Too Good!

Hat Tip to Sammy!

In (Sort of) Defense of Geithner

Timothy Geithner, Obama's pick for Treasury Secretary, is talking a good game in his nomination hearings before the Senate Finance Committee. He says that the next bailout should not favor large financial institutions the way the initial bail out did. What exactyly that means remains to be seen, but it's not Geithner's policy positions that have gotten him in hot water with the Senate. It's his inability to pay his taxes.

He faces questions over his recent payment of $34,000 in back taxes for Social Security and Medicare that he did not pay as a senior official of the International Monetary Fund from 2001 to 2003, including a small payment in 2004 after he left.

From what I have read, Geithner knowlingly withheld these payments after leaving the IMF. That's not good. Still, I can't help but feel a little sympathy for him. If the IMF structures its payroll anything like the United Nations I can attest that it is very difficult to ensure that all your taxes are paid. The UN, when I worked there, took a major tax out of your monthly paycheck. At the end of the financial year it would reimburse you (inevitbaly after a painfully long period of beraucratuic drag) with some of the funds with which to pay your U.S. taxes. The remainder of the money taken by the UN would then be kept by the organization and included into your country's dues to the organization. But, the money you received was not all you owed Uncle Sam. From what I recall, about half of your social security payments were not included in the money withheld by the organization (that money the UN just kept). Those payments had to then come out of pocket (something they didn't tell me when I signed on). Confused? I was.

I have no idea if the IMF, as an international aid organization, has as convoluted a tax system as the United Nations, but if it does I can sympathize with Mr. Geithner's current predicament. It's possible that he may have withheld payment because he thought it was rightfully owed by the IMF.

Of course all of this is based on assumption, I could be way off base. It's just that reading about about IMF backtaxes in the paper brought me back to those frustrating days of trying to figure out exactly how much I owed as an international civil servant.

Brown Can Stick Around

One of the highlights for me from an amazing inaugural day was the benediction by Rev. Joseph Lowery. Here is a guy who helped lead the Montgomery bus boycott, founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Dr. King and led the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery - a true soldier of the Civil Rights Movement - leading more than 2 million in prayer at the inauguration of the country's first black president. Extraordinary.

He even drew laughs from the crowd and President Obama with these lines: "We ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man, and when white will embrace what is right."

The passage riffs on a great tune by Chicago bluesman Big Bill Broonzy called "Black, Brown and White":



Here is the full benediction from Rev. Lowery:

I'm a Lebowski, You're a Lebowski

Happy Obama Inauguration!

I have serendipitously come into a new laptop just before the swearing in of president Obama. Will this mean a return to regular blog postings? Only time will tell. It does mean that I can wish everybody a happy Obamanaugurtion via our much neglected political forum.

Luckily, I'm back in Chicago for the big day. I plan to head out later this morning to a local bar to watch with some Chicagoans. Considering the fact that everyone is unemployed now, the bar should be packed!

That's right, today is all about the positive spin. In the coming months we will have numerous occasions to criticize and malign our Commander in Chief. But today the nation can breath a collective sign of relief that the reign of George Bush II is being put behind us.

Of course I can't help but be a little disappointed by the selection of Beyonce Knowels to sing at the inauguration. She already sang at George W. Bush's 2001 swearing in. There are even internet rumours circulating that she is a Republican. First Saddleback Preacher and now this?

But seriously, Beyonce's political beliefs are not my reason for feeling let down. I just think Leonard Cohen's distopian anthem of revolutionary justice is a little more appropriate for the times in which we live.

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Anyway, I'm off to the bar. Everyone have a great day!

Disgustingly Predicatble

Here's Robert Fisk on the Gaza invasion from an article on December 31:

If Israel indefinitely continues its billion dollar blitz on Gaza – and we all know who is paying for that – there will, at some stage, be an individual massacre; a school will be hit, a hospital or a pre-natal clinic or just an apartment packed with civilians. In other words, another Qana. At which point, a familiar story will be told; that Hamas destroyed the school/hospital/pre-natal clinic, that the journalists who report on the slaughter are anti-Semitic, that Israel is under threat, etc. We may even get the same disingenuous parallel with a disastrous RAF raid in the Second World War which both Menachem Begin and Benjamin Netanayahu have used over the past quarter century to justify the killing of civilians.

And Hamas – which never had the courage to admit it killed two Palestinian girls with one of its own rockets last week – will cynically make profit from the grief with announcements of war crimes and "genocide".

Here is the news today as reported in the New York Times:

GAZA — Israeli mortar shells killed as many as 40 Palestinians, among them women and children, outside a United Nations school in Gaza on Tuesday where they were taking refuge in the 11th day of the conflict. The Israeli military contended that Hamas fighters had fired mortars from the school compound, and United Nations officials called for an independent inquiry into the episode.

A Hamas Coup... What?

Just when you thought there was no way Bush could further insult your intelligence, here comes his weekly radio address, in which he observes that "18 months ago, Hamas took over the Gaza strip in a coup."

Let's all remember that Hamas was democratically elected to power. Bush, in fact, supported the elections. It wouldn't be a stretch to say that Hamas had more democratic legitimacy in the Gaza than G.W. did after his first "election." Considering the president's lame duck status, you might have hoped he would give the lies a rest in these final weeks, but that would be be too much to ask. This guy wants to go out in the same style he has governed for the past eight years.

As far as this Gaza mess is concerned, it feels like all we can do is watch on in horror as our media reports half-truths and Pro-Israel propaganda. I caught a media report before Christmas (courtesy of Harry Shearer) that the imprisoned Palestinians of Gaza had resorted to eating garbage, literal garbage, thanks to the Israeli embargo. So it appears that our noble allies in the region are bombing a people already made starving and destitute. Just as the embargo strengthened Hamas' hold on Gaza, so will this invasion lead to further radicalization of the occupied territories. The only logical conclusion is that further radicalization of the occupied territories is exactly what Israel is aiming for.

Happy New Year!