missile system, which, the army says, had intercepted around 160 of the 510 odd missiles fired from Gaza into Israel between November 14th and 16th. Footage of Tel Avivians diving for cover will boost Hamas's standing and compensate, in part, for the blows it suffered at the outset of this round of fighting. Egypt, under its Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohamed Morsi, is trying to broker a ceasefire. If the violence does end soon, the Egyptians will take credit for it.          

David Simon: Media's Petraeus Sex Obsession Is Dangerous!

I can remember the specific moment when I swore off the sex lives of the famous as journalistic currency. It was the case of a national sportscaster. I won't name him, but, alas, most of those old enough will remember the name, which is regrettable, whose sex life had suddenly become the media chow. This man had been involved in a consensual relationship with another adult, and for reasons both ridiculous and obscure, the other adult thought it just and meaningful to reveal herself and her complaints, making explicit all of the unique and varied ways in which she and this man had expressed their sexuality, and my, wasn't he a weird one. And wasn't it funny. When that story broke, I was standing in the newsroom of the Baltimore Sun, and I remember my growing distaste watching reporters and rewrite men as they were sucked, joking and snickering, into the breaking news. No one had any doubt that it was news. The man was a national sportscaster, for the love of god. A more public figure this nation cannot muster. I was no Candide on a first promenade through Paris. I'd held pen and notepad akimbo and reported hypocritically at points. Not a year earlier, I think, I'd been guilty of dragging to the front of the metro section some sad sack who happened to serve on a mayor's advisory committee, an unpaid position, mind you, and happened to get arrested in a car with a lit marijuana cigarette between his lips. At the price of that misdemeanor, I'd messed that guy up good. Wasn't my fault he caught that charge. Hey, I was just the cop shop reporter calling districts and reporting arrests. Don't shoot the messenger. And then, like the shit bird that reporters often are obliged to be, I probably left work that night and smoked a joint with the night editor, after which we went to Burke's for onion rings, which we did just about every other night. Hypocrisy will never go out of style in American journalism or American life, but sitting there and watching the rewrite and sports desk mobilize to surround the sexual wanderings of a sportscaster, I remember making a decision: Enough.

Nile Bowie: Gaza and the Politics of "Greater Irrael".

According to Benjamin Netanyahu: The Bible finds no worse image than this of the man from the desert. And why? Because he has no respect for any law. Because in the desert he can do as he pleases. The tendency towards conflict is in the essence of the Arab. He is an enemy by essence. His personality won't allow him any compromise or agreement. It doesn't matter what kind of resistance he will meet, what price he will pay. His existence is one of perpetual war. Israel's must be the same. The two states solution does not exist. There are no two people here. There is a Jewish people and an Arab population. There are no Palestinian people, so you don't create a state for an imaginary nation, they only call themselves a people in order to fight the Jews. The Israeli bombardment of Gaza being perpetuated under Operation Pillar of Defense comes at an interesting time. Under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, the expansion of illegal Jewish settlements into Palestinian lands has increased at unprecedented rates. Netanyahus administration has approved the construction of 850 settler homes in the occupied West Bank in June 2012, even after the Israeli parliament rejected a bill to retroactively legalize some of the existing homes in the area. The number of Jewish settlers in the West Bank has almost doubled in the past 12 years, with more than 350,000 residing illegally under international law. While Israels Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman asserts Tel Avivs unwillingness to permit Palestinians any right to return to their lands, emphasizing, not even one refugee, apartheid enforced on ethnic and religious lines has become a ratified part of Israeli government policy. Far right political discourse that was once considered extremism is now the status quo in Israel. While Netanyahu publically announced support for a Palestinian state on the West Bank, his government has threatened to end the Oslo Accords, if the United Nations General Assembly granted Palestine with non member observer state status. A panel of Israeli jurists assembled by Netanyahu's government to determine the legal status of the West Bank, concluded that there is no occupation of Palestinian lands, and that the continued construction of settlement outposts are entirely legal under Israeli law, despite critical international opinion.