SUPREME SACRIFICE: Iraq War Led The The President To Give Up Playing Golf. President Bush NOW says he didn’t trust pre-war intell and repeats oft repeated recent fear: a withdrawal will cause disaster.

GERMANY: HISTORY AND MEMORY
CHINA: DEATH TOLL RISING
BURMA: SINKING FAST

BERLIN: Berlin is a city of history and memory. Few, Jews who lived here in the 1920’s or 30’s believed i that a country with such historic culture could turn into an hotbed of aggressive fascism and external war. Germany was too civilized, or so it was thought.

We now know what happened—maybe not all of it—but enough of it to realize what a determined group of ideologically driven fanatics are capable of doing, especially at a time of economic downturn and depression. Using fear and spreading hatred, a government decided to build national pride around the idea of a master race accompanied by the demonization and genocidal scapegoating of Jews and others.

Somehow, the crimes of the war have faded in the public memory and been replaced by the crimes committed after the war, during the cold war, as discovered when I wandered over to the area called Checkpoint Charlie, once the border post dividing what was the American Sector—Berlin was divided in four sectors after the war by the then allies—and the Soviet Sector. This later became the epicenter of East-West confrontation when The Soviet Zone morphed into East Germany.

Today it is a tourist attraction with a guy wearing a US WW 2 uniform, holding an American flag, and taking pictures with sightseers for a Euro or two. Then you walk around an enclosed area and read the history of the place on a wall that takes you from the war’s end through the Berlin Airlift and the building of the Wall. You read about how people who tried to escape were shot down, about worker’s risings against the brutishness of the East German government, the role of the Stasi, the East German secret police that had spies everywhere (see stasimuseum.de) and then, finally, the change in the political situation under Gorbachev, and the dismantling of the wall. Some of it, the remanants of the Wall is still be sold on EBAY, only small sections of it remain on display.

The Berlin Wall was imposed in a time of paranoia–fear of skilled workers being recruited to leave as a form of Economic warfare aimed at weakening the State, and a fear of infiltrators. The Berlin Wall was just one TENTH of the whole divided border. 2.5 million people left before it was erected; 200,000 actually moved to the East.

According to one history, “The drain of East Germany’s population into West Germany was hugely damaging for the East German economy and society; one Western economist calculated that by 1957, the westward migration had cost East Germany over 22.5 billion marks in lost educational investment. So it wasn’t totally irrational but it also wasn’t very smart, was it? It was largely Stalin’s idea, no surprise.

There seemed to be few buyers of memorabilia from the days of the DDR (East Germany) although I was interested to learn that the country’s last official act was a public concert right near my hotel of Beethoven’s 9th. That’s how they went out. Before the Wall went down, I believe, Pink Floyd blasted the Wall with, what else, The Wall.

Of course you don’t learn anything about what former citizens of that country told me was its positive achievements including fighting Nazism after the war, advancing the rights of women, providing nursery schools for all kids, a vibrant if controlled culture including the plays of Bertold Brecht, and even the funding of liberation movements in Southern Africa.

All of that memory has been wiped out with layers of thick anti-socialist cold war propaganda, some of it true, some of it very selective. The East Germans did not have the economic advantages that came with the the Marshall Plan or the help of the far more effective propaganda purveyed by the Axel Springer media machine and its allies. Just as communism was a religion for some of its adherents, anti-communism was a religion for many of us in the West. US troops defended West Germany against “them;” the then Soviet bloc defended them against us. And in the middle, there emerged a big anti-war anti-missile movement in West Germany when a new generation there and here called for peace.

The irony today is that it is easier to get access to the archive of the Stasi than the files of the CIA. And I was more revolted by the latter–which kept files on me–than the former. That does not mean I feel any nostalgia for the authoritarianism of that suffocating system. I wouldn’t have wanted to live under it just as I do not like living under the fear ministry of the Busheviks who seem to have adapted some of its more disgraceful aspects.

As for the greater crimes commited by Germany, there is also a large abstract Holocaust memorial near the Brandenburg Gate. It was designed by by architect Peter Eisenman …, according to the Wilkipedia entry, to “produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere, and the whole sculpture aims to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason. A 2005 copy of the Foundation for the Memorial’s official English tourist pamphlet, however, states that the design represents a radical approach to the traditional concept of a memorial, partly because Eisenman did not use any symbolism. An attached underground “Place of Information” (German: Ort der Information) holds the names of all known Jewish Holocaust victims, obtained from the Israeli museum Yad Vashem.”

There were also many criticisms of this somewhat abstract artistic structure. Again, in the Wikipedia:

“In 1998, German novelist Martin Walser cited the Holocaust Memorial in his public condemnation of Germany’s “Holocaust industry.” Walser decried the “exploitation of our disgrace for present purposes.” He criticized the “monumentalization”, and “ceaseless presentation of our shame.” “Take all the towns in the world”, said Walser. “Check whether in any of these towns there is a memorial of national ignominy. I have never seen such. The Holocaust is not an appropriate subject of a memorial and such memorials should not be constructed…” The “place of information” has been criticized as breaking with the tradition of having informational museums attached directly to various German Holocaust sites.

For me these memorials were not as important as my first meeting members of my own extended family who survived the holocaust and moved in later years from Belarus to Germany. I had my first encounter with their history which could have been mine, had my Grandmother not emigrated to the United States. My young cousin Masha told me she has problems relating to these events that happened so long ago but believes that her High School in Berlin handled the subject of the war well.

As we know, history is written by the winners. And there is a big air of cold war-capitalist triumphalism which goes by the name of freedom here. Of course, there are no mention of Allied war crimes like the bombing of Dresden or the western companies that traded with and helped fund the Nazis. One of my cousins told me about a book he just bought—a first edition of industrialist Henry Ford’s “The International Jew,” a smarmy anti-Semitic tract. That was the reason my family never bought a Ford. Nazis come in many shapes and sizes.

A counter parallel today is offered up by a NY Judge who is allowing a law suit against the US companies that profited from their support of apartheid in South Africa. Already, many victims of the holocaust here have received compensation from German companies that fueled the ovens and backed Hitler. So far, no South Africans have, nor have American companies that profited in their dealings with Nazi Germany been put in the dock. Sorry to bring it up, but it happened and was shoveled under the rug of righteousness.

POLL: DEMOCRACY IS GOOD, WE WOULD LIKE MORE OF IT: Governments Widely Seen as Serving Big Interests, Not the People

A WorldPublicOpinion.org poll of 19 nations conducted around the world finds that, in every nation polled, publics support the principles of democracy. At the same time, in nearly every nation, majorities are dissatisfied with how responsive their government is to the will of the people.

In all 19 nations polled majorities agree with the democratic principle that “the will of the people should be the basis for the authority of government”–a principle enunciated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, whose 60th anniversary is being celebrated this year. On average 85 percent agree–52 percent strongly. Across the 19 nations, 74 percent say that the “will of the people” should have more influence than it currently does.

“The perception that governments are not responsive to the popular will appears to be contributing to the low levels of confidence in government found around the world,” comments Steven Kull, director of WorldPublicOpinion.org. Kull adds: “Most see their governments as primarily serving big interests rather than the people as a whole.”

The poll of 17,525 respondents was conducted between January 10 and March 20, 2008 by WorldPublicOpinion.org, a collaborative research project involving research centers from around the world and managed by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland. Interviews were conducted in 19 nations, though in three of them not all questions were asked.

ANOTHER POLL FINDS GLOOM IN THE USA

WP: U.S. Outlook Is Worst Since ‘92, Poll Finds–Americans are gloomier about the direction of the country than they have been at any point in 15 years, and Democrats hold their biggest advantage since early 1993 as the party better able to deal with the nation’s main problems, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, reports Jon Cohen and Dan Balz.

HILLARY WINS WEST VIRGINA PRIMARY, EXPERTS ASK DOES IT MATTER? Delegate Count Largely Unaffected,

BELIEFNET REPORTS: BUSH ADVISOR BACKS BARACK

The Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell is pastor of Windsor Village United Methodist Church, the largest United Methodist congregation in the nation. Often described as a ‘spiritual advisor’ to President George W. Bush, Caldwell introduced Bush at the 2000 Republican National Convention and delivered the benedictions at the 2001 and 2005 presidential inaugurations. He endorsed Senator Barack Obama for president in January

When you called President Bush to say you were endorsing Senator Barack Obama, how did he respond?

He had shared his thoughts with me about Senator Obama months before I called and told him I was going to endorse. And he says he likes him as a person. He told me that early on, before the Senator even announced he was running for president. He has a tremendous amount of respect for him.

NY OBSERVER; HILL BACKER NY CONG RANGEL ON CLINTON”S MARATHON

Charlie Rangel said the proof that Hillary Clinton can still win the Democratic nomination is that she is still pursuing the Democratic nomination. Either she has a chance, he said, or she’s nuts.

“If mathematically she couldn’t get the nomination, it would mean that Obama has won and so she wouldn’t be in the race,” said Rangel. “And so obviously mathematically she can.”

When asked how she could win the nomination, Rangel replied, “I don’t know, but if mathematically she cannot win, then why aren’t we declaring Obama the winner? I mean, it doesn’t make sense. It is not my job to explain how, if she put $6 million of her money, the team is still together, the campaign is still going on, why do I have to explain mathematically why she can’t win? If mathematically she can’t win, then they are crazy. They ought to go to an insane asylum.”

He added, “Anybody who really knows that they can’t win and they won’t quit, there is really something wrong with them.”

Clinton is still in the race. So by that logic she must see some way of winning. What is it?

“I have no clue,” said Rangel, explaining it wasn’t his job as chairman of the House’s Ways and Means Committee to chart or analyze Clinton’s path to the nomination.

BUSH TO VISIT MASADA: HIS LAST STAND?

The Israel Project reports:

U.S. President George Bush is scheduled to arrive in Israel for the second time this year on Wednesday (May 13) in honor of Israel’s sixtieth birthday. During his visit, Bush will give an historic address to the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, and will speak at the international Presidents Conference hosted by Israeli President Shimon Peres.

Bush is also slated to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Peres and visit the ancient fortress of Masada, site of the last stand of Jews rebelling against the Roman army in 73 CE.

US LISTED IRAQ’S PALESTINE HOTEL AS TARGET IN 2003

DEMOCRACY NOW: Fmr. Military Intelligence Officer Reveals US Listed Palestine Hotel in Baghdad as Target Prior to Killing of Two Journalists in 2003

Last month marked the fifth anniversary of the US military shelling of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad. The attack killed two journalists: Reuters cameraman Taras Protsyuk and Jose Couso, a cameraman for the Spanish television network Telecinco. The Pentagon has called the killings accidental, but in this broadcast exclusive Army Sgt. Adrienne Kinne (Ret.) reveals she saw secret US military documents that listed the hotel as a possible target. Kinne also discloses that she was personally ordered to eavesdrop on Americans working for news organizations and NGOs in Iraq.

A NEW DISASTER THREATENS BURMA

BOSTON GLOBE: BANGKOK - An estimated 1.5 million Burmese are on the
brink of a “massive public health catastrophe,” the British charity Oxfam warned yesterday, as desperate survivors of Cyclone Nargis poured out of the
devastated Irrawaddy Delta into regional towns in search of water, food, and other help.

Burma is facing a “perfect storm” of conditions that could lead to an outbreak of waterborne disease, said Sarah Ireland, Oxfam’s regional director.

“The ponds are full of dead bodies, the wells have saline water, and even things like a bucket are in scarce supply,” Ireland said. She appealed for Burmese authorities, who have restricted access to the country, to allow humanitarian agencies to send in technical and health specialists to help prevent disease outbreaks.

INTERNATIONAL RED CROSS CALLS FOR CLUSTER BOMB BAN

Representatives from over a hundred governments are meeting in Dublin, Ireland, 19-30 May, to finalize a new treaty to ban the use, manufacture and stocking of cluster munitions. The conference is the culmination of a negotiation process that began in Oslo in February 2007. Its supporters believe that the treaty will be as effective as the 1997 Ottawa Treaty has been in dealing with anti-personnel landmines - now banned by three-quarters of the world’s states.

Cluster munitions are usually bombs, rocket or artillery shells which open to release up to 650 smaller ‘bomblets’. These bomblets, known as submunitions, disperse and explode over a wide area. Experience over the last four decades shows that between 10 and 40% of them fail to detonate. As a result, vast areas of land are polluted with live ammunition, primed to explode at the touch of a spade or a child’s hand. The ICRC has called for a ban on unreliable and inaccurate sub-munitions to spare future generations from their lethal consequences: ‘Its bad enough that civilians are caught up in the fighting and suffer incredible pain and disruption…but to us it is repugnant that this killing and injuring of civilians will go on for years or decades,’ says the ICRC’s Peter Herby.

There is a rising groundswell of support for the new treaty which would prohibit the use, production, stockpiling and transfer of cluster munitions; and require the elimination of current stocks, help for victims and clearance of existing contamination. Military officers also recognize the importance of the new Treaty. According to Lt Colonel Jim Burke of the Irish Defence Forces, military commanders “don’t want unreliable or inaccurate munitions, they also don’t want to be in a position of being forced to use a weapon which is stigmatized internationally and they don’t want to be accused of disobeying international humanitarian law.”

It took the 2006 war in southern Lebanon to make the world finally sit up and take notice of the dreadful consequences of cluster munitions. In just one month an estimated 37 million square metres of land were contaminated with up to a million unexploded cluster submunitions. More than 250 civilians and clearance operators have been killed and injured by them since the fighting ended.

Portside: ICFTU UNIONS CALL FOR ACTION ON FOOD CRISIS

In response to the deepening global food crisis the
ITUC has called on governments and world institutions
to take far-reaching measures to guarantee food
security for all. ‘This is an opportunity to
completely revamp the failed policies which have led to
this crisis, and it is vital that governments and the
global institutions do more than just fiddle at the
edges of a system which simply isn’t delivering for the
world’s people’, said ITUC General Secretary Guy Ryder.

‘The factors behind soaring food and agricultural
commodity prices are part of the same set of global
policies which have resulted in massive global
financial instability and intensifying climate change,
and these three current global crises must be tackled
through root and branch reform and effective regulation
that can deliver decent work. Large parts of the
global agricultural system are built upon poverty wages
and violation of workers’ fundamental rights. No
durable solution to the crisis can be found unless the
appalling worker rights record in global agriculture is
addressed’, Ryder added.

Bank Robberies Up In Hard Economic Times/ (When I read this headline, I realized that it is a report on stickups at banks–not banks robbing shareholders or customer through the sale of fraudulent sub prime investment securities.)

THIS JUST IN: HOME OWNERS RESOURCE CENTER REPORTS:

In a dramatic, last minute ruling, a California Court of Appeal has stayed the takeover of AHRC.com. In a terse order, the Court of Appeal stayed the trial court’s order to takeover AHRC.com pending further briefing. Network Solutions was scheduled to turnover AHRC.com to the law firm of Peters and Freedman and Palacio del Mar within a few hours. This dispute grows out of a housing conflict with a pro-Housing Association law firm seeking to shut down a website that reports on foreclosures and home owner grievances.

Senate Collapse on Housing Bill Likely

washingtonpost.com — Hopes have dimmed that Congress would act quickly to rescue homeowners at risk of foreclosure after key Republican and Democratic negotiators in the Senate said they could not reach agreement on a plan. Talks broke down between aides to Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) and the senior Republican on his committee, Richard C. Shelby (Ala.), aides said. The two camps had been trying for more than a month to develop a bipartisan proposal to ease the nation’s housing crisis.

Housing Bailout Little Help

money.cnn.com — Congress’ proposal to help troubled homeowners may only cost $1.7 billion to taxpayers since it might only keep 325,000 of nearly 3 million borrowers from foreclosure.

Little Help From Lenders

boston.com — Loan companies are proving ill-equipped to handle record foreclosures, particularly requests involving sales that would require lenders to accept losses on the loans, so-called short sales. The mortgage companies turn down offers — even though it may be more costly to seize the house in foreclosure — or they take so long to respond that the buyers move on, or don’t respond at all. Homeowners, real estate brokers, and others who have tried to crack the system describe it as akin to a black hole.

Economic Slump Hits Hispanics Hard

nytimes.com — The economic downturn unfolding across the United States is imposing a particularly punishing toll on Hispanics, a group that was among the primary beneficiaries of the expansion in recent years. What had been a story of broad and steady advances has given way to growing joblessness, diminishing paychecks and lost homes.

ALTERNET: HOW HEDGE FUNDS SCREW US

FROM THE MR. MORTGAGE BLOG—BANKS LIE, NO LIGHT IN SIGHT

Here is a little ditty from the Carlyle Group’s Rubenstein, just released. He talks about ‘enormous losses not yet realized for the bank’ and where this is all headed. He says, ‘it will take at least a year before all losses are realized, and some financial institutions may fail’. Hey, that is FOUR MORE KITCHEN SINK QUARTERS! Moving right along he says ‘the sovereign wealth funds are not likely to jump into the fray again to bail out these institutions’ and ‘many financial institutions aren’t going to be able to survive as independent institutions’. There is much more where this came from. I could add to his report by mentioning the $5.5 TRLLION in Level 2 and 3 assets not yet marked appropriately in most cases.

Now, the pumpers will say ‘how can you believe a guy who was leveraged 25:1 in the mortgage bond arena and who just got crushed. ’ In my opinion, that is the very person you should listen to. He has had to accept reality the hard way.

OMG: EAST HAMPTON FACES FORECLOSURES

NY POST: In the first three months of this year, banks have launched preliminary foreclosure actions - known as lis pendens proceedings - against a record 120 borrowers in East Hampton and Southampton towns.

MORTGAGE STORY FROM “THIS AMERICAN LIFE”–LISTEN

FED STILL INTERVENING TO SAVE MARKETS, REPORTS THE FINANCIAL TIMES

The Federal Reserve stands ready to increase the size of its credit auctions beyond the current level of $150bn a month if required to combat stress in the money markets, said chairman Ben Bernanke. His pledge came in a speech in which he welcomed “some improvement in financing markets” but warned that “conditions in financial markets are still far from normal”. The Fed chairman defended its decision to support a rescue takeover of Bear Stearns, saying that if Bear had been declared bankrupt it could have triggered a “much broader liquidity crisis” and a fire sale of assets. But he said the central bank would scale down its extensive liquidity support operations when markets normalised. He also warned that regulators would have to ensure that financial institutions did not run increased liquidity risks in future based on the assumption that the Fed would always step in whenever markets were stressed. Mr Bernanke said the credit crisis had overturned the assumption that primary dealers – many of them investment banks – could safely rely on short-term secured funding.

WHAT USA TODAY THINKS THE UDA THINKS By WALTER BRASCH:
All the News That Fits—In 500 words or a Graphic

The editors of USA Today, as they do every day, had to decide what to make its “Cover Story.”

The death toll from the cyclone in Myanmar was approaching 25,000, with about almost a million homeless, and the ruling military junta was still refusing to accept foreign assistance.

A Pentagon report revealed that about 43,000 medically unfit troops were sent into combat.

In Philadelphia, six police officers were under investigation for beating suspects. And, in Russia a new president was inaugurated.

What the editors chose to dominate the front page was a three-column head photo of presidential daughter Jenna Bush and a story about her forthcoming non-public private wedding. The only reason USA Today didn’t run the story on its front pages Saturday and Sunday is because it doesn’t publish on weekends. But, just about every other news medium gave the wedding heavy play.

At least we have our priorities straight.

IN MEMORIUM: From My Old Friend and Frequent Reader, the writer and more, Daniel Patrick Cassidy in San Francisco:

My mother Doris Frances Cassidy died on Mother’s Day, May 11, 2008, at around 5:30 PM in New York. She would have been ninety years old on September 3rd. My wife Clare and I were married on her birthday. She was the most wonderful mother anyone could ask for. I will miss her every moment. Her eyes were the color of life…. My Mom was born a survivor. She was a doozer (duaiseoir, duasóir, a prizewinner; someone remarkable)!

Thats my blog for now. Comments welcome at dissector@mediachannel.org