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Hermit
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The sweet rank smell of hypocracy
« on: 2009-06-29 04:33:40 » |
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Subsidies for Israel, Sanctions for Iran
Source: Antiwar.com
Authors: Grant Smith
Dated: 2009-06-29
President Barack Obama’s fiscal year 2010 budget request for $2.775 billion in military aid to Israel is proceeding smoothly through the Congress. On June 17 the House Appropriations Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs held a “markup” session on the budget. The subcommittee came under pressure from an antiwar group that sought to suspend or condition foreign aid over Israel’s use of U.S. weapons that left 3,000 Palestinians dead during the Bush administration. The subcommittee held its session in a tiny Capitol room, denying activists and members of the press access to determine whether there was any discussion on aid to Israel. The budget quickly passed and is now before the full House Appropriations committee. [ Hermit : Do Congressmen have immunity if they spend money illegally? Is there any mechanism to force Congress to obey its own laws? How about the agencies that would be involved? Can they be forced to obey the law? If so how? Is it just there is no mechanism to try to enforce existing laws, or is there no money available to fund such efforts, or is it simply that nobody cares about this blatant illegality being carried out by people who are being given relatively small amounts of money critical to their election campaigns and clearly disposing them to provide vast amounts of money in blatant violation of US law, to those bribing them? ]
Israel enjoys “unusually wide latitude in spending the [military assistance] funds,” according to the Wall Street Journal. Unlike other recipients that must go through the Pentagon, Israel deals directly with U.S. military contractors for almost all of its purchases. This gives the U.S.-based Israel lobby, particularly the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), increased influence on Capitol Hill. Large contractors proactively segment many military contracts across key congressional districts to make them harder to oppose. The military contractor fight for Israel’s favor frees up AIPAC from shepherding the massive aid package to dedicate its considerable resources toward Iran sanctions.
Rep. Mark Steven Kirk (R-Ill.) sponsored an amendment to the foreign operations bill that would prevent the Export-Import Bank of the United States from providing loan guarantees to companies selling refined petroleum to Iran. According to the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Kirk is the top 2008 recipient of pro-Israel political action committee (PAC) contributions [.pdf]. Kirk received $91,200 in the 2008 election cycle, bringing his career total thus far to more than $221,000. Kirk’s AIPAC-sponsored sanctions legislation passed the House Appropriations Committee on June 23. While tactically positioned as a rebuke to the crackdown on Iranian election protesters, the measure is only the most recent of a raft of long-term AIPAC-sponsored sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program. Israel contends Iran is secretly developing nuclear weapons under the auspices of a civilian program, though no hard evidence has emerged [ Hermit : This is misleading. It would be correct to say that unlike Israel, no credible evidence has ever come to light suggesting that Iran has any nuclear weapons programs - and huge amounts of evidence exists to say it has not. Silly of them really. Clearly deterrence works. Note that nobody has engaged in suggesting the US should bomb the DPRK despite its successful nuclear weapons program. ] . Yet one illicit nuclear arsenal in the region has been positively identified.
The U.S. Army [.pdf], former president Jimmy Carter, and Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller [ Hermit : As well as declassification of Nixon era State Department documents (one by Kissinger) ] have all recently confirmed that the only country in the Middle East that has deployed nuclear weapons is Israel. The Symington and Glenn amendments to foreign aid law specifically prohibit U.S. aid to nuclear states outside the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). Iran has signed the NPT. Israel hasn’t.
Congress can’t have it both ways on taxpayer-funded sanctions and rewards. If gasoline imports indirectly support Iran’s nuclear ambitions, then $2.775 billion in cash for conventional U.S. weapons and military technology clearly allows Israel to focus on development and deployment of its illicit nuclear arsenal [ Hermit : I do not pretend to understand the linkage of the conditional and the consequent in this sentence. Bad editing perhaps. ] . Recently released CIA files long ago forecast that such an arsenal would not only make Israel more “assertive” but also more reluctant to engage in bona fide peace initiatives. Cutting the massive indirect U.S. subsidization of Israel’s nukes and insisting that Israel sign the NPT would go further in averting a nuclear arms race and conflicts in the region than targeting hapless Iranians at the gas pump. It would also demonstrate to the American public that the president and Congress, even under the pressure of AIPAC, won’t blatantly violate U.S. foreign aid laws by publicly pretending Iran – rather than Israel – is the region’s nuclear hegemon.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Blunderov
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"We think in generalities, we live in details"
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Re:The sweet rank smell of hypocracy
« Reply #1 on: 2009-06-29 13:07:16 » |
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[Blunderov] "Hypocracy"? The Hermit is not one to make spelling mistakes except perhaps the odd typo every other month or so. So, a neologism. And a rather useful one I think. "A form of government that pretends to hold principles to which it does not in fact truly subscribe"? Sadly, Obama makes his administration more guilty of this with every passing day. Not of course that he isn't following a rich tradition. The world had hoped for something different but what we got was Bush Lite. Rats.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypocrite
<snip>Whereas hypokrisis applied to any sort of public performance (including the art of rhetoric), hypokrites was a technical term for a stage actor and was not considered an appropriate role for a public figure. In Athens in the 4th Century BC, for example, the great orator Demosthenes ridiculed his rival Aeschines, who had been a successful actor before taking up politics, as a hypokrites whose skill at impersonating characters on stage made him an untrustworthy politician. This negative view of the hypokrites, perhaps combined with the Roman disdain for actors, later shaded into the originally neutral hypokrisis. It is this later sense of hypokrisis as "play-acting," i.e. the assumption of a counterfeit persona,* that gives the modern word hypocrisy its negative connotation.</snip>
*[Bl.] "Change we can believe in"? Seems with Obama the more things change the more they stay the same. The only thing that I can think of that he has done differently is to give Israel a bit of a hard time about new settlements. Humbug.
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Hermit
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Re:The sweet rank smell of hypocracy
« Reply #2 on: 2009-06-29 15:15:17 » |
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My initial thought behind the neologism was that the US is still apparently ruled by utterly non-representative clowns who do not hesitate to lie when appropriately bribed, no matter how visible the reality they attempt to deny and no matter how little it takes to purchase their support. Thus:hypo- - deficient
-cracy - a system of governance (in this case a failed system). Together they formed a homophone sufficiently akin to hypocrisy - which is blossoming even more these days than under the Cheney-Bush maladministration - to be descriptive as well as amusing.
While it abandons the roots and clews more to the homophone, I prefer Blunderov's definition.
Thanks
Hermit & Co
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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