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 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 24th 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 to 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 Isreal's deployment 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. Their prime minister, Hisham Kandil, visited Gaza on November 16th. His mission was described as an act of "solidarity" with Hamas, but it also signals a desire to see the violence end, and to be seen to help.  

Julie Levesque: The Petraeus Affair, The CIA's Long Criminal History.

The Petraeus Affair has demonstrated yet again how a sex scandal story can be fed into the US media to serve both as a trigger for "political assassination" and as "the tree hiding the forest." Even though what hides behind the salacious smoke screen is still the object of speculation, most of those speculations are more credible than a simple extramarital affair. One of the possible explanations of Petraeus departure is his stance on Israel, which he saw as a liability to US interests in the Middle East: "The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests in our Area of Operations. Israeli Palestinian tensions often flare into violence and large scale armed confrontations. The conflict foments anti American sentiment, due to a perception of US favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of US partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR, and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile, al Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hizballah and Hamas. (See Ali Abunimah, When Former CIA Chief David Petraeus Enraged the Israel Lobby, Electronic Intifada, November 12, 2012.) As Stephen Lendman observes, sex scandals don't necessarily lead to resignations unless state secrets are at stake: Forget resignation over "extramarital sex" nonsense, unless state secrets were compromised. Lots of elected and appointed Washington officials had affairs. Many likely have current ones. Resignations don't generally follow. Newt Gingrich survived sex and ethics scandals. He resigned as House Speaker after the Republicans "faired poorly" in 1998 off year elections. Overlooked are secret CIA Benghazi operations. Involved are heavy weapons sent to Syrian opposition fighters. Petraeus left days before his scheduled congressional testimony. The Benghazi operation is erroneously called a US consulate. Its a meeting place to coordinate aid for the rebel led insurgencies in the Middle East.   

Michel Chossudovsky: The Crimes of War "In the Name of 911"

The tragic events of September 11, 2001 constitute a fundamental landmark in American history, a decisive watershed, a breaking point. Millions of people have been misled regarding the causes and consequences of 9/11. September 11 2001 opens up an era of crisis, upheaval and militarization of American society. The post September 11, 2001 opens up an era of crisis, upheaval and militarization of American society. The post September 11, 2001 era is marked by the outright criminalization of the US State, including its judicial foreign policy, national security and intelligence apparatus. 9/11 marks the onslaught of the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), used as a pretext and a justification by the US and its NATO allies to carry out a war without borders, a global war of conquest. A far reaching overhaul of US military doctrine was launched in the wake of 9/11. 9/11 was also a stepping stone towards the relentless repeal of civil liberties, the militarization of law enforcement, and the inauguration of Police State USA. In assessing the crimes associated with 9/11 in the context of a legal procedure, we must distinguish between those associated with the actual event, namely the loss of life and the destruction of property, from the crimes committed in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 "in the name of 9/11". The latter build upon the former. We are dealing with two related dimensions of criminality. The crimes committed in the name of 9/11, involving acts of war are far reaching, resulting in the deaths of millions of people as well as the destruction of entire countries. The 9/11 event in itself, which becomes symbolic, is used to justify the onslaught of the post 9/11 US NATO military agenda, under the banner of the "Global War on Terrorism" (GWOT), not to mention the ushering in of the Homeland police state and the repeal of civil liberties. The crimes committed in the name of 9/11 broadly consist in two intimately related processes: 1. The launching of the "Global War on Terrorism" (GWOT), used as a pretext and a justification to Wage a War of Conquest. This GWOT mandate was used to justify the 2001 and 2003 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The GWOT mandate has since extended its grip to a large number of countries in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, where the US and its NATO allies are intervening selectively under a counter-terrorism mandate.     

Richard Eskow: The War On Women Is a Class War!

Last week the voters delivered their verdict on what has come to be known as "the Republican War on Women": They're against it. We've had decades of relentless class warfare from above, in the form of wealth distribution from the many to the few. Finally, class related issues have helped to deliver a resounding defeat to scores of candidates who represented the interests of naked greed. Women's issues and women voters were critical to this election. That's not coincidental. The War On Women has many dimensions, social, cultural, psychological, but in many ways women's issues are class issues. That makes the war on women a class war, among other things. The upcoming "fiscal cliff" talks will open up another front in this seemingly endless struggle. Here are some of the reasons why: 1. There are much fewer women than men at the top of the pay scale. As income goes up, the percentage of women goes down. Roughly two thirds of Americans who make $10,000 per year or less are women. The gender balance only reaches 50/50 status as it approaches the income levels we commonly think of as 'middle class'. From there on up, it skews heavily in favor of men. Nearly two thirds of the people who earn between $100,000 and $249,000 per year were male. The disparity is even more striking for earners above $250,000. Less than one out of four Americans making $250,000 per year is a woman. The key issue in this fiscal cliff conflict is taxation for people in this group. The artificial "fiscal cliff" crisis has gender implications at every income level.

Thomas Hedges: How Germany Is Getting 100 Percent Renewable Energy?

There is no debate on climate change in Germany. The temperature for the past 10 months has been 3 degrees above average, and we're again on course for the warmest year on record. There's no dispute among Germans, as to whether this change is man made, or that we contribute to it, and need to stop accelerating the process. Since 2000, Germany has converted 25 percent of its power grid to renewable energy sources, such as solar, wind and biomass. The architects of the clean energy movement, "Energiewende", which translates to "energy transformation," estimate that from 80 percent to 100 percent of Germany's electricity will come from renewable sources by 2050. Germans are baffled that the United States has not taken the same path. Not only is the US the wealthiest nation in the world, but it's also credited with jump starting Germany's green movement 40 years ago. "This is a very American idea," Arne Jungjohann, a director at the Heinrich Boll Stiftung Foundation (HBSF), said at a news conference Tuesday morning in Washington, DC, "We got this from Jimmy Carter." Germany adopted and continued Carter's push for energy conservation,, while the US abandoned further efforts. The death of an American "Energieewende" solidified when President Ronald Reagan ripped down the solar panels atop the White House that Carter had installed. Since then, Germany has created strong incentives for the public to invest in renewable energy. It pays people to generate electricity from solar panels on their houses. The effort to turn more consumers into producers is accelerated through feed in tariffs, which are 20 year contracts that ensure a fixed price the government will pay. Germany lowers the price every year, so there's good reason to sign one as soon as possible, before compensation falls further. The money the government uses to pay producers comes from a monthly surcharge on utility bills that everyone pays, similar to a rebate. Customers pay an additional cost for the renewable energy fund, and then get that money back from the government, at a profit, if they are producing their own energy.

Dr Paul Anderson: Fighting Terrorism or Repressing Democracy?

The focus of critiques of authoritarianism today lies increasingly in the use by liberal governments of exceptional powers. These are powers in which an imminent threat to national security is judged to be of such importance as to warrant the restriction of liberties and other socially repressive measures in order to protect national security. Terrorism has offered a particularly salient source of justification for a level of social repression that would be intolerable in normal times. A dominant line of criticism is that the use of exceptional powers to this end has gone too far. Critics emphasize the need to curtail such power by bringing it into line with basic human rights standards. As pertinent as this critique may be, focus on the proper extent of the social repression tends to assume, Scheuerman, Herman and Peterson point out, there is a real threat of terrorism, and that repression by an expansion of executive of executive authority, is itself an appropriate response to that threat. A less noticed yet critical feature of governments use of anti terror power is the prior erosion of democratic oversight and control, which has enabled repression to appear a plausible response to what is, in many respects, an as yet unspecified threat. The erosion is essentially three pronged. The first aspect of democratic control to have been eroded is the power to define what constitutes a threat. In the absence of meaningful control, governments are able, Clive Walker explains, to ascribe to whatever political violence is being encountered, attributes of novelty and extraordinary seriousness, so as to justify correspondingly alarming incursions into individual rights and domestic accountability. Governments are able to do so, in no small part because of the semantic fog that surrounds the core concepts of national security, threat and terrorism by which exceptional powers are usually evoked. Terrorism, for instance, is a concept that resists consistent definition. Commonly understood by governments as the use of threat or use serious violence to advance a cause, the term eludes legitimate resistance to occupation and oppression with senseless destruction.

The Economist: Politics in Japan, the Kamikaze Election!

The prime minister, Yoshihiko Noda, appears suddenly to have settled a question that has hung over Japanese politics since the summer. He all but promised to dissolve the lower house of the Diet, or parliament, within two days, to hold a general election by December 16th. The move was greeted with glee by Shinzo Abe, who believes he can lead the opposition Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) back to the position of power it occupied for nearly all of the 55 years to 2009. It raises another big question for Mr Noda, though. Why is he willing to hold an election, so soon, that polls suggest he is bound to lose? The answer would seem to reveal a lot about the prime minister, a man who seems prepared to take his party down in flames, in order to do what he considers to be the right thing. Many within the ruling Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) have urged him to cling to power for as long as possible, hoping that Mr Abe, who fluffed the job of prime minister from 2006-07, will stumble again in the meantime. Yet Mr Noda overrode their objections and set only two conditions for dissolving parliament. First, he wants the LDP-led opposition to join the DPJ in voting in the Diet to issue bonds that would cover the budget deficit, and so avoid Japan's version of the "fiscal cliff". The opposition has already agreed to that. Secondly, he wants a commitment in the next parliament to reduce the number of MPs. Japan needs to redraw the electoral map after the election, in order to avoid a constitutional crisis related to voting disparities between heavily populated and depopulated areas. For Mr Abe, that appears a small price to pay for something the LDP craves, a return to power. Standing opposite Mr Abe in a face to face debate in the Diet, Mr Noda sought to justify the election timing by declaring that he was honest. He had made a promise in August to the LDP that he would dissolve parliament "soon", and he intended to stick to it.