The announcement last week by the United States of the largest military aid package in its history – to Israel – was a win for both sides. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu could boast that his lobbying had boosted aid from $3.1 billion a year to $3.8bn – a 22 per cent increase – for a decade starting in 2019. Mr Netanyahu has presented this as a rebuff to those who accuse him of jeopardising Israeli security interests with his government’s repeated affronts to the White House. In the past weeks alone, defence minister Avigdor Lieberman has compared last year’s nuclear deal between Washington and Iran with the 1938 Munich pact, which bolstered Hitler; and Mr Netanyahu has implied that US opposition to settlement expansion is the same as support for the “ethnic cleansing” of Jews. American president Barack Obama, meanwhile, hopes to stifle his own critics who insinuate that he is anti-Israel. The deal should serve as a fillip too for Hillary Clinton, the Democratic party’s candidate to succeed Mr Obama in November’s election. In reality, however, the Obama administration has quietly punished Mr Netanyahu for his misbehaviour. Israeli expectations of a $4.5bn-a-year deal were whittled down after Mr Netanyahu stalled negotiations last year as he sought to recruit Congress to his battle against the Iran deal. In fact, Israel already receives roughly $3.8bn – if Congress’s assistance on developing missile defence programmes is factored in. Notably, Israel has been forced to promise not to approach Congress for extra funds. The deal takes into account neither inflation nor the dollar’s depreciation against the shekel. A bigger blow still is the White House’s demand to phase out a special exemption that allowed Israel to spend nearly 40 per cent of aid locally on weapon and fuel purchases. Israel will soon have to buy all its armaments from the US, ending what amounted to a subsidy to its own arms industry. Nonetheless, Washington’s renewed military largesse – in the face of almost continual insults – inevitably fuels claims that the Israeli tail is wagging the US dog. Even The New York Times has described the aid package as “too big”. Since the 1973 war, Israel has received at least $100bn in military aid, with more assistance hidden from view. Back in the 1970s, Washington paid half of Israel’s military budget. Today it still foots a fifth of the bill, despite Israel’s economic success. But the US expects a return on its massive investment. As the late Israeli politician-general Ariel Sharon once observed, ­Israel has been a US “aircraft carrier” in the Middle East, acting as the regional bully and carrying out operations that benefit Washington. Almost no one blames the US for Israeli attacks that wiped out Iraq’s and Syria’s nuclear programmes. A nuclear-armed Iraq or Syria would have deterred later US-backed moves at regime overthrow, as well as countering the strategic advantage Israel derives from its own nuclear arsenal. In addition, Israel’s US-sponsored military prowess is a triple boon to the US weapons industry, the country’s most powerful lobby. Public funds are siphoned off to let Israel buy goodies from American arms makers. That, in turn, serves as a shop window for other customers and spurs an endless and lucrative game of catch-up in the rest of the Middle East. The first F-35 fighter jets to arrive in Israel in December – their various components produced in 46 US states – will increase the clamour for the cutting-edge warplane. Israel is also a “front-line laboratory”, as former Israeli army negotiator Eival Gilady admitted at the weekend, that develops and field-tests new technology Washington can later use itself. The US is planning to buy back the missile interception system Iron Dome – which neutralises battlefield threats of retaliation – it largely paid for. Israel works closely too with the US in developing cyber­warfare, such as the Stuxnet worm that damaged Iran’s civilian nuclear programme. But the clearest message from Israel’s new aid package is one delivered to the Palestinians: Washington sees no pressing strategic interest in ending the occupation. It stood up to Mr Netanyahu over the Iran deal but will not risk a damaging clash over Palestinian statehood. Some believe that Mr Obama signed the aid package to win the credibility necessary to overcome his domestic Israel lobby and pull a rabbit from the hat: an initiative, unveiled shortly before he leaves office, that corners Mr Netanyahu into making peace. Hopes have been raised by an expected meeting at the United Nations in New York on Wednesday. But their first talks in 10 months are planned only to demonstrate unity to confound critics of the aid deal. If Mr Obama really wanted to pressure Mr Netanyahu, he would have used the aid agreement as leverage. Now Mr Netanyahu need not fear US financial retaliation, even as he intensifies effective annexation of the West Bank. Mr Netanyahu has drawn the right lesson from the aid deal – he can act against the Palestinians with continuing US impunity. - See more at: http://www.jonathan-cook.net/2016-09-19/palestinians-lose-in-us-military-aid-deal-with-israel/#sthash.fL4Eq28N.dpuf We Live in a Democracy for Dummies By Robert C. Koehler October 08, 2016 " Information Clearing House " - “This politics of fear has actually delivered everything we were afraid of.” Well, OK, let’s think about these words of Jill Stein for a moment, as the 2016 presidential race enters, oh Lord, its final month — and the possibility still looms that this country could elect a hybrid of Benito Mussolini and Jim Crow its next, uh, commander in chief. Politics of fear, indeed! Most of the people I know are going to vote for Hillary Clinton, and I get it. The other guy is the most unapologetic “greater evil” the Democrats have ever been blessed with. Everybody’s scared. Bernie Sanders, my guy, the force behind the Bernie Revolution that almost transformed, or reclaimed, the Democratic Party this year, said: “I know more about third-party politics than anyone. (But) this is not the time for a protest vote.” And Michelle Obama, speaking at a Clinton rally a few days ago, equated not voting at all with voting for a third-party candidate. She told the crowd, according to Bloomberg.com, that they could “help swing an entire precinct for Hillary’s opponent with a protest vote or by staying home out of frustration.” (And the headline on the Bloomberg story neatly summed up the media consensus on how democracy works: “Which States Can Gary Johnson and Jill Stein Spoil?”) A month to go and I find myself skewered with something bigger than frustration. It begins with the false, dead enthusiasm I hear in Hillary’s attempts to rally her base, the tepid “USA! USA!” she invokes as she praises America’s generals and its wars and its moral righteousness. She and Trump are running for president of the same illusion, and there’s something seriously wrong with this. It’s no accident that most of the focus this election season is on how bad the other candidate is. The rallying cry from both sides is: We have no choice. And I agree with those words, but attach a different meaning to them. We have no choice because we’re given no choice. We live in a permanent state of Democracy for Dummies: a complexity-free democracy, reduced to a game of winning and losing. The voters are spectators, not co-creators of the national future. No, the future is already predetermined, and it’s one of unquestioned military budgets and endless war. Andrew Bacevich , reflecting on the lameness of the first presidential debate last week, pondered a different scenario: a debate in which real questions are addressed. “Consider it,” he wrote, “the question that Washington has declared off-limits: What lessons should be drawn from America’s costly and disappointing post-9/11 wars and how should those lessons apply to future policy?” Can you imagine an actual, serious discussion of such a question? Can you imagine that the point of this discussion wasn’t to clobber and humiliate the other guy but rather to address a deep, unacknowledged national (and global) wound and begin the work of healing it? Such questions have been missing from the U.S. presidential elections since 1972, when George McGovern ran on a platform of ending the Vietnam War. In the 44 years since, we’ve gotten grotesquely used to campaigns about far, far less than that — with the mainstream media acting as the bouncers, keeping impertinent questions, and candidates, out of the pseudo-news. This year, with two extremely unpopular major-party candidates vying for the job of president, the media have been more cynically dismissive than ever of third-party intruders, a.k.a., spoilers. And of course, any third-party vision of the future is idealistic treacle, not something to actually talk about. So it is in this context that I bring Jill Stein and the Greens back into the discussion: “All the reasons you were told you had to vote for the lesser evil,” she said last June, in a Democracy Now interview “— because you didn’t want the massive Wall Street bailouts, the offshoring of our jobs, the meltdown of the climate, the endless expanding wars, the attack on immigrants — all that, we’ve gotten by the droves, because we allowed ourselves to be silenced. You know, silence is not what democracy needs. . . . “It’s time,” she said, “to forget the lesser evil, stand up and fight for the greater good like our lives depend on it, because they do.” If you’re not a Trump supporter, you may well be someone caught between the fear of Trump and the longing for a political process truly engaged in the creation of a compassionate, sustainable future. Is voting Green the way to go? I don’t know, but I definitely do not believe shutting the Green Party’s presidential candidate and platform out of the discussion is the way to go. The Green platform, as outlined recently by David Cobb, Stein’s campaign manager and 2004 Green Party presidential candidate, includes such items as: transitioning to 100 percent renewable energy (and creating millions of jobs in the process); ending mass incarceration; creating a Truth and Reconciliation Commission “to understand and eliminate the legacy of slavery”; ending our current wars and drone attacks, closing our 700-plus foreign military bases and slashing military spending by at least 50 percent; taking the lead on a global treaty to halt climate change. There’s plenty more, but this cuts to the heart of it. The media consensus on such a platform begins and ends, no doubt, with rolled eyeballs. The unspoken message is: This stuff’s for later. We’ll start addressing it in 2020. http://commonwonders.com