Israelis from Texas and Alabama Attack Kerry

I just happened to flip on to C-SPAN's coverage of Secretary of State Kerry's testimony before the House on the nuclear agreement with Iran.  I was appalled at the questioning by Congressman Ted Poe from Texas' 2nd District and Congressman Mo Brooks from Alabama's 5th District.  They appeared to be representing Israel rather than America.  They appeared to be hired agents of a foreign power, not loyal Americans.  Texas 2nd District is famous as the seat of Charlie Wilson, of "Charlie Wilson's War" book and movie fame.  In the movie, Tom Hanks says as Charlie Wilson that he is supported by lots of Jewish money from New York; all he has to do is support Israel and make sure his constituents can keep their guns.  It looks to me like these congressmen have sold out to Jew money, like Judas did when he betrayed Jesus.  Israel may be a fine country, but it is not the United States of America.  These guys should be loyal to America and love this country. They should put America first.

Aparthied in Israel

The passing of Nelson Mandela reminds us of his fight against apartheid in South Africa.  Apartheid still exists in places around the world, one of which is Israel.  Israel legally imposes strict bias against non-Jewish people who live in or near Israel.  The most obvious, of course, is the Palestinian population that lives in Israel, but there are other affected populations.  How many blacks live in Israel?  There are groups of blacks who claim to be descended from Jews for hundreds or thousands of years, but they are not particularly welcome in Israel.  In general there is a huge Israeli bias against people who are not Jews.  There may be reasons for this, going back to the Holocaust or discrimination against Jews by gentiles for thousands of years, but that does not erase the fact that discrimination by Israelis exists.

There are many countries that engage in worse racial discrimination than Israel, but Israel claims to belong to the advanced group of civilized countries who were united in their opposition to South African apartheid.  Israel developed its nuclear bomb program in cooperation with the old, white, pre-Mandela South African government, with which it maintained close ties throughout its existence.  There is a legacy of discrimination that Israel needs to overcome.

Israel needs its own Nelson Mandela.

Income Inequality Forever

I am disappointed that the new budget deal did nothing about income taxes.  The budget deal a year ago carried over most of the Bush tax cuts.  One group said that it carried over 82% of the tax cuts.  These low taxes guarantee that income inequality will continue indefinitely.  While some rates went up a little a year ago, income taxes are still extremely low by historical standards.  That is certainly a major contributor income inequality.  There are a lot of other factors, including outsourcing and the displacement of human workers by computers, but the easiest way to rectify income inequality would be by implementing a more progressive tax structure which would tax higher incomes at a higher rate.  This would not affect many of the underlying issues favoring capital over labor in the financial market, as described in the book Race Against the Machine, but it would ameliorate the rate of destruction of the middle and lower classes in the US, ideally giving us time to address the more fundamental structural issues.

Bush and the Iranian Nuclear Program

An op-ed today in the NYT on Bush's failure to invade Iran, by Ari Shavit misses the point.  Shavit has gotten lots of praise for not hiding Israel's flaws in his recent book, My Promised Land.  However, his article just says that Bush should have attacked Iran rather than Iraq.  It's an example of Jewish hatred of Iran that I cited in my previous post, despite Shavit's reputation as an enlightened Israeli.

Where Bush erred regarding Iran's nuclear program was in India.  India has flouted the nuclear non-proliferation regime, mainly embodied in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, for decades.  It has had a clandestine nuclear weapons program ever since it started working on nuclear energy.  At the end of his administration, Bush basically said, "Never mind about the NPT, India can have its nuclear program, civilian and military."  He made India the example for other proliferating countries, like Iran.  He said you can break all the rules, and once you become a true nuclear weapons state like the US and Russia, you can keep your nuclear weapons.  This is clearly what Iran wants, if it develops nuclear weapons, and India shows that it is a possibility.

I am not convinced that Iran has made the decision to develop nuclear weapons, and there are many examples of countries that have decided not to.  Brazil was once in a position similar to Iran's, having a nuclear energy program that could facilitate the development of nuclear weapons, and Brazil abandoned it and joined the NPT.  That could still happen with Iran.  Of course, one difference is that Brazil's potential nuclear rival was Argentina.  Brazil and Argentina mutually agreed to give up their military programs.  Iran's rival is Israel, and maybe Saudi Arabia.  Israel is not likely to give up its nuclear weapons program.  Saudi Arabia does not have one, and this is not a serious rival, although it has the money to buy one.  By retaining its nuclear weapons program, Israel is probably the main factor encouraging Iran to pursue an Iranian bomb.

Another example of a nuclear rivalry is India and Pakistan.  India has gotten the US seal of approval on its program.  Pakistan has not, but it is so far along, that there is not much the US can do about it.  It is probably in America's interest to allow the more responsible Indians to vastly overpower the Pakistani nuclear arsenal as a way of decreasing the likelihood that the crazier Pakistanis might use theirs.  However, there should be a better way to accomplish the goal of lowering tensions on the subcontinent without undermining the non-proliferation regime for the whole world, including Iran.