Recent History

$850,000,000- a somewhat conservative estimate of the expenditure needed to secure the nomination and the presidency. The campaign finance chair-Penny Pritzker, well known member of Chicago banking family, owner, among other entities, of the Hyatt Hotel chain worldwide. The Hyatt Hotel on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem occupies land seized from Palestinian landowners in the 1967 war. Penny Pritzker emerged from obscurity after the 2008 election when it was noted that she was being considered for the cabinet position of Secretary of Commerce. She declined the nomination. Henny Penny was the chairwoman of the Superior Bank from 1989 to 1994, a savings and loan institution which collapsed in July 2001. Superior was the succesor bank to another failed institution, the Lyons Savings bank of Chicago. The board members of Superior Bank were some of the first financial hegemons to concentrate on subprime lending principally on home mortgages. When Superior went belly up with an estimated loss of $350,000 to $1,000,000,000, its toxic mortgages were bundled up and sold to Bear-Stearns.As you might remember it was this institution that led right out of the gate in the stampede to insolvency currently known as the economic meltdown. It was shortly after the Superior fiasco that Henny hooked up with the young Illinois state representative through the agency of a Michael Nesbit, the head of Pritzker Realty and became the campaign finance chair of Yobama's U.S.Senate campaign in 2002(?) After winning the Senate seat, in a virtually unopposed campaign thanks to a lurid sex scandal that early on doomed his Republican opponent, Yobama, who had garnered a considerable amount of support for his pro-palestinian positions,supporting the right of return and the establishment of a unified Palestinian state among others, started veering quite sharply towards a decidedly Pro-Israel stance. This culminated in his significant policy address to the American-Israel Public Affairs Commitee in March of 2007, points of which were susequently reiterated and elaborated in a speech to AIPAC after he had apparently secured the Democratic nomination for president on June 4,2008. No stranger to the power of symbolism, Yobama delivered this speech on the anniversary of the 1967Arab-Israeli War. This address immediately ignited a firestorm of criticism from the Arab-Palestinian world, which had expected a more sympathetic treatment from Yobama due to his previous unqualified support of the Palestinian cause. Almost overnight, the candidate had not only disavowed his Palestinian supporters, among whom were numbered the distinguished scholars Edward Said and Rashid Khalidi of Columbia University, but had also made the unqualified support of the State of Israel a centerpiece of his foreign policy aspirations. Perhaps the most paramount evidence of this sea change was Yobama's assertion that he supported the establishment of a unified Israeli capital in Jerusalem, even though East Jerusalem is internationally recognised as an occupied zone not subject to any claims of annexation by the state of Israel. Most significantly, this is a view formally shared by the U.S. State Department and all past administrations. In addition the foundation of a Palestinian state is predicated upon the establishment of its capital in East Jerusalem, the disavowal of which in Yobama's AIPAC address might have led the chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat to say "Obama has closed all doors to peace" a view undoubtedly shared by the "moderate" Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas.It's interesting to note at this juncture that Yobama recieved the endorsement of AIPAC's point man in the House of Representatives, Rahm Emmanuel, the day after the speech. In respect of the Israeli invasionof the Gaza strip months later on the occasion of Yobama's election it can only be supposed that the incoming administration had given Israelthe green light for the terrible destruction which it subsequently unleashed on the largely defenseless inhabitants of the Gaza Strip. Emmanuel was rewarded with the position of White House Chief of Staff. The Israeli invasion was called off the day before Yobama's coronation. The symbolism was not lost on the palestinians I'm sure. As a post script, it should be noted that, as of this writing, five predator-drone attacks authorised by Yobama have killed upwards of 250 people in the tribal regions of Pakistan, the latest theater of the endless war proclaimed by the previous occupant of the White House. As the French say, the more things change the more they remain the same. Cowboy Jihad