Peter Sellers (left) as Dr Strangelove from Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr Strangelove and (right) Brett H McGurk
Sixty years after Kubrick’s film, meet the U.S.’s real Dr. Strangelove
Originally published: Morning Star Online on October 4, 2024 by Solomon Hughes (more by Morning Star Online) | (Posted Oct 07, 2024)
STANLEY KUBRICK made Dr Strangelove sixty years ago.
This black comedy is old enough to be filmed in black and white, but remains a compelling film because the characters seem to recur in real life: like Strangelove himself, the sinister adviser who pushes a horrible, heartless plan of war and death on a hapless president. Or General Ripper, the macho military man who goes a bit “funny in the head.” And, of course, Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, representing the British, who flap about in a vague, posh way while being dragged along by U.S. military adventures.
It’s fairly common for U.S. presidents to have a “Strangelove” figure: many thought he was based on Henry Kissinger, who “Strangeloved” for successive presidents, although he was actually drawn from earlier characters including Cold War “intellectual” Herman Kahn.
President George “Dubya” Bush was so hapless that he had several “Strangelove” type figures to dream up the Iraq War, including Dick “shot his own best friend in the face” Cheney and Don “known unknowns” Rumsfeld.
Joe Biden has a kind of low-wattage Dr Strangelove figure, Brett McGurk, who helped persuade the president to back Israel’s invasion of Lebanon.
McGurk was just a lawyer who got into U.S. politics by being a judicial clerk. He has no direct military experience, but he became a military adviser to George “Dubya” Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and now Biden, showing that the Strangelove-y military bureaucracy transcends supposed political divisions. Bombing foreigners is bipartisan in the States.
McGurk grew his career as a military bureaucrat via the Iraq war–that is to say he climbed a ladder of disasters, although it was Iraqis who suffered while he raised himself higher.
McGurk was a legal adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq from 2004 on. The Coalition Provisional Authority was the colonial-style administration the U.S. imposed on Iraqis after “liberating” them from Saddam.
The “laws” McGurk advised on were frankly disgusting, like “Coalition Provisional Authority Order 17” which exempted all the U.S. and British mercenaries from any Iraqi laws, so they could kill without consequence.
Other laws gave the Authority a huge sum of Iraqi cash, known as the Development Fund for Iraq, or pushed privatisation so Western contractors could come and take over Iraqi services. These laws helped U.S. firms squeeze vast sums out of Iraq, while leaving the “liberated” population powerless.
McGurk then drafted Iraq’s “interim constitution” which used a “divide and rule” tactic of institutionalising sectarian Shia-Sunni splits into Iraqi politics. This exacerbated a violent civil war, leading to many deaths, but the U.S. thought this a price worth paying: As long as Iraqis didn’t unite against the U.S. occupier, they were happy.
McGurk was then one of the advisers behind the 2007 “Surge,” one last attempt to flood Iraq with more U.S. troops to try control the multiple insurgencies faced by the occupation-backed government.
Many U.S. politicians patted themselves on the back claiming the Surge “stabilised” Iraq, but the continued attempt to shape Iraq with U.S. firepower rather than handing over actual power to Iraq’s own people just led to new, and more nihilistic reactions in the region, like Isis.
McGurk’s career was formed by the failures in Iraq, as the U.S. tried to impose its will on Iraq’s people. He was part of repeated attempts to try shape the country by U.S. firepower in favour of U.S. corporations, leading to years of chaos and bloodshed.
So it is no surprise that as Biden’s “ National Security Council co-ordinator for the Middle East and North Africa,” he is backing Israel’s attempts to impose its will on the Palestinian, and now Lebanese, people using U.S.-supplied firepower.
I think understanding McGurk’s role will also help clear up a fairly common misunderstanding about the U.S. relationship with Israel.
McGurk’s general advice is that Biden should rely on “partnerships” in the Middle East, both with Israel and with authoritarian regimes including Saudi Arabia and Egypt: the U.S. is not always strong enough to permanently “project power” into the region–as the Iraq war ultimately showed.
So instead it must rely on local strong powers and “regional strong men.” Broadly speaking, the United States wants to press down their main regional challenger, Iran, and make sure the people of the “Arab Street” don’t give them a load of trouble.
So the U.S. does deals with, sells (or gives) arms to, and occasionally sends U.S. fighter planes to support, their “partners” in the region–which could be Saudi, or Egypt or Israel.
It is for this reason McGurk reportedly privately told Israel that the U.S. would support Israel’s missile attacks and invasion of Lebanon against Hezbollah targets: the U.S. is enthusiastic about Israel going to war with a group they see as a proxy for the U.S. regional enemy, Iran.
At the same time, McGurk has been promoting a “peace deal” for Gaza, where Israel joins up with the Saudis to impose a peace on the Palestinians, one where the war ends and the Palestinians get a sort of well-funded “reconstruction” but settle for a subordinate territory under heavy Saudi-Israeli influence.
The former, the war in Lebanon, is happening. The latter might be a bit of a U.S. pipe dream.
But what this does show is the U.S. is genuinely enthusiastic about Israel fighting their joint enemies–“Iran and Iranian proxies”–but is not super happy about Israel killing loads of Palestinians; although they can definitely put up with it, or might even cynically hope the IDF “gets it done sooner rather than later.”
Many on the left think Israel has lobbied and pushed the U.S. political system to the point where Israel has “captured” the U.S. And while this lobbying is real, the bigger truth is that the U.S. political establishment really sees Israel as a kind of “regional strongman,” a cat’s paw they can rely on to fight their perceived enemies.
The deal is that the U.S. arms Israel to do the US’s bidding, rather than because the U.S. is doing Israel’s bidding.
https://mronline.org/2024/10/07/sixty-y ... rangelove/
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Patrick Lawrence: Powerlessness
October 7, 2024
America’s political elites are not powerless to restrain the rogue Israeli regime: They are powerless to act against the grotesque lobby, led by but not limited to AIPAC, to which they have sold themselves.
No Pride in Genocide protest in Washington on Sept. 7. (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
By Patrick Lawrence
ScheerPost
Let us begin with some facts of the cold, hard kind concerning conditions in Gaza and the West Bank after a year of terrorist Israel’s daily assaults on the Palestinian populations in both places. These statistics derive from a World Bank report issued this month, “Impacts of the Conflict in the Middle East on the Palestinian Economy.” They cover conditions through March; we can confidently conclude things have since worsened.
“Eleven months into the conflict in the Middle East, the Palestinian territories are nearing economic freefall, amidst a historic humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip,” the report begins. “Official data reveals a 35 percent decline in real GDP in the first quarter of 2024 for the Palestinian territories overall, marking its largest economic contraction on record. The conflict has brought Gaza’s economy to the brink of total collapse, with a staggering 86 percent contraction in Q1–2024.”
In Gaza, 1.9 million people have been displaced and more or less everyone now lives in poverty, the bank reports. We already know about the hospital bombings and the murders of administrators, doctors and nurses; now we learn that 80 percent of primary care centers no longer function.
Up to 70 percent of farmland has been damaged or destroyed, “pushing nearly 2 million people to the edge of widespread famine.” The education system has collapsed. “All 625,000 school-aged children of Gaza have been out of school since October 7, 2023,” the World Bank says.
As most Palestinians well and grimly understand, the Israelis intend to make the West Bank another Gaza and are simply attempting to attract less attention as they do so.
The West Bank economy contracted by only — “only” — 25 percent in this year’s first quarter. The bank puts unemployment at 35 percent, primarily because post–Oct. 7 checkpoints and roadblocks make getting to work difficult, if not impossible, and because Palestinians are now barred from commuting to jobs in Israel.
Bezalel Smotrich, the Netanyahu regime’s fanatical finance minister, has taken to withholding tax funds Israel collects on the Palestinian Authority’s behalf, sending the West Bank into a deficit the bank predicts will come to nearly $2 billion this year.
What has any one of us been able to do to stop the rampage that has produced these conditions? This is my question.
Gilles Paris, a longtime reporter and now columnist at Le Monde, considered the realities facing Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank in a commentary published this week under the headline, “The losers of the Gaza war are those whose powerlessness has become de facto acceptance.”
Apart from all the World Bank stats, he also notes a U.N. Environment Program study published in June that concludes the Palestinians of Gaza now live under or atop 39 million metric tons of rubble and will need at least a decade to dig out of it.
The Gilles Paris piece caught my eye because the state of powerlessness has been much on my mind since Israel began its genocide on Oct. 8, 2023.
There is no question Israel’s inhuman conduct toward the Palestinian people has revealed, in rip-off-the-veil fashion, the impotence of many people and constituencies. But which people, which constituencies? And what can be done about it? Let us take care to consider these questions scrupulously.
As Gilles Paris sees it, the powerless losers in the current West Asia crisis are the American leadership — he names President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and C.I.A. Director William Burns — along with the European powers and the Arab regimes that signed the Abraham Accords four years ago hoping to normalize with the Zionist state.
They have all suffered damaged images and reputations. None succeeded in stopping the Israelis’ atrocities. They have all suffered “humiliation upon humiliation,” as Paris puts it. But he takes too much at face value, it seems to me, and so makes a critical error of judgment.
It is true that Benjamin Netanyahu has emerged this past year as an out-of-control sociopath, and I am going by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the good old DSM. He is aggressive, given to violence, isolated, driven by irrational compulsions, indifferent to others, utterly lacking in empathy. If you study his face you detect the features of a crazed, maniacally possessed man. He has acted, since the events of Oct. 7, with near-total impunity.
The ‘Collective Biden’
Biden’s Cabinet meeting on Sept. 20. (White House, Cameron Smith)
But the thought that Biden and his people “proved incapable of preventing the disaster,” as Gilles Paris puts it, is a preposterous fiction. I would have thought a journalist of his standing could see as such. “The collective Biden” — a wonderful term the Russians have used since the president’s mental infirmities make it impossible to tell who is running the show — never had any intention of stopping the Israelis. All paying-attention people know this.
As Brett Murphy at ProPublica reported this week, when two State Department reports concluded in the spring that Israel was blocking humanitarian aid from Gaza, Blinken went to Congress to testify,
“We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance.”
The two official findings — from the Agency for International Development and the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration — should have required the Biden regime to freeze nearly $830 million in weapons aid to Israel. Blinken dumped his own people out of the limo.
Is this a man or an administration trying and failing to prevent Israel’s campaign of terror?
It is true, as Gilles Paris asserts, that the collective Biden has proved powerless even to attenuate Netanyahu’s madness, just as the Biden White House, whoever is making its decisions, will not moderate it now as Israeli aggression accelerates in the West Bank and lately against Lebanon. But it is vitally important to get this question of powerlessness right if we are to understand our predicament.
America’s political elites are not powerless to restrain the rogue Israeli regime: They are powerless to act against the grotesque lobby, led by but not limited to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, to which they have sold themselves.
In late September the Israelis opened in Lebanon another theater in what Netanyahu describes as “the seven-front war” he plans. As that was happening, Middle East Eye quoted Amichai Chikli, Israel’s minister for diaspora affairs, calling for the occupation of southern Lebanon on the argument that Beirut has “failed to exercise its sovereignty.”
There is no sign the Biden regime will raise any objection as Israel aggresses in Lebanon, another of its wanton provocations. We must now consider whether “the Jewish state’s” near-total impunity, as it has appeared to date, is in fact limitless impunity — impunity without end.
The Truly Powerless
Demonstrators in London on Nov. 4. calling for an end to the Israeli genocide in Gaza and an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestine. (Alisdare Hickson, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Once we grasp the extent to which the executive and legislative branches in Washington have sold U.S. policy to AIPAC and other influence-mongering groups serving in the Zionist state’s behalf, we are face-to-face with powerlessness as it is.
The true powerlessness is ours. This is what we have to think about.
From the comment thread appended to a randomly selected column, “The War Party Makes Its Plans,” published in this space and reproduced in Consortium News, I choose the remarks of a few readers representative of various shared views.
From Lois Gagnon, Sept. 20, 2024, at 17:15:
“At what point do the people of the U.S. and its colonies decide they’ve had enough of this insane brinkmanship and call for a national strike until these lunatics step back, concede defeat, call for an immediate ceasefire and negotiations? Nothing less is acceptable. They are terrorizing the whole of humanity to further their imperialist agenda that only benefits a tiny oligarchy.”
From “Steve,” Sept. 21, 2024, at 11:56, in response to Lois Gagnon:
“Never.
FOMO is real. Fear of Missing Out on that next promotion, or that next invite to a cool kids’ party, or of being ostracized by people you thought were your friends has paralyzed Western society. Just look at what has happened with families and friends freezing out members because of political beliefs since 2016, or because of unwillingness to take a vaccine in 2020, or because of lack of support for war in Ukraine, or lack of support for Israel’s war in Gaza. Social media has driven the world mad over the last decade. People once used to be able to put political or religious differences aside, but now everything has to become a Manichean decision. You are either with me or I will cut you out of my life.”
From Cypher Random, Sept. 21, 2024 at 17:53:
“I’d love to think it could happen, but we are about to have an election where, just like in the last election, well over 95% of Americans will vote for candidates that support war.
There’s not even a hint of a peace party in this country. The only thing that can be found is warmongers who tactically say that they are against a particular war. Or the Obama tactic of complaining that the war is being mismanaged and that they can do better. All such anti-war candidates would of course give even more money to the military. But, in America, a Partner for Peace is not anywhere in sight. When they tally the votes for this election, they will find War with about 98–99% and Peace with maybe 1%….
In an election with uncertainty about whether an even bigger war might erupt even before the computers announce the victor, that is how America is going to vote…. Nobody proposes big cuts to the military for prosperity at home. A candidate proposing Peace would get stoned by the mob….
President Kennedy once gave a Peace Speech. One can still find it on YouTube, or at least you could the last time I looked. The Dems might have classified it as Russian Propaganda by now. But he did make such a speech. JFK never got a chance to see if that might have been a popular way to run for re-election….”
This is what powerlessness sounds like in America in the early autumn of 2024, less than a month before those who vote will choose a new president. It is by turns principled, determined, bitter, cynical, at times confused in its thinking, nostalgic for what once was but no longer is.
These three, and I quote them because there are so many like them, look at the political landscape this autumn and see no one standing for election, other than honorable fringe candidates, who comes even close to representing their aspirations.
I am sure there are many different views of the Gaza crisis, Israel and the Palestinians abroad among Americans. I am not sure how many people who still vote would choose an antiwar, anti-genocide president were one on the ballot this Nov. 5.
I am absolutely sure that, setting aside the impossible prospect of a partner for peace, as Cypher Random would put it, whoever is elected in a few weeks’ time will take more or less no interest in the sentiments and aspirations of Americans as he or she proceeds with the business of making war.
This is one of the realities of powerlessness in America. The nation’s political institutions and its political process are no longer responsive to those they are supposed to serve — those who own them, indeed.
The elites purporting to lead the United States, and to speak and act in Americans’ name, have fully participated in Israel’s brutalities these past 11 months, and in so doing debase America’s morality and its very humanity — making Americans complicit, indeed, in war crimes.
We have watched for nearly a year as the violence, torture, suffering and death have proceeded. And now, as dismal reminders of our impotence, we read of the results, the faits accomplis, in World Bank and U.N. reports.
I have long thought, having lost faith in the political process many years ago, that ours is a time — and there have been many such times in America’s past — when people need to form genuine social and political movements well outside this process to find their ways forward.
“A ’60s on steroids,” as a late friend from the old antiwar days once put it. Some of those readers quoted above seem to tilt in this direction. But then comes the pessimism: No, that sort of scene is not possible any longer.
Dynamics of Dissidence
The New York Times ran a remarkable piece in this line in its Sept. 21 editions under the headline, “How the Powerful Outmaneuvered the American Protest Movement.” Zeynep Tufekci is a professor at Princeton, where she claims the study of social movements as her expertise. Reviewing the preparations universities now make to preclude protests and the ineffectual demonstrations at the Democratic convention in Chicago last month, she writes, “Protesting just doesn’t get results anymore. Not the way it used to. Not in that form. It can’t.”
And then:
“Those in power have figured out how to outmaneuver protesters: by keeping peaceful demonstrators far out of sight, organizing an overwhelming police response that brings the threat of long prison sentences, and circulating images of the most disruptive outliers that makes the whole movement look bad.
It works. And the organizers have failed to keep up.”
And a little further, Tufekci’s coup de grâce:
“Hell, no, we won’t go! The whole world is watching! No justice, no peace! R.I.P. the era when big protest marches, civil disobedience and campus encampments so often changed the course of history. It was a good run, wasn’t it?”
It is a good thing Professor Tufekci is not an organizer or a leader of anything of importance, so exuberantly does she celebrate what she takes to be the end-of-history triumph of power — power, the topic from which she flinches in the predictable way of most liberals, in this case power as repression.
Tufekci’s training is in computer programming. There is no evidence in this piece, none, that she has any understanding of the dynamics of dissidence, as I may as well call it. Where would we be, I have to wonder, if some new university rules and more rows of police barricades were sufficient, as Tufekci seems to think, to extinguish any idea of worth, any commitment to a cause that insists on itself because its time is imminent?
I credit Tufekci, though, for suggesting various social factors that make the impressive movements of the past seem so distant, impossible acts to follow.
Consumer capitalism is vastly more advanced than it was during the “Hell, no” days. Neoliberal orthodoxies are far more prevalent, economic insecurities much greater. The “me decade,” so brilliantly explicated in the late Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism (Norton, 1979), came but never went.
Ours, in short, is a different and diminished consciousness. Our dependence on technological devices has advanced a social atomization that was evident well before Apple put its first iPhone on the market. Somewhere along the post–1960s line, people took on the idea that right-thinking social movements are not to countenance either hierarchy or authority. It is childish. Nothing gets done without both.
These matters have a lot to do with what I take to be a sense of powerlessness prevalent among many of us as one violent crisis after another unfolds before our eyes, the worst of them threats to humanity itself, and no effective reply seems available.
The sensation of powerlessness, as I have argued previously, is a primary source of depression. But it is almost always an illusion. To escape it one need only take the next logical step after an honest appraisal of circumstances as they are. This may be an advance of a few inches or of many miles. But with it, one is in motion, one has begun to act. One is still alive.
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/10/07/p ... rlessness/
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ISRAEL’S BOND SALE TO AMERICANS – HOW TO STOP THE BIG STEAL
by John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with
Just days before Iran and Arab forces launched their October 1 operation to expose Israel’s military vulnerabilities, four Palestinian Americans launched the most serious threat to Israel’s survival in the economic war that is under way in parallel.
On September 24 they filed an 89-page brief in a Florida state court to declare illegal US financing of Israel’s war against Palestine through the purchase of Israeli government bonds with American taxpayer money. Their target is $700 million worth of Israel bonds purchased by the Palm Beach County treasury of Florida on the order of a single man, the county’s chief financial officer Joseph Abruzzo.
Starting in September 2023, one month before Hamas launched its break-out from Gaza, Abruzzo signed a purchase of $40 million in Israel bonds. Then from October 10 through March 2024 Abruzzo used county taxpayer funds to buy $660 million worth of securities the Israeli government was issuing to cover its warfighting costs.
Altogether, the Israeli plan is to raise at least $58 billion in new debt this year, with an increasing proportion of this debt to be covered from the US where Goldman Sachs and Bank of America are placing the bonds with small-town officials like Abruzzo.
In Abruzzo’s case, the court papers relate, “Palm Beach County is currently the world’s largest investor in Israel Bonds due to the Defendant’s [Abruzzo] $700 million dollar investment in Israel bonds. These $700 million dollars, sourced from Palm Beach County taxpayers’ property taxes, are being poured into a foreign economy that has an increased risk of default. Defendant purchased $700 million dollars of Israel Bonds amidst a housing crisis in Palm Beach County, an education crisis, and a funding shortfall of $732 million dollars in Palm Beach County’s budget that is leading to several capital-improvement projects such as athletic centers, parks, animal shelters, and bridges to be either delayed or cancelled. At the time the $732 million dollar shortfall in Palm Beach County’s budget was announced, Defendant had already invested $160 million dollars in Israel Bonds.”
After his own budget deficit and treasury debt were announced, Abruzzo “invested an additional $540 million dollars in Israel Bonds.”
In his public justification, Abruzzo told the Miami press on October 10: “I am proud to show solidarity with the people of Israel and make Palm Beach County the first county in the nation to increase its investment in Israel Bonds following their declaration of war against Hamas.” Six months later, Abruzzo attacked critics of Israel in the Democratic party as it began the presidential election campaign. “Do I hear, especially from the far-left wing of my Democratic party, concerns about investing in Israel? Yes. Are the public leaders in D.C. of the Democratic Party condemning support for Israel? Yes. . . But I would say to them, we’re not going to be deterred. They need to back off and we need to stand united with our greatest ally, Israel.”
At the same time Abruzzo has claimed: “everything I do financially is, down to the penny, putting personal feelings aside,” Abruzzo said. “None of my purchases was done for a political purpose whatsoever. It’s the dollars and cents and getting the most we can for taxpayers. It’s all economic driven.”
Abruzzo has also tweeted that “if we don’t balance the federal budget and curb spending, our nation’s future will be unrecognizable. With interest payments on the national debt now exceeding $1 trillion, the urgency for fiscal responsibility should have been addressed…”
Between supporting Israel with Florida state funds and meeting his county and state taxpayer needs, Abruzzo says Israel should come first. “We must prioritize Israel’s security, not reward nations that enable terrorism and extreme hatred towards the United States. At the same time, let’s focus on helping Americans at home—like the people of North Carolina and Florida still struggling after recent disasters. U.S. aid should reflect these priorities: support our allies and take care of our own.”
The Palestinian American court challenge declares Abruzzo has been lying about his domestic priorities, and that his Israel bond buying is illegal under the Florida state constitution, several state laws, and Palm Beach County policy. “Defendant’s [Abruzzo] investments in Israel Bonds are putting the county’s funds at risk and are ignoring vital local needs… Notwithstanding any other law, when deciding whether to invest and when investing public funds pursuant to this section, the unit of local government must make decisions based solely on pecuniary factors and may not subordinate the interests of the people of this state to other objectives, including sacrificing investment return or undertaking additional investment risk to promote any non-pecuniary factor. The weight given to any pecuniary factor must appropriately reflect a prudent assessment of its impact on risk or returns… Defendant’s Investments in Israel Bonds on and after October 10 Violated His Fiduciary Duty, Local Investment Standards, and The Florida Trust Code as Defined by Florida Statutes 218.415, 518.11, 736.0801, 736.0802, 736.0803, and the Palm Beach County Investment Policy.”
The lawsuit asks the court “[to rule] that Defendant’s role in the Israel Bonds Government, Industry, and Financial Services Leadership Group violates Defendant’s duty of impartiality. Order Defendant to terminate his role in the Israel Bonds Government, Industry, and Financial Services Leadership Group. Permanently enjoin Defendant from investing in Israel Bonds while the war in Gaza is ongoing, as this poses an economic threat to Palm Beach County’s general fund and endangers Palm Beach County taxpayers.”
The court papers do not accuse Abruzzo of personal corruption in his contacts with Israeli bond salesmen, and there is no record of the contacts Abruzzo has had with the bond placement banks, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America, or with Israeli government agents — except for an email and letters of receipt from the Development Corporation for Israel, the bond issuer, after Abruzzo had paid over the Palm Beach money. An archive of emails and other evidence, indicating inducements to local officials from the Israelis, including the Florida state chief financial officer but not Abruzzo, have been reported here.
There is no also no mention in the court papers of Abruzzo’s re-election campaign. November 5 is his election day.
Local press reports indicate, however, there has been a surge in the number of Jewish voters in Abruzzo’s county constituency since he was first elected to the state legislature, and then comptroller in November 2020. A local rabbi invited to preside at Abruzzo’s official swearing-in said: “if anyone can protect our public records and our public funds with integrity and honesty and responsibility, Joe Abruzzo, you are the one to do that.”
Jewish voters comprise 16% of the registered voters in the 22nd US Congressional district which includes Palm Beach. In the Palm Beach County population of 1.5 million, the Jewish community adds up to less – just 9%. That minority, however, has dominated Abruzzo’s campaign for re-election to the comptroller’s post.
Israel’s war against the Palestinians is also a war by the Jewish community in Florida against Arab Americans in the state. The plaintiffs in the case against Abruzzo have asked the court to protect their identities because they have testified to “significant concerns for personal safety, privacy, and potential harm to themselves and their family based on their involvement with Palestinian issues and advocacy.” These include threats of death and arrest by Israeli forces against their family members in Palestine. In Florida, “given the state’s willingness to conflate speech protected by the First Amendment with criminal activity, Plaintiffs’ admissions that they have sent thousands of dollars to family and friends in Gaza exposes them not only to criminal liability, but to life in prison.”
Abruzzo, 44, an Italian American Catholic, has been running for office in southern Florida for his entire career and has held no other professional employment. He was elected to the Florida state legislature for three terms between 2008 and 2020 before winning election to the higher paid comptroller’s post in charge of the Palm Beach finances, taxes and investments. This is acknowledged to be the most powerful post in local politics.
Left, Palm Beach County Comptroller (chief financial officer) Joseph Abruzzo. Right: Miami attorney for the Israel war bond challenge, David Pina. A graduate of Harvard Law School in 2021, Pina is a member of the Florida community protection group, Chainless Change.
Abruzzo uses his official Twitter account to mobilize support for Israel’s attacks on Arab targets in Palestine and Lebanon. On September 20, 2024, he endorsed the Israeli bombing of Beirut which killed a Hezbollah commander and dozens of others. The air strike was the deadliest on a neighbourhood of Beirut since Israel and Hezbollah had fought the war of 2006. Then on October 6, following the air attack killing the Hezbollah leadership in Beirut and the Israeli ground force invasion of southern Lebanon, Abruzzo tweeted: “Israel faces constant threats from Hamas and Hezbollah, who exploit Lebanon’s borders. We must prioritize Israel's security, not reward nations that enable terrorism and extreme hatred towards the United States.”
The September 24 court filing of the Israel bonds case against Abruzzo can be read in full here. “We expect the frivolous case brought against me in my capacity as Clerk will be quickly dismissed with prejudice,” Abruzzo responded.
This is an expansion of the initial filing of the case in the Palm Beach County Circuit Court on May 15. Local reporters covered the story briefly, and it was picked up by The Nation on May 30. In May also, David Pina, the Harvard Law School-educated attorney for the Palestinian American case, filed for identity protection orders for the plaintiffs. Read those papers here and here.
For the first analysis last March of the secrecy surrounding the placement of the Israel bonds in the US, click to read. In this report, sources reported the scope for prosecution of US bankers and Israel bond marketers for committing Section 17(a) fraud under the federal Securities Act. The vulnerability of Israeli state financing to changes in the legal situation for bond sales in the US is analysed here.
In an attachment to the new court filing in Palm Beach, this is the official listing of Abruzzo’s purchases of Israel bonds since last September.
Source:
https://drive.google.com/
The argument of the court papers is the only one of its kind in the US at present. Arab American leaders and organizations have yet to acknowledge or endorse the case; James Zogby, a well-known pollster and head of the Arab American Institute in Washington, has refused requested comment.
The legal case for the court is that Abruzzo in Palm Beach, like other “county government officials must competently manage a county’s financial portfolio and ensure that the county’s money is utilized to address vital local needs in order to deliver on the faith entrusted to them by the American public and fulfill their role of administrating essential local services… Defendant is required to invest Palm Beach County’s excess funds composed of taxpayers’ money in the safest sources possible that will generate the highest market rate of return and that have sufficient liquidity.”
“When Defendant took office in 2021, only 5% of Palm Beach County’s portfolio could be invested in Israel Bonds. In 2023, Defendant requested and obtained permission from The Palm Beach County Board of County Commissioners to raise the amount of the county’s portfolio that could be invested in Israel Bonds to 10%. On March 12, 2024, Defendant requested and obtained permission from The Palm Beach County Board of County Commissioners to raise the amount of Palm Beach County’s portfolio that could be invested in Israel Bonds from 10% to 15%.”
Public finance experts are cited, and are expected to testify in court, that they are not “aware of any other jurisdiction that has 15% of their holdings in one type of investment…[this represents] a greater concentration of risk in any portfolio for a public entity than [he’s] seen in a long time.”
In a presentation of the Florida constitution, statutes and regulations which govern Abruzzo’s performance in his post, the court brief argues that Abruzzo has violated the required fiduciary duty “to invest and manage investment assets as a prudent investor would considering the purposes, terms, distribution requirements, and other circumstances of the trust. This standard requires the exercise of reasonable care and caution and is to be applied to investments not in isolation, but in the context of the investment portfolio as a whole and as a part of an overall investment strategy that should incorporate risk and return objectives reasonably suitable to the trust, guardianship, or probate estate.”
Applied to the Palm Beach county’s investment decisions, the prudent investor test in the county policy and laws requires that with “each investment opportunity, the following objectives, in order of priority: A) Safety of financial assets, B) Liquidity of funds adequate for timely satisfaction of financial obligations, and C) the maximum achievable investment income given prudent safety and liquidity objectives.”
The political objective of supporting Israel, which Abruzzo has repeatedly declared to be his priority, is unlawful, according to the state and county laws. “Florida Statute 218.415(24)(b) states “Notwithstanding any other law, when deciding whether to invest and when investing public funds pursuant to this section, the unit of local government must make decisions based solely on pecuniary factors and may not subordinate the interests of the people of this state to other objectives, including sacrificing investment return or undertaking additional investment risk to promote any nonpecuniary factor. The weight given to any pecuniary factor must appropriately reflect a prudent assessment of its impact on risk or returns.”
A series of data displays in the court file shows that before the outbreak of war on October 7, Israel’s financial indicators were already in decline, and that this decline has accelerated sharply since then. Measures of Israel’s state budget deficit, stock market price trajectory, investment indexes, and interest rates have been tabulated to confirm that Abruzzo’s decisions to buy more and more Israel bonds were breaches of the statutory rules, motivated by his personal and political convictions.
For more detail on the measurement of Israel’s economic decline and rising Israel economic risk in the Arab war of attrition, read this.
Source:
https://ratings.moodys.com/ . The international rating company’s credit risk metrics just published reinforce the three conclusions in the court papers: “Liquidity violation: “Furthermore, Israel Bonds are not traded in a secondary market. A secondary market is a financial market where investors buy and sell securities that have already been issued, such as stocks and bonds. This means that Defendant [Abruzzo] cannot divest from Israel Bonds before they mature without finding a private buyer, which could lead to a loss in value. Market rates of return violations: From the period of June 2023 to March 2024, Israel Bonds consistently underperformed money market funds (MMF) by 0.5% to 4.04% (this is the range that Israel Bonds underperformed MMF within the period of June 2023-March 2024, from lowest to highest) and SBA pool [US Small Business Administration loans guaranteed by the US Treasury] by 0.6% to 4.28% (this is the range that Israel Bonds underperformed SBA pool within the period of June 2023-March 2024, from lowest to highest). This is significant because as of December 2023, Defendant more than doubled Palm Beach County's investment in Israel bonds and decreased the county’s investment in SBA pool to do so. The portfolio would have generated higher returns if Defendant had maintained the investment in SBA pools. Starting in January 2024, Israel bonds modestly outperformed the T-Bill and inflation.The 2-year T-bill is a U.S. debt obligation. Because Israel Bonds modestly outperformed the 2-year T-bill, it would have been safer to invest in the U.S. debt obligation instead, given the better credit rating of the United States compared to Israel. Investing in the 2-year T-bill also would have guaranteed a higher market rate of return.”
The independent international ratings agency Moody’s analysed the evidence for a downgrade in February of this year; click. Moody’s then issued a second, sharper downgrade on September 27. The new Moody’s report warned explicitly that Israel’s negative creditworthiness and default risk for its bonds was rising. “The key driver for the downgrade is our view that geopolitical risk has intensified significantly further, to very high levels, with material negative consequences for Israel’s creditworthiness in both the near and longer term. The intensity of the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah has increased significantly in recent days. This is in the context of Israel’s publicly-stated objective to return its evacuated residents back to the North of the country. Achieving this objective is likely to involve a yet more intense conflict. At the same time, prospects for a ceasefire in Gaza have receded and we assess that domestic political risks have increased alongside geopolitical risks.”
The Moody’s report is signed by Kathrin Muehlbronner, who is Senior Vice President of Moody’s Sovereign Risk Group. “Longer term, we consider that Israel’s economy will be more durably weakened by the military conflict than expected earlier. With heightened security risks (a social consideration), we no longer expect a swift and strong economic recovery as in previous conflicts. In turn, a delayed and slower economic recovery in combination with a more prolonged and broader military campaign will more persistently impact public finances, further pushing out the prospect of a stabilisation of the public debt ratio, compared to our earlier projections. In our view, the significant escalation in geopolitical risk also points to diminished quality of Israel’s institutions and governance which have not fully mitigated actions detrimental to the sovereign’s credit.”
The Times of Israel responded with an editorial warning: “A lower credit rating increases the riskiness of government bonds, which is reflected in a decline in the price of the debt and an increase in yields, that overall lowers the value of savings portfolios.”
The Palm Beach court challenge was filed three days before Moody’s issued its new warning. The court papers conclude that Abruzzo as county comptroller “is required to prioritize safety of principal, liquidity, and market rate of return with his investments. Defendant’s investments in Israel Bonds on and after October 10, 2023 did not prioritize safety of principal, liquidity, and market rate of return…Defendant is also required to make impartial investments, investments that comply with the prudent investor rule, and investments that comply with his fiduciary duties. Defendant’s investments in Israel Bonds on and after October 10, 2023 were not impartial, did not comply with the prudent investor rule (which assesses how reasonable the investment was given prevailing social and economic circumstances on the date of investment, not the resulting return on the investment), and did not comply with his fiduciary duties. “
In the technical analysis of the Palestinian American court brief it becomes dramatically clear that Abruzzo has been favouring higher-risk, lower rate-of-return Israel bonds over US Government securities. No US reporter has noticed this is evidence of state capture.
The court papers also reveal the risk to the Palestinian American plaintiffs that the Florida authorities may apply against them newly enacted state laws criminalizing criticism of Israel and support for Palestine. “Plaintiffs ask this Court to grant them leave to proceed anonymously for the following reasons: (1) Plaintiffs are challenging government activity; (2) the Complaint and subsequent pleadings will contain sensitive, personal information about their religious affiliation and political support, as well as information about their families living in warzones in which civilians have been systematically targeted; (3) through this action, Plaintiffs are admitting their intention to engage in conduct that the State of Florida has announced will be a priority for criminal investigation and prosecution; (4) Plaintiffs are at great risk of physical, professional, and emotional injury if identified (5) proceeding anonymously will not pose any unfairness to Defendants, given that Defendants are government actors, and the issues to be litigated revolve entirely around the conduct of the Defendants.”
“Plaintiffs regularly travel to Palestine to visit family and have concerns about potential harassment or adverse actions by Israeli forces upon entry into the region. Plaintiffs are aware of individuals in the United States who have faced threats and intimidation from Israeli forces due to their legal advocacy for Palestinians’ rights during visits to Palestine. Plaintiffs have family and friends residing in Gaza, where Israeli forces have a pattern of targeting vocal individuals during the ongoing conflict, putting those associated with them at risk. Plaintiffs know advocates in South Florida who have experienced severe consequences such as death threats and loss of employment due to their public support for Palestinian rights or criticism of Israeli policies.”
“In this instance, Plaintiffs are not merely voicing support or criticism; they are taking active steps to remove $700 million from the Israeli war effort. There is no analogous circumstance. And there is therefore no telling the extent of retaliation they might endure from all sectors: self-styled vigilantes, employers, and their own state and local governments. One other possible source of retaliation comes in the form of a new artificial intelligence known as ‘Where’s Daddy?’, which is being used to ‘track[] Palestinians on [a] kill list and was purposely designed to help Israel target individuals when they were at home at night with their families. The targeting systems, combined with an ‘extremely permissive’ bombing policy in the Israeli military, led to ‘entire Palestinian families being wiped out inside their houses.’”
“Plaintiffs’ concerns for the privacy of their identity therefore extend not only to themselves but also to what family they still have left alive in Gaza.”
Read the affidavit filed by one of the plaintiffs, a resident in Palm Beach for twice as long as Abruzzo.
“In the last 6 months, over 40 members of my family have been killed,” she told the court. “I live with fear; every single minute of every single day I am afraid for my family. And unfortunately, this is not a situation where I can tell myself that I am simply worrying too much.”
“The sound of the phone ringing has become like the bell announcing death. Every time I hear the phone ring, my heart stops; my chest constricts, I become dizzy. What’s worse, though, is when I call family in Palestine and there is no answer. I begin to wonder— has it finally happened? Is there simply no one left? I can’t imagine torture being worse than this.”
“I tell my husband to send every dollar we can; we’re sending thousands. No one there is making money, of course; they are just trying to stay alive. I know my family shares when they can, and we send until we can’t send anymore, but I lose myself wondering how many more I can’t help. Who is helping them? If they aren’t getting help, they are literally starving.”
“If we make an exception for Israel to kill without consequences—in fact, to target civilians and be rewarded for it with $700 million dollars in bonds— what is this world?”
Source:
https://drive.google.com/
https://johnhelmer.net/israels-bond-sal ... more-90399
