Sunday Roundup - October 26, 2014

This is the weekly selection of news and opinion from sources outside the US mainstream corporate media.  Today we look at Iran, climate change, voter suppression, and the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

Iran 
Progress was made in Iran's dilution of its uranium.  Reuters reported on October 20:   Iran is taking further action to comply with an interim nuclear agreement with six world powers, a monthly U.N. atomic agency report showed, a finding the West may see as positive ahead of a November deadline for clinching a long-term deal.  The report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)...made clear that Iran is meeting its commitments under the temporary deal, as it and major powers seek to negotiate a final settlement of a decade-old nuclear dispute. It said Iran had diluted more than 4,100 kg of uranium enriched to a fissile concentration of up to 2 percent down to the level of natural uranium. 

From BBC News website

Gareth Porter, in an October 22 Truthout article, lays out the story of the deception behind the Western claim that Iran was "stonewalling" investigations into alleged past nuclear weapons research. The accusation...has been a familiar theme in mainstream media coverage of Iran's relations with the IAEA for years.  What remains virtually unknown, however, is how a brazen deception by the George W. Bush administration and a key official within the IAEA created the false narrative of Iranian refusal to cooperate with the IAEA and was used to justify harsh international sanctions.  Based on conversations with former IAEA officials, Wikileaks documents, and the public record, Porter describes the background.  His article includes the smear campaign against the agency's director Mohamed ElBaredei - who had cleared Iran of six issues of concern in spite of the West's pressure -and the misleading report of meetings between the IAEA's Olli Heinonen and Iranian officials.  In one of those meetings, Heinonen asked Iran's Permanent Representative to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, whether various names of people, organizations and addresses found in the documents were correct. Soltanieh confirmed that the people, organizations and addresses did exist, but added, "So what?"....The language in the [IAEA May 2008 report from those meetings] was carefully chosen to mislead the reader without technically telling an outright lie. The report said Iran "did not dispute that some of the information contained in the documents was factually accurate, but said the events and activities concerned involved civil or conventional military applications." ...Iran, in a letter to the IAEA secretariat a few months later, denied that [they] had ever acknowledged the accuracy of anything in the intelligence documents except for those incidental details.  The misleading report formed the basis of the allegations that continue to this day.

The window of opportunity that would bring the Iran "in from the cold" may be closing.  The US Congressional elections are in a couple of weeks and pressure from the hardliners in the Israel lobby to keep Iran isolated will probably ratchet up.  Netanyahu has already started the rumblings with his anti-Iran comments at the UN in September.  Writing in The Guardian. Christopher de Ballaigue notes that Netanyahu's comments may reflect a fear that a rehabilitated Islamic Republic could dislodge Israel from western affections – a process already well advanced by the widespread killing of Palestinian civilians during the recent violence in Gaza.  De Ballaigue stresses the importance of closing the nuclear deal - perhaps the best hope of restoring stability to the Middle East.  A deal that offers Iran a nuclear power industry not exceeding its needs and ambitions, and the rest of the world reassurance through intrusive inspections, would do more than bring Iran in from the cold. It would inaugurate a new relationship between the Islamic Republic and the west that could keep together a region that is, in every other particular, coming apart.  [The Guardian, October 2]

Climate Change
With an eye on the global climate conference in Paris in 2015, the EU agreed on goals for greenhouse gas emissions, energy efficiency and renewable energy.  The Guardian reported on October 23: European leaders have struck a broad climate change pact obliging the EU as a whole to cut greenhouse gases by at least 40% by 2030.  But key aspects of the deal that will form a bargaining position for global climate talks in Paris next year were left vague or voluntary, raising questions as to how the aims would be realised.  As well as the greenhouse gas, two 27% targets were agreed – for renewable energy market share and increase in energy efficiency improvement.  Informed Comment carried a post on solar energy good news stories.  Morocco, India, Tanzania, and Mexico all have programs to increase the use of solar energy.  Solar will likely be the world’s largest source of electricity by 2050, when some 26% of world energy will come from solar panels. 
Related Link
Spotlight on Green News and Views [Daily Kos, Oct. 23]

Voter Suppression

With Republicans on the verge of taking over the US Senate in November, every vote that might prevent that disaster is important.  Here's some of the past week's news on the status of  voter suppression in two "solid red" states in the midst of a demographic shift.

Poll tax sign- Mineola Texas, 1939 -  Russell Lee/Library of Congress
Appeared in Mother Jones article

Overturning a Federal trial court's earlier decision, the Supreme Court upheld without comment the Texas Voter ID Law, one of the worst in the nation.  The majority decision was unsigned but Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg  along with Justices Kagan and Sotomayor authored a blistering dissent. Salon.com carried an Alternet article on Ginsburg's dissent. “Texas did not begin to demonstrate that the Bill’s discriminatory features were necessary to prevent fraud or to increase public confidence in the electoral process,” Ginsburg wrote in her dissent. The article summarizes the key points of Ginsburg's dissent, among them: hundreds of thousands of Texans will have a hard time getting the required ID and  "On an extensive factual record developed in the course of a nine-day trial, the District Court found Senate Bill 14 [the voter ID law] irreconcilable with Section 2 of the [federal] Voting Rights Act of 1965 because it was enacted with a racially discriminatory purpose and would yield a prohibited discriminatory result.” The law could potentially disenfranchise 600,000 Texas voters. [Salon.com, Oct. 21]  The law falls in line with Texas' long history of discriminatory voting practices.  Mother Jones presents a look at that history, based on expert testimony by Orville Vernon Burton, a professor of history at Clemson University, and Barry Burden, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in an October 21 article. [Mother Jones, Oct. 21]

In Georgia, the Republican Secretary of State is delaying approval of tens of thousands of minority applications secured by by the New Georgia Project on the grounds that fraud was involved.  There is little evidence of any such thing.  Republican candidates are hyping voter fraud fears and the reason is fairly obvious.  Republican concerns about large numbers of black voters turning out this year have already roiled politics in the Peachtree State. One GOP state lawmaker said he opposed opening a new early voting location because it was in a heavily minority area. Georgia, which has seen big demographic shifts over the last decade, has nearly 900,000 unregistered minority voters. Mitt Romney’s 2012 margin of victory over President Obama in the state was just 305,000 votes. Michelle Nunn, the Democratic candidate in the U.S. Senate race, is counting on a big minority turnout to propel her to an upset victory. [MSNBC, Oct. 21]  NGP has introduced a lawsuit against 5 counties and has settled with one of them (De Kalb),  The lawsuit is proceeding against the other 4 counties.  Daily Kos reports:  Earlier this month, NGP complained that the registrations in five counties—all of them surrounding large Democratic strongholds in Atlanta, Columbus and Savannah—had not processed some 40,000 of these registrations. Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp said the claim is wrong....Since most of those 40,000 people are likely to be Democrats, the consequences could have a major impact on the election, including the outcome in the tight open-seat Senate contest between Democrat Michelle Nunn and Republican David Perdue. Given the potential for disenfranchisement, the NGP, together with the NAACP, filed suit against Kemp and the county election boards.  [Daily Kos, Oct. 24]

Related Links

Running Scared : Georgia’s Democrats have registered more than 85,000 minority voters (and counting).Republicans never saw it coming. [Slate.com, Sept. 11]

Georgia's Battle for the Ballot Box [New York Magazine, Oct.21] tells the story of Stacey Abrams, the Georgia House minority leader and the woman behind the voter registration drive.

Occupied Palestinian Territory
The Palestinian Territory of the West Bank and Gaza has been under Israeli military occupation for more than 47 years.  The Gaza Strip has been crippled by a land, sea, and air blockade for 7 years. This summer Gaza endured an Israeli assault that left the enclave devastated and more than 2,100 Palestinians, mostly civilians, dead.  Even before the brutal Israeli siege, Gaza was deemed to become unlivable by 2020, and 80% of its people were receiving humanitarian aid of some type.  The Palestinian Authority laid out its plans to achieve statehood in an address to the United Nations in September - going to the Security Council for a resolution to end the Israeli Occupation by a definitive date and, failing that (for example, because of a US veto), to join the International Criminal Court.  Here are links to some stories relevant to Palestinian statehood and the Gaza War of 2014 that have developed since Abbas' speech at the UN.

October 3:  Sweden announces its intention to recognise state of Palestine [Reuters, Oct. 3]

October 12: Donor conference co-hosted by Egypt and Norway raises 5.4 billion US dollars for rebuilding Gaza.[Al Jazeera, Oct. 12]

October 14: British parliament votes 274-12 in favor of recognizing Palestine [YNetNews, Oct. 14]

October 21: U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced he was setting up an investigation into the attacks on United Nations facilities [Daily Mail, Oct. 21]

October 22: Democracy Now! interview with Noam Chomsky after his speech at the UN [Democracy Now!, Oct. 22]

October 23: Complicated mechanisms and restrictive measures risk prolonging the Gaza rebuilding effort [Al Jazeera, Oct. 23]

October 24: Irish upper house backs Palestinian state [Haaretz, Oct. 24]

October 24: Croatian Foreign Minister: "Croatia is likely to recognize Palestine as an independent state" [Daily Sabah, Oct. 24]

Sunday Roundup - September 14, 2014

This is the weekly selection of news from sources outside the US mainstream corporate media. Today we look at Islamic State, Gaza, Texas politics, and in brief, the latest greenhouse gas data and the Scottish independence vote. 

Islamic State
The drums of perpetual war are beating again on the banks of the Potomac.  Without a Congressional vote or debate, American military might is being thrown at Islamic State (aka ISIS) in the midst of the sectarian war that has been gripping the Middle East.  On September 9, Sarah Lazare at Commondreams.org reported on a recently released study on the strange parallel between the arming of Islamic State and al Qaeda.  The Islamic State (IS) is now in possession of lethal weapons formerly owned by so-called "moderate" Syrian rebels, as well as large quantities of arms produced in the United States, a new report reveals.  The study — conducted by Conflict Armament Research, a research organization that tracks weapons proliferation in war zones — documents arms and ammunition captured by Kurdish People's Protection Units and Peshmerga forces from IS in Iraq and Syria from from mid-June to early August 2014...."This is one more piece of evidence of why military solutions have devastating consequences in the immediate and long terms," said Phyllis Bennis, senior fellow at Institute for Policy Studies, in an interview with Common Dreams. "We see an example of the consequences of the over-arming of the region if we look back at Afghanistan in the 1980s during the anti-Soviet War when the U.S. provided stinger missiles that can bring down aircraft to mujahedin guerrillas who morphed into al Qaeda."  We have 13 years of experience in knowing what doesn't work in these conflicts and here we are doing it again.

There are other options short of war to weaken ISIS. The above-quoted Phyllis Bennis wrote in The Progressive on September 10: We have to recognize that military attacks are not only wrong in a host of ways (illegal in international law, immoral because of civilian casualties, a distraction from vitally needed diplomacy) but also that those strikes are making real solutions impossible....weakening ISIS requires ending the support it relies on from tribal leaders, military figures, and ordinary Iraqi Sunnis.   Bennis then presents six steps short of war to accomplish this:  

• Stop the airstrikes. 
• Make real the commitment for “No boots on the ground.”  
• Organize a real diplomatic partnership to deal with ISIS. Even though the U.S. is carrying out airstrikes and deploying new troops in Iraq, everyone agrees there is no military solution. 
• Initiate a new search for broader diplomatic solutions in the United Nations. That means working to build a real coalition aimed at using diplomatic and financial pressures, not military strikes, at the international level in both Iraq and Syria.
• Push the UN...to restart real negotiations on ending the civil war in Syria. That means everyone involved needs to be at the table.
• Massively increase US humanitarian contributions to U.N. agencies for the now millions of refugees and IDPs in and from both Syria and Iraq.

Related

As usual in these poorly thought-out rushes to military action, some of the best analysis comes from The Nation.  Here are links to a trio of relevant articles.

Phyllis Bennis, "The Speech on Diplomacy That Obama Should Have Given Last Night"

Zoe Carpenter, "Is the War on ISIS Illegal?"

William Grieder, "Obama’s Long War in the Middle East"

Gaza

As Egypt gets ready to host a donor conference for the devastated enclave of Gaza on October 12, Noam Chomsky's September 9 article for TomDispatch.com "Ceasefires in Which Violations Never Cease - What’s Next for Israel, Hamas, and Gaza?" should be required reading for every pundit on the planet and for anyone wanting to understand the situation in Gaza.  Tom Englehardt's introduction makes clear that if what Israel wanted to accomplish in Operation Protective Edge was to destroy support for Hamas, they failed miserably.  Englehardt quotes a Palestinian poll taken just before the current ceasefire went into effect:  If new presidential elections are held today and only two [candidates] were nominated, [the Hamas candidate] Haniyeh, for the first time since we have started asking about his popularity about eight years ago, would receive a majority of 61% and Abbas would receive 32%.  

Chomsky notes the history of these ceasefires whose terms have basically remained the same since Hamas came to power in the 2006 elections.  The regular pattern is for Israel, then, to disregard whatever agreement is in place, while Hamas observes it -- as Israel has officially recognized -- until a sharp increase in Israeli violence elicits a Hamas response, followed by even fiercer brutality. These escalations, which amount to shooting fish in a pond, are called "mowing the lawn" in Israeli parlance. The most recent was more accurately described as "removing the topsoil" by a senior U.S. military officer, appalled by the practices of the self-described "most moral army in the world."  Chomsky has much to say about Israel's disengagement from Gaza in 2005, the world reaction to the internationally monitored 2006 elections that brought Hamas to power in Gaza and the West Bank, Operations Cast Lead and Pillar of Defense, the recently concluded Operation Protective Edge, and the latest Israeli land grab in the West Bank.  On the land grab: As Operation Protective Edge ended, Israel announced its largest appropriation of West Bank land in 30 years, almost 1,000 acres.  Israel Radio reported that the takeover was in response to the killing of the three Jewish teenagers by "Hamas militants." A Palestinian boy was burned to death in retaliation for the murder, but no Israeli land was handed to Palestinians, nor was there any reaction when an Israeli soldier murdered 10-year-old Khalil Anati on a quiet street in a refugee camp near Hebron on August 10th, while the most moral army in the world was smashing Gaza to bits, and then drove away in his jeep as the child bled to death. 

Quoting Israeli scholars, journalists, military and political leaders, Chomsky concludes that a viable two-state solution is not a strong consideration in Israeli political circles: The realistic alternative to a two-state settlement is that Israel will continue to carry forward the plans it has been implementing for years, taking over whatever is of value to it in the West Bank, while avoiding Palestinian population concentrations and removing Palestinians from the areas it is integrating into Israel...Gaza will likely remain under its usual harsh siege, separated from the West Bank.  And the Syrian Golan Heights -- like Jerusalem, annexed in violation of Security Council orders -- will quietly become part of Greater Israel.  In the meantime, West Bank Palestinians will be contained in unviable cantons, with special accommodation for elites in standard neocolonial style.....For a century, the Zionist colonization of Palestine has proceeded primarily on the pragmatic principle of the quiet establishment of facts on the ground, which the world was to ultimately come to accept.  It has been a highly successful policy.  There is every reason to expect it to persist as long as the United States provides the necessary military, economic, diplomatic, and ideological support.  For those concerned with the rights of the brutalized Palestinians, there can be no higher priority than working to change U.S. policies, not an idle dream by any means.

Related
For a discussion of what has happened to Palestinians politically and territorially, see "The Map: A Palestinian Nation Thwarted & Speaking Truth to Power" - Informed Comment (reprinted July 13, 2014)

Map is from Friends of Sabeel - North America website
and Informed Comment

Lone Star Politics
Over the past year or so, there have been various surges of optimism over the possibility of Democrats picking up a governorship or a US Senate seat now held by a Republican in a red state. The latest bit of unfounded optimism is the Kansas Senate race.  The Democrat is dropping out of the race and Democrats are supporting the independent.  Whether this last bit of optimism pans out or not, we'll have to see.  Earlier would-be upsets are now long forgotten and Democrats are trying desperately to hold onto Senate seats in swing states.  One of the early examples of this unfounded optimism was in the Texas governor's race.  As Rolling Stone journalist Mark Binelli noted in a July article: This was supposed to be the year Texas turned blue, or at least purple, the year female and Hispanic voters turned out in droves and carried Democrat state Sen. Wendy Davis to the governor's mansion. Battleground Texas, a group founded last year with the bold goal of transforming Texas into a swing state, targeted the swelling Latino population, which by 2020 is projected to overtake the white population of Texas....By Memorial Day, however, the Battleground Texas narrative, at least in this election cycle, had begun to look like Daily Kos fan fiction. Davis was trailing Abbott by 14 points. Meanwhile, back in her old Fort Worth Senate district, a Tea Party Republican named Konni Burton seems well-placed to win Davis' old seat in the fall.  The Abbott lead over Davis is still hovering in low to mid double digits and our second most populous state looks like it will remain "red.  The article "Lone Star Crazy: How Right-Wing Extremists Took Over Texas" explains how Texas fell "into the hands of gun nuts, border-sealers and talk-radio charlatans":  After nearly six years of pumping out cynical horror stories involving our nefarious president and a Washington bureaucracy run amok, the right-wing fear machine has managed to reduce its target audience to a quivering state of waking nightmare, jumping at shadows.  Binelli sees a parallel with the 1960's.  In the years after JFK's murder, Dallas was known as the City of Hate, an image which the city struggled for years to erase.  Nowadays, the City of Hate era has grown so distant that hate has been allowed to return as a winning campaign slogan in Texas. ...Then as now, the pot was stirred by reactionary preachers..., wealthy string-pullers.., political opportunists...and organized interest groups.  

Links/In Brief
Scotland
With less than a week until Scotland votes on independence from the UK on September 18, the most recent polls are saying that it is too close to call.  [The Guardian, Sep 12]

If the vote is for independence, a whole slew of constitutional questions arise.  And the exit of the overwhelmingly Labour Scottish MP's from Westminster has led to a (perhaps ill-founded) hope among Tories that Scottish independence will consign the rest of the UK to permanent Conservative government.  [The New Statesman, Feb 20]

Greenhouse Gases
Surging carbon dioxide levels have pushed greenhouse gases to record highs in the atmosphere, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) has said.  Concentrations of carbon dioxide, the major cause of global warming, increased at their fastest rate for 30 years in 2013, despite warnings from the world’s scientists of the need to cut emissions to halt temperature rises. [The Guardian, Sep 9]