I have a few quick points in response to Jeremy Ben-Ami's posting in which he argued (in response to me) that "a large majority of the American Jewish community does support active diplomacy, a two-state solution and an end to the occupation."

First, I have great respect for the efforts that Ben-Ami, Daniel Levy, M.J. Rosenberg, and other like-minded individuals have made to organize and mobilize American Jews to get firmly and enthusiastically behind a two-state solution.

Second, I have long been aware that there are marked differences between the rank and file of the American Jewish community and most of its leaders regarding how to think about dealing with the Palestinians. I understand that the leadership is clearly more hard-line than the rank and file and that most leaders have little if any enthusiasm for a two-state solution. Steve Walt and I wrote about this in our book on the Israel lobby.

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It is becoming clear that Barack Obama understands that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at the heart of virtually all of America's problems in the Middle East.

He also understands that, paradoxically, it is the Middle East problem most amenable to resolution by way of American leadership. Indians and Pakistanis care what the United States thinks, but neither depends on us the way Israelis and Palestinians do. Israelis and Palestinians need us, both for our aid and for political and moral support. Neither side can say "no" to an American President with impunity--especially when all he is demanding is that each live up to commitments they have already made.

He would not have told the Chicago Tribune this week that he will go to the Middle East this winter to tell the Arabs (and the Israelis) that the page has turned if he had not intended to abandon America's entirely one-sided policy in favor of playing the role of honest broker. We haven't played that role in decades.

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One thing to admire about Barack Obama is his willingness to name big problems bluntly: for exampe, energy (wasteful overuse, overloading the ecosystem) and health care (a problem of costs as well as insurance company ripoffs), to name two. It goes without saying that clarity about first principles comes as an enormous relief after the brain-dead, plutocracy-gilding drivel that has spewed out of the White House for the last eight years.

The savvy Lorelei Kelly has a valuable piece up at Huffington Post on the huge missing argument in Washington. What, she asks, is the point of a military budget that accounts for "approximately 54% of discretionary spending" not including war spending? You read that correctly--leave out Iraq and Afghanistan, and the military still take more than half all discretionary spending. That staggering figure does include "plenty of permanent earmarks like missile defense and nuclear weapons." Talk about whole herds of large beasts in the room.

This is not to say that the country can afford to go without intelligent strategy. But "America has not had a real security strategy since the end of 'containment' and the Cold War in 1991," she writes. It's long past time for a rethink of the purpose of military spending. Sticking the label "national security" on gigantic, automatic expenditures clarifies nothing. Meanwhile, on the right, big spenders are insisting that 4 percent of GDP constitute a floor for military spending. (These big spenders call themselves "conservatives." Perhaps Rick Warren might apply himself to the Purpose-Driven Military Budget.)

But in keeping with the new philosophical mood, Kelly is also practical, and tough on what she calls The Lefty Chorus, which "may be right on priorities, but its rhetoric still looks backward for inspiration." Instead of beating the drums for butter over guns, she argues,

A much more effective strategy for the Left will be to make tradeoffs within the defense budget this year and not try to shift money around between domestic and defense spending. Take on missile defense and the F-22, but at the same time, stand up for military families, genocide prevention, body armor, Foreign Area Officers. Take on the imbalance in our policy that hands the military far too much responsibility. This is a great opportunity for the Left to gain much needed legitimacy in this debate. Don't blow the common ground that exists out there! Quit pitting the Air Force against the Department of Education. That argument doesn't work. It never has.

The discussion is long overdue. I don't expect to see it on the Sunday shows or major op-ed pages, but isn't this one thing the blogosphere is for?

John Dean's Open Letter to President-elect Obama:
Change the Nature of the Response to the Blagojevich Scandal

December 12, 2008

President-Elect Barack Obama
Office of the President-Elect
Chicago, IL

Dear President-Elect Obama:

I am writing with a suggestion that might help to remove you and your new administration from the still metastasizing scandal of Governor Blagojevich trying to sell your senate seat. Needless to say, until the news media is satisfied that you and your new administration have no complicity in this matter, they will continue to focus on it. Because of my own personal experience with Watergate, the mother of modern presidential scandals, not to mention being a student of scandals that followed, I speak as someone who learned the hard way by making mistakes and then watched as others made their own similar and unnecessary blunders. First, a bit of background.

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Avraham Burg obviously believes that the occupation has had a deeply corrupting effect on Israel. But there is something else going on inside Israel that worries him greatly: the changing nature of that society. He says, for example, that "Israeli society is split to its core," and although he does not detail the specifics of that divide, it is apparent that it has a political and a religious dimension. He believes that the political center of gravity in Israel has shifted markedly to the right. Indeed, he believes that the left has "decreased in numbers and become marginal." He also sees the balance between secular and religious Israelis shifting in favor of the latter, which is why he writes that "the establishment of a state run by rabbis and generals is not an impossible nightmare."

I would like to try to buttress Burg's analysis by pointing out some trends in Israeli society that are having and will continue to have a profound effect on the Jewish state over time, but which are hardly talked about in the mainstream media here in America. Specifically, I would like to focus on the growth of the ultra-Orthodox or Haredi in Israel, and emigration out of Israel, or what one might call "reverse Aliyah."

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We hear that Senator Mitch McConnell and assorted grafters in both parties want U.S. autoworkers to reduce their salaries in line with other workers in the same industry. To extend this excellent idea, we could align the salaries of Members of Congress with those of members of the parliament of India, which as near as I can determine is 16,000 rupees, or about $330.95 -- hell, let's round it off to $331.00 -- annually. As Senator McConnell and other students of economic science are aware, this will forestall the inefficient oversupply of talented people to the U.S. Congress and halt the Indian legislative braindrain.

The discussion taking place in this cafe is one of the most qualitative I ever had. As I carefully read everyone's comments I realize how much you can learn from people if you are willing to listen.

Many of you raise the Palestinian question. No doubt this is a very important subject for us Israelis, for Palestinians and for the entire world. But they do not play a major role in my current book. In part because I wrote a great deal about this conflict in my last book, God is Back, and in part because I believe this issue is primarily about us Israelis and our psychological mindset.

Daniel Levy compared me to Natan Sheranski. I do not know whether it is a compliment or a criticism. But there is something there. Sheranski became George W Bush's prophet. Tell me who your disciples are and I'll tell you who you are. There is nothing to add, given the last terrible 8 years. I'm ready for this challenge, ready to give it as much time as possible and as needed. As long as I know that I have real partners -- not just to talk the talk but to walk the walk.

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At the end of this discussion on Avraham Burg's book, The Holocaust is Over We Must Rise from the Ashes, we are reminded just how volatile the discussion is around Israel and its survival. We also see that so many want to have and participate in such a discussion. Still the situation remains.

In John Mearsheimer's posting, "Why Isn't Burg's Book a Bestseller?," he asks many pertinent questions about why this is. One referring to American Jews, "Why don't they see that Israel is in serious trouble and that the situation is likely to get worse, not better?" They are out there on 'J Street' as Jeremy Ben-Ami says and in Brit Tzedek v'Shalom, both definitely breaking ground. So the change is beginning and to Burg's credit, he is telling us that it is urgent.

Everyone must continue to talk and question. Without questioning, and looking at possibilities and opportunities, how do we change, evolve from violence or learn? How can policy be formed to help instead of hinder all of our interests? While we, in this case and as Burg says, help Israel move away from "serious trouble."

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Before you get too worked up about all the ways Obama is selling out (before he's moved into the White House) read this from Dick Cheney's favorite columnist and leap:

Obama was quite serious when he said he was going to change the world. And now he has a national crisis, a personal mandate, a pliant Congress, a desperate public -- and, at his disposal, the greatest pot of money in galactic history. (I include here the extrasolar planets.)

It begins with a near $1 trillion stimulus package. This is where Obama will show himself ideologically. It is his one great opportunity to plant the seeds for everything he cares about: a new green economy, universal health care, a labor resurgence, government as benevolent private-sector "partner." The first hint came yesterday, when Obama claimed, "If we want to overcome our economic challenges, we must also finally address our health care challenge" -- the perfect non sequitur that gives carte blanche to whatever health-care reform and spending the Obama team dreams up. It is the community organizer's ultimate dream....

With the country clamoring for action and with all psychological barriers to government intervention obliterated (by the conservative party, no less), the stage is set for a young, ambitious, supremely confident president -- who sees himself as a world-historical figure before even having been sworn in -- to begin a restructuring of the American economy and the forging of a new relationship between government and people.

Don't be fooled by Bob Gates staying on. Obama didn't get elected to manage Afghanistan. He intends to transform America. And he has the money, the mandate and the moxie to go for it.

[H/t: Dean Baker]

What now for the automakers, now that their bridge loan failed in Congress? The Troubled Assets Relief Program -- TARP -- was enacted to save Wall Street but it's already been so twisted out of its original shape by Hank Paulson that a bit more twisting to save the Big Three from bankruptcy, at least over the next few weeks, won't be difficult. The White House was behind the auto rescue, and Bush doesn't want to leave yet another failure on the portico as he leaves. Democrats certainly won't object, and Senate Republicans will growl but so what?

I expect TARP funds to be offered as a bridge loan to Detroit, especially GM and Chrysler, to keep them going until early January. The new Congress convenes January 6, and its first order of business will be to amend TARP and make it official (Bush will be President until January 20, of course, so this will be one of those odd-ball pieces of legislation featuring a new Congress and an old President).

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What now for the automakers? The Troubled Assets Relief Program -- TARP -- was enacted to save Wall Street but it's already been so twisted out of its original shape by Hank Paulson that a bit more twisting to save the Big Three from bankruptcy over the next few weeks won't be difficult. The White House was behind the auto rescue, and Bush doesn't want to leave yet another failure on the portico as he leaves. Democrats certainly won't object, and Senate Republicans will growl but so what?

TARP funds will be offered as a bridge loan to Detroit, especially GM and Chrysler, to keep them going until early January. The new Congress convenes January 6, and its first order of business will be to amend TARP and make it official (Bush will be President until January 20, of course, so this will be one of those odd-ball pieces of legislation featuring a new Congress and an old President).

But the real immediate need right now lies with state and local governments. States and locales are already showing shortfalls in the range of $70 to $100 billion this fiscal year, and they can't officially go into deficit. That means they're starting to whack public services -- teachers, police and fire, social workers, admission to state universities, garbage collections, you name it.

Most of the public has no idea what happens on Wall Street and hasn't even heard of TARP; and a big portion of the public doesn't really believe that if the Big Three implode they'll be hurt. But when it comes to their own local services, it's a different story. To them, these are the only things government really does. And cuts in these services, on the magnitude just starting to happen, will create a generate holler on Main Street so loud as to crack the windows of every member of Congress back home this holiday season.

If we're bailing out Wall Street and the Big Three, the public will insist that public services be restored. If not through TARP, then through the big stimulus package that will be signed January 20 or 21st. The federal government is bailout out America. But who's bailing out the federal government? You and I, as our limited savings move into the safe haven of T-bills, along with a whole bunch of Asians.

John Mearsheimer asks why American Jews who feel a deep attachment to Israel don't see that it is "in Israel's interest and their own interest to champion a two-state solution".

I think the vast majority of American Jews do. As J Street's polling and others have shown, a large majority of the American Jewish community does support active diplomacy, a two-state solution and an end to the occupation. There is broad understanding among American Jews that a negotiated two-state peace agreement is critical to both Israeli security and American interests; in fact, 87 percent of American Jews believe that the U.S. should take an active role in resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict, according to our July 2008 poll.

The problem we face is that the loudest voices - a minority of the Jewish community - have been allowed to define what it means to be "pro-Israel." They've monopolized the debate in a manner that all who are posting here understand to be counterproductive to the interests of not only Israel, but the United States and, frankly, the American Jewish community.

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Read today's Washington Post story on how Barack Obama managed to distance himself from the corrupt governor of his state as if Blago was a stinking fish.

From their earliest dealings, Obama made clear his contempt for a politician he clearly believed was crooked. Blago hated Obama for looking down at him, but Obama did and the governor knew it. (It is in the tapes).

It is not easy for up-and-coming politicians to avoid contact with their own state's political machine and still rise to the top. I think Obama was able to do it the same way FDR avoided the stench that surrounded Tammany Hall. FDR had his own Blago case. At the very moment he was nominated for President, the Mayor of New York, Jimmy Walker, (FDR was governor) was exposed as a crook and FDR had to lead the effort to remove him while running for President.

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Jon Stewart has pointed out that MSNBC is the new Fox, and since the election, the left-of-center political universe has proven itself the equal of the Bushlovin', Dittohead, No-Spin Zone Right in the stupidity Olympics. First there was the frenzy to bat down the 'meme' of a center-right nation. Now there is the haste to disprove the notion of an "Angry Left."

Of course the idea of the Left is elastic. Left of Richard Nixon is not the same thing as left of George W. Bush. Harry Truman supported national health insurance, the same sort of scheme criticized in Obama campaign advertisements. Nixon supported a national, guaranteed annual income, while Bill Clinton ended welfare, crappy as it was, as a Federal entitlement. Where does center end, and left begin? Where does center-left end, and disreputable, crazy left begin?

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The Senate logjam over a $14 billion "bridge loan" for the Big Three to tide them over until the end of March may be breaking. Republicans are demanding the equivalent of Chapter 11 bankruptcy as a condition -- creditors must accept 33 cents on the dollar they're owed, and workers must accept wages and benefits that match those of American workers in foreign-owned autoplants in the U.S. Democrats are at this hour negotiating a compromise.

Background: There's a new Civil War going on when it comes to automaking in America. Japanese, Korean, and German automakers are now building 18 auto assembly plants in the United States, none of which is unionized. Kentucky (Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell) already has Toyota's biggest auto assembly plant outside Japan. Tennessee (Senate Rep. Bob Corker, who came up with the "chapter 11" bailout amendment) houses Nissan's North American headquarters. Alabama (Senate Rep. Richard Shelby) hosts Mercedez Benz and several other foreign automakers.

So there's no reason to suppose the good citizens of Kentucky, Tennessee, or Alabama are particularly excited at the prospect of handing over their taxpayer money to competing firms and their workforces.

Besides, southern Republican are not particularly enamoured with the UAW, which has steadfastly bankrolled Democrats who have taken on Republicans. (The new Congress will have at least six new Democrats from formerly Republican districts, all of whom received at least $40K from the UAW.)

Corker's compromise -- which would force the UAW to match the wages of foreign, mostly non-unionized autoworkers in the South -- would essentially make the UAW irrelevant. Why have a union if you can get the same deal without one?

But Republicans also know that the Big Three and their suppliers are spread out over the battle-ground states of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Minnesota. Republicans don't dare give up these states or alienate their citizens.

So here's where compromise comes in.

The dirty little secret is that, bailout or no bailout, the Big Three will have to lay off thousands of workers over the next few years, as the foreign non-union automakers take market share away from them.

Throughout its history, America has cycled back and forth between two distinct targets of distrust -- big business (including Wall Street), and government. In periods when big business is most distrusted, Americans seek protection from it, and reluctantly give government authority to expand its scope. When big government is most distrusted, Americans want less of it, and give big business greater leeway.

Exactly where the pendulum of distrust is located at any given time depends partly on the business cycle. When the economy is expanding briskly, distrust of big business is muted and the public fears that government will spoil the party; when the economy is plunging, big business is deemed the culprit and the public looks to government for solutions. The location and direction of the pendulum also depend on headlines documenting self-dealing and corruption -- either among business leaders or, alternatively, government officials.

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Throughout its history, America has cycled back and forth between two distinct targets of distrust -- big business (including Wall Street), and government. In periods when big business is most distrusted, Americans seek protection from it, and reluctantly give government authority to expand its scope. When big government is most distrusted, Americans want less of it, and give big business greater leeway.

Exactly where the pendulum of distrust is located at any given time depends partly on the business cycle. When the economy is heading upward, distrust of big business is muted and the public fears that government will spoil the party; when the economy is heading downward, big business is deemed the culprit and the public looks to government for solutions. The location and direction of the pendulum also depend on headlines documenting self-dealing and corruption -- either among business leaders or, alternatively, government officials.

In recent months the plunging economy combined with headlines about Wall Street's astounding malfeasance have pushed the pendulum far toward one end of its historic swing. Add in the goodwill a new administration brings, and the public seems ready to accept massive government intervention. Quite apart from good economic arguments in favor of it, for example, the public is supportive of a $500 to $600 billion stimulus plan come January.

But two sets of headlines could cause the pendulum to start swinging back even before the new administration takes office.

The first involves the current administration's massive bailout of Wall Street -- the Troubled Assets Relief Program -- to which some $350 billion of taxpayer dollars have already been committed. Never before in history has so much money been spent with such little effect. The Government Accountability Office has already made headlines about the program's inefficacy and lack of transparency; the Treasury Department's own Inspector General has described it as a "mess." Even if the current Treasury Secretary doesn't ask Congress for the second $350 billion tranche, these and related stories could give the pendulum a shove backward.

The second is this week's headlines about Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich's bizarre and brazen plans to profit from selling off Obama's senate seat. Nothing has been proven yet, but the tapes are incriminating enough. The longer Blagojevich clings to office and the more stories link his plans directly or by innuendo to anyone else in public life, the stronger the push on the pendulum -- back toward public distrust in government.

The Detroit automakers have made many mistaken business decisions that have been important factors contributing to their current crisis. However, they are not responsible for some of the factors that have brought them to the brink of bankruptcy.

Most obviously, they are not responsible for the collapse of the housing bubble and the subsequent loss of more than $15 trillion in housing and stock wealth. This falloff in wealth has sent consumption plummeting. The auto industry has been especially hard hit, with sales falling by more than 30 percent year over year in the last two months.

The Big Three are also not responsible for the broken U.S. health care system. If we paid the same amount for health care as Canada, G.M. would have accumulated an additional $22 billion in profits over the last decade.

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Patricia DeGennaro says in her most recent posting that the current situation between Israel and the Palestinians is "unsustainable." I believe she is correct, which prompts the obvious question: where is this conflict headed?

Avraham Burg clearly believes that Israel is headed for serious trouble. Ditto Ehud Olmert, who has said that if there is no two-state solution, Israel will "face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, and as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished." In other words, Israel will end up as an apartheid state if the Palestinians do not get a viable state of their own.

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Avraham Burg has urged me not to argue about Zionism but to talk about the future and what everyone can do. Nice. Last week Avraham said in New York that God made man out of polemics. Even nicer. And so today I'm going to argue more about Zionism.

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I never heard of Bill Ayers before this year. I learned his name thanks to the GOP campaign against Barack Obama. The whole thing was ridiculous. Worse than guilt by association, it was guilt by acquaintance.

But now I know who Ayers is and in today's Washington Post, Charles Lane (once played brilliantly by Peter Sarsgaard in the best Hollywood movie about the New Republic and one of the best, period) tells me more.

Bill Ayers is a terrible guy who, by any definition, spent his youth as a terrorist. He's the kind of guy who dedicates his book to, among others, Sirhan Sirhan.

And yet he is a pillar of the Chicago establishment.

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I am joining this late, and having read the previous posts and comments, I'm tempted to suggest that a more dissenting voice may be needed. I will not be that voice--my appreciation of the book The Holocaust is Over and its author are immense (even if I would take issue with points here and there and for instance critique Burg's suggestion of creating a "World Religion Organization"). But I not only share the central thread of Burg's critique of, as he calls it, "catastrophic Zionism", or the "imperial Israel of the Seventh Day" (i.e. what Israel became after the 1967 Six Day's War), I also consider the elaboration of this narrative and of the alternative to be both critical and urgent.

I have framed this post as Burg vs. Sharansky, partly because two of the most polemically delightful pages of this book are when Avrum is dissing the former refusenik-turned-"typical nationalist, chauvinist Israeli" and icon of Bush and the neocons, but mainly to suggest that Burg can be a central component of the intellectual antidote to Sharanskyism. If Sharansky's The Case for Democracy was required reading for the right and Bush's Whitehouse in their framing of the Middle East, then The Holocaust is Over can play a similar role for progressives.

Washington thinkers and policy-makers are spending a lot of time right now thinking through the mechanics of how to address the Bush-made (and Sharansky-made) mess in the Middle East--how to enhance stability, peace, and security. That's an interesting conversation and one that I often partake in, sometimes here at TPM Café--when and how to engage Iran or Syria; should an envoy get appointed; whether de-occupation or Palestinian institution-building come first; etc. But there is another conversation that needs to take place just as, if not more important, than process and mechanics. And that is the conceptual reframing of how we think about the Middle East, an intellectual counter-insurgency against the neocons and the Global War on Terror packaging which is still so ubiquitous.

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Some pre-holiday cheer. The neocon outfit, Freedom's Watch, has bitten the dust.

In the words of Monty Python, "This parrot is no more. It has ceased to be. It's expired and gone to meet its maker. This is a late parrot. It's a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. If you hadn't nailed it to the perch, it would be pushing up the daisies. It's rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-parrot."

And Freedom's Watch is an ex-warmongering organization.

It turns out that its sugar daddy, Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate, lost a few billion in the recent Wall Street troubles. Down to his last dozen billion or so, he can no longer afford to feed the family and spend a fortune supporting escalation in Iraq, war with Iran, and the continued expansion of West Bank settlements.

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On Monday, NBC Universal chief executive Jeff Zucker told weary investors at an industry conference that the network was determined to cut costs. His comments came as the company laid off 500 employees and annnounced it would move Jay Leno to its 10 pm weekday time slot. This makes sense for NBC: Every hour of scripted programming costs about $5 million -- for fleets of writers, directors, cinematographers, actors, editors, and everyone in between. Leno's compensation is hefty but not nearly $5 million an hour, and his live show costs a fraction of that. (Big-name stars come to hawk their latest films and books for free.) The Wall Street Journal estimates the move will save NBC as much as $25 million a week, minus Leno's larger takehome pay.

It's happening all over the economy now. Star players are being moved to where they can do the work of many others, who are being laid off in large numbers. The stars earn more yet the companies save big because they decimate payrolls. It's done to improve profits and thereby calm anxious shareholders.

Somehow, though, it's not working. Shareholders are still anxious -- and becoming ever more so. Why? Because all the payroll cuts, multiplied across the economy, are reducing the capacity of consumers to buy goods and services. Which is why advertising budgets are being slashed. And with less advertising, NBC's profits will continue to plummet even as it cuts its costs.

What's rational for an individual company and wonderful for its star players turns out to be irrational for the economy as a whole. It's not Jeff Zucker's fault or any other executive armed with an axe. But this does suggest why smart government policies are critically important, especially now, and why a very large stimulus package is in the interest of everyone -- including Jeff Zucker and Jay Leno.

In closing Guantanamo, we are told we must find legal ways to deal with those now incarcerated there. Some hold that we should treat them like criminals, entitled to the same legal rights as Americans. Others, as soldiers, protected by the Geneva Conventions. As I see it, our minds are big enough to accommodate more than two options. Terrorists clearly are neither garden variety criminals nor soldiers but a third, distinct category.

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A former leader of the Nicaraguan revolution and member of the current ruling party in his country,Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, is the current head of the UN General Assembly. A Roman Catholic priest and former 'moderate' within the revolutionary guard of that old revolution, d'Escoto has been incredibly stupid in trying to prevent the new ISraeli UN Ambassador, Professor Gabriela Shalev, from speaking at the UN's special commemorative plenary session marking 60 years since the UN adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights scheduled for today.

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First I would like to respond to the comments and questions in regard to Senator Kennedy. Since the conversation was some time ago, I cannot, as you might imagine, recall exact words. However, his statements support Burg's analysis about how influential the idea of 'Shoah' is and how it has so deeply affected American rhetoric and its policies. As I write in my own article, "Debating the 'Lobby,'" "When it comes to the Middle East, U.S. lawmakers go out of their way to prioritize Israel's security concerns."

Kennedy's reasoning for not dealing with Russia was based on a restrictive trade agreement. In the 70s Russia put a tax on those emigrating, mostly Jews, because they claimed they wanted to stop the 'brain drain' exodus. The Russians got slapped with the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which I see someone has mentioned, for Russia it is still in place. Upon hearing that, I learned about AIPAC as well and was astounded by how organized and influential 'The Israel Lobby' is inside the US Congress, which Drs. Mearsheimer and Walt explain so well in their book by the same name. I highly recommend it.

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The naysayers were wrong about Barack Obama yet again. Both the pundits and the status quo lobby predicted that he would be crazy to take on the Israeli-Palestinian and other Middle East issues during the first year.

During the campaign Obama repeatedly said that he would. And now, he says it as President-Elect. (It didn't hurt that he received 80% of the Jewish vote).

Yesterday he told the Chicago Tribune that he will be going to a Middle East capital (probably Cairo) as soon as he takes office to tell the Arab world (and the Israelis) that the bad old days are over. The Obama administration will put all its weight behind peace and, reading between the lines, behind the Arab League initiative which offers Israel full peace and normalization of relations with all 22 Arab states in exchange for a Palestinian state in West Bank/Gaza and East Jerusalem.

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John Mearsheimer writes, obviously in agreement:

His [Burg's] core message is that Israel is in serious trouble at home and there is good reason to think that things could go horribly wrong in the future. He emphasizes that Israel has changed greatly since 1948.

He quotes his mother on this point:

This country is not the country that we built. We founded a different country in 1948, but I don't know where it's disappeared."

That Israel has changed is inarguably true. Just watch this heart-stopping little film about the country, made by Air France in 1951. I'm not sure Israel has changed quite in the way Avrum and John imply: some big wrong turn after 1967. Tragedy does not usually result from suddenly doing the wrong thing but rather from doing the right thing too long.

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Bernard -- You are right that Spinoza's distinction that peace is not the absence of violence is something that needs to be seriously considered -- especially by someone like me who is not just interested in justice for myself and my society but to establish the presence of justice in the entire region. Though the Holocaust may be a barrier, we must cross over it and change the lesson of trauma into a strategy of trust.
 
Patricia -- thank you for your kind words about my book. Just a note, cautiousness should not prevent us from self-criticism.
 
Jeremy -- it cannot be the mission of one individual alone. We have to do this together. People like you over here and people like me over there and people like us all over the world. I believe in a decent alternative to right wing self-satisfaction AIPAC-style, which is a real limitation of the classical Jewish horizon. The Jewish people never was and should never be a single-issue community, we are about much more than that. We are about being considerate, sensitive and open to social affairs and human justice.
 
Philip -- Instead of arguing about Zionism and mathematical definitions, let's speak about what should be done. It's a long scroll, I will try to summarize it in only one line. Assume responsibility -- whether it is individual, communal, corrective or any other, I am not judgmental. I just want to be a partner in this responsibility of ours. As for Obama, it is not his color but his attitude that is a departure. He belongs to the well-respected long line of presidents who introduced dialogue, conversation, and listening into the world equations rather than imposing or legitimizing unilateral aggression and arrogance based on white supremacy.

For American readers, the great virtue of Avraham Burg's important new book is that he says things about Israel and the Jewish people that are hardly ever heard in mainstream discourse in the United States. It is hard to believe how stunted and biased the coverage of Israel is in the American media, not to mention the extent to which our politicians have perfected the art of pandering to the Jewish state. The situation got so bad in the recent presidential campaign that journalists Jeffrey Goldberg and Shmuel Rosner -- both staunch defenders of Israel -- wrote pieces titled "Enough about Israel Already."

Let's hope that The Holocaust is Over is widely read and discussed, because it makes arguments that need to be heard and considered by Americans of all persuasions, but especially by those who feel a deep attachment to Israel. The fact that Burg wrote this book also matters greatly. He cannot be easily dismissed as a self-hating Jew or a crank, as he comes from a prominent Israeli family and has been deeply involved in mainstream Israeli politics for much of his adult life. Moreover, he clearly loves Israel.

Burg makes many smart points in his book, but I would like to focus on what I take to be his central arguments. His core message is that Israel is in serious trouble at home and there is good reason to think that things could go horribly wrong in the future. He emphasizes that Israel has changed greatly since 1948. He quotes his mother on this point: "This country is not the country that we built. We founded a different country in 1948, but I don't know where it's disappeared." Israel today, he writes, "is frighteningly similar to the countries we never wanted to resemble." Talking about Israel's shift to the right over time, he makes the eye-popping observation that "Jews and Israelis have become thugs."

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In reading Avrum Burg's book, I can't help but get a story torn from current events out of my mind-the terror attacks in Mumbai against the Chabad center there. Chabad is an outreach educational arm of the Lubavitcher hassidic movement, which is represented both in NY (a few blocks from me in Brooklyn) and in Israel, though they believe that Israel will not gain its full contemporary --statelike, not biblical--legitimacy until the messiah arrives.
And, while the Chabad rabbi and his wife got buried with state honors in ISrael (as I believe they should have since they appear to have been targeted as Jews) another victim's family refused to be buried with any symbols of the state, according to Israeli news reports.

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Superstar author Malcolm Gladwell's current New Yorker piece, titled "Most Likely to Succeed," conveys that the difficulties scouts have in identifying college quarterbacks who will be successful as pros has something to do with the challenge of hiring good teachers. He defines what he calls "the quarterback problem" this way: "there are certain jobs where almost nothing you can learn about candidates before they start predicts how they will do once they're hired." Just as coveted college stars like Ryan Leaf and Joey Harrington flop in the pros, some graduates of leading schools of education end up boring their students to death.

The solution for the teaching profession, Gladwell argues, is to follow the path of the financial advice industry. (He doesn't broach the question of the quality of advice clients in said industry have received in recent years). The model is a four-month training camp in which apprentice advisers are challenged to retain clients and are weeded out based on how well they do by that measure. Gladwell cites sources who say you'd probably have to try out four candidates to find one good teacher.

But there are only a few dozen professional quarterbacking jobs in contrast to some 7 million public school teachers, with significant shortages in many cities and subjects. Whatever your position on the appropriate credentialing of teachers, most urban school administrators don't have the luxury of selecting 25 percent of applicants after some sort of closely monitored trial period.

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The Big Three need a hybrid vehicle, if you will -- a combination of chapter 11 bankruptcy and a bailout. For every taxpayer dollar they receive, the automakers should be required to come up with $2 from their stakeholders (creditors, shareholders, executives, white and blue collar employees), just as stakeholders would have to sacrifice under Chapter 11.

This is the only way GM, Ford, and Chrysler can possibly accumulate enough money to survive and restructure. It's also the way to avoid favoring the Big Three over foreign automakers in the US (if they want to make the same $2 for every $1 sacrifice, they can do so, too.) And it's a way to avoiding the "moral hazard" of every other big company that gets into trouble during this downturn expecting Washington to bail it out as well.

The only reason for taxpayers to put up even one dollar for every two that the automakers put up is the significant social cost that would occur if any one of the Big Three were to rapidly shrink -- including unemployment insurance, increased liabilities for the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, lost tax revenues, and costs associated with large numbers of people suffering losses of wages and employment.

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I have long admired and learned from Anne-Marie Slaughter, and the Princeton Project report, "Forging a World of Liberty under Law," which she coauthored with another leading scholar I admire, John Ikenberry, is a major contribution to the debate over post-Bush foreign policy that I encourage everyone to read. As I have said before, I consider my differences with them to be part of a debate within the family of liberal internationalists in the Wilson-Roosevelt tradition, so my focus on limited areas of disagreement should not obscure the consensus on most values and subjects that we share, such as a favorable view of international law and multinational institutions that distinguishes liberal internationalists from neoconservatives.

We do disagree, to be sure, about some aspects of history and present-day policy. First, history. Anne-Marie writes: "In the first place, the liberal internationalism of Roosevelt and Truman believed both in having a concert of great powers (the UN Security Council) and of democracies (NATO, the Marshall Plan, and ultimately the EU)." This is not inaccurate as a description of the long span from World War II until the end of the Cold War, but I think it is important to distinguish Cold War institutions like NATO, the Marshall Plan, and the EU from the earlier, postwar global architecture planned by American liberal internationalists between the outbreak of World War II and the Cold War, with the Korean War serving as the hinge between the two eras of liberal internationalism. Although they contemplated regional groupings like the Organization of American States (OAS) as part of the UN system, neither the Roosevelt administration nor the early Truman administration had any plans for a "concert of democracies" or a European union excluding the dictatorial Soviet Union before the Cold War intensified. Indeed, the U.S. offered Marshall Plan aid to the Soviet Union, which rejected it and forced its satellites in Eastern Europe to reject it. NATO was founded only in 1949, and the European Common Market, which became the EU, was founded much later in 1957 by the Treaty of Rome.

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The Big Three need a hybrid vehicle, if you will -- a combination of chapter 11 bankruptcy and a bailout. For every taxpayer dollar they receive, the automakers should be required to come up with $2 from their stakeholders (creditors, shareholders, executives, white and blue collar employees), just as stakeholders would have to sacrifice under Chapter 11.

This is the only way GM, Ford, and Chrysler can possibly accumulate enough money to survive and restructure. It's also the way to avoid favoring the Big Three over foreign automakers in the US (if they want to make the same $2 for every $1 sacrifice, they can do so, too.) And it's a way to avoiding the "moral hazard" of every other big company that gets into trouble during this downturn expecting Washington to bail it out as well.

The only reason for taxpayers to put up even one dollar for every two that the automakers put up is the significant social cost that would occur if any one of the Big Three were to rapidly shrink -- including unemployment insurance, increased liabilities for the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, lost tax revenues, and costs associated with large numbers of people suffering losses of wages and employment.

Wall Street is a different story entirely. There's no good reason for taxpayers to continue bailing out the Street. TARP hasn't worked. Some $350 billion later, credit markets are still quite frozen. The only obvious beneficiaries of TARP have been the executives, creditors, and shareholders of the big Wall Street banks, who have come out better than they would have had there been no Wall Street bailout.

From here on, Wall Street banks that can't pay their creditors should have to resourt to Chapter 11 of the bankruptcy code, which allows a firm to pay off its creditors -- say, 30 cents on the dollar -- and then wipe the slate clean.

Chapter 11 is ideally suited to the Wall Street credit crisis because it creates a forum in which creditors are forced to negotiate and ultimately accept a "market" price for the securities they hold -- thereby accomplishing what the Treasury first tried to do under TARP: create market valuations for these otherwise unmarketable securities. And by allowing the big banks to clean up their balance sheets and get rid of their "toxic" securities, Chapter 11 clears the way for the banks to attract new investors now scared off by the unknown dimensions of potential losses.

There's no reason to suppose Chapter 11 would be especially difficult for a big bank, nor are there likely to be significant social costs. Two months ago the Treasury warned of "contagion" if Wall Street weren't bailed out. But the real contagion involves the continued fears and uncertainties surrounding mortgage-backed securities -- and Chapter 11 provides a way to reduce these.

Prior to 1978, a company could seek Chapter 11 protection only if it was insolvent or was unable to pay maturing debt, and Chapter 11 normally meant that a company's managers would have to relinquish control. But in 1978 Congress amended Chapter 11 to delete the insolvency test, and also to allow managers to keep control of a company unless a bankruptcy judge explicitly finds them to be incompetent or untrustworthy. Since then, instead of presiding over meetings of creditors where claims are bargained out, judges have left most decisions -- even major ones -- to existing managers.

Naysayers point to Lehman Brothers as evidence that Chapter 11 won't work. But it wasn't tried, mainly because the Treasury was by then signaling that it would bail out troubled banks. Lehman apparently chose to play a game of chicken with the Treasury, hoping and expecting the Treasury would bail it out. When the Treasury finally refused, Lehman was pushed into liquidation because it hadn't prepared the way for Chapter 11. Chapter 11 also should have been used by Citigroup. Taxpayers took a bath on that one, for no good reason.

Bottom line: Detroit should get a hybrid vehicle, one third bailout and two-thirds Chapter 11 -- $1 of taxpayer investment for every $2 of sacrifice by Big Three stakeholders. But Wall Street should not get the second $350 billion tranche of the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Wall Street deserves -- and the public can do better if Wall Street utilizes -- Chapter 11.

First off, I don't think there is any way we can let the domestic automobile industry disappear. First steel. Then cars. At this rate, the entire country will be nothing but a rust belt and an entertainment industry. No more GM, but plenty of cool software for smart phones.

It can't happen.

And, forgive me, I cannot get worked up into a frenzy about the industry for ignoring economic and environmental trends and allowing foreigners to take over. I do not expect industry to act in the nation's interests. I expect capital to behave like capital, with minimal regard for their workers let alone the country at large.

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Avraham Burg's book is great and important, no doubt. His idea that Israel pardoned Germany too quickly and shifted the rage to Arabs is significant. His identification of the neocons as powerful Jewish proponents of the Iraq war is one that liberal American Jews have too long resisted. His impatience with Jewish ethnocentrism and his tolerance of intermarriage will also resonate. Jews will discuss this book for a long time. That's mostly a Jewish conversation.

Here's the American one. Last week in NY, Burg said that American Jews compose a "semi-autonomous" structure of Zionism, giving support to the Jewish state. I don't want that role, I never have. Douglas Feith and Elliott Abrams did, and look where our foreign policy is in the Middle East. Today Richard Falk, the special rapporteur for the UN in Gaza, states that the U.S. is complicit in Israel's "massive" violations of the Geneva Conventions that threaten wide famine and disease in the Palestinian population and that breed extremism. The international outrage over these conditions, Falk says, recalls the outrage over apartheid 20 years back. This is the true context for Burg's revelations; and yes the Obama train is leaving the station--which is to say that my country, having elected a black president, will be paying more attention, at last, to Israel's grievous and shocking treatment of a minority.

Avrum, you have opened such a critical conversation for the Jewish people with your writing and your thinking, not just in Israel but for American Jews as well. I thank you for that.

So much of our thinking about the world and about the future has become a hostage to our experiences of the past. If we remain captives to fear, obliged to view the world through the lens of past persecutions and horror, we will never adapt to the new realities of the present day and never be able to build a future of hope and optimism.

The election of Barack Obama has the potential to completely lead us to a future built on hope. Not only can the new President reestablish America as a pragmatic and positive player on the world stage, but he has the potential to help mobilize the international community to address the serious global challenges that lie ahead.

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It is with great honor that I join the conversation set forth here on TPMCafe by Avraham Burg. The Holocaust is Over: Let us rise from the Ashes is a courageous book that calls out for the healing of a people. For if one cannot be at peace with themselves how on earth can they be at peace with anyone else.

I learned about the struggles in the Middle East some twenty years ago while I was an intern in the office of Senator Edward M. Kennedy. As a budding national security scholar, I asked the good Senator why the US did not work closer with the Russians to contain nuclear weapons. His answer was not about nuclear weapons but Jewish emigration.

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Reading Avrum Burg's first post, and the comments following, it is difficult to know how to enter the conversation in a way that does not just excite over-exercised passions, or become an occasion to repeat all the things I (and others) have argued for during past months. So let me suggest a few questions:

1. Spinoza once wrote that peace is not the absence of violence but the presence of justice. Does experience of the holocaust, the trauma, not teach, among other things (more than other things), Spinoza's principle? And whose trauma, by the way? My dear friend, Ilona Karmel--a survivor of the Plashow death camp, who died eight years ago this week--used to scoff at young Israelis and American Jews who wanted to use her as a prop to preach Jewish exceptionalism. She was no easier on defenders of American military intervention abroad who saw Munich everywhere. "They have scars but no wounds," she said. By the way, Ilona also said, unforgettably, that there were times she "missed the camp": "Things were simple," she said, you could easily know good from evil, something she never experienced again.

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Bill Clinton's campaign genius, James Carville, was once a populist. He was quoted as saying "I do politics; I don't do government." Arcane matters of political economy he left to the best and the brightest -- folks like financial master of the universe Robert Rubin and Harvard (Harvard!) wunderkind Larry Summers. The best and the brightest. The very same people who can claim a liberal share of the blame for the collapse of the world economy and its leading financial institutions. Because they're so brilliant, didn't you know?

Now we have this nebbish, this shmendrik, one Steve Hildebrand, presuming to lecture the nation about public policy, a topic concerning which, as his post reveals, he ought to just shut his stupid face.

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The government is doing a lousy job helping distressed homeowners. And according to John Dugan, the Comptroller of the Currency, the little that's been done has had surprisingly little effect. Nearly 36 percent of homeowners holding mortgages whose terms were adjusted to give them more leeway defaulted on payments within three months, and almost 53 percent were behind on payments by six months.

What's going on? It's hard to know for sure, because the homeowners who have qualified for help so far were supposed to have been fairly good credit risks to begin with. My guess is the worsening economy is making it harder for just about all homeowners to pay their mortgages, and those who were teetering on the edge months ago -- although perhaps good credit risks before that time -- are now way under water. Two of the biggest culprits: Layoffs and fewer working hours. With far less money coming in, more and more people have to choose between paying their mortgages and trying to keep up with larger and larger credit card debt. They're trying to manage both while paying the medical bills and the food bills and energy bills, and they can't make it.

It wouldn't surprise me if many of these Americans were starting to look at the size of the bailouts of Wall Street and the bailout of the Big Three -- at the executives, well-paid professional employees, upscale creditors and shareholders, and even well-paid blue-collar workers, who are the major beneficiaries of this federal largesse -- and conclude that a fundamental principle of fairness is being violated.

These Americans aren't revolutionaries. To the contrary, they're deeply conservative. They've worked hard, but their hard work hasn't paid off. Some have tried to save, only to see their savings disappear. They're worried about the future and about their kids' futures. They never expected anything like this.

This is the angry soil in which populist backlashes can take root.

On December 9th, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York City will consider whether Bush Administration officials must answer for actions carried out against Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen. In September 2002, Mr. Arar was stopped by federal agents at JFK Airport, detained for days, and finally sent to Syria, where he was imprisoned in a grave-like cell for nearly a year and tortured. These officials argue that their conduct is not subject to review by the courts, largely because Mr. Arar's case implicates national security concerns.

The Administration has invoked national security to justify its decision to ship Mr. Arar to Syria and claims that national security concerns now preclude judicial review of that decision. This is hardly surprising, as the Bush Administration has frequently used "national security" to justify -- and avoid accountability for -- numerous illegal policies, such as warrantless surveillance of Americans, the denial of due process to detainees, and torture, including documented cases of waterboarding.

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The last two weeks have been unbelievable. I have seen the world -- Jerusalem, Milan, New York, Munich, Washington. So far, everywhere I went I witnessed the same conversation. There is a feeling, in all of these places, that a train is about to depart from a station. In America, there is a feeling that President-elect Obama has put an end to so many years of discrimination and oppression and that America is going to depart toward a new, much better world. In Italy, as in Germany, they are discussing the present, but thinking about the past -- how best to depart from the miseries caused by the political regimes of the 20th century and toward an open, pluralistic society which contains the contemporary "other," the non-European elements of society.

Soon I will be on my way home, back to Israel, and I ask myself -- are we going to depart for somewhere or are we doomed to live in the past, with our ghosts, never to be redeemed? I don't believe in this attitude. I always believed in the future -- not to say that the past is not important or that forgiving means forgetting but that Israel must get out of the bunker of trauma and depart toward the safe haven of trust.

So I wrote a book that stirred up a lot of controversy. My argument is simple: very soon our children will live in a world without living witnesses of World War Two. The Holocaust will become a memory rather than an experience. How do we depart from experience to memory, from trauma to trust, from the past to the future? This is what I would like discuss with you all because, for me, the essence of this journey is to listen to other people's overt and covert experiences and attitudes and develop mine from them.

This week, we'll be discussing Avraham Burg's new book The Holocaust is Over; We Must Rise From Its Ashes. Burg is the former Speaker of the Knesset in Israel (1999-2003), turned political dissenter, and the book is at once intensely personal-- using his own family history to think about the Jewish state today-- and significantly political. He writes in his intro post (to go up shortly):

My argument is simple -- very soon our children will live in a world without living witnesses. The Holocaust will become a memory rather than an experience. So how do we depart from experience to memory, from trauma to trust, from the past to the future?

Joining the conversation are: Philip Weiss, who blogs at www.philipweiss.org and is the author of American Taboo: A Murder in the Peace Corps; John Mearsheimer, a University of Chicago professor and author of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy; TPMCafe regulars Bernard Avishai, the author of Hebrew Republic and Jo-Ann Mort, the founder and CEO of ChangeCommunications; Daniel Levy, director of the Middle East Initiative at the New America Foundation, and a former adviser to the Israeli government; Jonathan Jacoby, a writer and former director of the Israel Policy Forum; Jeremy Ben-Ami, the executive director of jstreet.org, who served as Bill Clinton's deputy domestic policy adviser.

Stay tuned for Burg's first post.

"Change comes from me....That's my job, to provide a vision in terms of where we are going, and to make sure, then, that my team is implementing." -- President-Elect Obama

I keep hearing from friends who are unhappy about the overall feel of Barack Obama's Cabinet and White House staff choices. Too conservative. Too Clintonesque. Too typical Washington.

I understand that. I'm not crazy about all his choices (especially on the domestic side).

But, so far, I have no reason to believe that his instincts are anything but superior to my own, my friends, or the pundits in the blogosphere. Of course, I supported his candidacy even before Iowa. I supported it even before he decided to run so my confidence in him is no big surprise.

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As the tale of greed and stupidity that gave us the housing bubble and subsequent crash continues to unfold, it is becoming increasingly clear that the problem was not simply that the regulators were out to lunch. Some regulators saw the problems and wanted to take steps to rein in abuses but were prevented from doing so by the political power of the financial industry.

The best example of politics thwarting effective regulation was when Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, and Larry Summers prevented Brooksley Born, the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, from regulating credit default swaps in 1998. However, there are many other instances coming to light in which political interference obstructed efforts to stem questionable practices by the financial industry.

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