Thursday, 10 June 2010

I hope you are digging these creative titles. As you may have noticed, I finally put the new revised blogroll up. It's still a work in progress, as I decided to put the "non-blog blogs" like Black Agenda Report and Counterpunch in a separate second category, which I anticipate I'll be adding more to eventually. If I misspelled your name or your title, let me know. Also, I'm sure I left somebody out while not meaning to, etc.

Speaking of Counterpunch, you should definitely go read "A Hell of Their Own Creation:Does the Ruling Class Really Want to Commit Suicide?" by Charles M. Young. Young deftly connects the rape of the environment by capital to the general societal decline and sense of corruption of the elites many of us have been fumbling about and trying to express. An excerpt:

The panel discussion I most wanted to see (out of 300 or so) was called “The Crisis That Gives the Capitalist Class Nightmares,” because Michael Hudson was speaking. Whenever Hudson writes something, I read it, because he’s one of a tiny number of economists with academic credentials who predicted the present debt crisis. (Apparently not predicting crises is necessary for tenure in most economic departments these days.) At the panel, he explained that when labor is squeezed to the point that it can’t purchase anything, the capitalist is left with nothing to invest in, except more debt, and so we end up with Wall Street creating ever more complicated, ever more leveraged, ever more worthless junk for its gambling habit. When this collapses, as it must, half the hospitals in Latvia (which Hudson advises) have to shut down for lack of funds.

That's from the beginning. The last part of the essay is so darkly poetic I want to travel back in time and space and steal it from him, although I probably shouldn't.

Also see "The method in Israel's madness" by Pepe Escobar, in the Asia Times. Escobar sort of corroborates what I suggested a few days back, so naturally I'm quoting him:

Even US Central Command commander General David “I'm always positioning myself to 2012” Petraeus has been forced to publicly admit that US strategic ally Israel - because of the non-stop colonization of Palestine and the blockade it is enforcing in Gaza - has become an immense burden for US strategic designs.

Russia on the other hand supports the new Turkey, Syria and Iran politico-economic axis.
[…]
Russia - just like Turkey - also wants a fully denuclearized Middle East, which implies a non-nuclear Israel. This will be discussed at the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency.

Thus, essentially, Israel fears the new Turkey, Syria and Iran as much as it fears Russian support for it. A new Middle East is being born - and there seems to be only one place for Israel: isolation.

Israel's "mad dog" strategy - conceived by former military leader Moshe Dayan - is not exactly an exercise in fitting in. Even centrist Middle East analyst Anthony Cordesman, an establishment icon at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote an essay under the title "Israel as a Strategic Liability?"