Deep Politics Monitor: July 25, 2010

Jul 25, 2010

Is College Education The Next Bubble Set To Pop?

Longwave's Ian Gordon shows how gold's war with paper runs in long cycles

from Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee - Exposing the long-term manipulation of the gold market:

12:24p ET Sunday, July 25, 2010

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:
Ian Gordon of the Longwave Group in British Columbia has just published a wonderful study showing the performance of gold against the Dow Jones Industrial Average going back 120 years. Gordon notes that "gold and paper are forever at war with each other" and that each is dominant over decades-long cycles. He argues: "To make money you either have to be invested in stocks or gold. You should never be invested in these two investment mediums at the same time." His charts bear him out and show that we're in the middle of a gold cycle with a long way to go. Gordon's study is contained in Longwave Group's subscription newsletter, "Winter Warning," but he has generously consented to GATA's sharing it with you here:

http://www.gata.org/files/LongwaveGroupReport-07-19-2010.pdf

_________--

Related: Gene Arensberg: Enormous and fast short-covering in gold

11:55a ET Sunday, July 25, 2010

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold (and Silver):

Gene Arensberg's new "Got Gold Report" finds enormous and fast short covering in gold by the large commercial traders and notable short covering in silver. Arensberg also argues that the big problem with manipulation of those markets is not the lack of trading position limits but the market concentration resulting from the exemptions granted by market regulators to so-called "bona-fide hedgers." You can find Arensberg's "Got Gold Report" at his Internet site here:

http://www.gotgoldreportsubscription.com/COTflash20100725.pdf
CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
______________

More: Gold Will Hit $5,000 an Ounce Long Term … But the Near-Term Profit Prospects Are Even Bigger

Longtime commodities guru Peter Krauth touched off a real media buzz earlier this year when he publicly predicted that gold would hit $5,000 an ounce in the next few years - a projection he stands behind.

But here's the irony.

While Krauth's prediction would represent a total return of about 320% over that multi-year span, he says the potential returns on some of the near-term profit plays he's looking at are even bigger.

"These near-term opportunities are significant because the companies that explore and/or produce gold are leveraged to the price of gold," Krauth said in an interview with Money Morning. "So a 10% to 20% rise in gold's price could cause the share prices of some of these firms to gain 20% to 60% - or more - in a matter of months."

The Death of Paper Money

As they prepare for holiday reading in Tuscany, City bankers are buying up rare copies of an obscure book on the mechanics of Weimar inflation published in 1974.

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard - Telegraph.co.uk
Published: 7:05PM BST 25 Jul 2010

Comment

Ebay is offering a well-thumbed volume of "Dying of Money: Lessons of the Great German and American Inflations" at a starting bid of $699 (shipping free.. thanks a lot).

The crucial passage comes in Chapter 17 entitled "Velocity". Each big inflation -- whether the early 1920s in Germany, or the Korean and Vietnam wars in the US -- starts with a passive expansion of the quantity money. This sits inert for a surprisingly long time. Asset prices may go up, but latent price inflation is disguised. The effect is much like lighter fuel on a camp fire before the match is struck.

People’s willingness to hold money can change suddenly for a "psychological and spontaneous reason" , causing a spike in the velocity of money. It can occur at lightning speed, over a few weeks. The shift invariably catches economists by surprise. They wait too long to drain the excess money.

"Velocity took an almost right-angle turn upward in the summer of 1922," said Mr O Parsson. Reichsbank officials were baffled. They could not fathom why the German people had started to behave differently almost two years after the bank had already boosted the money supply. He contends that public patience snapped abruptly once people lost trust and began to "smell a government rat".

Some might smile at the Bank of England "surprise" at the recent the jump in Brtiish inflation. Across the Atlantic, Fed critics say the rise in the US monetary base from $871bn to $2,024bn in just two years is an incendiary pyre that will ignite as soon as US money velocity returns to normal.

Morgan Stanley expects bond carnage as this catches up with the Fed, predicting that yields on US Treasuries will rocket to 5.5pc. This has not happened so far. 10-year yields have fallen below 3pc, and M2 velocity has remained at historic lows of 1.72.

As a signed-up member of the deflation camp, I think the Bank and the Fed are right to keep their nerve and delay the withdrawal of stimulus -- though that case is easier to make in the US where core inflation has dropped to the lowest since the mid 1960s. But fact that O Parsson’s book is suddenly in demand in elite banking circles is itself a sign of the sort of behavioral change that can become self-fulfilling.

As it happens, another book from the 1970s entitled "When Money Dies: the Nightmare of The Weimar Hyper-Inflation" has just been reprinted. Written by former Tory MEP Adam Fergusson -- endorsed by Warren Buffett as a must-read -- it is a vivid account drawn from the diaries of those who lived through the turmoil in Germany, Austria, and Hungary as the empires were broken up.

Near civil war between town and country was a pervasive feature of this break-down in social order. Large mobs of half-starved and vindictive townsmen descended on villages to seize food from farmers accused of hoarding. The diary of one young woman described the scene at her cousin’s farm.

"In the cart I saw three slaughtered pigs. The cowshed was drenched in blood. One cow had been slaughtered where it stood and the meat torn from its bones. The monsters had slit the udder of the finest milch cow, so that she had to be put out of her misery immediately. In the granary, a rag soaked with petrol was still smouldering to show what these beasts had intended," she wrote.

Grand pianos became a currency or sorts as pauperized members of the civil service elites traded the symbols of their old status for a sack of potatoes and a side of bacon. There is a harrowing moment when each middle-class families first starts to undertand that its gilt-edged securities and War Loan will never recover. Irreversible ruin lies ahead. Elderly couples gassed themselves in their apartments.

Foreigners with dollars, pounds, Swiss francs, or Czech crowns lived in opulence. They were hated. "Times made us cynical. Everybody saw an enemy in everybody else," said Erna von Pustau, daughter of a Hamburg fish merchant.

Great numbers of people failed to see it coming. "My relations and friends were stupid. They didn’t understand what inflation meant. Our solicitors were no better. My mother’s bank manager gave her appalling advice," said one well-connected woman.

"You used to see the appearance of their flats gradually changing. One remembered where there used to be a picture or a carpet, or a secretaire. Eventually their rooms would be almost empty. Some of them begged -- not in the streets -- but by making casual visits. One knew too well what they had come for."

Corruption became rampant. People were stripped of their coat and shoes at knife-point on the street. The winners were those who -- by luck or design -- had borrowed heavily from banks to buy hard assets, or industrial conglomerates that had issued debentures. There was a great transfer of wealth from saver to debtor, though the Reichstag later passed a law linking old contracts to the gold price. Creditors clawed back something.

A conspiracy theory took root that the inflation was a Jewish plot to ruin Germany. The currency became known as "Judefetzen" (Jew- confetti), hinting at the chain of events that wouild lead to Kristallnacht a decade later.

While the Weimar tale is a timeless study of social disintegration, it cannot shed much light on events today. The final trigger for the 1923 collapse was the French occupation of the Ruhr, which ripped a great chunk out of German industry and set off mass resistance.

Lloyd George suspected that the French were trying to precipitate the disintegration of Germany by sponsoring a break-away Rhineland state (as indeed they were). For a brief moment rebels set up a separatist government in Dusseldorf. With poetic justice, the crisis recoiled against Paris and destroyed the franc.

The Carthaginian peace of Versailles had by then poisoned everything. It was a patriotic duty not to pay taxes that would be sequestered for reparation payments to the enemy. Influenced by the Bolsheviks, Germany had become a Communist cauldron. partakists tried to take Berlin. Worker `soviets' proliferated. Dockers and shipworkers occupied police stations and set up barricades in Hamburg. Communist Red Centuries fought deadly street battles with right-wing militia.

Nostalgics plotted the restauration of Bavaria’s Wittelsbach monarchy and the old currency, the gold-backed thaler. The Bremen Senate issued its own notes tied to gold. Others issued currencies linked to the price of rye.

This is not a picture of America, or Britain, or Europe in 2010. But we should be careful of embracing the opposite and overly-reassuring assumption that this is a mild replay of Japan’s Lost Decade, that is to say a slow and largely benign slide into deflation as debt deleveraging exerts its discipline.

Japan was the world’s biggest external creditor when the Nikkei bubble burst twenty years ago. It had a private savings rate of 15pc of GDP. The Japanese people have gradually cut this rate to 2pc, cushioning the effects of the long slump. The Anglo-Saxons have no such cushion.

There is a clear temptation for the West to extricate itself from the errors of the Greenspan asset bubble, the Brown credit bubble, and the EMU sovereign bubble by stealth default through inflation. But that is a danger for later years. First we have the deflation shock of lives. Then -- and only then -- will central banks go to far and risk losing control over their printing experiment as velocity takes off. One problem at a time please.

Corporations Lobby For Private Debtors Prisons

From Survivalist News:

After the 2010 election corporations will launch an all out push for congress to institute some form of debtors incarnation where Americans are imprisoned and forced to work at slave wages to pay off their corporate creditors. This will finish the globalist agenda of reducing America’s working class to slave laborers on par with China.

In our modern era of debt servitude, a PR Push has been designed to reintroduce a serious discussion of debtors’ prisons as a sound solution. What goes beyond alarming is that the full-fledged return of debtors’ prisons might be seen as both appropriately terrifying, as well as a profitable investment opportunity and politically sound decision to be made by state governments struggling with their own looming bankruptcies, and a Federal government struggling politically with the concept of a jobless recovery that is not materializing.
A de facto debtors’ prison has already been largely accepted in the case of “deadbeat” parents when a failure to pay child support puts them in civil contempt of court. It is this civil contempt charge that is now beginning to take on an expanded definition to include those who owe for much smaller infractions. When a court order to pay a debt is issued and ignored, it then qualifies as a civil contempt of court. At that point, the judge becomes a literal dictator with the ability to imprison a person indefinitely for the violation. The Constitution explicitly prohibits incarceration for failure to pay debts, but it is the violation of a court order that gives judges free rein to impose draconian punishments. In this way, an end-run around the Constitution can become frighteningly commonplace.
America already has a record-high ratio of people in prison, with no signs of the trend reversing as private corporations like Wackenhut Corporation, referred to as a “Free Market in Human Misery,” have long been enlisted to turn government directives into shareholder profit. One might even deign to call it blatant fascism in its purest form, as government legislation leads offenders directly into private company coffers. The prison-industrial complex has already capitalized on government actions like The War on Drugs. A prime example is how The California Correctional Peace Officers Association helped fuel the prison-building boom as a cozy relationship was established on Capitol Hill through influence peddling.
Profiting from the suffering of the poor while bailouts and bonuses await the over-leveraged banksters, car companies, and state governments, sets up a prison-industrial complex with a class warfare component that is the domestic mirror of the military-industrial complex sent abroad. This domestic prison system seems to be the only industry left to build upon, and it is here that things become truly frightening. For the federally-owned prison system complex, Federal Prison Industries (UNICOR), more incarceration means a growing supply of cheap labor and a skewing of unemployment numbers, as these inmates are often doing jobs they couldn’t even find if they were job hunting on the outside. But it is the private prison system, with its web fully woven throughout the U.S. government, that stands to profit the most from the return of debtors’ admission.
The largest private prison conglomerate in the U.S. is Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), which controls more than 47% of all private prison and jail beds nationwide and is able to produce a 13-15% return annually on new real estate investments. Wackenhut (now subsumed into G4S, the largest security company in the world) was of course started by an FBI agent, George Wackenhut, who is famous for developing millions of dossiers on America’s “potential subversives” in the sixties, and was exposed as being an integral player within the shadow CIA.
These major security conglomerates are at the top of a growing pyramid of for-profit, international detention center operators that has Wall Street giants like Goldman Sachs simply fawning over the solid, long-term investment potential. Similar to war, when there is a profit to be made off of incarceration, only more incarceration can be expected to follow. The U.S. government certainly seems to be working hard to ensure that the numbers of poor continue to increase, as they are well aware that that programs designed to help the downtrodden are an abject failure every time. Furthermore, the massive government debts that must be repaid directly into the hands of the Federal Reserve-led banking cabal must lead us to an inescapable conclusion: More money is to be made from slavery in the United States, than from freedom.
Read Full Article Here: Activist Post: Our Future In Chains: The For-Profit Debtors’ Prison System.

We are seeing this slave labor being used right now as BP pays pennies on the dollar for inmate labor to clean up the oil disaster in the gulf even though there are millions of Americans out of work.

Hiring prison labor is more than a way for BP to save money while cleaning up the biggest oil spill in history. By tapping into the inmate workforce, the company and its subcontractors get workers who are not only cheap but easily silenced—and they get lucrative tax write-offs in the process.
Known to some as “the inmate state,” Louisiana has the highest rate of incarceration of any other state in the country. Seventy percent of its 39,000 inmates are African-American men. The Louisiana Department of Corrections (DOC) only has beds for half that many prisoners, so 20,000 inmates live in parish jails, privately run contract facilities and for-profit work release centers.Prisons and parish jails provide free daily labor to the state and private companies like BP, while also operating their own factories and farms, where inmates earn between zero and forty cents an hour.
Read Full Article Here: BP Hires Prison Labor to Clean Up Spill While Coastal Residents Struggle | The Nation.

The banking industry can no longer count on Americans to get into debt at an early age and spend the next 60 years maintaining corporate profits. For-profit debtors prisons utilizing American slave labor is the next big economic bubble.

Six Facts No War Supporter Knows: Largest Source of Revenue for the Taliban has Been U.S. Taxpayers.

by David Swanson

Global Research, July 25, 2010
War Is A Crime - 2010-07-24

This coming week, the House of Representatives is expected to vote on $33 billion for war. A majority of Americans opposes this, but a sizable minority of Americans supports it. No one who supports it can be aware of any of the following six facts.

1. For many months, probably years, at least the second largest and probably the largest source of revenue for the Taliban has been U.S. taxpayers. We are giving the Taliban our money instead of investing it in useful things at home or abroad. "WARLORD, INC.: Extortion and Corruption Along the U.S. Supply Chain in Afghanistan," is a report from the Majority Staff of the Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs in the U.S. House of Representatives. The report documents payoffs to the Taliban for safe passage of U.S. goods, payoffs very likely greater than the Taliban's profits from opium, its other big money maker. And this is neither new nor unknown to top U.S. officials. But it must be unknown to Americans supporting the war. You can't support a war where you're funding both sides unless you want both sides to lose. We lock people away for giving a pair of socks to the enemy, while our own government serves as chief financial sponsor.

2. Our top consumer of oil is the U.S. military. We don't just fight wars in areas of the globe that are coincidentally rich in oil, but fighting those wars is the single biggest way in which we burn oil. We pollute the air in the process of poisoning the earth with all variety of weaponry. According to the 2007 CIA World Fact Book, when oil consumption is broken down per capita, the U.S. military ranks fourth in the world, behind just three actual nations. There's no way to care about the environment while allowing the money that could create renewable energy to be spent instead on an operation whose destructiveness is rivaled only by BP. We could have 20 green energy jobs at $50 K each for what it costs to send one soldier to Afghanistan. We're fighting wars for the fuel to fight wars, even though the process is eating up the funds we could use to try to survive its side-effects.

3. Over half of every U.S. tax dollar is spent on wars, the military, and payments on debt for past wars and military spending. Here's a pie chart that breaks it down for you. If you're concerned about government spending, you can't just be concerned with the minority of it that is carefully funded with taxes and off-setting cuts elsewhere. You have to also consider the single biggest item, the one that takes up a majority of the budget, large chunks of which are routinely funded off the books, borrowed from China, and passed with so-called "emergency supplemental" bills of the sort now before the House of Representatives, the sole purpose of which is to keep the money outside the budget. Numerouseconomic studies have shown that investing in the military, even at home, does less for the economy than tax cuts, which do less for the economy than investing in education, energy, infrastructure, and other areas. Its wars or jobs, we can't have both. The labor movement has mostly (with some good exceptions) been silent on war spending, in part because jobs spending has been packaged into the same bill. Now it's not. Now the House is confronted with a bill that spends on war the money that is needed for jobs, for housing, for schools, for green energy, for retirement. Will advocates of these raise their voices this week?

4. A leading, and probably the leading, cause of death in the U.S. military is suicide. U.S. troops are killing themselves in record numbers. One central reason for this is likely that these troops have no idea what it is they are risking their lives, and taking others' lives, for. Can we expect them to know, when top officials in Washington don't? When the President's special representative to Afghanistan testified in the Senate recently, senators from both parties asked him repeatedly what the goal was, what success would look like, for what purpose the war went on. Richard Holbrooke had no answers. Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) told the Los Angeles Times: "A lot of folks on both sides of the aisle think this effort is adrift. A lot of folks you'd consider the strongest hawks in the country are scratching their heads in concern." Corker complained that after listening for 90 minutes to Holbrooke he had "no earthly idea what our objectives are on the civilian front. So far, this has been an incredible waste of time."

5. The $33 billion about to be voted on cannot possibly be needed to continue the war in Afghanistan, because it is exclusively to be used for escalating that war. The President was publicly pressured by his generals several months ago to begin an escalation, but Congress has yet to fund it. To the extent that it has been begun unfunded, it can be undone. CNN reports: "Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned senators in June that military operations will need to be reduced for the rest of the year unless Congress approves additional funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan." This is nonsense. If this escalation funding were blocked, the war would remain at the level it was at before. And that's if the Pentagon respects the authority of the Congress. The other alternative, openly indicated by Gates, is that the Pentagon will fund the escalation out of its standard budget. Congressman Alan Grayson has a bill called "The War Is Making You Poor Act" which would require that wars be funded out of the military budget, which would eliminate federal taxes on the first $35,000 anyone earned and reduce the national debt. How horrible would that be?

6. War would be the greatest evil on earth even if it were free. Watch this new video of a man whose father was shot and killed while sleeping in bed. More of our tax dollars at work. How many of these stories of what our military does can we write off? Our drones kill both civilians and "insurgents," as do our night raids and check points. Or, maybe not the check points. General Stanley McChrystal said that of the amazing number of people we've killed at check points, none of them have been any threat. And the damage lasts in the places we destroy. Look at this new report on the damage done to the children of Fallujah. This is not because U.S. soldiers aren't brave or their parents didn't raise them well. It's because these wars don't involve pairs of armies on battlefields. We're occupying countries where the enemies look like everyone except us.

Well, maybe our representatives know all of this and still fund wars because people who fund them tell them to. But what can we do about it? We vote whenever there's an election, or at least some of us do. Isn't that our role? What does this have to do with elections? It should have everything to do with them. When we call our congress members this week we should not just ask them to vote No on war money, we should demand it, and we should let them know that we will work to unelect them, even replacing them with someone worse (since you can't get much worse), if they vote for this money. And we should spend August rewarding and punishing accordingly. Here are 88 candidates for Congress this year who have committed to not voting a dime for these wars. They are from every party and political inclination. They should be supported.

If this war funding can be blocked for another week it will be blocked until mid-September and perhaps for good. If we can get closer to doing that than we have before, we will have something to build on. Just holding a straightforward vote in which war opponents vote No and war supporters vote Yes, no matter how close or far we are from winning, will identify who needs to keep their job and who doesn't. If most of the Yes votes are Republican, we will be able to confront the President with the opposition of his own party. We're moving toward peace.

Get resources from http://defundwar.org
FCNL has a toll-free number to call your representative: 1-888-493-5443. Use it.

David Swanson is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by David Swanson

US Professors Raise Doubts About Report on South Korean Ship Sinking

By Akiko Fujita
Voanews | Tokyo 09 July 2010

A new study by U.S. researchers raises questions about the investigation into the sinking of a South Korean navy ship. International investigators blamed a North Korean torpedo, raising tensions on the Korean peninsula.

Researchers J.J. Suh and Seung-Hun Lee say the South Korean Joint Investigation Group made a weak case when it concluded that North Korea was responsible for sinking the Cheonan.

Speaking in Tokyo Friday, the two said the investigation was riddled with inconsistencies and cast "profound doubt" on the integrity of the investigation. "The only conclusion one can draw on the basis of the evidence is that there was no outside explosion," Suh said. "The JIG completely failed to produce evidence that backs up its claims that there was an outside explosion."

Suh is an associate professor in international relations at Johns Hopkins University in the United States, where he runs the Korean studies program.

International investigators said in May that an external explosion caused the South Korean ship to sink last March, killing 46 sailors. The report said a North Korean-made torpedo caused the explosion.

Suh and Lee the cracked portion of the bottom of the ship does not show the signs of a large shock that are usually associated with outside explosions. They add that all the ship's internal parts remained intact and few fragments were recovered outside the ship.

"Almost all parts and fragments should've been recovered within about three to six meters within where the torpedo part was discovered," Lee says, "The fact that only the propeller and the propulsion part was discovered doesn't make any sense to me."

Lee is a professor of physics at the University of Virginia in the United States. Lee also points to a blue mark on a fragment of the torpedo to question the validity of the study. South Korean scientists say that part of the torpedo was marked "number one" in Korean, with a blue marker.
Suh and Lee say the writing would not have survived the intense heat of an explosion. "This can not be taken as evidence. Because any Korean, North and South, can write this mark," Suh said. "Also, it does not make sense that this blue ink mark could survive so freshly when the paint all around was all burned at the explosion."

Both researchers say their findings do not prove that North Korea did not sink the Cheonan. But they say it is irresponsible for the South Korean government to reach its conclusions based on an inconclusive study.

They are calling for a new international investigation to re-examine the Cheonan's sinking. They also want the United Nations Security Council to pressure the South Korean government and request an "objective and scientific" report before the council deliberates on the incident.

Israel's New Land Grab Master Plan

by Stephen Lendman

July 24, 2010

The new plan updates older ones, going back to the first, what Israeli historian Ilan Pappe documented in his 2006 book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, on David Ben-Gurion’s Plan D (Dalet in Hebrew), his final master plan following Plans A, B and C, what Palestinians call the Nakba, the catastrophe, commemorated annually to never forget.

By bombarding and besieging villages and population centers, destroying communities, and expelling or killing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, it planned an exclusive Jewish state, excluding Arabs by any means, including mass-murder, dispossession, and persecution, ongoing to this day, what Palestinians heroically resist.

It took six months to complete, expelling or slaughtering about 800,000 people, and destroying 531 villages and 11 urban neighborhoods in Tel-Aviv, Haifa, Jerusalem and other cities. It was barbarous ethnic cleansing, Palestinians shown no mercy, including women and children, yet it was just the beginning, much more yet to come, including new ethnic cleaning plans.

Old and New Master Plans

The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA) is an Israeli policy research organization, its president Dore Gold, a notorious right-wing extremist, hostile to democratic principles and Palestinian rights.

It’s recent report is titled "Demography, Geopolitics, and the Future of Israel’s Capital: Jerusalem’s Proposed Master Plan," explaining that on October 7, 2008, the District Planning and Construction Commission for the Jerusalem region proposed one, approved by Mayor Nir Barkat, then revised "to create and preserve a stable Jewish majority in the unified capital," assure the city always stays unified, and follows Ben-Gurion’s idea:

to "bring Jews to eastern Jerusalem at any cost. We must settle tens of thousands of Jews in a brief time. Jews will agree to settle in eastern Jerusalem even in shacks. We cannot await the construction of orderly neighborhoods. The essential thing is that Jews will be there."

In large numbers they’re displacing Palestinians, destroying their homes, seizing their land, and fulfilling Ben-Gurion’s dream to make Israel exclusively Jewish, Jerusalem its capital.

The city’s 1968 Master Plan recommended accelerated Jewish population growth. In 1973, Prime Minister Golda Meir planned to increase it by 3.7% by 1982. Various other plans followed.

Master Plan 2000 aimed to preserve a Jewish majority, its planners apprehensive about Arab population growth. As a result, they proposed "intervention tools" to counter it by:

a sufficient supply of housing by building new neighborhoods and reinforcing and increasing the density of veteran Jewish (ones), as well as adding places of employment and services on a quantitative and qualitative basis.

The June 2009 Arbel Report proposed annexing part of Ramat Rahel, located on a hilltop halfway between Jerusalem’s Old City and Bethlehem, to accommodate a growing Jewish population.

A July 2009 Master Plan for Transportation in Jerusalem revealed 13,300 newly approved housing units and another 15,000 at other stages of planning, suggesting an urgency to complete them and add more based on population growth forecasts.

Planned land seizures weren’t mentioned. However, Jerusalem’s Master Plan 2000 said the following:

"The most severe problem in eastern Jerusalem is the absence of a system to resolve land ownership. This problem, in combination with a deliberate policy by both nationalist and criminal elements, has led to a huge volume of illegal construction (without required permits) on lands that were intended for public purposes and a takeover of privately owned lands…. In order to solve the problem, a special judicial system should be established in the municipality to regulate the registration of land ownership" to assure Jews are preferentially treated.

Jerusalem Master Plan 2010

On June 28, Haaretz writers Akiva Eldar and Nir Hasson headlined, "Jerusalem master plan: Expansion of Jewish enclaves across the city," saying it calls for expanding Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, "a move largely based on construction on privately owned Arab property," meaning Palestinians will be removed to accommodate them.

On July 10, Haaretz writer Don Futterman headlined, "The Jerusalem Master Plan for destruction," saying it plans "to relocate as many Arabs as possible to the margins of the municipal boundaries; to promote overcrowding (in their areas) in the hope (they) will leave the city of their own accord," develop their own neighborhoods, encouraged by "accelerate(d) evictions and house demolitions."

The plan plays into both the settler-led campaign to (de-Arabize) the Old City, and the government’s efforts to make sure Jerusalem will never be the capital of a Palestinian state….

Will it work? Before he died, Edward Said said: "There is no way for Israel to get rid of Palestinians. (They) shar(e) the land that has thrust (them) together (and must do it jointly) in a truly democratic way, with equal rights for (all) citizen(s)," Jews, Arabs, Christians, and others. No master plan will prevent it.

Yet Israel’s new one includes accelerated home demolitions and land seizures, Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein telling the High Court that the government plans to apply the 1950 Absentees’ Property Law (ABL), authorizing the state to seize abandoned properties. At risk are thousands of acres worth billions of dollars, land legally held by Arabs.

Haaretz writer Akiva Eldar said:

"The state intends to assume control over properties of people who moved to 'enemy states’ during the War of Independence (now refugees denied the right of return), as well as structures in East Jerusalem," belonging to West Bank and Gaza residents.

They’ll be used for new Jewish developments besides others underway or planned, sparking protests met with attacks and arrests, a recent Silwan one assaulted with live fire, tear gas, and percussion grenades. One Palestinian lost an eye. A woman miscarriaged from tear gas, another also after her home was invaded.

Five Palestinians were arrested, including a 12-year old child. Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, Secretary General of al-Mubadara Palestinian National Initiative, accused Israel of attempting to Judaize East Jerusalem with "bulldozers, the expansion of the settlement units, (and) changing the demographic composition of the city to favor" Jews over Arabs, the final plan to make Jerusalem exclusively Jewish by any means.

Israel acts ruthlessly, does what it pleases with no regard for the law, internal or external pressure, or the rights and needs of indigenous Palestinians, being systematically removed for Jewish expansion, a Palestinian official saying it’s to "decapitate" East Jerusalem’s Arab identity by building thousands of Jewish-only apartments and homes on Arab-owned land.

They’re being squeezed into narrower spaces, currently confined to about 13% of the city, the rest seized since 1967 when East Jerusalem was occupied. Palestinian Authority (PA) official Ghassan Al-Khatib called it "more than a provocation. It is actually a decapitation of the peace process. (It won’t) withstand the reported plan to expand Jewish settlements in Jerusalem." Others say it’s a prescription for resistance and violence. A recently released blueprint calling for expanding Jewish neighborhoods on privately owned Palestinian land assures it, especially if as widespread as envisioned to Judaize the entire city.

On July 20, the International Middle East Media Center’s Brian Ennis headlined, "Palestinians in East Jerusalem Feeling Abandoned," given the "specter of more housing demolition and (Judaization) of East Jerusalem," the international community doing nothing to prevent it, or help Israeli Arabs — Israel’s Blacks and Latinos, lawlessly persecuted, shamelessly denied their rights.

Targeting Israeli Arabs

On July 20, London Observer writer Harriet Sherwood headlined, "Jaffa’s Arab haven of coexistence resists influx of Israeli hardliners," saying:

Its Ajami neighborhood, south of Tel-Aviv, has seen "every stone and blade of grass" bitterly contested, now "the centre of a struggle that touches on social, religious, nationalist, economic and legal questions and which — whatever the outcome — will inevitably result in further strife."

Until recently, it was one of Israel’s few areas where Jews and Muslims coexisted for decades, though never easily. However, destabilization and strife threatens to erupt if a 20-apartment development is approved, an Israeli High Court ruling imminent, the result of a case brought by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), claiming it discriminates against Arabs and non-religious Jews in favor of Zionist extremists demanding it go ahead to create "a religious community free from non-Jewish and secular influences," their own exclusive gated community.

Historian Sami Abu Shehadeh said if they succeed, "the (neighborhood) will be polarized. (People who) say Jaffa is a model of coexistence will be silenced." Judaization will assure it and encourage more in Israel, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

He called the whole neighborhood "a construction site. We — the Arabs — are being forced out again, but we have nowhere else to go." Building permits aren’t granted, and locals say 500 families have been issued eviction or demolition orders. Others got huge fines. The entire Arab population faces an uncertain future, like other Israeli Arabs, not wanted, denied their rights, and being systematically pressured to make way for Jews.

Another way is a proposed measure requiring they pledge loyalty to a "Jewish and Democratic state," mainly Palestinian men and women who marry Israeli citizens (an estimated 25,000), then seek citizenship on the basis of family reunification, the latter already denied without Interior Ministry approval, for most impossible to get.

On July 19, Jerusalem Post writer Herb Keinon said the measure hadn’t yet passed, contrary to other accounts. He called it a way to "deter Palestinians from asking for citizenship." The government said it’s only for "illegal residents," not Israeli Arabs, but if extremist Yisrael Beitneinu party officials prevail, including David Rotem, Chairman of the Knesset Constitution and Avigdor Lieberman, Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, all Israeli Arabs will have to pledge loyalty to a "Jewish, Zionist, and democratic State," its emblems and values, and perform military or equivalent service as a condition for a national ID card signifying citizenship and right to stay in the country legally.

Final Comments

Palestinians and Israeli Arabs have reason to worry, Haaretz writer Amira Hass providing more evidence in her July 21 article headlined, "IDF destroys West Bank village after declaring it a military zone," saying that the army demolished an entire Jordan Valley village after declaring it within a closed military zone, 55 structures and 120 farmers, workers, and their families left without homes in Farasiya. Earlier the Civil Administration cut off their water, and before that the military destroyed a distribution pipe from a nearby stream, what residents built for irrigation.

Last year, they were prohibited from connecting to wells belonging to Mekorot, Israel’s National Water Company, forcing them to use saltwater for their livestock and buy expensive private water for themselves, what most can’t afford.

B’Tselem photographer Atef Abu, arriving hours after the demolition, said "mattresses, pipes and broken furniture were lying on the ground in the debris."

On July 18, 10 Bardala village families (north of Farasiya) also got demolition orders, a farmer with 300 sheep "told to leave in 24 hours or his herd would be confiscated."

In Israel and throughout the Territories, millions of Palestinians are endangered, their lives and livelihoods threatened by Israel’s longstanding plan to Judaize all "Eretz Yisrael," no matter that indigenous Arabs lived there for centuries and have legal right to their homes and property.

No wonder Haaretz writer Gideon Levy sees Israel "sinking into a strident, nationalistic atmosphere and darkness is beginning to cover everything, (evidenced by) jingoism, ruthlessness and vengeance, (its extremist voices) now expressing its heart," Palestinians feeling the affects, collectively punished for being Muslims under Jewish domination — racist, lawless and merciless, for Levy, a "sign of how we have lost our senses and humanity," for historians, a prescription for self-destruction.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. Contact him at:lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site and listen to The Global Research News Hour on RepublicBroadcasting.org Mondays from 11AM-1PM US Central time, or visit the archive at

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