The Candidate We Still Don't Know

Frank Rich, The New York Times

As I went on vacation at the end of July, Barack Obama was leading John McCain by three to four percentage points in national polls. When I returned last week he still was. But lo and behold, a whole new plot twist had rolled off the bloviation assembly line in those intervening two weeks: Obama had lost the election! (John McCain during a commercial break at the forum on faith. (Photo: David McNew / Getty Images)

The poor guy should be winning in a landslide against the despised party of Bush-Cheney, and he's not. He should be passing the 50 percent mark in polls, and he's not. He's been done in by that ad with Britney and Paris and by a new international crisis that allows McCain to again flex his Manchurian Candidate military cred. Let the neocons identify a new battleground for igniting World War III, whether Baghdad or Tehran or Moscow, and McCain gets with the program as if Angela Lansbury has just dealt him the Queen of Hearts.

Obama has also been defeated by racism (again). He can't connect and 'close the deal' with ordinary Americans too doltish to comprehend a multicultural biography that includes what Cokie Roberts of ABC News has damned as the 'foreign, exotic place' of Hawaii. As The Economist sums up the received wisdom, 'lunch-pail Ohio Democrats' find Obama's ideas of change 'airy-fairy' and are all asking, 'Who on earth is this guy?'
It seems almost churlish to look at some actual facts. No presidential candidate was breaking the 50 percent mark in mid-August polls in 2004 or 2000. Obama's average lead of three to four points is marginally larger than both John Kerry's and Al Gore's leads then (each was winning by one point in Gallup surveys). Obama is also ahead of Ronald Reagan in mid-August 1980 (40 percent to Jimmy Carter's 46). At Pollster.com, which aggregates polls and gauges the electoral count, Obama as of Friday stood at 284 electoral votes, McCain at 169. That means McCain could win all 85 electoral votes in current toss-up states and still lose the election.
Yet surely, we keep hearing, Obama should be running away with the thing. Even Michael Dukakis was beating the first George Bush by 17 percentage points in the summer of 1988. Of course, were Obama ahead by 17 points today, the same prognosticators now fussing over his narrow lead would be predicting that the arrogant and presumptuous Obama was destined to squander that landslide on vacation and tank just like his hapless predecessor.
The truth is we have no idea what will happen in November. But for the sake of argument, let's posit that one thread of the Obama-is-doomed scenario is right: His lead should be huge in a year when the G.O.P. is in such disrepute that at least eight of the party's own senatorial incumbents are skipping their own convention, the fail-safe way to avoid being caught near the Larry Craig Memorial Men's Room at the Twin Cities airport.
So why isn't Obama romping? The obvious answer - and both the excessively genteel Obama campaign and a too-compliant press bear responsibility for it - is that the public doesn't know who on earth John McCain is. The most revealing poll this month by far is the Pew Research Center survey finding that 48 percent of Americans feel they're 'hearing too much' about Obama. Pew found that only 26 percent feel that way about McCain, and that nearly 4 in 10 Americans feel they hear too little about him. It's past time for that pressing educational need to be met.
What is widely known is the skin-deep, out-of-date McCain image. As this fairy tale has it, the hero who survived the Hanoi Hilton has stood up as rebelliously in Washington as he did to his Vietnamese captors. He strenuously opposed the execution of the Iraq war; he slammed the president's response to Katrina; he fought the 'agents of intolerance' of the religious right; he crusaded against the G.O.P. House leader Tom DeLay, the criminal lobbyist Jack Abramoff and their coterie of influence-peddlers.
With the exception of McCain's imprisonment in Vietnam, every aspect of this profile in courage is inaccurate or defunct.
McCain never called for Donald Rumsfeld to be fired and didn't start criticizing the war plan until late August 2003, nearly four months after 'Mission Accomplished.' By then the growing insurgency was undeniable. On the day Hurricane Katrina hit, McCain laughed it up with the oblivious president at a birthday photo-op in Arizona. McCain didn't get to New Orleans for another six months and didn't sharply express public criticism of the Bush response to the calamity until this April, when he traveled to the Gulf Coast in desperate search of election-year pageantry surrounding him with black extras.
McCain long ago embraced the right's agents of intolerance, even spending months courting the Rev. John Hagee, whose fringe views about Roman Catholics and the Holocaust were known to anyone who can use the Internet. (Once the McCain campaign discovered YouTube, it ditched Hagee.)

On Monday McCain is scheduled to appear at an Atlanta fund-raiser being promoted by Ralph Reed, who is not only the former aide de camp to one of the agents of intolerance McCain once vilified (Pat Robertson) but is also the former Abramoff acolyte showcased in McCain's own Senate investigation of Indian casino lobbying.
Though the McCain campaign announced a new no-lobbyists policy three months after The Washington Post's February report that lobbyists were 'essentially running' the whole operation, the fact remains that McCain's top officials and fund-raisers have past financial ties to nearly every domestic and foreign flashpoint, from Fannie Mae to Blackwater to Ahmad Chalabi to the government of Georgia. No sooner does McCain flip-flop on oil drilling than a bevy of Hess Oil family members and executives, not to mention a lowly Hess office manager and his wife, each give a maximum $28,500 to the Republican Party.
While reporters at The Post and The New York Times have been vetting McCain, many others give him a free pass. Their default cliché is to present him as the Old Faithful everyone already knows. They routinely salute his 'independence,' his 'maverick image' and his 'renegade reputation' - as the hackneyed script was reiterated by Karl Rove in a Wall Street Journal op-ed column last week. At Talking Points Memo, the essential blog vigilantly pursuing the McCain revelations often ignored elsewhere, Josh Marshall accurately observes that the Republican candidate is 'graded on a curve.'
Most Americans still don't know, as Marshall writes, that on the campaign trail 'McCain frequently forgets key elements of policies, gets countries' names wrong, forgets things he's said only hours or days before and is frequently just confused.' Most Americans still don't know it is precisely for this reason that the McCain campaign has now shut down the press's previously unfettered access to the candidate on the Straight Talk Express.
To appreciate the discrepancy in what we know about McCain and Obama, merely look at the coverage of the potential first ladies. We have heard too much indeed about Michelle Obama's Princeton thesis, her pay raises at the University of Chicago hospital, her statement about being 'proud' of her country and the false rumor of a video of her ranting about 'whitey.' But we still haven't been inside Cindy McCain's tax returns, all her multiple homes or private plane. The Los Angeles Times reported in June that Hensley & Company, the enormous beer distributorship she controls, 'lobbies regulatory agencies on alcohol issues that involve public health and safety,' in opposition to groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving. The McCain campaign told The Times that Mrs. McCain's future role in her beer empire won't be revealed before the election.
Some of those who know McCain best - Republicans - are tougher on him than the press is. Rita Hauser, who was a Bush financial chairwoman in New York in 2000 and served on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board in the administration's first term, joined other players in the G.O.P. establishment in forming Republicans for Obama last week. Why? The leadership qualities she admires in Obama - temperament, sustained judgment, the ability to play well with others - are missing in McCain. 'He doesn't listen carefully to people and make reasoned judgments,' Hauser told me. 'If John says ‘I'm going with so and so,' you can't count on that the next morning,' she complained, adding, 'That's not the man we want for president.'
McCain has even prompted alarms from the right's own favorite hit man du jour: Jerome Corsi, who Swift-boated John Kerry as co-author of 'Unfit to Command' in 2004 and who is trying to do the same to Obama in his newly minted best seller, 'The Obama Nation.'
Corsi's writings have been repeatedly promoted by Sean Hannity on Fox News; Corsi's publisher, Mary Matalin, has praised her author's 'scholarship.' If Republican warriors like Hannity and Matalin think so highly of Corsi's research into Obama, then perhaps we should take seriously Corsi's scholarship about McCain. In recent articles at worldnetdaily.com, Corsi has claimed (among other charges) that the McCain campaign received 'strong' financial support from a 'group tied to Al Qaeda' and that 'McCain's personal fortune traces back to organized crime in Arizona.'
As everyone says, polls are meaningless in the summers of election years. Especially this year, when there's one candidate whose real story has yet to be fully told.

YOU are Invited...to the Midsummer's Night Dream Salon Spectacle

Has America become Fascist?

by Sherwood Ross
Global Research, August 1, 2008
If it hasn’t gone the way of Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany, it sure is teetering on the brink. America is a nation in deepening crisis, a nation whose leaders repeatedly plunge their citizens into, and make them pay for, serial wars abroad, while stealing their liberties at home. USA has become a country that trashes its citizens (New Orleans), tortures its enemies (Abu Ghraib), threatens other nations with nuclear fire (Iran), flouts international treaties (UN Charter re Iraq), and spies on (FISA), and intimidates, its critics (No Fly). Americans that can clearly see the totalitarian machinations of Vladimir Putin in Russia and Hu Jintao in China are blind to the fascism threatening to envelop them as well.
Webster’s defines fascism as “a totalitarian governmental system led by a dictator and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism, militarism, and often racism.” A comparison of 20th century fascist and communist regimes with President Bush’s USA indicates the machinery for a full-blown totalitarian takeover is now in place, even if no coup has occurred. As Naomi Wolf writes in “The End of America” (Chelsea Green) the 2007 Defense Authorization Bill’s Section 333 allows the president “to declare martial law and take charge of the National Guard troops without the permission of a governor when ‘public order’ has been lost…” and to “send the guard into our streets during a public health emergency, terrorist attack or ‘other condition.’”
The enabling crowbar was the Military Commissions Act of 2006. It gives the president authority to set up his own system for bringing alien combatants to trial while denying them protection of the Geneva Conventions. “The president and his lawyers now claim the authority to designate any American citizen he chooses as being an ‘enemy combatant,’” Wolf writes of power usurpation that characterized the post-World War One epoch in Europe and Asia.
Thus, Congress has empowered Bush just as Germany’s Reichstag empowered Hitler, Wolf writes, recalling Hitler’s boast, “Democracy will be overthrown with the tools of democracy.” Hitler’s Interior Minister issued Clause 2 that gave police the power to hold people in custody indefinitely and without a court order, powers the U.S. Congress today has conferred upon “The Decider” in the White House. Mussolini’s used the less grandiose “Il Duce” or “The Leader.”
According to Michael Ratner, director of the Center For Constitutional Rights, New York, “the president can…designate people enemy combatants and detain them for whatever reason he wants…there are no charges and prisoners have no lawyers, no family visits, no court reviews, no rights to anything, and no right to release until the mythical end to the ‘war on terror.’”
Wolf writes that dictators justify their usurpation of domestic liberties by raising the alarm of “terrorist” threats. Stalin, for example, used this very term in 1934 when he warned his public of a world-wide conspiracy by capitalists to overthrow the Soviet state. If there have been no mass arrests of native-born Americans it is only because the president has not chosen to exercise this authority. If you think it can’t happen to you, recall that in September of 2003 the Army arrested 36-year-old American-born Muslim chaplain James Yee, a West Point graduate, allegedly for “espionage and possibly treason”---but more likely for calling for better conditions for Gitmo inmates. Wolf wrote:
“He was blindfolded; his ears were blocked; he was manacled and then put into solitary confinement for 76 days; forbidden mail, television, or anything to read except the Koran. His family was not allowed to visit him. …His lawyers were told he would face execution. (But)Within six months, the U.S. government had dropped all criminal charges against Yee.” Yes, just as it has dropped charges against hundreds of Guantanamo prisoners earlier, men labeled by former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld as “the worst of the worst” but against the overwhelming majority of whom the Bush regime apparently had no case whatever!
The treatment Yee got is typical of those who run afoul of the Bush regime: torture first, trial after…if there is a trial. And since his release, Yee has been denied his free speech right to discuss his ordeal---gagged by the Pentagon. Perhaps most incredible, even if a Guantanamo prisoner should be found innocent, the Pentagon says he might not be released anyway. This echoes Stalin’s practice of re-arresting Gulag prisoners after they had done their time. At one point, Stalin had eight million souls behind bars, even exceeding President Bush, currently the world’s Incarcerator-In-Chief.
Author Wolf says another danger flag is the creation of paramilitary groups, “aggressive men who have no clear, accountable relationship to the government or the party seeking power…” Mussolini had the blackshirts; Hitler the brownshirts; but whatever their dress, they were thugs. Wolf says that Moycock, N.C.-based Blackwater Worldwide stands ready “to deploy its unaccountable private army (35,000 men) in the U.S.---in the aftermath of natural disasters, and also in cases of ‘national emergency.’” With at least a half billion dollars in government contracts, “Blackwater is the world’s largest private security force, works closely with Halliburton, and is available for action outside the scrutiny of Congress,” Wolf writes. The outfit raked in $73 million for patrolling the streets of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. And Blackwater subcontractor Red Tactica, recruits former Chilean commandos,” men described by one Chilean sociologist that are “valued for their expertise in kidnapping, torturing and killing defenseless civilians,” Wolf wrote.
Besides creating such “security” forces, dictators create secret prisons, as Bush has done, ranging from prison ships in the Indian Ocean to dungeons in Poland, where they can hide them from Red Cross scrutiny, as the CIA has done. “We should worry about the men held at Guantanamo because history shows that stripping prisoners of their rights is intoxicating not only to leaders but to functionaries at every level of society,” Wolf writes. “Gitmo” is also an interrogation camp, an operation “that is completely and flatly illegal” and outlawed by the Geneva Conventions in 1949, she points out. Stalin also employed torture and in 1937 actually legalized its use in Soviet prisons. When he received his infamous “albums” with the names of those to be executed and imprisoned, next to some names he often wrote: “Beat! Beat! Beat!” And only months after taking power, Hitler “established a network of illegitimate prisons where torture took place” and where guards could murder inmates with “no chance of being punished,” Wolf said. And like Stalin, The Decider has signaled his henchmen beatings are now the American Way.
Dictators hold power by instilling fear in their citizens. Since 2000, Wolf writes there has been “a sharp increase in U.S. citizen groups that are being harassed and infiltrated by police and federal agents, often in illegal ways.” She pointed to a 2006 ACLU report that California police had infiltrated antiwar protests, political rallies, and other constitutionally protected gatherings and were secretly investigating them, even though the California state constitution forbids this. And prior to the 2004 Republican convention in New York, police department detectives infiltrated groups planning peaceful demonstrations. At the Federal level, Bush’s apparatchiks are compiling dossiers on law-abiding citizens. The Defense Department’s Talon program has created a database about peaceful antiwar and other groups and activists. As Jen Nessel of the Center for Constitutional Rights says, “We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model---you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we’re going to hold you.”
Bush regime actions’ today recall how the Gestapo, NKVD, Stasi (East German secret police) and Red China’s Politburo “all requisitioned private data such as medical, banking, and library records,” Wolf writes, because access to such private data “breaks down citizens’ sense of being able to act freely against those in power.” And although the Department of Homeland Security’s TIPS scheme to get letter carriers and meter readers, etc., to report suspicious activities was met with derision and never funded, the ACLU noted it was merely absorbed in the Pentagon’s “black budget.”
Privacy in America today as guaranteed by the Constitution is fast becoming a memory. The New York Times reported the government in 2005 was monitoring your e-mail and telephone talk without legal warrants and the following year the newspaper disclosed U.S. treasury officials, with CIA help, “were reviewing millions of private bank transactions without individual court-ordered warrants or subpoenas,” Wolf pointed out.
One method of intimidation is to limit a citizen’s right to travel freely. The Bush regime has created “watch”(75,000 names) and “no fly”(45,000 names) lists that restrict individuals’ air travel--and those searched and/or stopped from flying can complain all they like because it won’t do them any good. Robert Johnson, an American citizen, Wolf reports, described the humiliation factor of being strip searched when he attempted to board an airplane: “I had to take off my pants. I had to take off my sneakers, then I had to take off my socks. I was treated like a criminal.” This has now become a commonplace ordeal for thousands of Americans. Even at the height of World War Two, such invasions of personal rights would have been unthinkable.
Going back to Webster’s definition of fascism, USA today is the world’s runaway leader in “militarism.” Forty-three percent of all U.S. tax dollars in 2007 went to feed the war machine, as the Pentagon believes security depends on operating more than 700 military bases in 130 countries overseas in addition to 1,000 at home. Bush has escalated its budget so that USA now spends nearly as much on arms as all the rest of the world combined. Uncle Sam is also the No. 1 private arms peddler to the world. By contrast, Iran, portrayed by the White House as a menace to the Middle East, has an annual military budget that is 1/100th of the Pentagon’s outlay.
Perhaps it would be a good exercise for Americans to read how Hitler emphasized nationalism and militarism. As he wrote in “Mein Kampf”: “Instead of everlasting struggle the world preaches cowardly pacifism, and everlasting peace…There is only one right in this world and this right is one’s own strength.” As for “reconciliation, understanding, world peace, the League of Nations, and international solidarity---we destroy these ideas.” Hitler called for delivering Germans “from the hopeless confusion of international convictions” and educating them “consciously and systematically to fanatical nationalism.” Armed with such views the fascist state thinks nothing of starting an aggressive war based on lies. In 1939, Hitler claimed he was attacked by Poland, igniting World War Two. Bush claimed that Iraq had nuclear and biological weapons to destroy America when, in fact, it was the United States that possessed those very weapons and it was Iraq that had none.
Bush nonetheless started a seemingly endless war that has by some estimates to date killed more than 1 million Iraqis, wounded perhaps 2 million more, forced a like number from their homes, ravished their country and its economy, touched off a civil war, forced 1 million Iraqis into foreign exile, and killed and wounded 35,000 American troops. Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan called the Iraq war “illegal” but Bush, like Hitler, cares nothing for international treaties, even if those the U.S. has signed under our Constitution are the supreme law of the land. He has made a mockery to the anti-nuclear treaty, causing former President Carter to charge his own country has become the leader in nuclear proliferation. What’s more, Bush has spent about $50 billion on germ warfare “defense” with no known significant foreign threat to USA.
Americans may think that Webster’s view that fascism is often accompanied by racism doesn’t fit them. Indeed, USA’s strides to eliminate racism based on color in the last century are a societal marvel. But racism against African Americans has largely been replaced with the foolhardy notion that Americans are better than everybody else in the world and have the authority to set right any ruler they believe is in error. This view of their own superiority echoes Hitler’s “master race” view of the German people or the Tokyo militarists’ view in 1940 that a superior Japan was destined to rule “the eight corners of the world.” In this sense, America is very “racist” indeed and the “aggressive nationalism” highlighted by Webster’s is apparent in the rhetoric of its public officials and the conduct of its foreign affairs.
Yet another characteristic of the fascist state is its leader’s use of arbitrary power. Note how Bush evades the will of Congress by tacking on “signing statements” to laws he doesn’t like, thus refusing to enforce them, putting himself above the will of Congress and the American people. Note how his aides refuse to respond to Congressional subpoenas to testify. Yet another example is how the Justice Department’s own internal investigators found Bush’s appointees filled nonpolitical posts with party hacks and then lied about what they had done. “Civil Service Laws Were Breached in Filling Nonpolitical Jobs” said a New York Times reported July 29th. It should be remembered Hitler followed a like policy when he purged Jews from their government posts. When tyrants rule, merit is ever subservient to loyalty.
Of course, Bush has not flung thousands of Americans into prison to torture and murder them as Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin did, but he has the power to do so, making the latter half of 2008 a time of danger for Americans. Wolf writes, “At a point in both Mussolini’s and Hitler’s takeovers, citizens witnessed a stunning series of quickly escalating pronunciamentos or faits accomplis. After each leader made his bids for power beyond what the Italian parliament and the German Reichstag allowed him, each abruptly started to claim all kinds of new rights that were extra-parliamentary; the right unilaterally to go to war, to annex territory, to veto existing laws, or to overrule the judiciary,” etc.
To repeat the question, “Is America fascist?” the answer is that the machinery is in place for a totalitarian takeover at the direction of a tyrant. While it is true that the U.S. is not a one-party state (some will dispute this owing to the many similarities of the two major parties) like fascist Italy and Germany, and it does have free elections, for the first time in its history in 2000 and 2004 an ominous cloud of doubt has hung over the authenticity of the popular vote and a vast segment of the voting public today does not trust the election machinery to record their vote as they intend. There are no mass arrests and executions in the thousands and millions that typified the regimes of Hitler and Stalin (Stalin had 681,000 people executed in 1937-8 “Great Terror” alone); free speech still exists (under Stalin, a person could be imprisoned for making a Stalin joke); and the government has not put its leaden hand on business as Putin has done although crony capitalism in the selection of defense contractors is rampant. These vital distinctions set America apart from the totalitarian society. Yet, with each passing day in its “War on Terror” the Bush regime tightens its hold on the machinery to establish totalitarian rule here.
Americans need to keep in mind that worse than anything President Bush has inflicted upon its own citizenry is what its wars of aggression have inflicted on innocent humanity abroad. A million dead Iraqis can’t give a damn by what terminology you describe the United States. If the American people allow their government to make criminal wars to deprive innocent foreigners of their lives and liberties they do not deserve to enjoy either at home.
Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based writer who has worked as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News, a columnist for wire services, a news director for a large civil rights organization, and as a publicist for colleges, labor unions and entrepreneurial start-ups. Reach him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com Phone: 305-205-8281. The writer is indebted to Naomi Wolf for her book, “The End of America.” Ms. Wolf is cofounder of The Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership, New York, an organization that teaches young women how to assume leadership roles.)
Sherwood Ross is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

The TRUE State of the US Economy shows 13.7% Unemployment

When Henry Paulson agreed to leave his job as chairman of the powerful Wall Street investment bank, Goldman Sachs to go to Washington as Treasury Secretary in 2006 he demanded extraordinary powers as de facto economic czar. He got it. Paulson is also head of the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets -- the secretary of the treasury and the chairmen of the Federal Reserve Board, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The Working Group is the financial world's equivalent of the Pentagon war room. Paulson, not Fed chairman Bernanke, is the person running the Administration’s crisis management. And his recent actions indicate he has lost control as the snowballing problems from the semi-government mortgage companies Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to the collapse of the multi-trillion dollar market in Asset Backed Securities (ABS) to the real economy are compounding into the worst crisis since the 1930’s Great Depression.

‘The US banking system is sound.’In an eerie echo of President Herbert Hoover in 1930, during a Presidential campaign against Roosevelt, following the stock market crash and collapse of numerous smaller banks, Paulson recently appeared on national TV to declare "our banking system is a safe and sound one." He added that the list of "troubled" banks "is a very manageable situation." In fact what he did not say was that the US bank deposit insurance fund, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) has a list of problem banks that numbers 90. Not included on that list are banks such as Citigroup, until recently the largest bank in the world.
The statement is hardly reassuring. The California savings bank, IndyMac Bank which was declared insolvent a month ago was not on the FDIC list a week before it collapsed. The reality is the crisis created by "securitizing" millions of home mortgages into new financial instruments and selling the packages to pension funds and investors is unfolding like a snowball rolling down the Swiss Alps.
Indication of the lack of control is the statement just weeks ago by Paulson that "financial institutions must be allowed to fail." That was two weeks before Paulson went to Congress to ask for "Congressional authority to buy unlimited stakes in and lend to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac." As I noted in my recent piece, Financial Tsunami: The Next Big Wave is Breaking: Fannie Mae Freddie Mac and US Mortgage Debt , those two private companies insured some $6 trillion worth of home mortgages, half the entire US mortgage debt. Paulson defended the request by calling Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae "the only functioning part of the home loan market."
That comes back to the statement about a "sound banking system". Can we have a sound banking system where the only functioning part is literally insolvent—its debts greater than its assets?
It is well known on Wall Street that some of the largest financial institutions have huge undeclared problems with Asset Backed Securities they have valued far above their worth to make their books look better than they are. The names Citigroup, Lehman Bros., Morgan Stanley, even Paulson’s old firm, Goldman Sachs and of course the inventor of sub-prime mortgage securitization, Merrill Lynch, all hold a huge percentage of what are called Level Three assets, these being assets where no one is willing to buy but the bank declares their worth based on "fantasy." In short the value of those core financial institutions of the US financial system is massively overvalued compared with their value were they forced to sell into the open market today. In a sobering aside, readers should not expect any serious economic remedies for the crisis from a President Barack Obama. Obama’s National Campaign Finance Chairman is Chicago real estate billionaire, Penny Pritzker, who is heir to among other things the Hyatt Hotels. It was Pritzker together with Merrill Lynch ten years ago who first developed the model for securitizing "sub-prime" real estate, the trigger for the current Financial Tsunami crisis. (note: She is also, since 2005, the Chair of TransUnion, the credit reporting agency, and was chair until its collapse of the Chicago based Superior Bank. She has also contributed significantly to the campaigns of Bush 43, Lieberman, Guiliani, Bill Bradley, as well as Gore, Kerry, and Hillary Clinton. And John McCain in 2000. What odd bedfellows money makes. - MS)
Already Citigroup has been forced to go to Dubai hat in hand and ask for billions in cash. After it announced it would not need more capital. Now Citigroup just announced plans to sell some $500 billion more assets to raise funds. Is Citigroup really solvent is the question sober investors are asking. Similarly Merrill Lynch raised $6.6 billion from Kuwait Mizuho, stated it was fine and weeks later had to raise still more capital. Morgan Stanley sold a 10% share of the company to China International Corp.

The real economy is contracting rapidly.
Behind the reassuring statements from Paulson and others that the "worst is over" the reality of the credit collapse since August 2007 is a deepening economic contraction which I have said several times in this space will surpass the Great Depression of the 1929-1938 period. A good friend who is an unemployed homebuilder in a prosperous part of Arizona just sent me the following list of US department retail store closures. It is worth noting that over 70% of the US GDP is consumer spending and that the entire Federal Reserve strategy of Alan Greenspan after the March 2000 collapse of the stock market bubble, was to bring US interest rates to their lowest levels since the 1930’s in order to stimulate consumer spending on credit, i.e. debt, to avoid "recession." Note the scale of the following store closings across America in recent weeks:
Ann Taylor closing 117 stores nationwide.
Eddie Bauer to close more stores after closing 27 stores in the first quarter.
Cache, a women’s retailer is closing 20 to 23 stores this year.
Lane Bryant, Fashion Bug, Catherines closing 150 stores nationwide
Talbots, J. Jill closing stores. Talbots will close all 78 of its kids and men's stores plus another 22 underperforming stores. The 22 stores will be a mix of Talbots women's and J. Jill.
Gap Inc. closing 85 stores
Foot Locker to close 140 stores
Wickes Furniture is going out of business and closing all of its stores. The 37-year-old retailer that targets middle-income customers, filed for bankruptcy protection last month.
Levitz - the furniture retailer, announced it was going out of business and closing all 76 of its stores in December. The retailer dates back to 1910.
Zales, Piercing Pagoda plans to close 82 stores by July 31 followed by closing another 23 underperforming stores.
Disney Store owner has the right to close 98 stores.
Home Depot store closing 15 of them amid a slumping US economy and housing market. The move will affect 1,300 employees. It is the first time the world's largest home improvement store chain has ever closed a flagship store.
CompUSA (CLOSED).
Macy's - 9 stores closed
Movie Gallery – video rental company plans to close 400 of 3,500 Movie Gallery
and Hollywood Video stores in addition to the 520 locations the video rental
chain closed last fall as part of bankruptcy.
Pacific Sunwear - 153 Demo stores closing
Pep Boys - 33 stores of auto parts supplier closing
Sprint Nextel - 125 retail locations to close with 4,000 employees following 5,000 layoffs last year.
J. C. Penney, Lowe's and Office Depot are all scaling back
Ethan Allen Interiors: plans to close 12 of 300 stores to cut costs.
Wilsons the Leather Experts – closing 158 stores
Bombay Company: to close all 384 U.S.-based Bombay Company stores.
KB Toys closing 356 stores around the United States as part of its bankruptcy reorganization.
Dillard's Inc. will close another six stores this year.
For anyone familiar with American shopping malls and retailing, this represents a staggering part of the daily economic life of the nation, from furniture stores to clothing to video rentals to leather. The process has only begun and neither major party Presidential candidate has dared to mention this on the ground economic reality, because they evidently have no solutions to offer that would not jeopardize their campaign finances. Obama is tied to not only Pritzker but also to Omaha billionaire, Warren Buffett and George Soros. McCain depends on the traditional money contributions of the Republican Party which demand permanent tax reform for highest income earners and a pro-bank laissez faire treatment of millions of homeowners facing home foreclosure and asset seizure by banks.
Banks across the country have severely cut back on loans, fearful of bad debts. That has aggravated the consumer collapse documented above. Hundreds of thousands of real estate brokers, small and large bankers, furniture workers and salespeople, and construction workers are unable to find work. Jobs are being cut wholesale and those working are often on reduced hours. Car sales in June plunged by 28% for Ford, 18% for General Motors and even 21% for Toyota which will mean more layoffs in coming weeks. This will be the next wave of unemployment.
The economic reality is not reflected in official US Commerce Department or Labor Department statistics. There the data is constantly being "revised" to hide the grim reality in an election year.
My good friend, economist John Williams of California, has meticulously tracked such "data revisions" for more than 25 years and found the manipulation of reality so alarming that he founded an independent subscriber service titled "Shadow Government Statistics" (http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=001HSrUDSXVr3VVGWoRuFs5TgRle-1huZusQDyFKh1XBzIX8WZNRB-D1yRUR1r78KUxhbiMsSoBIGB_hJj1rpBU27uR17L99GgjQhJFqpEsMej9jDGaZT9IgQ== ), where he makes best estimate calculations of the reality not the official mythology.
By Williams’ calculations the US economy first entered recession, defined as two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth, at the end of 2006. Ever since, the recession has deepened, dramatically so in the past 12 months. Little known is the fact that the Labor Department also publishes six different unemployment statistics from U1, U2 through to U6 being the most comprehensive. The reported "official unemployment" is the very narrowly defined U3 which stands at 5.5%. However, as Williams notes, U6 is the real measure and that officially shows 9.7% unemployed. His calculations put the figure at 13.7% actually unemployed and seeking work.
A personal account
The unemployed homebuilder from Arizona I mentioned above recently sent me the following personal note on the situation: "Here is how it looks to people like me: Real estate dealings fuelled the economy in most areas of the country for the past decade or more. We’ve been in a market downturn for three years. We have seen the cost of doing business increase for builders, along with a big drop in buyers as everyone tightens their belts, or can’t sell existing homes. Many employers have gone under ending thousands of jobs. If they have a job people are worried about losing it. Driving long distances to work is not possible with gasoline costs double that of 2006. There has been a 40% drop in most peoples’ home equity worth. Many people are "underwater" on their homes, meaning they owe more than the market price is worth today. So many under-employed don’t show up in government unemployed statistics. Self employed like me never get counted."
The Arizona homebuilder continued, "Today nobody is building. Unsold home inventories are triple that of 2003. Banks no longer give easy credit for home buyers. Many realtors I know have gone two years without selling a home. Empty storefronts are becoming common. In many areas unemployment among construction trades people is 50% or more. Tens of thousands of illegal Mexicans who did most of the manual labor have returned to Mexico to find work. What now? Well, I do handyman projects of all sorts, big or small and make about 70-90% of what it takes to survive with a family of a wife and three young children. My savings make up the rest. That can’t go on for too much longer. We went from affluent and comfortable to nervous and broke with diminished opportunities in just three years. We used to be the middle class."

To be continued. F. William Engdahl is author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (Pluto Press) and Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation (http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=001HSrUDSXVr3Wyn6DAIp9OpkzLhAITj4uuY0-r0EpmekY9cCZuAAfbRbgXEtt7k0HXs6ZHym_1g0f6450042lr-AhW8vEGQ9Pm9lCeXnxMLTa_uL6CC-Hd0_AhRK7Jx3bs). He is at work on a new book, from which this has been adapted, Power of Money: The Rise and Decline of the American Century. He may be reached through his website, http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=001HSrUDSXVr3UgLNhQvy0ybISPRix9DnV0F9figjBmZjvUYycvVNrMeKM8LiCrp3X1gcGL1sioD5VOETp40NGrORtKKu7K_Aa829E7xKDB5Yo6yJCUqrq6IDuOzB18nzCL9ZGZFshLOwo=.

How Should the Next President Deal with the Bush White House's Crimes?

Amy Goodman is the host of the nationally syndicated radio news program, Democracy Now!

Amy Goodman:The dominant role of corporations is one of a number of issues fueling skepticism around the 2008 campaign. Criticism has also mounted recently over presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama's perceived shift to the right.
In an apparent reversal, Obama backed a new bill authorizing the Bush administration's domestic spy program and granting immunity for the telecom companies that took part. He also supported a Supreme Court decision to overturn a D.C. handgun ban. On foreign policy, Obama said he'd be open to revise his pledge to withdraw US troops from Iraq and also called for a major increase to the size of the US occupation of Afghanistan. And like all top Democratic leaders, Obama has refused to support calls for the prosecution of President Bush and top White House officials for war crimes and other abuses of power.
The criticism of Obama's stances has come as part of a larger debate over whether efforts to hold the Bush administration accountable would jeopardize an ostensibly higher goal of ensuring a Democratic win this November.

I'm joined right now, in addition to Glenn Greenwald (r.), who blogs at Salon.com, the legal scholar Cass Sunstein, who's an informal adviser to Barack Obama, professor at Harvard University and the University of Chicago Law School. He is co-author of the book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness and is cited as one of the most-cited legal scholars in the country.
Cass Sunstein, your response to those who talk about -- particularly concerned about Barack Obama, for example, shifting on the FISA bill, saying he would filibuster and now actually voting for the bill that granting retroactive immunity to the telecoms.
Sunstein: Yes, I think it's -- this is widely misunderstood. What the bill isn't is basically a bill that -- whose fundamental purpose is to give immunity. It's a bill that creates a range of new safeguards to protect privacy, to ensure judicial supervision, to give a role for the inspector general. So it actually gives privacy and civil liberties a big boost over the previous arrangement.
It also does contain an immunity provision, which Senator Obama opposed. He voted for the substitute bill that didn't have that. But he thought that this was a compromise which had safeguards for going forward, which made it worth supporting on balance, compared to the alternative, which was the status quo. So there's been no fundamental switch for him. He's basically concerned with protecting privacy. And this is not his favorite bill, but it's a lot better than what the Bush administration had before, which was close to free reign.
Goodman: Glenn Greenwald, you've written a lot about this, as well.
Greenwald: Well, you know, it's one thing to defend Senator Obama and to support his candidacy, as I do. It's another thing to just make factually false claims in order to justify or rationalize anything that he does.
The idea that this wasn't a reversal is just insultingly false. Back in December, Senator Obama was asked, "What is your position on Senator Dodd's pledge to filibuster a bill that contains retroactive immunity?" And at first, Senator Obama issued an equivocal statement, and there were demands that he issue a clearer statement. His campaign spokesman said -- and I quote -- "Senator Obama will support a filibuster of any bill that contains retroactive immunity" -- "any bill that contains retroactive immunity." The bill before the Senate two weeks ago contained retroactive immunity, by everybody's account, and yet not only did Senator Obama not adhere to his pledge to support a filibuster of that bill, he voted for closure on the bill, which is the opposite of a filibuster. It's what enables a vote to occur. And then he voted for the underlying bill itself. So it's a complete betrayal of the very unequivocal commitment that he made not more than six months ago in response to people who wanted to know his position on this issue in order to decide whether or not to vote for him. That's number one.
Number two, the idea that this bill is an improvement on civil liberties is equally insulting in terms of how false it is. This is a bill demanded by George Bush and Dick Cheney and opposed by civil libertarians across the board. ACLU is suing. The EFF is vigorously opposed. Russ Feingold and Chris Dodd, the civil libertarians in the Senate, are vehemently opposed to it; they say it's an evisceration of the Fourth Amendment. The idea that George Bush and Dick Cheney would demand a bill that's an improvement on civil liberties and judicial oversight is just absurd. This bill vests vast new categories of illegal and/or unconstitutional and warrantless surveillance powers in the President to spy on Americans' communications without warrants. If you want to say that that's necessary for the terrorist threat, one should say that. But to say that it's an improvement on civil liberties is just propaganda.
Goodman: Cass Sunstein?
Sunstein: Well, I appreciate the passion behind that statement. I don't see it that way. And Morton Halperin, who's been one of the most aggressive advocates of privacy protections in the last decades, is an enthusiastic supporter of this bill on exactly the ground that I gave. My reading of it, just as a legal matter, is that it ensures exclusivity of the FISA procedure, which the Bush administration strongly resisted, it creates supervision both on the part of the inspector general and the legal system, which the Bush administration had said did not exist previously. So the view that this is an improvement over the Bush administration status quo, I believe, is widely accepted by those who have studied the bill with care.
I do appreciate the concern about retroactive immunity. Senator Obama did oppose that, voted for the opposing bill. But I don't share the extreme negativity about this compromise that the speaker endorses.
Goodman: Glenn Greenwald?
Greenwald: Well, again, Senator Obama made a promise and then betrayed it. The idea that the bill is an improvement on civil liberties, like I said, is demonstrated by the fact that all civil libertarians, virtually across the board, vigorously oppose it and are suing over it. And I think --
Goodman: Glenn Greenwald, let me move on to another issue, and that is the issue of holding Bush administration officials accountable. This is also an issue, Professor Sunstein, that you addressed this weekend in Austin at the Netroots Nation conference. And on Friday, the House Judiciary Chair John Conyers is going to be holding a hearing around the issue of impeachment, with those for and against impeachment speaking through the day. Your assessment of the whole movement and your thoughts on this, Cass Sunstein?
Sunstein: Well, I speak just for myself and not for Senator Obama on this, but my view is that impeachment is a remedy of last resort, that the consequences of an impeachment process, a serious one now, would be to divide the country in a way that is probably not very helpful. It would result in the presidency of Vice President Cheney, which many people enthusiastic about impeachment probably aren't that excited about. I think it has an understandable motivation, but I don't think it's appropriate at this stage to attempt to impeach two presidents consecutively.
In terms of holding Bush administration officials accountable for illegality, any crime has to be taken quite seriously. We want to make sure there's a process for investigating and opening up past wrongdoing in a way that doesn't even have the appearance of partisan retribution. So I'm sure an Obama administration will be very careful both not to turn a blind eye to illegality in the past and to institute a process that has guarantees of independence, so that there isn't a sense of the kind of retribution we've seen at some points in the last decade or two that's not healthy.
Goodman: I recently spoke to Democratic Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, who's been a leading congressional voice against the Bush spy program. This is some of what he had to say.
Sen. Russ Feingold: The President takes the position that under Article II of the Constitution he can ignore the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. We believe that that's absolutely wrong. I have pointed out that I think it is not only against the law, but I think it's a pretty plain impeachable offense that the President created this program, and yet this immunity provision may have the effect not only of giving immunity to the telephone companies, but it may also allow the administration to block legal accountability for this crime, which I believe it is.
Goodman: Cass Sunstein?
Cass Sunstein: Well, there has been a big debate among law professors and within the Supreme Court about the President's adherent authority to wiretap people. And while I agree with Senator Feingold that the President's position is wrong and the Supreme Court has recently, indirectly at least, given a very strong signal that the Supreme Court itself has rejected the Bush position, the idea that it's an impeachable offense to adopt an incorrect interpretation of the President's power, that, I think, is too far-reaching. There are people in the Clinton administration who share Bush's view with respect to foreign surveillance. There are past attorney generals who suggested that the Bush administration position is right. So, I do think the Bush administration is wrong -- let's be very clear on that -- but the notion that it's an impeachable offense seems to me to distort the notion of what an impeachable offense is. That's high crimes and misdemeanors. And an incorrect, even a badly incorrect, interpretation of the law is not impeachable.
Goodman: Glenn Greenwald?
Glenn Greenwald: You know, I think this mentality that we're hearing is really one of the principal reasons why our government has become so lawless and so distorted over the past thirty years. You know, if you go into any courtroom where there is a criminal on trial for any kind of a crime, they'll have lawyers there who stand up and offer all sorts of legal and factual justifications or defenses for what they did. You know, going back all the way to the pardon of Nixon, you know, you have members of the political elite and law professors standing up and saying, "Oh, there's good faith reasons not to impeach or to criminally prosecute." And then you go to the Iran-Contra scandal, where the members of the Beltway class stood up and said the same things Professor Sunstein is saying: we need to look to the future, it's important that we not criminalize policy debates. You know, you look at Lewis Libby being spared from prison.
And now you have an administration that -- we have a law in this country that says it is a felony offense, punishable by up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine, to spy on Americans without the warrants required by law. We have a president who got caught doing that, who admits that he did that. And yet, you have people saying, "Well, there may be legal excuses as to why he did that." Or you have a president who admits ordering, in the White House, planning with his top aides, interrogation policies that the International Red Cross says are categorically torture, which are also felony offenses in the United States. And you have people saying, "Well, we can't criminalize policy disputes."
And what this has really done is it's created a two-tiered system of government, where government leaders know that they are free to break our laws, and they'll have members of the pundit class and the political class and law professors standing up and saying, "Well, these are important intellectual issues that we need to grapple with, and it's really not fair to put them inside of a courtroom or talk about prison." And so, we've incentivized lawlessness in this country. I mean, the laws are clear that it's criminal to do these things. The President has done them, and he -- there's no reason to treat him differently than any other citizen who breaks our laws.
Goodman: You've also, Glenn Greenwald, written about the President possibly granting preemptive pardons to officials involved in controversial counterterrorism programs.
Greenwald: Yeah, I think that's right. And you already see members of the right -- the New York Times reported about a week ago that certain right-wing legal analysts were already demanding that he issue a full-scale pardon of all members -- of all participants in these illegal detention and surveillance programs. And that's one of the interesting parts about what Senator Obama just did in supporting telecom amnesty, is that those lawsuits that exist, I mean, that were proceeding along, were really our only real avenue for finding out what the government did.
I think one critical thing here is that, you know, last year, James Comey, who was the number two person at the Justice Department, testified before Congress that they discovered that certain surveillance activities that the administration was engaged in, not what we end up knowing about, but other activities, were so patently illegal that the entire top level of the Justice Department had threatened to resign en masse unless it stopped immediately. And President Bush ordered that it continue for another forty-five days, even once he was told that, and it went on for two-and-a-half years.
We don't know what that is. Those lawsuits are really the only way that we would have found out and that there would have been a legal accountability, but because of telecom immunity, those lawsuits are now going to terminate, those crimes are likely to be covered up, and President Bush can simply issue pardons that would prevent any future administrations, Senator Obama's or anyone else's, from investigating it and vindicating the rule of law in this country. And that's what made it such a corrupt measure.
Goodman: Professor Sunstein, your response to Glenn Greenwald on the whole accountability issue? Also, one of the things you['ve] raised [is that] going after the Bush administration could start a cycle of criminalizing public service.
Sunstein: Right. We're talking about some pretty serious issues here, and I think it's good to distinguish among various ones. So, are we in favor of immunizing people who worked in the White House in the last eight years from accountability for criminal acts? I don't think anyone should be in favor of that. We're in agreement on the need to hold people accountable for criminal wrongdoing.
Then there's a second question, which is the impeachment question, which is analytically very different.
Then there's a third issue, which involves pardons. For the President to issue a preemptive pardon of all illegality on the part of those involved in his administration would be intolerable, and the political retribution for that should be extreme. I expect the President won't do that.
With respect to holding people accountable, the first things that's needed is sunlight. Justice Brandeis (photo, r.), the Supreme Court justice, said sunlight is the best of disinfectants. So I agree very much that we want clarity with respect to what's been done. It's important to think, not in a fussy way, but in a way that ensures the kind of fairness our system calls for. It's important to distinguish various processes by which we can produce accountability. I don't believe the courtroom is the exclusive route. Congress is our national lawmaker, and there are processes there that could have a bipartisan quality. There are also commissions that can be created, commissions that can try to figure out what's happened, what's gone wrong and how can we make this better.
When I talk about a fear of criminalizing political disagreement, I don't mean to suggest that we shouldn't criminalize crimes. Crimes are against the law, and if there's been egregious wrongdoing in violation of the law, then it's not right to put a blind eye to that. So I guess I'm saying that emotions play an important role in thinking about what the legal system should be doing. But under our constitutional order, we go back and forth between the emotions and the legal requirements, and that's a way of guaranteeing fairness. And as I say, very important to have a degree of bipartisanship with respect to subsequent investigations.
Goodman: You're cited as the most often cited legal scholar in the country. Yesterday, the military commissions trial began at Guantanamo, first time since World War II. Your take?
Sunstein: Well, I'd be honored but surprised if the military commissions cite some of my academic articles. In terms of military commissions, there's traditional nervousness in our system about holding people criminally to be tried in a not-an-ordinary tribunal, so there's reason for nervousness about that. I think any military commission, the first requirement is to ensure that the fundamental ingredients of American justice are included -- that is, a right to a lawyer, a right to an impartial tribunal, a right to confront contrary evidence. We don't want any convictions that don't fit with all of our fundamentals.
Goodman: We're going to come back to talk about your book Nudge , but I want to give Glenn Greenwald a final comment on this issue.
Greenwald: You know, it's interesting, about the military commissions, yesterday a military judge presiding over the military commission of the individual accused of being Osama bin Laden's driver, Salim Hamdan, ruled that certain evidence was inadmissible, because it was obtained by what he called, quote, "highly coercive conditions" while he was captive in Afghanistan. And so, you know, we don't need to say things like "if there was serious wrongdoing." We know that there was serious wrongdoing and serious illegality on the part of the Bush administration. But Congress, unfortunately, hasn't done its duty to investigate or oversight; what they've done instead is immunize the law-breaking and protect it and retroactively legalize it. And that's why courtrooms, unfortunately, are the only place where real judicial accountability can occur. That's where criminals are tried under a system of rule of law, is in a courtroom. And there's no reason to exempt the political class from that critical principle.

Youssef Chahine, Egypt's cinematic great, dies

It's a wrap on one of the boldest careers in the movies. Youssef Chahine was the leading voice of the Arab cinema for over half a century – and as prolific, versatile and accomplished as many a more famous western auteur – but his abiding worth, inside Egypt and out, has been in his outspoken expression of the conscience of his country. He took on imperialism and fundamentalism alike, celebrated the liberty of body and soul, and offered himself warts and all as an emblem of his nation. Egypt's modern history is etched in his life's work.
Chahine directed his first film, Baba Amin, in 1950, when Egypt was still a British colony. He second, Son of the Nile (1951), was invited to compete in Cannes, and over the following three decades he averaged more than a film a year, ranging from musicals and comedies to neorealist dramas, historical epics, self-portraits and a documentary. Chahine discovered Omar Sharif in a Cairo cafe, and gave him his first acting role in Blazing Sky (1953), as a peasant farm engineer fighting the injustices of a feudal landlord. Jamila, the Algerian (1958) adapted Jacques Vergès' book about the Algerian resistance fighter Djamila Bouhired, shortly after her torture and trial by the French.
Chahine's artistic breakthrough came in another film made the same year. Cairo Station distilled the tumult of General Nasser's new republic into an explosive love triangle between three working denizens of the city's bustling railway hub. Chahine, who had trained as an actor, himself played Qinawi, the lame and simple-minded newspaper boy whose frustrated desire for a flirty lemonade girl is fanned into tragedy; according to the director's own reminiscences in An Egyptian Story (1982), he was set to receive the Best Actor prize from the Berlin Film Festival, but some of the jury members doubted that he was merely acting the part of a cripple. Egyptian audiences weren't ready for the film's lively mix of neorealism, noir, sexuality and musical set-pieces, either, and Cairo Station went largely unseen for 20 years. (British audiences were treated to a re-release in 2002, and the film still looks groundbreaking. Evidently the flame of neorealism was blowing into shores much further afield than just France in 1958.)
Saladin (1963), a project Chahine inherited, proposed the 12th-century sultan's defence of Jerusalem against the Christian Crusaders as an epic allegory of Nasser's pan-Arab nationalism, though the Catholic Chahine and his leftist writers also cast Saladin as a paragon of peace and religious tolerance. Chahine's relationship with the post-colonial authorities soon turned more critical, however. Once Upon a Time the Nile (1968-78), a documentary of the construction of the Aswan Dam, was delayed for four years by its Egyptian and Soviet sponsors after Chahine steered away from their charter of national myth-making towards a portrait of the dam's impact on individual lives. The Choice (1970) was a murder mystery that suggested Egypt's growing intellectual schisms in the wake of the calamitous Six Day War – a defeat for which The Sparrow (1973) laid the blame squarely on corruption in the political establishment. Sadat's government duly banned the film for two years.

Chahine's ability to link the personal and political took another step forward with his autobiographical Alexandria quartet, named after the cosmopolitan city of his birth. Alexandria… Why? (1978) recounted the filmmaking dreams of his teenage alter ego, Yehia, amidst the ambivalently received German occupation of Cairo in 1942: while locals are kidnapping British soldiers, or promising them that "Hitler will turn you into bellydancers", Yehia is dreaming of directing MGM musicals, and various illicit passions flare up between a Jew and a Muslim communist, Yehia's uncle and a young British soldier. It too was widely banned.
After a stress-induced sabbatical and open-heart surgery, Chahine dramatised the operation as a trial of Yehia's life in An Egyptian Story (1982), his most Fellini-esque film: accused by his conscience of betraying his youthful idealism, he reviews relationships and career milestones against the backdrop of Egypt's post-war metamorphoses. 1990's Alexandria Again and Forever (1990) was a musical fantasy in which the entire Egyptian film industry goes on hunger strike for democracy; the Yehia character's fantasies within the film about a young protege actor were Chahine's most forthright illustration of his own bisexuality.

Chahine continued to resist borders wherever the world raised them. His story of the biblical Joseph, The Emigrant (1994), was censored in Egypt for idolatry – representing a prophet. Chahine responded with the prescient Destiny (1997), a sensualist celebration of the Spanish-Arabian scholar Avarroes (or Ibn Rushd), and his struggles against power-mongering politicians and murderous fundamentalists in 12th-century Moorish Andalusia. It ends with a massive book-burning, and the defiant motto "Ideas have wings. No-one can stop their flight."
Alexandria ... New York (2004) brought Chahine's alter ego Yehia back to America, half a century after his first visit as a wide-eyed acting student. He finds a lost son, but the promise of the American Dream, and the charm of classical Hollywood, seem sorely mislaid.

His last movie, Chaos, returned to scrutinising contemporary Cairo. A burlesque about police brutality and bad education, it excoriates Egypt's autocracy for its choke-hold on civil society, and the country's sybaritic elite for abandoning the cause of democracy. The film was released in late 2007 – shooting was completed by Khaled Youssef, Chahine's recent co-writer, when Chahine fell ill – and it plainly anticipates this year's food riots. Islamic fundamentalists also feature in Chaos, but for Chahine the equation is simple: injustice is the incubator of violence.
Chahine's films have been released piecemeal on DVD in France and the US, but (with the exception of his contribution to the portmanteau movie 11'09"01 – September 11) never in Britain. They still await their wings.
This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Monday July 28 2008.

Opus Opines on Oil - Ohh But He is So Fowl

Don't ya just LUV Opus?!
Bring it on....

The unbearable whiteness of being, or, Bobos in Paradise revisted

The author of "Stuff White People Like" skewers the sacred cows of lefty Caucasian culture, from the Prius to David Sedaris.

By Katharine Mieszkowski
Jul. 05, 2008
Stuff White People Like is a satirical blog about a particular segment of Caucasian culture. It's like an extended "you might be a redneck if" joke recast for a more upscale set. It gently mocks the habits and pretensions of urbane, educated, left-leaning whites, skewering their passion for Barack Obama and public transportation (as long as it's not a bus), their idle threats to move to Canada, and joy in playing children's games as adults. Kickball, anyone? (A list of the white stuff is here.)
It's likely I don't have to tell you about the Stuff White People Like site, because the odds are someone -- someone white -- has already forwarded it to you. Christian Lander, 29, who grew up in Toronto and now lives in Culver City, Calif., created the site to amuse his friends when he was working as the associate manager of corporate communications for an Internet agency last January. He doesn't do that job anymore, because 32 million hits and a book deal later -- "Stuff White People Like: The Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions" was published July 1 -- Lander's become a professional mocker of whitey and himself.
Lander is firmly in the demographic he's ribbing. By his own definition, he screams white. A grad school dropout, he studied film and literature in a master's program at the University of Arizona before bailing on a Ph.D. program at Indiana University. In his author's photo, Lander illustrates a number of things he spoofs in the book: He wears a beard, chunky glasses, shorts, a performance athletic vest, New Balance shoes and an iPod, while riding a bike and carrying a reusable water bottle, a Macintosh laptop, organic vegetables and a copy of the New Yorker.
Not surprisingly, Lander's site has been embraced by the white culture that he lampoons, complete with an appearance on public radio's "Talk of the Nation." The site's success supports Lander's theory that, as he writes in his book, self-deprecating humor is all a part of whiteness. Lander's site has also inspired copycat sites, such as Stuff Asian People Like, as well as hate mail accusing him of racist stereotyping and critiques that he's pretending to poke fun at white people while actually giving them new ways to feel superior.
Salon spoke with Lander by phone from his home office, where his fixed-gear bicycle hangs on the wall, near the shelves of books, proudly displayed.
What led you to launch your site Stuff White People Like?
My friend Myles Valentin and I were both at work, and we were just having an IM [instant messenger] conversation. We were talking about "The Wire." We're both huge fans of the TV show "The Wire." And then my friend Myles, who is Filipino, said he didn't trust any white people who don't watch "The Wire."
From there we ended up talking about what are white people doing instead of watching "The Wire"? And we threw back a few responses, like doing yoga, getting divorced, going to therapy. And I thought it was funny.
So I went to Word Press, and I just started writing, never expecting it to be popular, just expecting Myles to read it, and maybe a few more friends back home. And that was it. It wasn't any more of a grand scheme than that.
Obviously you're not talking about all white people. Which white people are you talking about?
I think it doesn't take long reading the site to figure out which white people I'm talking about. It's mostly left-wing, upper-middle-class.
In the book, you also occasionally mention "the wrong kind" of white people. Who are the wrong kind of white people?
There are a lot of the wrong kind of white people. You have, obviously, poor, right-wing white people, and rich, right-wing white people.
Yet a lot of the stuff you write that white people like, obviously many other people like, too.
When you create a site called Stuff White People Like, it's easy for people to make an assumption that it's actually about stuff only white people like. It's not meant to be exclusionary but rather a focus on the things that, well, white people like.
Let's talk about some of them. What is the significance of bottles of water?
It's all about ranking. It's essentially a contest. It used to be that bottled water was a status symbol. You drink Evian, or you drink Fiji, or what is the most expensive water.
But advanced-level white people, the higher-ranking white people, realized that they were creating a lot of waste, and so they switched over to the Nalgene bottle. That also reminded them of going camping. So then they could take a stance of superiority over the people who were drinking bottled water. And then, that whole story came out about Nalgenes leaching I don't know what the exact toxin is [Bisphenol A]. So then super-advanced white people went even further and got those metal Sigg bottles, and now you have this really solid hierarchy and ranking of white people of commercial bottled water, Nalgene bottle and either the glass or metal, twist-top bottles.
What's the significance of an eco product, like the Toyota Prius, the carbon offset or the reusable shopping bag?
That again is another way to claim superiority over regular-level, or subpar, white people. You're saving the environment, you're making a difference. It helps remind you and others that your lifestyle is making things better.
Why is it important to hate evil corporations, except for Apple, Ikea and Target?
That's one of the great contradictions of white people. For the most part, all the world's ills are based on large, evil corporations -- government corruption, American expansion through the use of corporate contracts, pollution, globalization, every bad thing that's happened. But if it happens with nice design, it's acceptable.
What happens if you point out these exceptions?
You're going to really annoy white people. They do not need to be reminded. It's like with the Prius. It's not a good idea to remind Prius owners that the car still burns gasoline. That really pisses them off.
You are a graduate school dropout. What is the significance of graduate school?
Graduate school -- it's very important, because you sort of get this impression in the rest of the world that getting advanced degrees helps you get a higher-paying job. But interestingly, within white culture it actually gets you lower-paying jobs.
Why is that?
A Ph.D. in English isn't going to get you a higher-paying job than, say, a Ph.D. in chemistry or law, but it does give you one important thing, which is academic credibility at cocktail parties.
But obviously, there are a lot of white lawyers.
Oh, yeah. Some of the white people, who are not quite advanced enough white people, have sold out.
What does going to law school represent?
It's what you do when you finish with your liberal arts degree, and you start to panic about realizing that the careers available for someone who knows a lot about Proust are very limited, and you realize that you still want money. So you end up going to law school. There are people who enjoy law school, because then you can work for a nonprofit organization, and you can be very helpful.
Why is working for a nonprofit important?
White people have the constant and unabiding need to feel as though they're helping, and because this gives them the ability to hold it over other people.
Who are the whitest celebrities?
Alec Baldwin, Susan Sarandon, Leonardo DiCaprio, Rosie O'Donnell.
Is the whitest TV show "The Wire?"
It's not the whitest TV show. It's just a TV show beloved by white people, because it was really well done, and it got low ratings. These are two very important characteristics for white people to like a TV show. In order to be known as an ultimate white TV show, you have to make sure that you don't last more than five seasons.
But isn't it kind of a contradiction, because isn't bragging about not having a TV also a sign of status?
Yes, because do you know how white people consume "The Wire"? Netflix subscription watched on their MacBook.
What do you think is the whitest TV show ever?
"Twin Peaks" is a contender. "Mr. Show" is definitely on that list. "The Simpsons" is on there, although in recent years it's also declined a little bit.
A very important concept when you're dealing with white people is this idea of "jumping the shark." And "The Simpsons" is one of the best examples of that. You have to make sure that when you talk about "The Simpsons" you know exactly the appropriate moment to say when you stopped liking it.
If you say you stopped liking it too early, you look too snobby. If you say you stopped liking it too late, you kind of look like an idiot. So, the best answer is you say the "Who Shot Mr. Burns?" episodes.
What's the whitest movie ever?
This one is a challenge. "The Royal Tenenbaums" is up there. "Garden State." "Donnie Darko" is on there. "Fight Club."
The problem is that whatever is liked by white people, advanced-level white people have to hate it, because it was popular. The advanced levels have to have some sort of French film in there from Godard. Some people need a Japanese film that hasn't been translated yet. You'll get some white people who are like, "I only watch silent film." It's difficult.
What about the whitest band?
Right now? I have to say Vampire Weekend all the way. They're pushing it to levels unseen.
Let's talk about food.
Food is another important area of competition, and being able to show up other white people. Some white people get their status based on how much they know about food, like expensive ingredients or foreign cuisine. Whereas other white people gain their status based on how many things they've cut out of what they eat, like gluten and sugar and refined things and dairy and meat, trying to reduce as much as possible.
But universally, throughout, shopping at Whole Foods is considered the best way to go.
But what about farmers' markets?
Unless you're in California, where you have year-round farmers' markets, you need consistency throughout the year, and Whole Foods provides that.
Definitely organic, when you're talking about fruits and vegetables?
This isn't even a question.
What meals are important?
Breakfast on the weekend, I guess you'd call it brunch, too, is one of the most important white meals, because it allows white couples to get together. Some people even bring their dogs, if they have outdoor patios. During the week for working white people, the expensive sandwich lunch is essential.
What do you mean by the expensive sandwich?
Anywhere you will find a predominance of white businesses, such as advertising agencies, nonprofit organizations, hedge funds, there will undoubtedly be a store nearby that sells sandwiches that cost between $8 and $12.
You've already mentioned eating outside. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of the outdoors?
It's just where white people want to be. From the time white people are raised, they're taught that being indoors is a bad thing, and that it's always better to be outside. So they're always on this constant quest to be camping or bicycling or eating outside, whatever it takes to get outside. The more time you spend outside the more credibility you have to dump on other people for not going outside.
And even if you're not outside, you might be wearing what you call outdoor performance clothes. Why is that?
White people need to know that if someone calls them up, and says: "You want to go camping?" they're ready at the drop of a hat. Bam, out they go. You could be in the Ikea, just leave the cart in one of the aisles, head up to some campsite.
Can you talk about the deep love of David Sedaris?
It's hard to talk about it. It's like talking about a love of oxygen. It's just there.
Why David Sedaris?
They love him, because he's funny, and he lives in France, and he's gay. He's like everything you could possibly want in the ideal friend. Oh, he also writes for the New Yorker. He hits so many things on the list it's unbelievable.
On the site, I've been getting all these e-mails from people who have gone to his signings, and they said that it's just like this sea of white people and huge lineups usually reserved for rock stars.
You have this quiz in your book to calculate how white you are. So, how white are you?
It's tough for me to say this, because there is the answer based on my quiz, and then the fact that I wrote the book gives me like a bonus score. So, I'm going to say 91 percent.
So, are you like the ultimate, advanced, elite white person, because you are categorizing all the rest of them?
I think, but I know that people are gunning for me, and I don't think that it's going to last much longer.
Do you see yourself as critiquing this white culture, or are you kind of celebrating it?
I think I'm critiquing it, as well. I make fun of myself a lot on the site. That's why I put my photo on there to let people know that I'm making fun of myself. It's been a great chance for me to call out so many of my pretentious leanings.
There is such a strong belief among this type of people that you're right, of being unwilling to listen to anything else, and I think that's one of the things I'm trying to point out. There is a critique in there, but the top priority is to be funny.
But don't you say that even self-deprecating humor is a marker of the white culture?
Yeah. I was trying so hard to sound smart there, and you totally called me out on it.
White people figured out an awesome way to use self-deprecating humor to compliment themselves. Like, when you talk about being "broke," what you're really saying is that the people with money are sellouts.
Haven't you gotten a lot of hate mail about the site?
Yeah. I used to read all the comments on the site, when it was getting like 30,000 hits a day, and I was getting comments every couple of minutes. I was reading them all, because it was fascinating to me, and there are so many funny people out there. But as it got bigger, people left a lot of mean comments about me, about the site, so I stopped reading them entirely, because I was trying to write the book, and I just wanted to stay positive. Reading the comments broke my spirit. I'd just feel so down. But I still read every e-mail that comes in.
Are the angry commenters mad about the idea of the site, or do they feel like you're making fun of them?
A lot of them just hate me for the fact that the site got popular. A lot of people just hate it because they think I'm being racist, but they don't really think it through. The people who write in think that I'm perpetuating hate, and that all stereotypes are evil, and I think that they're kind of missing the point.
The white people who like your site -- are you just giving them another way to feel self-congratulatory?
Pos