Helena – Page 96 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

Use the Detroit bailout to transform US transit

The Democrats’ campaign to win a quick bailout of the US’s Big Three, Detroit-based automakers seems to have stalled. That’s a good thing, since the only kind of substantive conditionality they’ve been mentioning so far is that the car companies should retool more of their production lines to produce “hybrid” or “flex-fuel” private cars.
That is ways too incremental and tiny of a change! These companies should undergo a much deeper transformation– so that between them they can become a hub for innovation and production related to a new, nation-spanning network of high-speed trains and other visionary transit solutions.
Thinking that turning to a mildly re-engineered version of the privately owned automobile will provide any kind of a longterm solution to the country’s transportation woes is short-term thinking indeed. The nation that is economically and politically successful in 2050 will be one that has an efficient, multi-layered mass transit system that produces the minimal level of greenhouse gas emissions and offers a rich quality of life to all citizens.
There is no way that any version of privately owned automobiles can do that. The reliance that this country has long had on privately owned cars– and the concomitant degradation of its mass-transit structure over many decades– has resulted not only in unacceptably high levels of emissions of noxious chemicals and reliance on foreign oil, but also in massive economic inefficiencies and the active exclusion of all non-owners and non-drivers of cars from full economic and social inclusion. These latter costs are hard to quantify, but they are certainly substantial.
We need a strong and compelling vision of what a fully “inclusive” and efficient national transit system would look like– and we also need a huge amount of investment to be poured into realizing it. Exactly similar to what Pres. Eisenhower did with the “interstate highway system” back in the 1950s– but this time a vision based on mass transit, not on the private auto.
Luckily, much of the technology for a national high-speed train (HST) system already exists, since such systems have been well developed in both Japan and Western Europe.
Some people have argued that the US population is too widely dispersed to allow a national passenger rail system ever to become profitable. Perhaps that is so. But taxpayer subsidies of a state-of-the-art national HST system would be a very worthwhile investment, bringing dividends in many areas of national life… Including, if this system is linked to significantly upgraded transit systems in all major urban areas, a great improvement in the quality of life of all citizens, whether they currently own and rely on cars or not, and in the general parameters of their social, economic, and political inclusion.
Such a system would also, if well designed, do a lot to revive areas of the middle of the country that have become economically depressed due to the seemingly irresistible pull of investment and people to the two coasts.
Regarding the “quality of life” question, here are some quick vignettes from me:

All of which is to say that re-imagining (and then rebuilding) the US transportation system as one that is based overwhelmingly on a speedy, efficient, and inclusive mass transit system is a project that can bring tremendous quality-of-life gains to most Americans and need not be looked at in terms of the “loss” of the “personal freedom” that car-ownership allegedly brings.
Freedom??? Freedom to do what? To sit stewing in a traffic jam tied to the task of driving but umnable to get anywhere for a good portion of each day? To emit unequaled amounts of pollutants into the air that everyone around the whole world breathes? To live a life of privilege insulated by the automakers’ glass and chrome from the reality of the lives of others– including those others who are excluded from the car-ownership “dream'”
No, I prefer the freedom of sitting in a mass-transit vehicle being driven by a professional while I read, write, work on the internet, or (if I choose) chat to my fellow-citizens. And yes, there would still be private vehicle “back-ups” for this lifestyle. But they need not be privately owned: Taxis, car rental companies, paratransit systems for the differently abled, and car-share companies like Zipcar should all be part of what is planned for. And yes, these supplementary car-based systems should all use be using the most fuel-efficient and emissions-free technology available.
But if the collections of talented and hard-working engineers, production people, and planners who form the backbone of “Detroit” are to be bailed out massively by the US taxpayers at this time, then surely we should do that on the basis of a National Transit Plan for 2050 that is visionary, far-reaching, inspiring, and attainable– and that doesn’t keep Americans still hog-tied to the socially divisive shibboleth of the private automobile.

Casino capitalists in the brainwash-Iraqis biz

I have long maintained (e.g. here, PDF) that two of the major goals of all oppressive powers that undertake campaigns of mass incarceration is to use that incarceration both as a means of active political blackmail against the families and communities of those detained (= quite illegal hostage-taking) and to use the control over detainees to brainwash them directly into some form of subservience, or otherwise to break their will.
‘Twas ever thus. Including in all imperial-style campaigns of “counter-insurgency” from the beginnings of imperial/colonial history until today. As in the occupied Palestinian territories (more than 7,000 men detained without trial by Israel) and in Iraq (around 17,000 held without trial by the US, plus thousands more by the Iraqi government), and Afghanistan.
Now, Nick Mottern of Consumers for Peace and Bill Rau have done some excellent spadework investigating the corporate structure of some of the “contractors” (i.e. mercenaries) doing the brainwashing work in the massive US-run detention system in Iraq. They report that the detention system inside Iraq that’s run by the US military’s “Task Force 134” operates a religious brainwashing program that employs 60 claimed “imams”– and that these imams are hired and supervised by a wholly owned subsidiary of Global Innovation (GI) Partners LLP, a California- and London-based private equity firm.
Among those investing in GI Partners are the pension systems run for employees of both the State of California (CALPERS) and Oregon, they report.
The “imams in the detention centers” program looks eerily similar to the way the British in Kenya used Anglican indoctrination in a long-sustained campaign to break the nationalist wills of the Kenyan independence activists known as the Mau-Mau, back in the 1950s. In the horrendous network of detention camps that the British ran then, detainees were humiliated and very seriously– often lethally– mistreated; meanwhile, they were promised better treatment or perhaps even “release” if only they’d abandon their “primitive” indigenous religions and take oaths of conversion into the Anglican faith.
Of course, all such forms of coercive brainwashing is completely illegal under international law, which guarantees the freedom of religion, religious understanding and practice, and conscience, to all persons. (It was illegal in the 1950, too. But that didn’t stop the British from practicing it.)
So now, Mottern and Rau have connected the dots of the story of how the restless forces of casino capitalism that are ever circling the globe in search of the next generator of the hyper-profits they seek, regardless of at whose expense, have met up with the world of mercenary brainwashing, in an allegedly “Islamic” religious context.
Investors, including those running state-employee pension funds, should dissociate themselves from companies that make profits in such a disreputable way.
(One final note: Human Rights Watch, and reportedly also Amnesty International, recently called on the US government not to hand control over its Iraqi detainees over to the Iraqi government under any of the bilateral security agreements it concludes. HRW had previously documented some serious abuses being committed inside the Iraqi-run detention centers. But HRW has done pitifully little to challenge the US’s own extensive– and extremely coercive– use of detention without trial in Iraq. In its latest press release, it calls on the US government only to “ensure that detainees are not in danger of being tortured [by Iraqi jailers] by establishing a mechanism that would provide each detainee with a genuine opportunity to contest a transfer to Iraqi custody, and by verifying the conditions of Iraqi detention facilities to which they could be transferred, through inspections whose results are made public.” Why on earth don’t they call more directly on the US to release all those detainees against whom it is unable to bring any credible charges of malfeasance? Why do they seem to concur so much with the US military’s view that sometimes it’s kinda necessary to detain large numbers of people without trial?)

G-20: When ‘Seven’ just isn’t enough

Pres. G.W. Bush may, as two NYT reporters wrote today, have been the first to insist that this weekend’s economic summit in Washington should include the leaders of all the “Group of 20” nations, not just the “G-7” or “G-8” that France’s Pres. Sarkozy originally suggested. But regardless of its authorship, it was an excellent idea.
The G-7 comprises the US, four European nations, Canada, and Japan. The G-8 (which may or may not be moribund at this point, after the Ossetian war of last August) includes those seven plus Russia. The G-20 includes those eight plus: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, and the EU.
Given the scale and the unequally distributed effects of the present crisis, including these additional heads of state in the current confab makes a lot of sense. The effects of the financial crisis have been the greatest on economies that had deregulated their financial systems and substantially opened them up to contagion by western-originated toxins before the onset of the crisis last year. As I noted here at the end of October, one analysis of the macroeconomic vulnerability of various “developing” nations to the effects of the crisis showed that Brazil, Russia, India, and China (aka the BRIC countries) all had relatively low vulnerability. That is just one reason why many analysts are now, quite correctly, saying that if the global economy as a whole is to be spared the worst effects of the current crisis, then this will have to be achieved through the leadership efforts of the non-G-7 countries.
The authors of today’s NYT article give some indications of the degree to which US supremacy of the world system has declined under Bush. They quote Adam S. Posen, described delphically as someone “who advises foreign governments on economic coordination” as saying of Bush:

He’s going to be much more the host and much less the chairman than he realizes… He’s going to be providing the snacks and the venue and making sure everybody’s comfortable, but he is not going to be driving the agenda; that’s the reality. The agenda-setting is with Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy and Hu Jintao.

Actually, contra Posen, I’d say that it will be Hu and all his fellow leaders of the BRIC countries who will be driving the agenda along with Brown and perhaps Sarkozy. Both Britain and France have been badly affected by the financial crisis.
It was apparently also Bush who insisted that the G-20 meeting be held in Washington rather than New York, which was Sarko’s original suggestion.
That might not have been such a good idea.
I suppose Bush’s original aim was to try to demonstrate that Washington DC is the still the center of the universe, rather than Turtle Bay, NY, home of the nefarious (in his view) United Nations…
But I think the main effect of his decision will be to demonstrate to everyone concerned just how lame (or dead) of a duck he has become in his own national capital.
Doubtless all the foreign leaders flocking to DC will be most eager of all to connect with anyone who has the ear of the uber-charismatic president-elect, rather than paying much attention to GWB.
The O-man, for his part, is sitting pretty in Chicago, in furtherance of his quite appropriate insistence that the country only has one president at a time, and that the current mess the economy’s in still sits firmly on GWB’s doorstep, not his.
Obama is sending two unofficial “envoys” to the meeting, in the shape of Madeleine Albright and former GOP Congressman Rep. Jim Leach. The choice of those two throwbacks to the 1990s is pretty sad. Leach, in particular, was one of the named authors of the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act– the legislation that abolished New Deal-era reforms of the federal banking system.
Oh well, they’re only “unofficial.” The Obama administration still hasn’t been officially born, remember.
Meanwhile, this weekend, watch for the degree to which the BRIC leaders– particularly Pres. Hu– start getting taken much more seriously as leading voices in global economic governance.

R. Emanuel apologizes for dad’s racist comments

Today, Rep. Rahm Emanuel, who will be Barack Obama’s chief of staff in the White House, called up the president of the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), former Congresswoman Mary Rose Oakar, and apologized for the racist, anti-Arab remarks his father made when his appointment to the future Obama White House was announced. (HT: Bob Spencer.)
The ADC’s website tells us that,

In the phone call, Congressman Emanuel said, “From the fullness of my heart, I personally apologize on behalf of my family and me. These are not the values upon which I was raised or those of my family.” During the phone call, Emanuel added, it is unacceptable to make remarks such as these against any ethnic or religious group.

Well, let’s hope he was not raised on anti-Arab values, though his father’s long history in the terrorist Irgun movement makes it quite possible that he was.
Still, the apology is extremely welcome. It gives acknowledgment that Emanuel’s father’s remarks were indeed offensive and quite inappropriate– something that some commenters here at JWN had tried to disprove.
Kudos to ADC for having raised the issue directly with Rahm Emanuel (with a ‘cc’ copy to Barack Obama, too.)
Let’s hope this whole incident, occurring at such a seminal point in the formation of Obama’s governing team, has succeeded in raising the awareness of everyone in the incoming administration to the wide incidence of anti-Arab racism in many portions of American society; to the need to include in the highest reaches of the US government representatives of all the ethnicities that make up the American melting point, including Arab-Americans– and to the fact that the United States’ national interests are not, indeed, always co-terminous with those of whatever government happens to be in power at any given point in Rahm Emanuel’s father’s homeland, Israel.
I’d just like to make one final point here– concerning the mainstream media in the US. I have found no call in any mainstream publication, prior to today, for Rahm Emanuel to distance himself in any way from his father’s horrible utterance. Just imagine how different the situation would have been if the father of a non-Jewish chief of staff had, on learning of his son’s appointment, made some equally hateful and derogatory statement about Jews. The New York Times editorial page– and all other major media in the US– would have been abuzz with the issue!
But an expression of anti-Arab racism gets nothing like the same treatment. In fact it is only today, after Rahm Emanuel did the right thing, that the US MSM have paid any real attention to the issue at all…

Gender and casino capitalism

I hate to get into reductionist pop psychology but it is very evident that the vast heaving masses of traders one sees in all the photos of trading exchanges, and the leading lights of economic (mis-)governance in the west overwhelmingly come from one race and one gender.
What is it about so many (white) guys and their addiction to risky behavior that encourages them to shrug aside regulation of their betting games (that is, our financial markets) whenever they can?*
It is interesting, therefore, to read this story about Brooksley Born, a now-retired woman in her late 60s, who as head of the US’s Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) back in 1998 sought to regulate private derivatives contracts, warning that left unregulated they could “pose grave dangers to our economy.”
Well, she lost that round to Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin, who argued that the CFTC didn’t have jurisdiction and refused to let the institutions they headed (the Fed and the Treasury Department) do anything to help with the task.
The Bloomberg piece linked to above notes that Born had been one of the first women admitted to Stanford Law School back in the 1960s. The article’s two (male) writers also say:

While described as smart, charming and analytical by friends and colleagues, Born was seen by some as stubborn and lacking political savvy.

Hey, why didn’t these anonymous sources just seek to additionally demean her by describing her as “shrill” or “witch-like” while they were about it?
More recently, of course, the white guys who are sitting atop of all these roiling and deeply toxic markets have come to the conclusion that, gee, yes certainly the derivatives markets need to be regulated if capitalism is to be saved…
And that includes Greenspan , who now acknowledges he was “partially” wrong to oppose such regulation back in the 1990s.
The authors include this quote from Joseph Dial, who served as a CFTC commissioner from 1991 to 1997:

“Brooksley was a voice crying in the wilderness…There’s no question in my mind, the current financial debacle had its genesis some 10 years ago.”

Of the US’s top economic regulators/officials right now, FDIC head Sheila Baer is the only female. And of the 17 members of Obama’s Transition Economic Advisory Board, only four are female.
… On a related note, Willem Buiter wrote this interesting analysis of the members of Obama’s TEAB. His conclusions?

I think all these are valid criticisms, except for the one about protectionism. The comments Buiter makes under the last of those rubrics are particularly to-the-point. I tend to agree with his judgment that Paul Volcker may the best of this admittedly lack-luster bunch.
But I wish he had also noted the gender and ethnic/racial imbalances on the board.
And besides, one of those on the board is Larry Summers… who has still not performed anything like an adequate mea culpa for the demeaning comments he made about women’s intellectual capacities back when he was at Harvard.
Fwiw, my bottom line on the issue is that females have just the same amount of intellectual potential as males, but that women tend to have different life experiences and social environments which encourage many or most of us to look at issues in social life in ways different from (and in general, more holistic than) the often rigidly linear thinking style used by most men.
An understanding of human psychology is, of course, central to any understanding of economics, and especially the psychology of markets. If economic actors really were all rationally optimizing, strictly self-serving versions of “homo economicus”, as traditional western economists considered them to be, they would still be capable also of looking beyond their immediate, narrow self-interest and take into consideration the health of “the market”, or “the economy” in general.
Instead of which, far too many of the “pioneers” and other players within the largely unregulated casino capitalism that has arisen in the past 15 years have been looking only at their own position relative to that of claimed peers or competitors… “If Trader X down the hall just bought his third Lamborghini, why, I have to get one too”… And what they haven’t taken into account are the interests of society as a whole, or low-income or other non-“trader” people within it, or the health of the supporting economy as a whole. Most women, I would say, would think more holistically about these matters and these social responsibilities; and be far more wary about engaging in very risky trading behavior.
(I’m just reading Kindleberger and Aliber’s classic book “Manias, Panics, and Crashes.” It has some great material about the dysfunctionality of the psychology of many participants in the financial markets.)
* One final note here. Of course J.M. Keynes, J.K. Galbraith and many other humanistic and “holistic” analysts of economics were also white men. But it is the heaving masses of participants in commodities and derivatives markets I’m criticizing here, along with the older white guys who run the firms they work for, and the people–overwhelmingly white and male– who run the relevant government departments, congressional committees, etc that in the 1990s were, in effect, “bought off” not to regulate, or to actively deregulate, those markets.

Let’s see the audacity in Obama’s Mideast policy, too!

I loved Paul Krugman’s column in the NYT today.
He was arguing that Barack Obama could learn a lot from studying the record of the “New Deal” policies enacted by Franklin Roosevelt in response to the economic crisis of the 1930… And in particular, from the fact that FDR’s economic policies almost failed– because they weren’t bold enough, soon enough.
Krugman makes a strong case for this argument, at both the economic and political levels. But reading the column, I thought an almost exactly similar case could be made regarding Middle East policy.
For the past 16 years, US diplomacy regarding the Middle East has been both atomized and painfully incrementalist. Under both Clinton and George W. Bush, the US government sought to keep its policy on Iraq and the Gulf as separate as possible from its policy on Arab-Israeli affairs; and within the domain of Arab-Israeli affairs it worked hard to keep each of the negotiating tracks separate while giving Israel ample time to stall and stall forever on all of them.
The policies pursued by Washington in both the Arab-Israeli theater and the Gulf region have failed. Now, if the war-battered peoples of this vital region are to see their lives stabilized, then a much broader and bolder approach should be used.
The Baker-Hamilton report of December 2006 certainly recommended this. It’s time to pull it off the shelf quickly– along with the records of the old Madrid Conference of 1991, and prepare for a whole new, Mideast-wide stabilization effort… To be undertaken in close coordination with the other four permanent Members of the Security Council.
Obama has written about “the audacity of hope.” So now, to keep the hope alive, let’s have some real audacity of diplomatic action.

The Syria raid and a whole White House gone rogue

As I argued here October 27, the raid that US Special Forces undertook against Syria Oct. 26 had indeed been authorized by the White House. In fact, by President Bush himself, if we are to believe this important report in the NYT today, which tells us that Syria is one of “15 to 20” countries covered by a classified order issued in spring of 2004 that allows the US military to hunt down for “kill or capture” accused Al-Qaeda operatives located in those countries.
That order does not cover Iran (where few Qaeda people would be hiding out, anyway, given the deep doctrinal differences between Qaeda and the Tehran regime.) But the authors of the NYT story, Eric Schmitt and Mark Mazzetti, suggest strongly that US military raids into Iran are probably covered by a separate order.
They write:

targets in a handful of countries, including Pakistan and Syria, require presidential approval.

That would doubtless be because of the intense diplomatic sensitivity of taking these hostile actions inside countries whose governments provide important services to the US. (Unlike Somalia, for example, which has far less diplomatic importance.)
Regatrding Syria, Schmitt and Mazzetti also write:

The 2004 executive order gave permission specifically to the US military to act within the “15 to 20” named countries under certain circumstances. The White House– with the connivance of top members of the US congress– has long allowed the CIA the right to carry out various kinds of illegal acts, including killing and abduction of suspects, in an even broader range of foreign countries.
For the US government to arrogate to itself the right to act in such an illegal and potentially extremely destabilizing way in other countries around the world underscores, yet again, how far our country has slipped from be an upholder of international law and what a rogue force it has become within the international system.
We should press President-elect Obama and the leaders of the incoming Congress to repeal all the “executive orders” that have allowed and encouraged such global malfeasance.

Don Bacon: New occasional poster here

Alert JWN readers– is there any other kind?– will have noted that yesterday long-term commenter Don Bacon got to publish his own (excellent) authored post here. It was on the Iraqi SOFA, etc negotiations and the notable lack of transparency and accountability with which the Bushies have been handling them. This is the first of an occasional series of posts I hope Don will be putting up here, joining Scott Harrop in the distinguished class of “occasional co-posters.”
I asked Don to tell me a little about himself and this is what he wrote:

Smedley Butler Society website

Good to have you aboard, Don.

More on R. Emanuel and US Mideast policy

In this post yesterday I wrote that Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama’s pick as WH chief of staff, was a dual, Israeli and US citizen. And I added,

There is a good question as to whether anyone occupying such a sensitive position in Washington ought to also hold the citizenship of a foreign country– or whether, in the circumstances, Rahm Emanuel should lay down his foreign citizenship.

I based my judgment that Emanuel is a dual citizen on the well-known facts of the citizenship and longtime political involvement that his father has had in that country, on Rahm’s having served “in a civilian capacity” with the Israel Defense Forces in 1991, and on this Nov. 2 posting on Israel’s Y-net (Yediot Aharonot) website, which is headlined, “Obama’s Israeli adviser: Next White House chief of staff?”
On reflection, I am not sure that asking Emanuel to “lay down” his Israeli citizenship– if he still holds it, which I assume he does– would really be meaningful. After all, any person from anywhere in the world who is recognized by Israel’s rabbis as Jewish is entitled to Israeli citizenship the moment he sets foot in Israel, no questions asked.
But what I as a US citizen want to be assured of at this point is two things:

regarding the first point, the assumption publicly expressed by most members of the US political elite in recent years– though not always– has been that “this could never happen.” Political leaders in the US spend so much time having to do their ritual dance of pro-Israeli obeisance in front of AIPAC in which they stress over and over and over that they have Israel’s best interests at heart, and that the policies of Israel only strengthen and never undermine US interests that many of them seem to come to internalize the belief that this is indeed the case.
Ain’t true.
The last leading American political figures who understood that there are, on occasion, serious divergences of interest between the US and the current government of Israel were Pres. George H.W. Bush and his Secretary of State, Jim Baker. They played hardball with Israel’s Likud PM Yitzhak Shamir back in 1991, at a time when Shamir wanted to get $10 billion worth of US loan guarantees and Bush and Baker sought to condition that aid on Israel not proceeding with plans to yet further expand its colonialist settlement project in the occupied territories.
Oh yes, 1991 was also the year that Mr. Emanuel took time off from being an American and went and served with Israel’s military. That happened, I think, a little earlier than the contest of wills between Bush and Shamir broke out in full force. But still, it was a period when many people understood that you might have to make a choice between the two affiliations. He made his.
And then, in 2003, Rahm Emanuel was the only member of Illinois’s congressional delegation who supported the invasion of Iraq… That was another significant choice he made– and one for which he should certainly, five years and 4,000-plus US service-members’ lives later, be held accountable…
But I guess on my point 1 above, for now we just have to trust Barack Obama’s good sense.
And that is where my point #2 becomes very important. We could have all kinds of trust in Obama’s good intentions– but if he doesn’t have access to good, impartial, and broadly based advice on matters Middle Eastern, then all his good intentions may well end up counting for little.
So let’s see who else gets appointed to high positions in his cabinet and in those sub-cabinet positions that have a direct impact on the Middle East. If it is wall-to-wall people with strong and partisan pro-Israeli track records, then we will have to conclude that our country– and Barack Obama– will be in real trouble.
And what influence might Rahm Emanuel have on such high-level appointments? Zero, constructive, or destructive/suppressive? We don’t know yet.
If Obama and R. Emanuel are smart, they will take this opportunity to appoint people who haven’t popped right out of the AIPAC-designed cookie cutter. As the (incidentally, Jewish-American) former high State Department Mideast policy official Aaron Miller has recently been writing and saying, one of the big problems with the Clinton presidency was that they didn’t have nearly enough high-level input from people who understood the Arab and Islamic worlds. Indeed, for much of their “analysis” on Arab and regional political matters, as well as for much of the actual crafting and carrying of high-level messages, they had to rely on someone whose expertise was solely that of a linguistic interpreter.
That happened because the numerous people available to the administration, from within and outside the government bureaucracy, who had a lengthy, experience-based understanding of all aspects of regional politics had nearly all been systematically excluded from the inner corridors of power. By the lobby and its many supporters inside and outside the administration.
And that happened under Clinton, remember. The, that exclusion of anyone with real regional expertise continued with a vengeance under George W. Bush. On matters Iraqi, as well as Arab-Israeli.
So now, let’s see what the next batch of Obama’s high-level appointments brings. If it brings in people who really understand many aspects of Middle East dynamics– that is, those of Israel and of the region’s many other countries– and who understand, too, that it is quite possible that at times the interests of the US and of the sitting government in Israel might diverge, and that in those circumstances the US government should, of course, pursue its own people’s interests… then that would be excellent.
(Hey, how about my old Oxford class-mate– and natural-born US citizen– Dr. Rashid Khalidi for one of those posts?)
And if if the hardline ideologues and discourse-suppressors in the pro-Israel community should complain about such appointments, as they surely would– then President-elect Obama and his chief of staff will be in a great position to tell those critics to go jump in a lake.
It is, after all, the content of the new administration’s policy that should be kept firmly in focus. Its fairness, its plausibility, and its effectiveness.
But how to get to a fair and effective policy?
Not, I would say, by continuing to buy into and help propagate the myth that the interests of the US and of all possible Israeli governments are always the same. Because they aren’t.

Requirements for Obama appointees

Obama had almost certainly picked on Rahm Emanuel as his WH chief of staff even before last Tuesday. But he told us yesterday that the next appointees– which will be to high cabinet positions– may take a bit more time/deliberation.
Brad DeLong, whom I think we can generally trust on this, tells us this about the general criteria in the selection process:

What a relief and a big change! To think that we’ll have people with real skills and expertise, rather than ideologues… As, too, that we’ll have people willing to understand and acknowledge the good points of in the arguments of those they disagree with, rather than bunch of same-thinking “true believers” deeply convinced their own individual and collective righteousness.
DeLong also quotes this from DC-based Spencer Ackerman:

Do you know why you’re not reading solid stuff about who’s getting what positions in an Obama administration? Because everyone in Democratic D.C. thinks s/he’s about to get a job and doesn’t want to go spoiling his/her chances by blabbing to reporters, even when said reporters are just trying to collect quotes about what such-and-such an appointment would signify about Obama’s approach to issue X…

I totally agree, from the experiences I’ve had in DC in the past few weeks– and notably not just since the election– that there are a large number of people going around town with smug smiles on their faces and their lips intriguingly zipped. And by the way, that also includes many journalists, since so many US “journos” do actually aspire to run, or be very close to those who run, actual policy.
So many people in the intelligent part of the universe here seem to hope to be “called upon”. This has to do, of course, with the fact that whenever a new prez comes to town, s/he gets to fill around 3,000 or so jobs in the administration with his (or one day, her) own appointees. It makes the administration considerably more heavily politicized than any other in the developed world– positively “Big Mannish”, indeed.
As for me, y’all can rest quite assured that I neither aspire nor expect to get “called upon” to serve in any government administration!
It’s at times like the present, seeing all these expectant faces and “nudge-nudge-wink-wink” backslaps all around that I (a) am glad I’ve kept top my view of a journalist as being an outside-the-power-nexus observer, and (b) wish the US had a more thoroughly professionalized rather than politicized government administration.
I will also note that, of the necessarily limited sample of Very Politically Ambitious People I’ve encountered this time around, nearly all have been white males. From about age 25 onwards, white guys seem to slip so easily into playing the male professional escalator game. Especially at a time like this.
Let’s hope Pres-elect Obama might change the rules of the game a bit this time round??