Government

I was not particularly distraught when I learned that US Senator Evan Bayh, a Democrat from Indiana, will not be seeking a third term in the upcoming elections. What most pundits call his "bipartisanship" is largely a product of the cynical view of government spending that he shares with most Republicans, whereby the investment of public funds in helpful social programs like Medicare and welfare is frowned upon, but wasteful military spending and large subsidies to private corporations is applauded. During his tenure in the Senate, Bayh has backed some of the Republicans' worst initiatives and has repeatedly blocked or undermined efforts to implement genuinely beneficial initiatives that the public supports, such as a single-payer health plan and many of the useful features of Obama's economic stimulus plan. That said, the exception that Bayh has taken with the Supreme Court's idiotic ruling on 21 January 2010 is, however, a sentiment I share with the Senator, and his recent initiative to introduce some minor reforms to the nightmare that political campaigns have become is a step in the right direction.

President Obama's 4 June 2009 speech in Cairo briefly turned the media's spotlight back to the conflict between the Israeli government and the Palestinian people. In keeping with the traditional role of the commercial press, the reports of CNN, The New York Times, the ever-reactionary FOX News, and others faithfully reiterated the "official" position of the two ruling parties and their array of "experts" (although FOX News did take the time to find a fanatical settler who would venture even farther right than the experts). The mainstream media's historically one-sided coverage of the issues that Obama raised in his speech has consistently failed to offer any critical analysis of the popular assumptions regarding the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people. Consequently, most people in the United States who rely on the media for their information have an extremely distorted perception of what's actually happening in the Occupied Territories, and why Israel has been such a significant source of tension in the Middle East. This article attempts to eliminate some of this ignorance by filling in a few of the contextual lacunae left by the corporate media's irresponsible journalism.

Why do different organizations and individuals speak of "mixed messages" coming from Obama's "first 100 days" in office? Obama's time in office thus far has played out almost exactly as I expected. He made perfunctory gestures toward fulfilling campaign promises, introduced initiatives to pacify the working and middle classes, and attempted to increase government transparency without upsetting the establishment. The Right also behaved almost exactly as expected by opposing almost every initiative with a flurry of rhetoric and pro-corporate propaganda. The only two surprises to me were that the Right didn't learn enough from their humiliating defeat to cut down their open and belligerent hostility toward the people and that Time Warner Cable wasn't able to move forward with its plans to further restrict Internet access.

The United States government is frequently criticized for abusing its veto power in the United Nations Security Council to block resolutions that call on Israel to deescalate military violence. A Security Council resolution is vetoed when any one of the five permanent member states casts a negative vote. In addition to the United States, the five permanent member states are the United Kingdom, France, China, and the Russian Federation. The Security Council also has ten rotating member states, but only a vote of "nay" from a permanent member state can veto a resolution. In addition to vetoing a resolution, a member state can abstain from voting, which allows a state to express its disapproval of a resolution without issuing an outright veto. Professor Noam Chomsky has referred to an abstention by the United States as a "double veto," because it effectively eliminates any coverage of the resolution in the media and it erases it from the historical record.1 In its defense, the United States government does not hold the record for the most vetoes cast by a single member state. That dubious honor belongs to the USSR, which cast 118 vetoes in its lifetime. The US follows in second place with 76 vetoes (which means it is the nation with the highest number of vetoes that still exists in the Security Council). The nation in third place--the United Kingdom--cast only 31 vetoes.2 To many, this record of resolutions vetoed by the US government demonstrates, in addition to a commitment to ongoing atrocities by the Israeli government, a pattern of violence openly opposed by the international community that the mainstream domestic press seems to be completely ignoring.

1. 1. Chomsky, N. 2003. Dominance and its Dilemmas. Boston Review http://www.chomsky.info/articles/200310--.htm
2. 2. I tallied these vetoes manually, so they may be off by a couple vetoes