The announcement last week by the United
States of the largest military aid
package in its history – to Israel – was
a win for both sides.
Israeli prime
minister Benjamin Netanyahu could boast
that his lobbying had boosted aid from
$3.1 billion a year to $3.8bn – a 22 per
cent increase – for a decade starting in
2019.
Mr Netanyahu has presented this as a
rebuff to those who accuse him of
jeopardising Israeli security interests
with his government’s repeated affronts
to the White House.
In the past weeks alone, defence
minister Avigdor Lieberman has compared
last year’s nuclear deal between
Washington and Iran with the 1938 Munich
pact, which bolstered Hitler; and Mr
Netanyahu has implied that US opposition
to settlement expansion is the same as
support for the “ethnic cleansing” of
Jews.
American president Barack Obama,
meanwhile, hopes to stifle his own
critics who insinuate that he is
anti-Israel. The deal should serve as a
fillip too for Hillary Clinton, the
Democratic party’s candidate to succeed
Mr Obama in November’s election.
In reality, however, the Obama
administration has quietly punished Mr
Netanyahu for his misbehaviour. Israeli
expectations of a $4.5bn-a-year deal
were whittled down after Mr Netanyahu
stalled negotiations last year as he
sought to recruit Congress to his battle
against the Iran deal.
In fact, Israel already receives
roughly $3.8bn – if Congress’s
assistance on developing missile defence
programmes is factored in. Notably,
Israel has been forced to promise not to
approach Congress for extra funds.
The deal takes into account neither
inflation nor the dollar’s depreciation
against the shekel.
A bigger blow still is the White
House’s demand to phase out a special
exemption that allowed Israel to spend
nearly 40 per cent of aid locally on
weapon and fuel purchases. Israel will
soon have to buy all its armaments from
the US, ending what amounted to a
subsidy to its own arms industry.
Nonetheless, Washington’s renewed
military largesse – in the face of
almost continual insults – inevitably
fuels claims that the Israeli tail is
wagging the US dog. Even The New York
Times has described the aid package as
“too big”.
Since the 1973 war, Israel has
received at least $100bn in military
aid, with more assistance hidden from
view. Back in the 1970s, Washington paid
half of Israel’s military budget. Today
it still foots a fifth of the bill,
despite Israel’s economic success.
But the US expects a return on its
massive investment. As the late Israeli
politician-general Ariel Sharon once
observed, Israel has been a US
“aircraft carrier” in the Middle East,
acting as the regional bully and
carrying out operations that benefit
Washington.
Almost no one blames the US for
Israeli attacks that wiped out Iraq’s
and Syria’s nuclear programmes. A
nuclear-armed Iraq or Syria would have
deterred later US-backed moves at regime
overthrow, as well as countering the
strategic advantage Israel derives from
its own nuclear arsenal.
In addition, Israel’s US-sponsored
military prowess is a triple boon to the
US weapons industry, the country’s most
powerful lobby. Public funds are
siphoned off to let Israel buy goodies
from American arms makers. That, in
turn, serves as a shop window for other
customers and spurs an endless and
lucrative game of catch-up in the rest
of the Middle East.
The first F-35 fighter jets to arrive
in Israel in December – their various
components produced in 46 US states –
will increase the clamour for the
cutting-edge warplane.
Israel is also a “front-line
laboratory”, as former Israeli army
negotiator Eival Gilady admitted at the
weekend, that develops and field-tests
new technology Washington can later use
itself.
The US is planning to buy back the
missile interception system Iron Dome –
which neutralises battlefield threats of
retaliation – it largely paid for.
Israel works closely too with the US in
developing cyberwarfare, such as the
Stuxnet worm that damaged Iran’s
civilian nuclear programme.
But the clearest message from
Israel’s new aid package is one
delivered to the Palestinians:
Washington sees no pressing strategic
interest in ending the occupation. It
stood up to Mr Netanyahu over the Iran
deal but will not risk a damaging clash
over Palestinian statehood.
Some believe that Mr Obama signed the
aid package to win the credibility
necessary to overcome his domestic
Israel lobby and pull a rabbit from the
hat: an initiative, unveiled shortly
before he leaves office, that corners Mr
Netanyahu into making peace.
Hopes have been raised by an expected
meeting at the United Nations in New
York on Wednesday. But their first talks
in 10 months are planned only to
demonstrate unity to confound critics of
the aid deal.
If Mr Obama really wanted to pressure
Mr Netanyahu, he would have used the aid
agreement as leverage. Now Mr Netanyahu
need not fear US financial retaliation,
even as he intensifies effective
annexation of the West Bank.
Mr Netanyahu has drawn the right
lesson from the aid deal – he can act
against the Palestinians with continuing
US impunity.
- See more at: http://www.jonathan-cook.net/2016-09-19/palestinians-lose-in-us-military-aid-deal-with-israel/#sthash.fL4Eq28N.dpuf
Citigroup Chose Obama’s 2008 Cabinet,
WikiLeaks Document Reveals
By Tom Eley
October 17, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
-
"WSWS"-
One
month before the presidential election of
2008, the giant Wall Street bank Citigroup
submitted to the Obama campaign a list of
its preferred candidates for cabinet
positions in an Obama administration. This
list corresponds almost exactly to the
eventual composition of Barack Obama’s
cabinet.
The
memorandum, revealed by WikiLeaks in a
recent document release from the email
account of John Podesta, who currently
serves as Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair,
was written by Michael Froman, who was then
an executive with Citigroup and currently
serves as US trade representative. The email
is dated Oct. 6, 2008 and bears the subject
line “Lists.” It went to Podesta a month
before he was named chairman of
President-Elect Obama’s transition team.
The
email was sent at the height of the
financial meltdown that erupted after the
bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers on September
15. Even as Citigroup and its Wall Street
counterparts were dragging the US and world
economy into its deepest crisis since the
1930s, they remained, as the email shows,
the real power behind the façade of American
democracy and its electoral process.
Froman’s list proved remarkably prescient.
As it proposed, Robert Gates, a Bush
holdover, became secretary of Defense; Eric
Holder became attorney general; Janet
Napolitano, secretary of Homeland Security;
Rahm Emanuel, White House chief of staff;
Susan Rice, United Nations ambassador; Arne
Duncan, secretary of Education; Kathleen
Sebelius, secretary of Health and Human
Services; Peter Orszag, head of the Office
of Management and Budget; Eric Shinseki,
secretary of Veterans Affairs; and Melody
Barnes, chief of the Domestic Policy
Council.
For
the highly sensitive position of secretary
of the Treasury, three possibilities were
presented: Robert Rubin and Rubin’s close
disciples Lawrence Summers and Timothy
Geithner. Obama chose Geithner, then
president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New
York. Geithner, along with Bush Treasury
Secretary (and former Goldman Sachs CEO)
Henry Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke,
had played the leading role in organizing
the Wall Street bailout.
Rubin had served as Treasury secretary in
the Bill Clinton administration from 1995
until 1999, when he was succeeded by
Summers. In that capacity, Rubin and Summers
oversaw the dismantling of the
Glass-Steagall Act (1933), which had imposed
a legal wall separating commercial banking
from investment banking. Immediately after
leaving Treasury, Rubin became a top
executive at Citigroup, remaining there
until 2009.
A
notable aspect of the Froman memo is its use
of identity politics. Among the Citigroup
executive’s lists of proposed hires to
Podesta were a “Diversity List” including
“African American, Latino and Asian American
candidates, broken down by Cabinet/Deputy
and Under/Assistant/Deputy Assistant level,”
in Froman’s words, and “a similar document
on women.” Froman also took diversity into
account for his White House cabinet list,
“probability-weighting the likelihood of
appointing a diverse candidate for each
position.” This list concluded with a table
breaking down the 31 assignments by race and
gender.
Citigroup’s recommendations came just three
days after then-President George W. Bush
signed into law the Troubled Asset Relief
Program, which allocated $700 billion in
taxpayer money to rescue the largest Wall
Street banks. The single biggest beneficiary
was Citigroup, which was given $45 billion
in cash in the form of a government stock
purchase, plus a $306 billion government
guarantee to back up its worthless
mortgage-related assets.
Then-presidential candidate Obama played a
critical political role in shepherding the
massively unpopular bank bailout through
Congress. The September financial crash
convinced decisive sections of the US
corporate-financial elite that the
Democratic candidate of “hope” and “change”
would be better positioned to contain
popular opposition to the bailout than his
Republican rival, Senator John McCain of
Arizona.
As
president, Obama not only funneled trillions
of dollars to the banks, he saw to it that
not a single leading Wall Street executive
faced prosecution for the orgy of
speculation and swindling that led to the
financial collapse and Great Recession, and
he personally intervened to block
legislation capping executive pay at
bailed-out firms.
The
same furtive and corrupt process is underway
in relation to a Hillary Clinton or Donald
Trump administration. Froman’s email is one
of many thousands released by WikiLeaks from
the account of Podesta. Those
communications, such as the Froman email,
which expose who really rules America, have
been virtually ignored by the media. The
pro-Democratic Party New Republic
called attention to it in an article
published Friday, but the story has received
little if any further coverage.
The
media has instead focused on salacious
details of Republican presidential nominee
Donald Trump’s sexual activities, designed,
in part, to divert attention from the
substance of the Clinton campaign-related
emails being released by WikiLeaks and other
sources.
The
New Republic drew attention to the
Froman memo not because it opposes such
machinations, but as a warning to the
interests it represents that they must move
now to influence the eventual composition of
a Hillary Clinton administration.
“If
the 2008 Podesta emails are any indication,
the next four years of public policy are
being hashed out right now, behind closed
doors,” wrote New Republic author
David Dayen. “And if liberals want to have
an impact on that process, waiting until
after the election will be too late.”
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