Tomatoes of Wrath

Race to the Bottom

American Hypocrisy on Display at the U.N.

When the Palestinian Authority goes to the United Nations to seek recognition as a state from the fifteen member Security Council, the United States casting the sole
negative vote — which serves as a veto — will be an ugly moment for this country. By taking this stance, confirmed by President Obama speaking at the U.N., our hypocrisy will be on flagrant display. Against our preachments that the peoples of the world should have the right of self-determination, the vote to disallow statehood will stand out in stark relief to give the lie to what this country purports to stand for.

We cheered when Tunisians rose up, applauded the Egyptians in Tahrir Square, helped Libyan rebels gain independence, but, well, you see, the Palestinians are different. The Obama administration will snuff out their aspirations to have a country for themselves because of our lopsided alliance with Israel.

The action will inflame anti-American sentiment in the Arab world. An op-ed piece in the New York Times by a former director of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence services


This poll by Pew Research came as something of a surprise

given that 68% of Americans side with Israel. They do so
despite recent events: Israeli president Netanyahu scolding
our president face-to-face in the White House, appealing
directly to Congress and rebuffing Obama’s request to aid
the peace process by discontinuing annexing land for
settlements in the West Bank.
and a former ambassador to the United States said that if the United States does not support the Palestinian bid for statehood, it will “risk losing the little credibility it has in the Arab world” and that cooperation with the United States “would increasingly be seen as toxic by the vast majority of Arabs and Muslims, who demand justice for the Palestinian people”.

That very same day, across the fold, the Times’ editorial writers, afar in New York City, somehow knew better, declaring that going forward with the vote in the U.N. would be “ruinous” and that a negotiated settlement would be preferable. Well, of course it would. But when will that ever happen? Forty-four years into the occupation, the record says ‘never’.

At the U.N., Netanyahu, sitting at Obama’s side, called the president’s stance “principled”; it was quite the opposite. Obama has asked Mahmoud

The real cynics believe that the Netanyahu government’s continued call for negotiations over borders and such means that he’s just not going to give up the West Bank…The Israelis always wanted two things that once it turned out they had, it didn’t seem so appealing to Mr. Netanyahu. "    Former President Bill    Clinton in Foreign    Policy magazine

Abbas, the Palestinian president, to cancel his plan,
saying that the maneuver would not bring peace. Correct, it would not, but it might spur movement of a process that has now languished for years.

The Palestinian move has been months in coming. All the while, a group referred to as the “quartet”, consisting of the U.S., the U.N. the European Union and Russia, with former British prime minister Tony Blair as envoy, has been mapping a plan for the resumption of talks. That group might have been able to head off the Palestinian ploy, but there is a fair amount of dissension even between themselves, still less agreement by Israel and the Palestinians, and despite the urgency, the group has produced nothing.

George Mitchell, an experienced envoy gifted in bringing people to consensus, resigned in May after trying for two years to broker a peace accord. President Obama has been disengaged, preoccupied by the debt limit showdown, and apparently able to focus on only one thing at a time.

Rather than using the United States as its pawn in the United Nations, leaving our country to take the arrows of contempt from around the world, the question is why Israel did not attempt to head this off by putting a deal on the table.

Netanyahu claims that it is the Palestinians who now refuse to resume talks. But when Obama stated that the starting point of any talks would be
the return to the pre-1967 boundaries, with mutually negotiated land swaps to reflect shifts since, Netanyahu reacted angrily, calling those borders “indefensible”. That, to Abbas, said there was no basis for talks.

The Palestinians want settlement building halted before negotiations can resume. But the Israelis say negotiations cannot be subject to preconditions — that is, except Israel’s precondition that Hamas foreswear its refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist. Never mind that Israel has refused to allow Palestine to exist. Preconditions are a time-tested and surefire way to make certain that negotiations will never begin. They should be dropped by both sides.

Hamas cannot, of course, cave in to such a demand without losing face and power among its people. Were there a peace agreement that removes troops and settlements and gives the Palestinians a country of their own, we predict that its people would turn against Hamas as a force intent on ruining a peace that had finally come true, and that faction’s denial of existence would simply fade. Better still — why not make the precondition a post-condition. Make the abrogation of Hamas’ refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist the final sentence of the peace agreement, added just before the parties sign. If Hamas were to refuse and block the entire peace accord, they would become their own country’s pariah.

But these are just musings. None of it is happening. So Abbas and the Palestinians see only the usual disagreements and have decided it’s time to act on their own. The quartet “wasted all the time” since the beginning of the year, he says, and still has nothing to propose.

The land grab

Israel has occupied the Palestinian territories since 1967 — the Six-Day War in which, ironically, few Palestinians took part, according to Israeli historian Benny Morris. For all this time its people have lived with roadblocks and checkpoints and troops — and a great deal worse when their retaliatory suicide bombings and rocket attacks have led Israel to launch full scale assaults, as against Jenin, Nablus and Gaza (the kill ratio is almost 6 Palestinian deaths for each Israeli killed, as tallied by IfAmericansKnew.org ).

But it is the increasing confiscation of Palestinian land by Israeli settlements that is causing the most intractable problem. Half a million Israelis now live in the West Bank. The United States admonishes Israel for continuing to build settlements, yet, after a 10-month moratorium that began in late 2009, settlement building resumed under Benjamin Netanyahu. Ignoring a request for extension by Obama as essential to bring the parties to table, Netanyahu confounded the affront to Obama by wangling an invitation to speak before a joint session of Congress in May, where he was met with the slavering support he knew he could count on from that body, always ready as it is to grovel for money and votes. The House voted 407 to 6 to urge Obama to head off the Palestinian appeal to the U.N. and threatened to cut millions of dollars of aid to Palestinians in retaliation. In reaction to resumed settlement building, there was not a whisper about trimming the $3 billion annual contribution to Israel that buys its tanks and warplanes.

Israel wants nearly all settlers to stay where they are. Many are fanatics who believe it is their land because Jews once lived there 2,000 years ago, a notion which, if generally applied, would result in the mass migrations of a few billion of Earth’s peoples (and, of course, the departure from this country of all of us, returning it to the aboriginal Americans whose deed of ownership is far more recent than that of the Israelis).

what’s likely to happen?

There is fear that the U.N. vote could spark another Arab awakening and a possible renewal of violence. That seems irrational. Actually, 70% of Palestinians say the opposite. They fear there could be another intifada if the deadlock with Israel is not broken. Statehood, or at least recognition of Palestine as an entity, is thought more likely to promote serious work toward a new future, whereas another intifada would be an irreversible setback. But who can say for certain.

Israel fears attacks on West Bank settlers. But it is the extremist settlers who are at the moment the greater problem: they have already vandalized two mosques this past month.

foreign policy for sale

Democrats are, of course, scrambling to assure Israel that we are an Israel-right-or-wrong ally, with votes and campaign contributions uppermost in priority. Republicans are scrambling to make the same claims, seeing an opportunity to steal the traditionally Democratic Jewish vote.

That we do not treat the Israeli-Palestinian conflict even-handedly originates from this country’s early compassion for the Jewish people finally having a place of their own after the horrors of World War II. That our deference continues after Israel in recent years has become more of a bad actor — especially with its settlement expansion in the Palestinian territories and its aggressive takeover of Jerusalem as belonging only to Israel — is now more attributable to Jewish money and votes in this country. So it is a legitimate question whether Obama’s concern for his own re-election in battleground states such as Florida and Pennsylvania has been placed ahead of principles of justice and freedom — and America’s reputation in the world. Whatever, it is clear to the world that U.S. foreign policy rests on a double standard (or no standards).

Americans Just Want to Make Movies

Outlook: Sun & Wind

The Next Financial Crisis: Student Loans

86%. That’s the percentage of college graduates who in a Pew Research  poll said that college was a good investment. And, indeed, other surveys find that college grads earn around $20,000 more a year than those with only high school diplomas. And the unemployment rate is far lower.

But two-thirds graduated with college debt — an average of $24,000 last year — whereas less than half did in 1993. College debt, only $200 billion as recently as 2000, now exceeds $1 trillion — it’s now more than credit card debt.

The question is, in this high unemployment economy, which is likely to last a decade, what if those collegians can’t find a job? Or a job that pays well enough to cover their college debt payments? Much as the buying of homes with no money down and no proof of income led to the subprime mortgage crash, are we about to see hundreds of thousands of our newly-minted adults trapped by debt and unable to pay the government or the banks?

you can’t discharge a student loan

Because trapped they are. Even if you declare personal bankruptcy, you cannot shed a college loan owed to the government. Barmak Nassirian of the American Association of College Registrars and Admissions Officers, quoted in this Atlantic Monthly article, said, “You will be hounded for life. They will garnish your wages. They will intercept your tax refunds”, and social security payments will be docked when you retire. That’s not all. Professional licenses can be revoked and you become ineligible for federal employment. Unable to pay, a key element of our society — our college-educated youths — will find themselves swamped by late fees and interest piling up insurmountably.

The reason for these vengeful measures is that the student has been handed taxpayer money and the government is obligated to get it back. But the government loan limit is

$31,000 and students also take out private loans. Lobbied and bought off by the banks, Congress, in an unforgivable act, made private loans irrevocable as well in the 2005 revision of the bankruptcy laws. There is absolutely no justification for the banks to have this special protection.

the root of the problem

Lured by the money to be had from student loans, a number of private colleges have arisen to take advantage of government largesse. The likes of the University of Phoenix, Kaplan University, Education Management Corp. (EDMC) — they are accused of being money machines, accepting under-qualified students in order to pocket the money from government loans that students take out to pay the college fees. Commissioned recruiters entice teenagers with “high pressure sales techniques and inflated claims about career placement” according to a New York Times article. Another unconscionable act by the 2005 Congress was to allow 18-year-olds to take out loans without parental knowledge or permission, an age when youths have next to no realization of what they are getting into.

The private colleges of this sort are also accused of delivering underwhelming educations, with questionable interest in preparing their students for jobs. That shows up in the statistics. Private colleges have grown to account for 10%-12% of all enrolled in higher education, soak up a quarter ($155 billion) of the student aid budget, yet go on to account for 50% of defaults on loans.

The college “industry” may have thought clear sailing lay ahead when Phoenix was fined $78 million by the Justice Department for its recruiting practices — a light touch given the money that rolls in — but then, after declining to pursue a dozen whistle-blower suits, the Justice Department has just followed up on a 2007 complaint by two former employees with a breathtaking suit against EDMC. The charge is that its multiple colleges — they go by the names Art Institute, Argosy University, Brown Mackie College and South University — were not not eligible for and must return $11 billion in federal and state aid that EDMC received between July 2003 and June 2011. The allegation is that they violated federal law by paying recruiters based on the number of students they enrolled rather than the required criteria such as whether students were qualified.

EDMC is 41% owned by Goldman Sachs. Its board chairman is Jock McKernan, a former governor of Maine, married to Republican Senator Olympia Snowe. Her financial disclosure form shows EDMC options worth $2-$10 million.

where does that leave the students?

Persuaded to over-extend themselves — many encouraged to borrow directly from the schools and at higher rates than federal aid — nearly a quarter of the students of for-profit colleges owed $40,000 or more on leaving, compared with only 6% of graduates from public colleges. If they cannot find jobs in an economy which is expected to remain at low ebb for a decade, these young graduates can expect to be burdened for years. They could find themselves still be paying off their college debt when it’s time to send their own kids to college.