Desperate Drumbeat For War Against Iran Intensifies As Netanyahu Faces Electoral Defeat In Israel

Although the latest polling from Israel-- all the latest polling from Israel show Israeli's have grown disenchanted with Netanyahu's far right Likud Party and are on the verge of handing over the government to the center-left Zionist Camp, run by Isaac Herzog Labor Party and Tzipi Livni's more centrist Hatnua. Still, many Israel-firsters in the U.S. Senate are rushing to shove Obama's delicate negotiations with Iran under the bus with more sanctions designed to enrage Iran's hardliners and scuttle the talks. Likud puppets Mark Kirk (R-IL) and Robert Melendez (D-NJ) are leading the charge to engineer a war with Iran, while Lindsey Graham, Kelly Ayotte and John McCain are the cheering squad.

Friday, Senate Banking Chair Richard Shelby (R-AL) said their bill is one of the first things the Banking Committee will take up-- probably Tuesday-- and a vote could come as soon as next Thursday. President Obama-- and Tony Blair-- have asked the senatorial Likudniks to hold off until the negotiations have ruin their natural course.

With enough warmonger, AIPAC-oriented Democrats joining virtually all the Republicans, there's little doubt that the bill can pass, despite Obama's requests that they hold their fire. "Why is it," he asked, "we would have to take actions that might jeopardize the possibility of getting a deal over the next 60 or 90 days? What is it precisely that is going to be accomplished?"

Last month Galland, executive director of MoveOn.org Civic Action, and Becky Bond, political director of CREDO Political Action, penned an OpEd for DC trade paper The Hill, Iran: Will Senate Democrats stand for diplomacy--or with Republican war hawks?". It's rare for Beltway types to ever read that the Republicans aren't up to the worst shit in the world by themselves and that conservative Democrats are their biggest enablers-- after the grotesque Zionist briber-meisters like Sheldon Adelson (R) and Haim Saban (D).

On November 24, 2014, negotiators in Vienna announced the extension of talks aimed at curbing Iran’s nuclear program. They now have until July 2015 to broker a deal and they're back at it this week. Predictably, a pack of Republican senators and neoconservative commentators pounced on the announcement, demanding everything from a new round of sanctions to airstrikes within Iran. Many of these folks-- like Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and Mark Kirk (R-Ill.)-- are the same cast of characters who led us into a disastrous war in Iraq in 2003.

Eager to undermine President Obama’s agenda, even at the cost of starting a war, Republicans are ramping up pressure on Senate Democrats in an effort to cobble together a veto-proof majority opposed to continued diplomatic efforts. Unfortunately, a small group of deeply misguided Democrats, like Sens. Robert Menendez (N.J.), Chuck Schumer (N.Y.), and Mark Warner (Va.), are poised to join Republicans in recklessly pushing the U.S. closer to another major Middle East war—and advancing the agenda of hard-liners in Iran.

It’s certainly tempting to direct all of our outrage at Republicans, who appear to be motivated more by a desire to deny Obama a major foreign policy victory than by an interest in preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. However, if Congress prevents Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry from brokering a deal with Iran, it will be first and foremost the fault of a handful of pro-war Senate Democrats who break ranks and vote with the GOP. 

This is because-- although Republicans will take over the Senate next year-- Democrats still hold most of the cards when it comes to Iran. To circumvent  Obama’s veto, any poison pill legislation intended to sabotage diplomacy (such as additional sanctions) will require a substantial number of Democratic votes.

Fortunately, the American people are solidly on the side of diplomacy. They’ve shown that they will speak out loudly in favor of Obama’s negotiations with Iran. In the past, we’ve seen fiercely determined progressive activists—including millions of MoveOn and CREDO members—successfully push Democrats to hold the line in Congress.

On the merits, Democrats have no excuse to deny the president their support. Since negotiations began, Iran’s nuclear stockpile has been sharply reduced. Iran has agreed to an internationally monitored cap on the enrichment of uranium. The frequency of international inspections of Iranian nuclear sites has increased, and sites that were previously off-limits are now subject to international inspections on short notice. And finally, Iran has said it will modify a nuclear reactor under construction to significantly reduce its production of weapons-grade material.

Ironically, Republicans' response to November’s extension of talks is almost perfectly mirrored by the response of hard-liners in Iran, who, like hard-liners in the U.S., oppose a diplomatic deal.

Farshad Farahat, the human rights activist and star of the Academy Award winning film Argo, makes a similar observation: “The fact of the matter is that the more you know about the politics of Iran, the clearer it becomes that senators like Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Mark Kirk (R-IL),  who are leading efforts to oppose the negotiations, are doing the bidding of those who oppose freedom in Iran.”

Democrats’ next move should be clear: Stand with Obama and the global community to lock in a lasting and peaceful diplomatic solution to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. All the proposed alternatives would undermine diplomacy and risk a return to a path of aggressive confrontation and eventual war. Democrats who choose the latter path should expect to be held fully accountable by the wider progressive community for what could become the most foolish, dangerous, and costly foreign policy decision of this decade.

An agency with "occupational" and "safety" and "health" in its name was always a sitting duck at the hands of the merciless Bush regimistas

"Heckuva Job Foulkie" (left) at a 2007 congressional
hearing, alongside injured worker Eric Peoples

by Ken

So, another federal agency bites the dust. Or, to be technical, turns out to have bitten the dust.

Oh, I know, I'm as bored as you are with this tiresome procession of Inspector General reports, congressionally mandated inquiries, GAO reports, CBO studies, independent inquiries, and on and on -- each revealing that yet another arm of the federal government was either reduced to impotence or transformed into an enforcement arm of the Far, Far Right totalitarian, megalomaniacal, constitution-shredding goons of the Bush regime. So what else is new?

Is there really much point sifting through the wreckage? Maybe trying to figure out how it all happened? Aren't we supposed to, you know, just get on with it?

Just like with Iraq. Why would troublemaking lefites insist on asking embarrassing questions about how the country got snookered into playing neocon war games, only for real? I would have thought that the "for real" part is explanation enough all by itself for why yes, we have to know how it all happened.

But I suppose we need to get some of the dreary facts on the record. Yesterday's Washington Post story began, typically enough, with a now-familiar sort of Incriminating Episode:

Under Bush, OSHA Mired in Inaction

By R. Jeffrey Smith

In early 2001, an epidemiologist at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration sought to publish a special bulletin warning dental technicians that they could be exposed to dangerous beryllium alloys while grinding fillings. Health studies showed that even a single day's exposure at the agency's permitted level could lead to incurable lung disease.

After the bulletin was drafted, political appointees at the agency gave a copy to a lobbying firm hired by the country's principal beryllium manufacturer, according to internal OSHA documents. The epidemiologist, Peter Infante, incorporated what he considered reasonable changes requested by the company and won approval from key directorates, but he bristled when the private firm complained again.

"In my 24 years at the Agency, I have never experienced such indecision and delay," Infante wrote in an e-mail to the agency's director of standards in March 2002. Eventually, top OSHA officials decided, over what Infante described in an e-mail to his boss as opposition from "the entire OSHA staff working on beryllium issues," to publish the bulletin with a footnote challenging a key recommendation the firm opposed.

The usual stuff, right? Next, of course, comes the revelation (gasp) that this was (a) by once-normal standards extraordinary, even unprecedented behavior inside an executive-branch agency, and (b) this behavior wasn't the exception, it was the rule at OSHA:

Current and former career officials at OSHA say that such sagas were a recurrent feature during the Bush administration, as political appointees ordered the withdrawal of dozens of workplace health regulations, slow-rolled others, and altered the reach of its warnings and rules in response to industry pressure.

The result is a legacy of unregulation common to several health-protection agencies under Bush: From 2001 to the end of 2007, OSHA officials issued 86 percent fewer rules or regulations termed economically significant by the Office of Management and Budget than their counterparts did during a similar period in President Bill Clinton's tenure, according to White House lists.

Then of course there's the regimistas' standard indignant how-dare-you denial of all:

White House officials have dismissed such tallies, emphasizing in recent regulatory overviews that their "objective is quality, not quantity," and that heavy restrictions on corporations harm economic performance. During Bush's presidency, they said in a September report, average annual regulatory costs were kept 24 percent lower than during the previous two decades. OSHA says it has issued many rules of lesser consequence that nonetheless clarified industry responsibilities.

Talk about pathetic! Do they think that at this late date they don't owe us better lies and cover-ups? (Maybe they've given up even trying?) We don't have to wait long to hear from people who actually care about occupational safety and health, and are actually for it, people who've known what's been going on -- and have probably been trying to get someone to listen -- for years:

"The legacy of the Bush administration has been one of dismal inaction," said Robert Harrison, a professor at the University of California at San Francisco and chairman of the occupational health section of the American Public Health Association. It has been "like turning a ketchup bottle upside down, banging the bottom of the container, and nothing comes out. You shake and shake and nothing comes out," Harrison said.

More than two dozen current and former senior career officials further said in interviews that the agency's strategic choices were frequently made without input from its experienced hands. Political appointees "shut us out," a longtime senior career official said.

I suppose we should go through the whole bloody thing. Listen, for example, to former administration director Edwin Foulke (technically "assistant secretary of labor for OSH," since OSHA is an agency within the Labor Dept.) brag --

* about "levying heavy fines after major workplace disasters" (after major disasters? and what constitutes "major"? and were the fines actually collected?),

* about continuing "a drop in reported workplace injuries that began in 1974" (without mentioning the "14 percent drop in U.S. production and manufacturing jobs since 2001" and the "2002 change in the government's record-keeping rules").

Heckuva job, Foulkie!

In retrospect, without any investigation or inquiry we can say two things about the decimation of OSHA with a high degree of certainty:

(1) We can date the beginning of the agency's demise to the day those five Supreme Court justices decided (as Noah was just recalling), "To hell with counting the votes, for the good of the country let's make the guy who's trying to steal the election president." Maybe the idea was that since his people wanted it so much more, that would mean good things for the country? (In which case, oops, the joke's on them!)

(2) An outfit with a name like Occupational Health and Safety Administration was a sitting duck from the outset. In Bushworld, these are weasel words for "just drains money out of the pockets of deserving, regulation-oppressed businessmen, in order to do stuff no right-thinking [or, particularly, Right-thinking] person gives a crap about." Safety and health in the workplace? Gimme a break! Who says workers have any right to either? The only right workers have is to the absolute minimum financial compensation management can get away with giving.

I almost fell into the trap of saying "the absolute minimum the law allows." But that, as Richard Nixon might have said, would be wrong. (And who would know better about what's "wrong"?) It assumes that your Right-thinking managers:

(a) can't get laws and administrative rules changed (in which case, what was the point of buying up a whole government?), and

(b) feel any obligation to follow either laws or administrative rules (after all, the president they bought didn't).

We don't need no stinkin' reggolation, the Good Friedmanite intones solemnly. All's we need is God's Own Free Market.

But of course they don't really want no stinkin' free market. They want a market that's rigged to relieve them of as much obligation to society and to their workers as possible -- and by golly, they were (and still are) prepared to buy a government to do it. In addition to which, the Good Friedmanite's doctrine is a fantasy -- always was, especially is now, and always will be.

The Friedmanite theory is that if workers are sickened and injured or maimed or even killed on the job, the competitive pressures of a free market will lead those managements to upgrade their health and safety practices in their own economic interest. Which is nonsense, of course. Especially if those managements can get their bought government to lighten the administrative burdens of paying for their lapses. Far cheaper than keeping those old workers on the job is jettisoning them and replacing them with younger, less experienced, and above all cheaper workers. Heck, it's not as if workers get trained to do their jobs anymore. (Too expensive! Unproductive!)

Do we not have that executive memo from WalMart? You know, the one detailing corporate policy to do everything possible to shed older, more experienced, and above all more expensive workers so they can be replaced by less skilled people who are more desperate for work, any kind of work, including (especially?) work for minimal pay, under any conditions, and with few if any benefits?

The only shame about the OSHA "revelations" is that they come within weeks of the final slinking away of the Bush regime. Where the hell have we been all this time?

Oh, there have been malcontents shouting about this as well as the innumerable other Bush regime depredations, going back before 9/11 -- the event that in retrospect provided cover for ideological ransacking of our legitimate government which followed. But nobody wanted to hear. They were dismissed and derided as "Bush-bashers."

Can we at least hope that the Obama transition team is paying attention? Close attention.


POSTSCRIPT: THE NEW YORK TIMES WEIGHS IN EDITORIALLY

While we're on the subject, and while outgoing Labor Secretary Elaine Chao (aka Mrs. "Miss Mitch" McConnell, and as labor secretary OSHA's overboss), who has presidied over what we have abundant indications is a similar reign of political terror and enforced ineptitude within the department as a whole, but lately has been attempting, astonishingly, to portray her stewardship as a boon for working people, yesterday's NYT carried this editorial, which I think speaks for itself:

December 29, 2008

EDITORIAL
The Labor Agenda

There is no doubt that President-elect Barack Obama has chosen a labor secretary who could be a transformative force in a long-neglected arena. The question is whether he will let her.

Hilda Solis, a United States representative from Southern California, is the daughter of immigrant parents with union jobs. She has been an unfailing advocate of workers’ rights during eight years in Congress and before that, in California politics.

Ms. Solis has been a leader on traditional workplace issues, like a higher minimum wage and an enhanced right to form unions. She also has helped to expand the labor agenda by sponsoring legislation to create jobs in green technology, and in her support for community health workers and immigration reform.

Her record in Congress dovetails with the mission of the Labor Department, to protect and further the rights and opportunities of working people. It also dovetails with many of the promises Mr. Obama made during the campaign, both in its specifics and in its focus on the needs of America’s working families.

The main issue is whether the Obama administration will assert a forceful labor agenda in the face of certain protests from business that now — during a recession — is not the time to move forward.

The first and biggest test of Mr. Obama’s commitment to labor, and to Ms. Solis, will be his decision on whether or not to push the Employee Free Choice Act in 2009. Corporate America is determined to derail the bill, which would make it easier than it has been for workers to form unions by requiring that employers recognize a union if a majority of employees at a workplace sign cards indicating they wish to organize.

Ms. Solis voted for the bill when it passed the House in 2007. Senate Republicans prevented the bill from coming to a vote that same year. Mr. Obama voted in favor of bringing the bill to the Senate floor and supported it during the campaign.

The measure is vital legislation and should not be postponed. Even modest increases in the share of the unionized labor force push wages upward, because nonunion workplaces must keep up with unionized ones that collectively bargain for increases. By giving employees a bigger say in compensation issues, unions also help to establish corporate norms, the absence of which has contributed to unjustifiable disparities between executive pay and rank-and-file pay.

The argument against unions — that they unduly burden employers with unreasonable demands — is one that corporate America makes in good times and bad, so the recession by itself is not an excuse to avoid pushing the bill next year. The real issue is whether enhanced unionizing would worsen the recession, and there is no evidence that it would.

There is a strong argument that the slack labor market of a recession actually makes unions all the more important. Without a united front, workers will have even less bargaining power in the recession than they had during the growth years of this decade, when they largely failed to get raises even as productivity and profits soared. If pay continues to lag, it will only prolong the downturn by inhibiting spending.

Another question clouding the labor agenda is whether Mr. Obama will give equal weight to worker concerns — from reforming health care to raising the minimum wage — while the financial crisis is still playing out. Most members of his economic team are veterans of the Clinton administration who tilt toward Wall Street. In the Clinton era, financial issues routinely trumped labor concerns. If Mr. Obama’s campaign promises are to be kept, that mindset cannot prevail again. Mr. Obama’s creation of a task force on middle-class issues, to be led by Vice President-elect Joseph Biden and including Ms. Solis and other high-ranking officials, is an encouraging sign that labor issues will not be given short shrift.

There are many nonlegislative issues on the agenda for Ms. Solis. Safety standards must be updated: in the last eight years, the Labor Department has issued only one new safety rule of its own accord; it issued a few others only after being compelled by Congress or the courts. Overtime rules that were weakened in 2004 need to be restored. To enforce labor standards, the Labor Department will need more staff and more money, both of which have been cut deeply by President Bush.

Only the president can give the new labor secretary the clout she will need to do well at a job that has been done so badly for so long, at such great cost to the quality of Americans’ lives.

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In a time of crisis, aren't we lucky to have a president who makes his "rescue" plan "sound less important than a Liquid-Plumr commerical"?

“Following Sept. 11, our national leaders came together at a time of crisis. We must show that kind of patriotism now,” he said.

In deference to the current emergency, we will refrain from pointing out that when our national leaders came together following Sept. 11, the results were, all and all, worse than if they had stayed home.

-- Gail Collins, in her NYT column today, "Bring On the Rubber Chicken"

by Ken

Now that the handling of the financial mess has devolved into one of our periodic Federal Dog-and-Pony Shows, with a cast of the sorriest-ass dogs and ponies you'll see anywhere, I've been happy to leave the task of keeping up with it to Howie. It's been quite a spectacle, not least thanks to the Bush regime commandos threatening to drive us into disaster if we don't deliver the ransom money in exactly the way Commandant Paulson called for it)

As the dust settles, even though the Democratic congressional leadership, especially in the House, doesn't seem to get it (and this, I'm afraid, means you, Barney Frank), a consensus is forming among the smart people that the Paulson plan, which at three pages (with almost no detail except that famous Section 8 grant of uncheckable authority to the Hankster) is apparently too long for Young Johnny McCranky to have read before launching his one-geezer crusade to solve the problem) is pretty clear that this plan not only is unnecessary but in all likelihood isn't going to achieve its stated goals.

By "smart people," by the way, I mean the ones who saw this mess coming, not to be confused with the ones who didn't, and in their various ways helped ensure that it would happen, and yet are by some curious miracle the people designated to lead us out of it. At the same time, it seems clear that we're going to get some version of this monstrous boondoggle, a parting crony-to-cronies gift from the dying Bush regime.

At a moment like this, the special voice of Gail Collins can be the sweetest call to sanity -- of some queasy sort. If you haven't read her column today, you owe it to yourself. It's the closest you're going to get to comic relief.

Let me get you started:

How do you think the besieged financial community felt when the White House announced that George W. Bush was going to address the nation on television Wednesday night?

Hopeful? Terrified?

“We are in the midst of a serious financial crisis,” the president said, reading his lines flatly and stolidly, like an announcer delivering a long public-service message about new parking regulations for the holiday season. The whole event had a kind of unreality to it, since Bush has arrived at that unhappy point in American public life when a famous person begins to look like a celebrity impersonator.

There is, in a way, a kind of talent required to tell the nation that it’s teetering on the brink of disaster in a way that makes the viewers’ attention wander. Bush’s explanation about how the rescue bill would unclog the lines of credit made the whole thing sound less important than a Liquid-Plumr commercial.

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The White House No-Brain Trust sets its beady eyes on an even excellenter adventure in Iran

The White House No-Brain Trust

"Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program."

-- Seymour Hersh, in "Preparing the Battlefield,"

in the July 7 and 14 New Yorker

"Ooh, that Sy Hersh!"

This, I'm guessing, is what you would hear -- embellished with suitable expletives -- if you could plug into today's communications going in and out of the White House and the Pentagon and wherever the vice president is holed up this weekend.

Credit RawStory with alerting one and all to a new New Yorker piece, already published today on the magazine's website, in which investigative reporter Seymour Hersh (code-named "That Goddamn Busybody" in administration circles) tells us that last year Chimpy the Prez got congressional leaders to pass in silence on plans to spend up to $400 million for "a major escalation of covert operations against Iran," aimed at "undermining Iran's nuclear ambitions and trying to undermine the government through regime change."

Apparently precious little detail was provided in the "presidential finding" that Chimpy had to provide to the so-called Gang of Eight, the party leaders as well as the ranking members of the Intelligence Committees in both houses of Congress. And some of those leaders are reported to have gone so far as to grumble about the failure to specify what exactly the cowboys of the Bush regime plan to do. According to Hersh's source, “There was a significant amount of high-level discussion,” but not enough to derail the plans.

Interestingly, Hersh's sources report considerably more pushback coming from the Pentagon, from both Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, confirming the view we quoted just yesterday from intelligence and foreign-affairs expert Thomas Powers: "It is a strange fact that the locus of opposition to attack on Iran is not in Congress but in the Pentagon." (Note that the Pentagon figures generally agree with the Bush regime high command about the danger from Iran. What they disagree about is the wisdom of attempting military action.)

Some of what Hersh reports is so familiar that it would be funny if the matter weren't so serious. For starters, it seems that the Cheney-Bush no-brain trust is once again stonewalling, providing the congressional Gang of Eight with the absolute minimum of information they can squeeze the law into requiring -- and of course these are people who believe that the law is what they say it is.

Apparently, the "presidential findings" on covert activities that the administration is legally bound to furnish are being confined to activities exclusively conducted by the CIA. Of course there's also all that cluster of agencies around the Defense Department doing covert operations, and increasingly even CIA operations are done under joint command. As far as the administration is concerned, it appears, none of these activities require presidential reporting, since in their view, of course, the president is the chimp-in-charge of all military matters.

It's hard not to imagine as well that that dribbling psychopath "Big Dick" Cheney, thinking he's oh so smart, is doing the same thing he did with the gathering and analysis of intelligence to make sure he could have his war in Iraq: diverting as much of our covert activity as possible away from that damned CIA to people he can control better, as long as those CIA people keep sassing him about something they keep calling "reality," and refuse to see the world the demented way his diseased brain does.

The other intriguing wrinkle Hersh reports is an extension of the above. From people involved in successful U.S. special ops, he's hearing of significantly increased administration management, even micromanagement, of special ops, about which the No-Brain Trust knows even less than all those things it has shown itself so catastrophically ignorant of. According to Hersh's Pentagon consultant:

We’ve had wonderful results in the Horn of Africa with the use of surrogates and false flags -- basic counterintelligence and counter-insurgency tactics. And we’re beginning to tie them in knots in Afghanistan. But the White House is going to kill the program if they use it to go after Iran. It’s one thing to engage in selective strikes and assassinations in Waziristan and another in Iran. The White House believes that one size fits all.

One special point of contention is the No-Brain Trust's demand for immediate results in special ops. This, it seems, is exactly what you can't order up, since successful ops generally require patience, allowing for proper care in the planning and execution.

Wouldn't the world be a safer as well as saner place if the U.S. no-brain trust, headed (for want of a better word) by Big Dick and his sock puppet Chimpy, were spending all their time preparing defenses for their war-crimes trials? At this point, an insanity defense looks like a sure winner.

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