02/4/15

Horrendous Truths Unfold

What I write about here will not in its essence be a surprise to many of my readers. And yet, there is no way to confront what is going on without a sense of horror. The reality is being exposed, one ugly report followed by another:

We start with this, which broke yesterday:

According to Israeli officials, European diplomats are saying that the US, which has made significant concessions, is close to striking a deal with Iran that would permit them to keep up to 6,500 centrifuges in return for “guaranteeing regional stability” in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria.

http://www.algemeiner.com/2015/02/03/eu-concerned-over-report-of-major-us-concessions-to-iranians-in-nuclear-negotiations/

This is insane. How can the source of the greatest terrorist unrest in the world “guarantee stability”?

This deal would put Iran about three months from creating a bomb. What is more, apparently the US is also considering a “time limit,”so that the “restrictions” would last only for 10 to 15 years, after which Iran could do what it wished.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-us-deal-will-leave-iran-with-6500-centrifuges-spinning-months-from-a-bomb/

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Now, it might be, as some say, that Obama is doing this because he covets the “historical legacy” of having “brought Iran into the family of nations” (a la Nixon and China). And I suppose it’s possible that he hopes Iran will cool its instigation of terrorism briefly, in order to allow him to say has accomplished positive things without having to commit the US military in a significant way. But when you tally the implications of this report with others, below, it appears that he is on the other side, content to see the destruction of his own nation, as well as others that he should be eager to protect. This is a surreal conclusion, but a very distinct possibility.

Word is that the Saudis, whom Iran seeks to control, are thoroughly enraged with what Obama is doing. In the end, whatever his motivations, his behavior is exceedingly destructive. (Please, do not write to me to tell me what Obama’s reasons are. I am tracking his behavior.)

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I do have a question for which there seems to be no satisfactory answer. In theory, it is P5 + 1 – the permanent members of the Security Council, US, UK, France, Russia and China, plus Germany – negotiating with Iran. So, if the Europeans are deeply dissatisfied with the US position, why can they not block it or override it? The best answer I’ve been able to secure is that the US, while cutting Iran significant slack, wields significant power with regard to fellow negotiating partners. Apparently, what Obama says, goes.

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How can anyone with an ounce of sense in his head object to Netanyahu’s scheduled speech to the Congress? What he has to say may be immeasurably important. Yet now I hear that some prominent democrats, Vice President Biden among them, are thinking that they might not attend. Who knows what arm-twisting has ensued from the White House, but it would be most unfortunate if they were not present. They might disagree in the end, but they have a responsibility to be open to hearing the information Prime Minister Netanyahu will seek to impart. That responsibility, in the face of huge dangers to the world, trumps political considerations.

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As if the above were not enough, just under a month ago, the German weekly Der Spiegel broke with news (emphasis added):

”New intelligence suggests that Bashar al-Assad is still trying to built the bomb. And he may be getting help from North Korea and Iran…

”…secret information obtained by SPIEGEL indicates that the world is once again being misled by Assad. Syria’s dictator has not given up his dream of an atomic weapon and has apparently built a new nuclear facility at a secret location. It is an extremely unsettling piece of news…

”Analysts say that the Syrian atomic weapon program has continued in a secret, underground location..Furthermore, a new reactor or an enrichment facility has very likely been built at the site — a development of incalculable geopolitical consequences.

Intelligence agency findings indicate that the material [uranium, etc.] was moved to a well-hidden underground location just west of the city of Qusayr, not even two kilometers from the border with Lebanon.

“…the clearest proof that it is a nuclear facility comes from radio traffic recently intercepted by a network of spies. A voice identified as belonging to a high-ranking Hezbollah functionary can be heard referring to the ‘atomic factory’ and mentions Qusayr…

“Work performed at the site by members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard is also mentioned in the intercepted conversations…”

http://imra.org.il/story.php3?id=66224

What was that, again, about Obama seeking Iran to “guarantee regional stability” in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria?

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And how about this, by Khalid Abu Toameh, who wrote, “U.S. Seen in Middle East as Ally of Terrorists” (emphasis added)”:

“While the Egyptian government has been waging war on the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamic radical groups, the U.S. Administration and some Europeans are continuing to hamper efforts to combat terrorism.

“Many Egyptians and moderate Arabs and Muslims were shocked to hear that the U.S. State Department recently hosted a Muslim Brotherhood delegation…

“The State Department’s hosting of the Muslim Brotherhood leaders has outraged Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah Sisi, who has been waging a relentless war against the organization over the past year…

“’If the White House is out to offend some of its closest Arab allies and is intent on heightening their suspicions, it’s succeeded,’ wrote Middle East expert Linda S. Heard. ‘If there’s a plot, then it’s unfolding,’ she added. ‘Just two days after the controversial visit, the Brotherhood called for a war against their fellow Egyptians.’

“’The U.S. Administration is continuing to jeopardize its relations with Egypt by appeasing Muslim Brotherhood,’ remarked columnist Ezzat Ibrahim. ‘The Muslim Brotherhood is seeking to return to the political arena through the American door and terrorist attacks. The U.S. policy appears to be devious and unreliable.’

“Another Egyptian columnist, Mohamed Salmawi, launched a scathing attack on the U.S. Administration; he accused it of deception and double standards. He said that the meeting between U.S. officials and Muslim Brotherhood leaders exposes the U.S. Administration’s deceptive policy toward Islamic terror groups.

“’The U.S. Administration says it is combating these groups at home while it is supporting them abroad,” Salmawi wrote. ‘This meeting has grave indications because it shows that Washington has not abandoned its policy of double standards toward Islamic terrorism.’

“Said Lindawi, a prominent Egyptian international affairs expert, said that the meeting of the Muslim Brotherhood leaders with State Department officials means that the Obama Administration has given the organization a green light to carry out terrorist attacks against Egypt.

“’The U.S. Administration has refused to recognize the Muslim Brotherhood as a terror group,’ he said. ‘The Americans continue to insist that the Muslim Brotherhood is not responsible for the terrorist attacks in Egypt.’

“By embracing the Muslim Brotherhood, the U.S. Administration has sent the wrong message to moderate Arabs and Muslims. This is a message that says that Washington believes that there are good terrorists and bad terrorists.”

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5179/us-terrorists-ally

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My job is to broadcast this information as broadly as possible. And so, to that end I look to each of you, as I always do, to share this posting, put the information on your FB pages, write talkbacks and letters to the editor, etc. Word on the current state of affairs must get out.

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J Street executive director Jeremy Ben-Ami has written: “Momentum is on our side — and it’s growing. Make it clear that Netanyahu’s speech shouldn’t go forward as planned.” Well, folks, if you are represented in Congress by Democrats, contact them and urge that they attend.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4622997,00.html

Martin Indyk, director of the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institute, and a former Obama envoy to the “peace negotiations,” is on record as having made some negative comments about Netanyahu’s up-coming speech. But please remember that the Brookings Institute has taken large sums of money from Qatar.

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In spite of all of the horrendous truths I speak about above, there are also signs that are encouraging. Next posting, I hope to share a number of these. Here I close with a link to an incredible MEMRI video of an imam in Brooklyn who speaks out passionately for Muslim moderation.

http://www.memri.org/clip/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/4748.htm

There is hope. (With thanks to Leon K. for calling my attention to this.)

01/28/15

Carol O’Cleireacain: Why is a Marxist Running Detroit’s Economic Recovery?

By: Trevor Loudon
New Zeal

In October of 2014, new Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan appointed Dr. Carol O’Cleireacain as Deputy Mayor for Economic Policy, Planning & Strategy.

Carol O’Cleireacain‎

According to Mayor Duggan, O’Cleireacain would be responsible for identifying “outside sources of funding” for the city so that it becomes financially stable outside of bankruptcy.

“Our ability to live within the Plan of Adjustment once it is approved can’t rely solely on traditional revenue sources because they can fluctuate based on conditions we can’t control,” Duggan said in a statement. “I’ve charged Dr. O’Cleireacain with identifying new funding sources to help insulate ourselves against these unknowns so the city can provide a consistent level of service.”

Detroit Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr had hired O’Cleireacain before the Mayor and Detroit City Council legally revoked his powers. Duggan, however, continued the appointment when he retook full control of the city.

“Mayor Duggan is setting a strong tone of fiscal accountability with his administration and I’m thrilled to have been asked to play a role,” O’Cleireacain said in a statement. “The mayor is building a great team that is going to transform the way Detroit meets the needs of its residents for years to come.”

Sounds great – except that Carol O’Cleireacain has been a card-carrying Marxist, who presided over New York City’s finances during one of the Big Apple’s most depressed periods, the 1990-93 Dinkins’ mayoralty.

O’Cleireacain came to Detroit from New York City, where she is a nonresident senior fellow at the leftist Brookings Institute, a think tank that is based in Washington, DC and an adjunct faculty in management and urban policy at the even more leftist New School. She is also a member of the “nonprofit, nonpartisan” Council on Foreign Relations.

O’Cleireacain moved to New York City in 1976 at the height of that city’s fiscal crisis and served 13 years as chief economist at District Council 37 AFSCME, a union notoriously controlled by Marxists led by the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee. DSOC, would in 1982, merge with the New American Movement (an amalgam of mainly former Students for a Democratic Society and Communist Party USA members) to form Democratic Socialists of America.

O’Cleireacain was first identified as a Democratic Socialists of America member in DSA’s Democratic Left, Sep./Oct. 1987, page 9, while she was serving as assistant to the executive director of AFSCME, District Council 37, Stanley Hill – another DSAer.

In 1990, another DSA comrade, David Dinkins, was elected mayor of New York on the back of a big campaign mounted by DSA, organized labor and the Communist Party.

Dinkins immediately appointed several Marxists to key positions in his administration (including current Mayor Bill de Blasio and Carol O’Cleireacain.

DSA’s Democratic Left, May/June 1990, page 8, proudly noted that their member, Carol O’Cleireacain, had been appointed Commissioner of Finance for New York City.

The same year, Democratic Socialists of America sent a delegation to the October 1990 Socialist International meeting in New York, which included DSA’s permanent representative to the SI, Bogdan Denitch; DSA Honorary Chair, Cornel West; Pat Belcon, a DSA NPC member; Motl Zelmanowicz, a “DSAer active in the Jewish Labor Bund;” Jo-Ann Mort, a DSA NPC member; Jack Sheinkman, president of ACTWU; Terri Burgess, chair of the DSA youth Section; Skip Roberts, Chair of DSA’s Socialist International Committee; and NYC Commissioner of Finance, Carol O’Cleireacain. She had briefly became NYC budget director in the last days of the Dinkins’ administration.

The Center for Democratic Values, a “progressive think-tank” developed with Democratic Socialists of America sponsorship, made its first public appearance at the Socialist Scholars Conference in New York, on April 12-14. 1996. CDV cosponsored two panels at the conference and held a reception to introduce the Center to the assembled socialist scholars and activists.

The first panel dealt with rethinking the role of government. The discussion centered around a paper authored by DSA member and CDV organizer David Belkin (a policy and budget analyst in the office of the Manhattan Borough President), which “challenged the left to seriously reopen the issue of the role of government in a democratic society.” Carol O’Cleireacain, former New York City Budget Director, another member of the panel, “stressed the need for the left to pay more attention to organization and management as well as policy and structure, the traditional focuses of socialist theories.”

Here is a photo from the late 1980s of Carol O’Cleireacain wearing the badge of DSA’s Institute for Democratic Socialism. DSA’s “rose and fist” symbol can be clearly seen.

As late as 2009, O’Cleireacain was still serving on the Editorial Board of Dissent Magazine, alongside well known DSA comrades Joanne Barkan, Paul Berman, Mitchell Cohen, Bogdan Denitch, Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, Todd Gitlin, Michael Kazin, Deborah Meier, Harold Meyerson, Jo-Ann Mort, Patricia Cayo Sexton and Cornel West.

Detroiters are wise to remember that DSA played a big role in wrecking Detroit in the first place. After socialists seized control of the United Auto Workers, they used union muscle and money to elect Marxist politicians all over the state – including to the Detroit City Council.

One of their greatest victories was the election in 1973 of Coleman Young, a bona fide Communist Party member posing as a Democrat, to the Detroit mayoralty.

Young presided over a Council, stacked with socialists, whose cronyism, corruption and over-regulation drove an already teetering city off the financial cliff. Socialist influence on the Council continued until recent times under DSA aligned Councillors Maryann Mahaffey, and JoAnn Watson, revolutionary Marxist Ken Cockrel, Sr., and Communist Party supporters Erma Henderson and Clyde Cleveland.

While in charge of New York City’s finances, Carol O’Cleireacain computerized the city’s tax system, massively increasing revenues. Sound fiscal policy perhaps, but not the kind of shock Detroit’s very fragile business community could easily handle today.

But Carol O’Cleireacain may not actually care that much about private businesses anyway.

In an article in DSA’s Democratic Left, Spring 2007, DSA National Political Committee member and Greater Detroit Democratic Socialists of America Chairman David Green, wrote in support of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) – or “card check”.

What distinguishes socialists from other progressives is the theory of surplus value. According to Marx, the secret of surplus value is that workers are a source of more value than they receive in wages. The capitalist is able to capture surplus value through his ownership of the means of production, his right to purchase labor as a commodity, his control over the production process, and his ownership of the final product. Surplus value is the measure of capital’s exploitation of labor…

Green went on to write:

Our goal as socialists is to abolish private ownership of the means of production. Our immediate task is to limit the capitalist class’s prerogatives in the workplace…

In the short run we must at least minimize the degree of exploitation of workers by capitalists. We can accomplish this by promoting full employment policies, passing local living wage laws, but most of all by increasing the union movement’s power…

Will this be Carol O’Cleireacain’s strategy for “saving” Detroit? More taxes, more regulations, stronger unions? Where will the “outsourced” revenue come from? What happens when American businesses and taxpayers are bled dry? Chinese interests?

Hasn’t America’s once greatest city suffered enough from socialists?

Trevor Loudon is an author, activist and political researcher from Christchurch New Zealand.

He is best known for exposing the ties between a young Barack Obama and Hawaiian Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis, as well as exposing the communist background of former Obama “Green Jobs Czar” Van Jones. Loudon’s latest book, The Enemies Within: Communists, Socialists and Progressives in the U.S. Congress, is designed to expose the comprehensive communist, socialist and extreme progressive infiltration of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate.