text:
It's impossible to have a credible unity tour between Bernie Sanders and Tom Perez.
It's impossible to call yourself a populist and defend a law written by insurance industry lobbyists.
Let's start with the so-called unity tour just completed with Sanders and Perez.
Crowds came out to see single payer Sanders and boo corporate Obamacare Perez.
On MSNBC last week, Chris Hayes had Perez and Sanders on his show.
Hayes asked Perez whether he supported single payer. Perez refused to answer. Sanders grimaced.
Of course Perez doesn't support single payer.
Yet single payer is the driving force at all the town hall meetings.
Single payer is what fueled Bernie's insurgent campaign last year.
And single payer won't become law without a new political movement that will wash away Perez and the corporate Democrats.
The corporate Democratic leadership pushed Sanders into a CNN town hall debate with Senator Ted Cruz earlier this year.
They asked Sanders to defend Obamacare.
Sanders proved it was impossible.
Case in point.
A hair salon owner from Texas confronted Sanders with her dilemma.
LaRonda owns five hair salons in Texas and employs just under 50 workers. She keeps it under 50 because under Obamacare, more than 50 workers means that she has to buy them health insurance.
"How do I employ more Americans without either raising the prices to my customers or lowering wages to my employees?" LaRonda asked Sanders.
Sanders could have answered – "Well LaRonda, if we had my preferred plan – single payer – you wouldn't have to bankrupt yourself by buying defective high priced health insurance from for profit health insurance companies. Under my plan, every American at birth gets a birth certificate and a Medicare card. They would be covered and you can hire employees to your heart's content."
Instead, Bernie answered with this:
"Let me give you an answer you will not be happy with. If you have more than 50 people, you know what, I think — I'm afraid to tell you — I think you will have to provide health insurance."
Texas populist and single payer supporter Jim Hightower put himself in a similar bind with a column last week titled — Obamacare is Actually Working.
In it, Hightower seeks to achieve the impossible — populist single payer supporter defending a law written by insurance industry lobbyists in an effort to save the corporate Democrats and their insurance industry funders from themselves.
In the column, Hightower doesn't mention single payer.
"While Obamacare has flaws that require fixing, overall it's been a tremendous success," Hightower writes.
To secure single payer, activists like Dr. Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese of Health Over Profit for Everyone are siding with the American people against Obamacare and the Democrats.
Zeese said that "Hightower surprisingly did not mention that 29 million are uninsured, tens of millions have inadequate insurance and that 30,000 people in the United States are dying each year because they do not have access to healthcare under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), nor did he mention the hundreds of thousands who go bankrupt because of medical illness even though they have insurance."
"Now, with the failure of the ACA — and 30,000 dying can only be called a failed system — and the even worse failures of the two Republican attempts to replace it, there is only one path forward. It has always been the obvious solution but bipartisan corruption in DC by the healthcare profiteers has prevented it," Zeese said. "Lower the age of Medicare inclusion to birth and improve it so the US has the best healthcare system in the world. A system that is of, by and for the people."
"Yes, more people have health insurance but their out-of-pocket costs are so high and the coverage is so skimpy that people still can't afford actual health care and bankruptcies due to medical illness continue unabated," Flowers said. "In a real perversion of our system, people can now get screenings for disease, but can't afford treatment once they are diagnosed with a new cancer or other disease."
"And tens of millions of people remain without health insurance," Flowers said. "The ACA can't change that because it will never be affordable to everyone. That's why we need to end this failed healthcare experiment and embrace the proven solution, National Improved Medicare for All as embodied in HR 676."]]>
Earlier this month, CIA Director Mike Pompeo vowed to end WikiLeaks, accusing the whistleblowing site as being a "non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia". He also once called Edward Snowden a traitor and claimed that he should be executed. This declaration of war against WikiLeaks may bring a reminiscence of George W. Bush's speech in the aftermath of 9-11, where he said, 'either you are with us or against us', and urged the nation to side with the government in his call to fight global 'war on terror'.
In a recent interview on DemocracyNow!, journalist at The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald put this persecution of WikiLeaks in the context of a government assault on basic freedom. He spelled out their tactics, noting how the government first chooses a target group that is hated and lacks popular support, for they know attacking an idea or a group that is popular would meet resistance. He explained:
"…. they pick somebody who they know is hated in society or who expresses an idea that most people find repellent, and they try and abridge freedom of speech in that case, so that most people will let their hatred for the person being targeted override the principle involved, and they will sanction or at least acquiesce to the attack on freedom because they hate the person being attacked".
Demonizing and scapegoating of a particular group or organization is an alarming tendency toward an authoritarian state. At a news conference last Thursday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions also chimed in to emphasize how Assange's arrest is a priority. This targeting of WikiLeaks is a threat to press freedom and could be seen a slippery slope toward fascism.
History Repeats Itself
Recall the Weimer Republic just before the rise of Adolf Hitler. He was successfully able to install hatred in the minds of Germans and carry out massive crimes against humanity. Americans often wondered what made many ordinary Germans accept these horrendous acts that led to the holocaust. Now, in Trump's America, it is not so far a stretch to say that Muslims, Mexicans and other immigrants are becoming like the new Jews, to be a scapegoated under this right wing administration.
Once he gained power, Hitler made his word to be above the law. Trump, in his first 75 days in office, turned the rhetoric of hatred into action through passing executive order barring refuges and citizens from seven majority Muslim nations from entering into the United States and enacting mass deportation with the ICE agents acting like Nazi Gestapo to track immigrants. Draconian policies that were more under the radar during the Obama administration are now becoming overt. More and more, Americans might now be able to get under the skin of those 'Good Germans'.
In Hitler's Germany, persecution of Jews didn't happen overnight. It was a gradual escalation. The first thing Hitler did was to control media and create an arm of propaganda. By using this weapon of mass deception, the Nazi Regime garnered popular support on a platform of racial identity and nationalism and managed to brainwash citizens with the Nazi-Auschwitz ideology of anti-Semitism. Under the guise of fighting communism, the Party suppressed civil liberties, free speech and association and expanded its power by demonizing whoever stood in their way.
Identity Politics and Machination of Power
The Trump campaign slogan "Make America Great Again" spoke to middle class America and disfranchised populations who were fed up with corporate plunder enacted under Democrats. His message of putting America first also struck a chord with white nationalists. By channeling their frustration and desires, Trump successfully created a fertile soil to harvest identity politics that is now coming to resemble Nazi's emphasis of nationalism and racial supremacy.
No one can deny how the Trump victory empowered white supremacist groups that until now were more on the fringe. These identity politics that seem to be spreading around the world tend to contract one's heart. Whatever the ideology is, progressive or conservative, anyone gripped with it falls into a narrow vision of humanity and loses perspective. This identity, fixed by ideology becomes a point of manipulation, to be exploited by those in power and used to divide everyone into 'Us vs. Them'.
When people lose capacity for dialogue, they become deaf to their own humanity. Then, the state can easily exert control over the masses and seize power through manufacturing wars of all against all. We are now seeing a new civil war unfolding in America. The city of Berkeley is becoming a battleground. In February, riots erupted on the UC Berkeley campus when protesters shut down an event scheduled for right wing commentator Milo Yiannopoulos. Also, at the recent free speech rally on Patriot Day, Trump supporters, along with members of far-right nationalists clashed with local activists and anti-fascist groups. Ironically, the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement in the 60's turned into a bloody fight, devolving into violence, with each camp acting totally contrary to the principles of free speech.
Height of McCarthy Era Hysteria
This attack against Julian Assange and WikiLeaks is not something new. Consorted efforts to delegitimatize the organization through character assassination and smearing of Assange have been persistent, ever since the site came to public prominence. Assange was called a high tech terrorist by former vice President Joe Biden and incitement for his murder came from high US officials.
Assange has been holed up in asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy for 5 years, despite a UN ruling clearly stating his detention is unlawful. This is not the first time he and his organization were declared to be enemies of the State. In 2012, the US military had designated them as such enemies.
So what is different now? The head of the CIA and the Department of Justice's declaration of war against WikiLeaks comes in a particular political climate. These efforts to arrest Assange, now backed by President Trump are taking place at the height of a kind of McCarthy era style hysteria.
Just like the recent US government cruise missile attacks on Syria, carried out without any investigation or evidence that Assad was the one using chemical weapons, the echo- chamber of the liberal media has been amplifying their own speculation of WikiLeaks alleged source of DNC leaks and Podesta emails. With the narrative that Russia meddled in the US election, they branded Assange as a Putin sympathizer and/or Russian agent without backing it up. The Left's seeming irrational obsession with Russia is also rooted in these identity politics, namely their allegiance to the Democratic Party and America's post-cold war national identity, defined by a hysteric red scare and its mission of defeating communism.
Whistleblowers as Democracy's Last Line of Defense
In the wake of the possible arrest of Assange, the ACLU noted that, "prosecuting Wikileaks would set a dangerous precedent that the Trump administration would surely use to target other news organizations." We must never forget where hatred-driven identity politics led Nazi Germany. Martin Niemöller, the famous Protestant pastor who spoke against the rise of Hitler and spent years in concentration camps, reminds us of this:
"First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out –Because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out –Because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out –Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me."
Fascism begins in the mind. Its seed grows whenever we accept hatred toward someone who has different or opposing views. Enclosure happens when we suspend critical thinking in the hype of fear and turn the other into an enemy. It happens every time we close our hearts, shunning those who have been made into our enemies. Democracy dies whenever we choose to pick up the sword of ideology, rather than choosing to uphold our common humanity and instead engage in a self-righteous crusade of defeating the enemy.
When Trump signed a Muslim ban into law, outrage spread nationwide and people rallied at airports. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit refused to reinstate Trump's travel ban and so the solidarity of the people won. As Trump pressured to cut funds in sanctuary cities, these cities defied the order, assuring to maintain their immigrant policy. Now, the US government is coming after WikiLeaks, a transnational journalistic organization, who has no allegiance to any nation, governments or corporations, only to the conscience of ordinary people around the world.
In the darkness that hovers in the veil of ideology, whistleblowers shine a light, through which we are able to recover perspectives that were lost. WikiLeaks, through their act of publishing, lets everyone see views that are forbidden, marginalized or shunned. They are last line of defense and are on the front line in this battle for democracy. One may dislike WikiLeaks and disagree with Assange, but whatever one's opinion is, we all need to stand up against this erosion of our civil liberties. Prosecution of WikiLeaks is persecution of free speech. Setting this precedent moves us down a dangerous path.
It's one thing to have a lunatic in the White House who watches late night television and tweets all day. But when the same lunatic goes to war, it now emerges, he's a safer bet for democracy, a strong President who stands up to tyrants (unless they happen to be Saudis, Turks or Egyptians) and who acts out of human emotion rather than cynicism.
How else can one account for the extraordinary report in The New York Times which recorded how Trump's "anguish" at the film of dying Syrian babies had led him to abandon "isolationism"?
Americans like action, but have typically confused Trump's infantile trigger finger with mature decision-making. What else is there to think when a normally sane US columnist like David Ignatius suddenly compares Trump to Harry Truman and praises his demented President for his "flexibility" and "pragmatism"?
This is preposterous. A madman who goofs off at something he doesn't like on CNN is just plain wacky. A man of unsound mind who attacks three Muslim countries – two of which were included in his seven Muslim nation refugee ban – is a danger to the world. Yet the moment he fires 59 missiles at Syria after more than 60 civilians die in an apparent chemical attack which he blames on Assad – but none after far more are massacred by a Syrian suicide bomber – even Angela Merkel takes leave of her senses and praises Trump, along with the Matron of Downing Street, Signora Mogherini and sundry other potentates. Hasn't someone cottoned on to the fact that Trump is now taking America into a shooting war?
Handing more power to the Pentagon – about the most perilous act of any US President – means that Defence Secretary James "Mad Dog" Mattis is now encouraging the head-chopping Saudis to bomb Yemen – adding even more American intelligence "assets" to this criminal enterprise — and encouraging the Gulf Arabs' delusional idea that Iran wants to conquer the Arab world. "Everywhere you look," Mattis told his Saudi hosts this month, "if there's trouble in the region, you find Iran."
Is that the case with Egypt, then, now under Isis attack as its President "disappears" thousands of his own people? Is that the case in Turkey whose even more crazed President has now locked up tens of thousands of his own people while turning himself into a dictator-by-law?
Let's just briefly take a look at Trump's reaction to Recep Tayyip Erdogan's dodgy referendum, which has given him a Caliph's power over Turkey. A round-up of the latest figures from Turkey by the French newspaper Liberation show that there have been 47,000 arrests since last year's attempted coup, 140,000 passports revoked, 120,000 men and women fired from their jobs (including 8,000 military officers, 5,000 academics, 4,000 judges and lawyers, 65 mayors and 2,000 journalists). One thousand two hundred schools and 15 universities have been closed down, 170 newspapers, television and radio stations shut.
And after the referendum which gave Erdogan a narrow (if very dubious) majority to legitimise these outrages, Trump called the Turkish President to congratulate him on his victory. Just as he continues to congratulate Egyptian President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi in his "battle" against "terror", a war which al-Sisi – whose coup d'etat against Egypt's first elected president originally brought him to power – appears to be losing. Al-Sisi, Trump enthused, would be someone "very close to him".
We know that the US Special Forces raid on Yemen, in which Navy Seal William Owens died, killed more civilians than al-Qaeda members. We don't know (or, I suspect, care) very much what the "mother of all bombs" did in the Nangahar province of Afghanistan. First it killed 60 Isis fighters. Then it killed 100 Isis fighters and not a single civilian – surely a first in US military history? But then, weirdly, nobody has been allowed to go to the site of this monster bomb's explosion. Because civilians were indeed killed? Or because – and this is a fact – Isis survivors went on fighting American ground troops after the bombing?
Now Trump is sending a naval battle group to threaten North Korea, a past master at childish threats itself. Ye gods! And this is a man who is now "flexible" and "pragmatic"? It's instructive to note that after its first edition, The New York Times changed its headline about Trump's Syrian "anguish" to "Trump Upends His Own Foreign Policy", still gifting him with a "foreign policy" (which doesn't exist) while cutting out the "anguish". I am told the first original edition headline read: "On Syria Attack, Trump's Heart Came First". Intriguing. If that is correct, you can see how The New York Times slowly – far too slowly – realised it had itself started to fall in love with its shooting-from-the-hip President.
Now we await the battle for Korea, forgetting that earlier war which drowned the peninsula in blood, American and British as well as Korean and Chinese. Maybe Trump, in his vague, frightening way, has decided that Southeast Asia will be his real war. And there, of course, the comparison with Truman gets rather too close to home. For Truman only came in at the end of the Second World War, after Roosevelt's death, and his crowning wartime achievement was also in Southeast Asia: the atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Heaven spare us the next 100 days.]]>
Thiel's glib posturing puts me in mind of a scene from another short, though hardly shallow, text, 'Being There' by Jersy Kozinski, the story of which revolves around the titular Chance, an empty-headed non-person who speaks only in clichés and has no real presence or agency other than to reflect what he watches on TV. In one scene of the book the hollow simpleton Chance the Gardener, reinterpreted by his elite hosts as the astute, well-bred Chauncey Gardiner, is approached by a pompous, fast-talking publisher who offers him a book deal (he doesn't care much what he writes about). 'I can't write' Chance replies. The publisher simply says it doesn't matter, a ghost-writer will do the work. 'I can't read' Chance continues, with Trump-like tact. Who can? The publisher wonders, who has the time to read anymore? It is a remarkable exchange, in which simple truth gets swallowed whole by arrogant assumptions. Like the rest of the book, it pushes the definition of dialogue to it's limits, as two people chat merrily, speaking in practically different languages.
Many comparisons have already been made between The Donald and The Gardener, taking apart mannerisms and personality to show how he reflects the character. Not many are far from the mark in this respect. Trump does indeed display many traits eerily reminiscent to that of Kosinski's creation. His limited, cliché-ridden vocabulary, his undeserved reputation for being rich and successful. They even share a penchant for ill-fitting suits which, in Chance's case, is literally borrowed from his father-figure, whereas Trump wears daddy's clothes only metaphorically. Crucially, both men are addicted to television, and appear to let their entire personality be shaped by it.
What few such comparisons remember however, is that 'Being There' is considerably more than a parody of superficial public figures like Chance. The obscenity of the Gardener's aimless ramble to power thoroughly mitigated by those around him. Stock characters of the cultural and political elite: politicians, economists, journalists and celebrities, all of them fall head over heels for Chance's down-to-earth charm, which is to say that he has no charm at all, other than his ability to make them feel important and clever.
In is terser way, Donald Trump has fulfilled this same role for the so-called intellectual classes of today in much the same manner. It is well-documented how conservatives have been willing to debase and delude themselves in the hope of seeing in Trump some faint glimmer of power and influence, painting a draft-dodging casino magnate as a patriotic man of God. Liberals however, have been no less pathetic and grasping in their attempts to define Trump's sins, and by extension their own saintliness. During the campaign and first months of his Presidency many outlets have discussed Trump with such cheap stock outrage that at times they might as well have not even come up with new things to be angry about, and simply published the same story about some crude remark of his day after day, expecting the same level of useful analysis. Liberal comedian/morality pundits like John Oliver and Samantha Bee both railed against and mocked Trump with the hubristic assurance of people who have never been challenged and don't plan on inflicting such a trauma upon their audience. As has already been pointed out, this arrogant approach to polemic comment has only served to widen the political gap and display just how self-involved these communicators are (2).
In 'Being There' the crowning moment of hypocrisy and emptiness comes, appropriately enough, at a funeral. As the President waxes lyrical about the political conviction and popularity of the deceased, who is Chance's recent benefactor, the pall-bearing politicians scheme among themselves how they can use this event to place Chance on the throne and secure their own positions. It is a remarkable portrait of callow duplicity. It is appropriate then that the event that should expose our so-called 'liberal' opposition to Trumpism for the empty opportunists they are, should be one of death.
With Chance-like simplicity, Trump explained that it was the images of dying Syrian children, killed in a chemical attack on Khan Shaykhun, seemingly carried out by the Syrian air force, that persuaded him to launch 59 Tomahawk missiles at a Syrian government airbase. Whereas Chance the Gardener may have simply opted to change the channel, Trump is concerned about how his audience perceives him, and thus opted to completely upend his entire foreign policy and intervene in a complex civil war, doing so with all the decisiveness and resolve of someone who only thinks in terms of TV ratings.
Almost as disgusting perhaps as Trump's flighty action was the supposedly independent Press's reaction. Like the audience swooning over Chance's meaningless waffle, the New York Times produced a breathlessly folksy leader praising the supposedly irredeemable Trump for listening 'to his heart'. It would seem that some on the established-liberal side fret only that this otherwise commendable action was carried out by someone as morally reprehensible and volatile as Trump, as if military adventurism were somehow the rightful preserve of a more statesmanlike leader. The wake of Trump's foreign policy U-turn, in which neocons and liberals have come together in sudden embracement of this otherwise anathema individual, display just how empty their political consciences are, how self-regarding, suggestible and callow they are, and how little capacity they have for learning.
One thing Kozinski understood about elites who become enamored with empty idols is that almost always what they are really obsessing over is themselves. In many cases it has become clear that what Donald Trump does or says is utterly irrelevant to how people react to him because at the end of the day they are not even really interested in what he did. In a scene in 'Being There' Chance is taken up to a room by a man at a party, clearly with a sexual encounter in mind. When Chance tells him, quite openly and honestly 'I like to watch' this does not faze his would-be seducer. The man strips down and masturbates to orgasm whilst Chance sits there, passively vacant. In the film version this scenario is re-jigged somewhat, ending in Chance's host, played by Shirley MacLaine, masturbating desperately on the floor in front of him while Chance robotically mimics the motions of people on the TV. What some critics saw as frivolously shocking is in fact pivotal to the plot. At its most basic form, every relationship anyone has with Chance is masturbation of one kind or another, whether emotional, intellectual or romantic. Like Trump, no one approaches Chance with any intention to be challenged, or surprised or questioned. They stare into him and talk through him like he does to the TV set (or rails into Twitter) expecting only to find what they knew was there, like a gardener tending domestic plants, beautifying the still and the lifeless, instead of exploring the woods beyond.
Anyone wondering how supposedly educated and partisan public figures could show such naivety and elasticity in their responses to Trump should really read Kosinski's book, to get a better understanding of just how our self-proclaimed shining lights can be so dim. Trump, and others like him, have pulled the wool over their eyes because, in any case, their eyes were never actually open to him. Like Chance's audience, it is only themselves they actually look at, and thus they easily mold any image they like out of whatever unformed clay is placed before them. The emptier the vessel, the more they can drink from it. Thus mumbler-Reagan could become 'the great communicator', 'Predator Drone' Obama could become 'Nobel Peace Prize winner'. And Trump, the emptiest vessel of them all, can change moniker on a monthly basis.
Kosinski, like Trump and his establishment interlocutors, leave no room for ordinary people outside of the jet-set to give an opinion about the sheer inanity and insanity of their so-called social betters. In the book this plays well with the isolation of Chance's life. In modern political discourse it is a gross sign of obsolescence. The 1979 film adaptation of 'Being There' did something to rectify this disparity, through the small part of Chance's former housekeeper. Seeing him garbling on TV to critical acclaim, she speaks for many people today in her reaction to the whole affair: 'Gobbledegook! All the time he talked gobbledegook!'
1. http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/10/31/13477236/trump-seriously-literally-thiel
2. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/05/how-late-night-comedy-alienated-conservatives-made-liberals-smug-and-fueled-the-rise]]>
Many of these problems were on display in New Orleans when the NAACP, which last year called for a moratorium on charter schools until issues of accountability and transparency were addressed, held a community forum in New Orleans on charters. The New Orleans hearing, which can be viewed here, featured outraged students, outraged parents, and dismayed community members reciting a litany of the problems created by the massive change to a charter school system. The single most powerful moment came when a group of students from Kids Rethink New Orleans Schools took the podium and detailed the many ways the system has failed and excluded them from participating in its transformation.
"We really wanted to share what happens in our schools" writes 18 year old Big Sister Love Rush in an article on the challenges the students face. "How the few permanent teachers we have work so hard for us, how so many classes are ran by short term substitutes, how food runs out at meal times, and how we worry if our school's reputation is good enough to support us in getting into the college or careers we want. We shared how we face two hour commutes to and from school, are forced to experiment with digital learning with systems like Odyssey, are punished for having the wrong color sweater, or how we worry about being able to attend a school that will give us the education we need."
In summary, the NAACP heard that they charter system remains highly segregated by race and economic status. Students have significantly longer commutes to and from school. The percentage of African American teachers has declined dramatically leaving less experienced teachers who are less likely to be accredited and less likely to remain in the system. The costs of administration have gone up while resources for teaching have declined. Several special select schools have their own admission process which results in racially and economically different student bodies. The top administrator of one K-12 system of three schools is paid over a quarter of a million dollars. Students with disabilities have been ill served. Fraud and mismanagement, which certainly predated the conversion to charter schools, continue to occur. Thousands of students are in below average schools. Students and parents feel disempowered and ignored by the system.
The birthing of the charter system occurred in 2005 when the community was displaced by Katrina. Control of the public school system was taken away from a board which had an elected majority of African American officials and was given to the white majority board of the state system.
The first casualty of the abrupt change was the termination of the South's largest local union and the firing of over 7000 most African American female teachers. Attorney Willie Zanders told the NAACP of the years of struggle for those teachers which, though initially successful, ended in bitter defeat years later. The city's veteran black educators were replaced by younger, less qualified white teachers from Teach for America and Teach NOLA.
The change to charters reduced the percentage of black teachers from 74 percent to 51 percent. There are now fewer experienced teachers, fewer accredited teachers, fewer local teachers, and more teachers who are likely to leave than before Katrina. Five charter schools have tried to unionize with United Teachers of New Orleans. Though two schools cooperated, two other charters have said they are exempt from NLRB – a position rejected by the National Labor Relations Board. One of those charter schools shut out the public in 2016 by meeting privately and online over how to respond to unionization efforts.
New Orleans now spends more on administration and less on teaching than they did before Katrina. One charter school executive, who oversees one K-12 school on three campuses, was paid $262,000 in 2014. At least 62 other charter execs made more than $100,000. This compares with the salary of $138,915 for the superintendent of all the public schools in Baton Rouge.
Admissions have been dramatically changed. In the new system, there is no longer any right to attend the neighborhood school. 86% no longer attend the school closest to their homes. Siblings do not automatically go to the same school, and no one is guaranteed a spot at their local school. Many families are frustrated by the admission process.
Seven select high performing schools do not use the system wide application process, called ONE APP. The "lotteries" run by these super select schools are not transparent but complex screening devices. The most selective, highest performing, and well-funded charter schools have many more white children attending them than the system as a whole as a result of special non-transparent admission processes. This is so well known that a local newspaper article headlined its article about some of the schools as "How 3 top New Orleans public schools keep students out."
This special admission process has significant racial impact. Most white students in public schools attend selective public schools that administer special tests that students must pass to be enrolled. Tulane University reported the charter system in New Orleans remains highly segregated in much the same way as before Katrina. This seems to be reflective in schools across the country where the charter school movement has been charged with re-segregating public schools. One select New Orleans charter school, Lusher, reported its student body was 53% white, 21% economically disadvantaged and 4% special education in comparison to the overall system which is 7% white, 85% economically disadvantaged and 11% special education.
Another result of eliminating neighborhood schools is New Orleans students now have nearly double the commute and the system is paying $30 million to bus students compared to $18 million before Katrina. Dr. Raynard Sanders notes the elimination of neighborhood schools can be observed in the early morning hours. "We now have thousands of children beginning their school day travel at 6:15 and ending at 5:15 PM, with many students spending hours or more traveling to and from school. This insane strategy puts kids in harms way daily as students cross major thoroughfares in the early morning hours, which resulted in one five year old's death to date. Despite numerous complaints from parents stating they want neighborhood schools state education officials have ignored their cries and continue this dangerous daily student migration."
One of the more dramatic and well-documented problems in the changeover to charters is the absence of services for students with disabilities.
The Southern Poverty Law Center sued over disability violations in 2010… The original complaint is here. Children with disabilities had been denied enrollment altogether, forced to attend schools ill-equipped or lacking resources to serve them, and suspended without procedural protections. A third grader with emotional problems was locked in the school closet and similarly a seventh grader expelled for emotional disabilities. After suit was filed it took an additional four years to set up a system to uphold the educational rights of students with disabilities. Now, there is a district-wide consent decree in place overseen by an Independent Monitor who reports to the Court.
Yet, the disability problems remain. In 2017 a charter was rebuked for suspending a student who the school thought was depressed. In 2016 the State found that the school was engaging in special education fraud by illegally taking public money by artificially inflating special education services, while at the same time ignoring special education students, telling staff they were "to be a secondary priority to students who were more likely to pass the state assessments" and that some kids "don't count." At another charter, since closed, the State identified egregious special education violations. Staff refused to screen students, tried to keep them from enrolling, put them in rooms with nothing to do, deprived students of their services, and faked records to cover it up. Yet another charter was accused of telling students with disabilities to stay home.
Discipline has been an ongoing problem. One charter in 2012-2013 had a suspension rate of 68% meaning over half of the student body was suspended out of school at least once in a school year. In 2017 another charter used handcuffs to restrain a 9 year old boy.
Fraud and mismanagement continue to plague New Orleans under the new system. A detailed 2015 report found systemic financial fraud and mismanagement of millions of dollars in local charter schools. The report documented numerous instances of fraud in charter schools in amounts ranging from tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars at ten different schools. These problems resulted from a dramatic underinvestment in oversight, reliance on self-reporting of fraud and mismanagement, insufficient auditing techniques, and understaffed and overworked auditors.
Transparency is a problem. The State of Louisiana has been withholding basic school data about economic disadvantage and language issues until a recent court decision made it public. There have been problems with lack of compliance with Open Meetings Law even into 2017. The overall whiteness of the education reform movement in New Orleans, which has been pointed out by scholars, was also criticized at the NAACP forum. The authorization process for starting charter schools has been criticized by African Americans in New Orleans as actively working to keep local African Americans from operating charter schools.
The NAACP was offered hours of painful evidence that the charter system has significant problems with transparency and accountability. These problems led Representative Joseph Bouie of New Orleans, the head of the Louisiana Black Caucus and former Chancellor of Southern University in New Orleans to insist to the NAACP that the experiment of charters schools imposed on the children of New Orleans was similar to the Tuskegee syphilis experiment conducted on African Americans.
No doubt many students are being left behind in the charter school experiment. Thousands of students are attending schools rated C or below. According to a 2016 report on Grades for the public schools in New Orleans: 8 schools received F; 21 received D; 26 received C; 11 received B; 12 received A.
The Stanford Center for Opportunity in Education issued a report on the system in September 2015 which concluded: "Successful reform must also support school improvement in ways that ultimately create a set of schools that are worth choosing, in which every child will choose and be chosen by the schools that meet their needs. That system has not yet been created in New Orleans. Time will tell whether it can be developed. It is likely that acknowledging the realities of the experiences of the most vulnerable children is a necessary first step in that direction.
NOLA reforms have created a set of schools that are highly stratified by race, class and educational advantage; this impacts the assignment to schools and discipline in the schools to which students are assigned. Fully 89 percent of white students and 73 percent of Asian students in New Orleans attend Tier 1 schools. However, only 23.5% of African American students have access to these schools. And whereas 60% of students who are above the poverty line (i.e. those who can pay for their school lunch) attend Tier 1 schools, only 21.5% of students whose family income is low enough to be eligible to receive a free lunch have access to these schools. Not only do Tier 1 schools rank as the best in the city, they consistently rank among the best schools in the state of Louisiana."
As the New York Times reported in an article titled "The Myth of the New Orleans School Makeover," "The New Orleans miracle is not all it seems. Louisiana state standards are among the lowest in the nation. The new research also says little about high school performance. And the average composite ACT score for the Recovery School District was just 16.4 in 2014, well below the minimum score required for admission to a four-year public university in Louisiana. There is also growing evidence that the reforms have come at the expense of the city's most disadvantaged children, who often disappear from school entirely and, thus, are no longer included in the data."
The students in the system are taking matters in their own hands. As Rethink student leaders write: "Youth lives, voices, and futures are not being valued. A stand for justice needs to be took and the time is now! Youth are the experts and we deserve to be treated like we are… We want curriculum that represent us and people like us. We want input from youth of color on curriculum and teacher trainings. We want educational infrastructure to support youth entrepreneurship, youth cooperatives and business opportunities that support the communities we come from. And we want real youth and community input and veto power on all decisions regarding school openings, closings, leadership, and locations."
The NAACP hearing certainly documented many of the problems. The question remains as to what will be done about them. The students are not waiting.]]>
I don't think so. Trump got what he wanted out of dropping missiles on Syria and a big bomb in Afghanistan. He is posturing like a fighting cock with his chest out and his feathers primed. He is enjoying the respect and media fawning he gets from being "strong" and tempting fate. He is acting a lot like the little dictator in Pyongyang.
The media has spent much of its time chronicling Trump's reversals: China does not manipulate its currency after all. President Xi Jinping is Trump's new best buddy. His policy of non-intervention in Syria is dead. He now apparently favors regime change. He has forgotten about NAFTA and CAFTA. To the extent he thinks about trade policy at all, he now favors renegotiation over repeal. He once promised to fire Janet Yellen as chair of the Federal Reserve. Now he likes her. On and on, Trump is the ultimate pragmatist or an extreme panderer. We have no idea what operates beneath the curtain of his coifed exterior. We do know that he is not to be trusted.
This is the thirteenth installment of the Trump Diaries.
April 14, 2017
With a US naval strike force heading to the coast of North Korea, a US military exercise with South Korea and North Korea providing a display of their most powerful weapons, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi warns both sides that they are drifting toward military conflict. He describes the situation as "storm clouds" over the Korean peninsula.
Head of the Environmental Protection Agency Scott Pruitt advocates leaving the Paris agreement on climate change. The White House is surprisingly divided on the issue with the recently demoted Steve Bannon on one side and Jared Kushner on the other. The biggest surprise is that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and his former company Exxon-Mobil support remaining in the accord.
April 15, 2017
Thousands of protestors take to the streets in an estimated 150 cities across America to demand that our president release his tax returns. Trump is the first president since Richard Nixon not to do so. We all know how it turned out for Tricky Dick, who won the 1972 presidential election by one of the greatest Electoral College margins in history. How will it turn out for Donald J. Trump?
Vice president Mike Pence heads to South Korea as the president remains hunkered down in Mar-a-Lago. Would the president approve a shock and awe attack on Pyongyang while Pence is in the neighborhood?
A failed missile launch by North Korea leads to speculation that the US sabotaged the effort. My question: If they did, did they let Trump know about it?
April 16, 2017
Trump tweets his conviction founded in the universe of alternative facts that the Saturday tax protesters were paid. Now that's a job I'd like to get: getting paid to march in protest! We could end homelessness overnight. Where do we sign up? Happy Easter!
The Washington Post reports that immigration arrests rose nearly 33 percent in the first weeks of the Trump administration. Contrary to his expressed policy the arrests have not focused on immigrants with criminal records: 5,441 of 21,362 arrests involved individuals without criminal records. [1] An internal Homeland Security memo suggests they are mobilizing to create a national deportation force, including expanded detention facilities and lowered standards for recruiting 5,000 new ICE and Border Patrol agents.
Anyone who thought Trump would soften his stance on immigration – considering the acute labor shortages in agriculture and service fields – is dead wrong. Trump and his attorney general intend to deport as many as they can as fast as they can and they want to spend a lot of money doing it.
The mass deportation is coming and it will create a massive new police apparatus. It will also trigger a massive resistance and feed an underground economy.
April 17, 2017
Vice foreign minister Han Song-Ryol informs British Broadcasting that North Korea will continue to test missile technology on a "weekly, monthly and yearly basis." [2]
Vice president Pence warns the North Koreans "not to test" the commander's resolve. Hasn't the VP heard Trump has no resolve? He has yielded military decisions to the generals. He loves the generals. Civilian control of the military is an overrated and outdated concept – like representative democracy or separation of church and state.
The pissing contest between the little dictator and the man with little hands (actually little fingers; his hands are fairly large) goes on unabated. It is developing into a classic game of chicken with literally millions of lives in the balance. I have to ask those who supported Trump in his march to the White House: How do you feel about the future of the planet – or at least the planet's ability to sustain human and animal life – being in those large hands with little fingers? Is this the gamble you wanted to take? Is this the message you wanted to drive home to a government that has ignored your welfare for as long as we can remember? Was it worth it? Will it still be worth it if Trump drops the big one? Do you still believe he's a rational businessman?
Trump has already yielded control of the military to the generals. Do the generals want another crack at victory on the Korean peninsula? Are we counting on China to rescue the world from global catastrophe? Roll the dice and take your chances. No one voted for the generals. And no one voted for war. I seem to recall a candidate who condemned the warmongering politicians and promised to extract us from stupid wars.
A Gallup poll reveals that only 45% of the people believe Trump keeps his word. The number is down from 62% in February. His daily approval rating is up two points to 41 percent. [3] It seems Trump has to keep bombing people to bolster his support – a dangerous phenomenon for a man who so wants to be liked.
Trump calls to congratulate Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan on his success in the recent referendum transforming Turkey into a dictatorship. The contested referendum abolishes the office of Prime Minister and grants Erdogan final approval of nominees for parliament. The vote was conducted under a state of emergency with thousands detained in the wake of a failed coup last summer.
Trump has a vested interest in Turkey: Trump Towers in Istanbul was completed in 2012. The ceremony was presided over by then Prime Minister Erdogan. [4] It does not bode well for the Kurds – our strongest ally in Iraq and Syria but Turkey's mortal enemy.
The president also has a Trump Tower in the Philippines, where strongman president Rodrigo Duterte is committing his version of genocide under the name of a war on drugs. In 2015 Duterte promised to kill up to 100,000 people to eradicate the drug problem and compared himself to Hitler. [5] Duterte has expressed admiration for the American president and told reporters that Trump told him in a December phone conversation that he was going about his drug war "the right way." [6] If the "right way" is extrajudicial assassination let us hope Trump never gets the authoritarian power he seems to admire in other nations.
April 18, 2017
Those fighting ships that were heading to the Sea of Japan off the coast of Korea – the ones described as an armada by our president – were never headed there after all. Was it miscommunication? Was it a bluff? Has our president completely lost touch with the military? Or was it a fleet of Spanish ghost ships from the sixteenth century? No one seems to know.
Trump signs what he calls a "Buy American and Hire American" executive decree that makes modest changes in the hiring of highly skilled foreign workers. Like his stipulation that the Dakota and Keystone oil pipelines use American steel, it turns out to be little more than lip service. They will not use American steel. It was just a talking point. Buy and hire American is more of the same.
Trump targets Georgia congressional candidate Jon Ossoff and takes credit when the Democrat falls short of winning the special election outright. Ossoff will face Republican Karen Handel in a June runoff.
April 19, 2017
On February 17, 23-year-old Juan Manuel Montes became the first dreamer under the protection of DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) to be deported by the Trump administration. DACA was implemented by the Obama administration to protect immigrants who entered the nation as children and who have since led law-abiding lives.
Immigrant groups rightly fear the beginning of mass deportations without regard for family bonds or humanitarian interests. Many of the immigrants who arrived as children have no family or community ties in their nations of origin.
Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina joins the hypocrisy parade, pledging his undying devotion – formerly reserved for Senator John McCain – to the president. Said Graham on Fox & Friends: "We have got a president and a security team that I've been dreaming of for eight years."
This from the man who led the Never Trump movement and refused to endorse the Republican nominee for president. All it took was 59 Tomahawk missiles and the Mother of All Bombs to turn on Graham's love light.
Bill O'Reilly is out at Fox News. Fellow woman groper Trump has said he doesn't think O'Reilly did anything wrong. Of course you don't, Donald. You can get away with anything when you're rich and famous.
Exxon Mobil applies to the Treasury Department for a waiver to the sanctions that blocked former CEO and current Secretary of State Rex Tillerson's deal with Russian oil giant Rosneft. [7] Is this the payback both Putin and Tillerson expected when they made the Donald king? That it comes only ninety days into Trump's reign is an indication of their collective arrogance.
The Trump people do not believe they will be held accountable for anything: corruption, cronyism, conflict-of-interest, tax evasion or collusion to defraud an election. They believe Russia Gate is a done deal. The president can get away with pretty much anything he wants to do as long as he's willing to drop a few bombs and toe the party line. Out goes Bannon and friends; in come Kushner and the Wall Street Crowd.
We'll hear no more of "deconstructing the administrative state." We'll get tax reform and budget cuts and military adventurism.
Lindsey Graham joins the party but John McCain steps back, tweeting in response the Wall Street Journal's story: Are they crazy?
Yes, they are, senator. Crazy like a fox. Billions upon billions are in the balance – an estimated half a trillion. If Putin can swing the Arctic deal with Exxon, he would buy a few more years for the stumbling Russian economy.
April 20, 2017
The day speaks for itself. A new CBS poll finds that 61% favor legalization and an even greater number support medical use of cannabis. Unfortunately, our antebellum attorney general Jeff Sessions is not among the majority.
Sessions tells a rightwing talk show he is amazed that "a judge sitting on an island in the Pacific" can block the actions of the president. He was referring to U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson of Hawaii with equal amounts of contempt for the judiciary and the state of Hawaii.
The Department of Justice is preparing to indict WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange despite his assistance in putting Trump in the White House and Sessions in the attorney general's office. "I love WikiLeaks" used to be a virtual campaign slogan.
Trump issues an executive order calling for a study of the problem of dumping on the American steel industry. That's like a study to determine if smoking cannabis is related to a feeling of euphoria. He doesn't mention China – his new best friend – but he has plenty of venom for the Canadian dairy and lumber industries.
China is on alert and preparing contingencies in the event war breaks out between America and North Korea.
Secretary of State Tillerson notifies Speaker of the House Paul Ryan that Iran is complying with the agreement not to develop nuclear weapons. Had the Trump administration refused to certify compliance, Obama's five-nation deal with Iran – a deal Trump called the worst ever – would have collapsed.
Clearly, there is nothing Trump the candidate said that Trump the president stands by. His entire presidency is some kind of charade, a display of smoke and mirrors, a two-bit magic act or a carnival trick show. Look as hard and long as you like, there is nothing there. He stands for nothing, envisions nothing, understands nothing and hopes for nothing. In the thirteenth week of his presidency, he is trying to run the clock out.
Trump swears that his healthcare program is still alive despite the collective groan emanating from the halls of congress. He swears they'll bring it up again and maybe they will. They have nothing else. They can't push through tax reform, infrastructure spending or immigration reform. Trump has no legislative agenda. He expected Paul Ryan to provide one for him but Ryan wants nothing to do with Trump.
We are witnessing a presidency that practices incompetence on a level never before experienced. We have had incompetent presidents but this is a president who doesn't want the office. Trump wanted to win the White House but he didn't want to run it. He has no clue how to operate government. He has no idea what to do next. He knows he's in over his head. He just wants to play golf and dream of happier times when he was a billionaire alone in his tower, groping women and boasting about what he would do if he were in the White House.
1/ "ICE immigration arrests of noncriminals double under Trump" by Maria Sacchetti. Washington Post, April 16, 2017.
2/ "North Korea 'will test missiles weekly' senior official tell BBC." British Broadcasting Corporation, April 17, 2017.
3/ "Majority in US No Longer Thinks Trump Keeps His Promises." Gallup, April 17, 2017.
4/ "Donald Trump Has a Conflict of Interest in Turkey. Just Ask Donald Trump." By Ashley Dejean. Mother Jones, April 18, 2017.
5/ "How Donald Trump's Business Ties are Already Jeopardizing U.S. Interests" by Kurt Eichenwald. Newsweek, December 13, 2016.
6/ "Duterte: Trump Says Philippines tackling drug problem 'the right way'" by Ivan Watson, Kathy Quiano and Bijan Hosseini. CNN, December 3, 2016.
7/ "Exxon Seeks U.S. Waiver to Resume Russia Oil Venture" by Jay Soloman and Bradley Olson. Wall Street Journal, April 19, 2017.]]>
Timely, and simple enough in its reach, this discussion will include myself and a number of intellectuals such as history professor Norton Mezvinsky, whistle blower Michael Lesher and author Gilad Atzmon. The panel will focus on the collapse of identity politics, the crises within new left thinking, and the future of liberal and progressive thought.
In particular, I will discuss "Insular View of the American Left" while Professor Mezvinsky will speak to "The Quagmire of Current Political Terminology in U.S. Society." Mr. Lesher will explore dichotomy between "Jewish Identity and Jewish Religion" and Mr. Atzmon will address "The Tyranny of Correctness- deconstructing identity politics and understanding its origin."
Although the panel will necessarily touch upon Zionism, Israel, and events in the Middle East, these topics will play but a small part in a much broader exploration of the political winds of today.
To some, the subject matter of the discussion is apparently of less consequence than the makeup of the panel itself. In particular, the presence of Gilad Atzmon, a onetime Israeli citizen and Jew who has since renounced both, has triggered an organized effort to bully the theatre into canceling the event or, failing that, to disrupt it.
I've long been accused of being a "self-hating" Jew largely because of my work as legal counsel for the political wing of Hamas and my fervent opposition to the state of Israel as one built from the marrow of ethnic cleansing.
Described as controversial because of my opposition to Zionism, and a long list of revolutionary clients and movements that have included more than a few accused of domestic or international terrorism, I've grown accustomed to being "shunned " by the political opposition that rarely seeks to engage in public discussion or debate. That's fine. For some, it's so much easier to toss barbs from the safety of the shadows then it is to withstand open exposure for the weakness of one's thought.
Yet, Gilad Atzmon presents another picture. Mr. Atzmon's stinging criticisms of Zionism, Jewish identity… perhaps even Judaism itself… have so enraged both Zionists and some anti-Zionists alike, that the mob seeks to silence him and thereby deny us all the benefit of his speech.
Censors of thought are not new to time or place. Throughout history, they have deigned to dictate the parameters of acceptable dialogue and, when unable to control the discourse, have sought to shut it down as if ideas are in themselves dangerous.
One need only look to recent events in Washington D.C. to understand that those who fear the market place of free ideas often seek to shutter it whether by economic intimidation or through resort to violence.
Just this past month, JDL (Jewish Defense League) imports from Canada brutally attacked, and seriously injured, a 55-year old Palestinian-American professor from North Carolina who had the temerity to pass an anti-AIPAC demonstration with his family.
The mindless brutality of the Canadian JDL members, that day, cannot be seen in a vacuum but rather must be viewed in the light of 50 plus years of terrorism carried out by its US counterpart, now formally designated as an outlawed terrorist organization.
Over these many years, the membership, indeed, leadership of the American branch of the JDL… or "associate organizations"… have unleashed an unprecedented reign of terror which has produced dozens of convictions for crimes ranging from a plot to bomb the office of Arab-American Congressman Darrell Issa and the King Fahd Mosque in Culver City, Calif. to numerous bombings of foreign embassies and properties to attacks on US buildings to conspiracies of kidnap and murder to assaults on foreign nationals and US police. Countless other crimes, including murder and conspiracy to bomb, have been laid at the feet of the JDL but to date remain un-charged.
Despite this documented, nay, unprecedented history of violent attacks by zio-fascists upon free speech and association, neither the JDL of Canada nor its US counterpart will suppress this panel discussion at Theatre 80 or silence our voice. Ours is a community of free spirits and thinkers. Women and men directed by little more than the pursuit of truth and justice.
Indeed, long ago the community of the LES of New York City opened its arms to refugees who fled tyranny abroad and, in so doing, became a welcome host to the dissident, the politically unpopular, the revolutionary idea or person.
Today, that greeting is under attack by some who have failed to learn the history of this community that I have called home for most of my adult life. A journey down the hardscrabble, but exhilarating, road of this community of resistance can say far more than I can about the necessity of the exchange of ideas that will occur this coming Sunday evening at Theatre 80.
The History of Dissent on the Lower East Side
Long before the free speech battles of the 60's, or the recent ones at Berkeley, there stood a proud tenement building at 208 East 13th Street in New York City. More than a hundred years ago, it echoed with the booming resonance of resistance… a declaration of who we were at the time and, more important, who we could become if only we dared to challenge political and social orthodoxy.
Today, on the façade of that old battered 19th century tenement building on the LES of Manhattan sits a cracked and stained plaque that simply says "Emma Goldman lived here." Enough said.
The same building was home to "Mother Earth," Goldman's periodical that promoted anarchist views and provided a platform for "radical" artists and militant ideas of the day… until it was closed as subversive by the government in 1917.
Goldman was a fierce and tireless supporter of "controversial" revolutionary struggles such as free speech, birth control, women's equality, union organizing, workers rights, sexual freedom and peace.
Known as "Red Emma", she was labeled by J. Edgar Hoover as one of the "most dangerous women" in the country." Among her closest friends and comrades were Alexander Berkman, Margaret Sanger, Roger Baldwin, Max Eastman, John Reed, Dorothy Day and Floyd Dell… a veritable who's who of radicals who, long ago, confronted political convention not all that different from that which seeks to intimidate or to silence us today.
In 1917, Goldman was sentenced to two years in prison after founding the No-Conscription League in protest against the draft. It was one of several stints she did, beyond bars, for political beliefs that ranged from a year in prison for "inciting to riot"… for a speech she gave at a Union Square hunger demonstration where she told the poor to steal bread if they could not afford to buy it… to another one for illegally distributing information about birth control. Following her arrest during the notorious Palmer Raids that began on November 7, 1919 (the second anniversary of the Russian Revolution), she was deported to Russia along with some 250 other "subversive aliens."
While the Palmer Raids occurred throughout the United States with more than 10,000 arrests for subversion, they, in particular, targeted hundreds of high profile "militants" who were rounded up on the LES which was then home to a powerful and vibrant community of revolutionary thinkers and activists.
In the life blood of the LES, Goldman has been anything but the exception to the rule in a community that historically has been home to the dissident… the unconventional… those who see more to life than surrender to the whims of politically correct dogma or the constraints of "patriotic" mobs.
Dorothy Day heard the call of the LES. Along with Peter Maurin, she founded the Catholic Worker Movement which, with anarchists and communists, fought for the rights of the homeless, workers, women, immigrants and others disempowered by virtue of gender or class.
Although the Movement found its vigor in Christian charity and promoted a political strategy of total non-violence, Day was never one to shy away from direct action. Jailed for picketing the White House in support of women's right to vote, while imprisoned for her offense, she helped organize a hunger strike at Occoquan Prison.
It is said that, over the course of a long life of civil disobedience, Day was arrested more than one hundred times. A poster memorializing her final arrest at age 76 declares "our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy rotten system." It hangs from the wall of my office.
To Dorothy Day, peaceful resistance necessarily demanded of activists' controversial speech that directly confronted the tyranny of the status quo… something she excelled at while working as the editor of The Masses.
Based in "Alphabet City" in the LES, Masses was a radical magazine that reported on most of the major labor struggles of its day: from the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek strike of 1912 in West Virginia to the Paterson Silk Strike of 1913 and the Ludlow massacre in Colorado. It strongly supported Big Bill Haywood and his IWW, the political campaigns of Eugene V. Debs and vigorously argued for birth control and women's suffrage.
Until closed by the government in 1917 for its anti-war and "anti-government" platform, The Masses featured a chorus of militant voices including such writers as John Reed, Crystal Eastman, Hubert Harrison, Inez Milholland, Mary Heaton Vorse, Louis Untermeyer, Randolf Bourne, Arturo Giovannitti, Michael Gold, Helen Keller, William English Walling, Anna Strunsky, Carl Sandburg, Upton Sinclair, Floyd Dell and Louise Bryant. It also featured a host of political artists including John Sloan, Robert Henri, Mary Ellen Sigsbee, Cornelia Barns, Rockwell Kent, Art Young, Boardman Robinson, Robert Minor, Lydia Gibson, K. R. Chamberlain, Hugo Gellert, George Bellows and Maurice Becker.
At other times, the radical history of the LES has been marked not just by controversial speech or passive resistance alone, but by direct action that, on occasion, has exploded into violence captivating the watch of the rest of New York City as if this one hundred square block area is very much of a different world.
Thus, on January 13, 1874, over 7,000 largely unemployed workers gathered in Tompkins Square Park, in the largest demonstration New York City had ever seen, to demand financial assistance from the City during an economic depression.
Ten and a half acres in total, the square-shaped park is bounded on the north by East 10th Street, on the east by Avenue B, on the south by East 7th Street, and on the west by Avenue A. It is abutted by St. Marks Place to the west.
Without warning, not long after the demonstration began, some 1,600 policemen charged the park and dispersed most of the crowd beating people throughout it with clubs. Others, on horseback, cleared the surrounding streets. Some of the demonstrators fought back in vain… attempting to defend the square. Hundreds were injured.
Samuel Gompers, himself a resident of the LES, who founded the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and was scheduled to address the demonstration that day, described the events and his experiences:
". . . mounted police charged the crowd on Eighth Street, riding them down and attacking men, women, and children without discrimination. It was an orgy of brutality. I was caught in the crowd on the street and barely saved my head from being cracked by jumping down a cellar-way."
Little more than a century later, on August 6, 1988, Tompkins Square Park exploded yet once again when police attacked a large group of peaceful demonstrators protesting a newly established curfew intended to clear the park of activists, homeless and so-called squatters that had made increasing use of Tompkins Square for demonstrations against the City and its misuse of local community space. Bystanders, activists, neighborhood residents and journalists were caught up in the violence.
Despite a brief lull in the fighting, the mêlée continued until 6 a.m. the next day. Numerous injuries resulted with over 100 complaints of police brutality lodged following the riot. One headline in the New York Times summed up the events: "Yes, a Police Riot."
St. Marks Place
If Tompkins Square Park is the heart of the East Village, St. Marks Place is its soul. James Fenimore Cooper lived at 6 St. Marks from 1834-1836. While there, he published his epic "A letter To My Countrymen." It proved to be his most scathing work of social criticism in which he denounces the "slavery of party affiliations."
In 1854 The Nursery for the Children of Poor Women…the first of its kind… was set up in a rundown house on St. Marks.
In 1917, Leon Trotsky arrived on St. Marks Place where he wrote for the Novy Mir ("New World"), then based at 77 St. Marks, while living with his family across the street in an apartment at 80 St. Marks. Just a few years earlier, Berkman and Goldman opened the progressive Modern School at No. 16 St. Marks. Among its teachers were famed muckrakers Jack London and Upton Sinclair.
In the 1940's, W.H. Auden resided on St. Marks. In the 60's, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin co-founded the Youth International Party ("Yippies") at No. 30 St. Marks and Lenny Bruce lived for a while, on the famed street, at No. 13. In 1966, Andy Warhol housed his Exploding Plastic Inevitable collective above the Electric Circus nightclub at 19-25 St. Marks… installing the Velvet Underground as the house band. During the same period, Debbie Harry lived at 13 St. Marks. Often were the occasions when a vibrant sweep down St. Marks Place would mean a chance encounter with Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg… a longtime area resident.
Elsewhere on the Lower East Side, throughout the 60's, political activists, movements and artists alike continued its well established tradition of serving as a safe haven for cultural diversity, political dissidents and controversial speech.
For example, just up the block from what had been the home of Charlie Parker, stands the Christodora House. Located on Avenue B, directly across the street from Tompkins Square Park, the Young Lords and Black Panther Party maintained their respective headquarters during this period.
The Young Lords, in particular, played an important role in what was, and remains, a heavily Latino neighborhood… creating community projects similar to those of the Black Panthers but with a Latino flavor. Such projects included a free breakfast program for children, the Emeterio Betances free health clinic, community testing for tuberculosis and lead-poisoning, free clothing drives, cultural events and Puerto Rican history classes. The female leadership in New York pushed the Young Lords to fight for women's rights.
80 St. Marks Place
The venue for Sunday's panel discussion has a storied history itself in the LES. Beginning as a nightclub during Prohibition, 80 Saint Marks Place was home to performers that included such Jazz greats as Thelonious Monk, Harry "Sweets" Edison, John Coltrane and Frank Sinatra.
After Theatre 80 was established in the former nightclub, its tradition of diversity in the arts continued as it launched the careers of famous performers including the likes of Gary Burghoff, Bob Balaban and Billy Crystal, who once worked there as an usher.
Richard "Lord" Buckley, described by Bob Dylan in his book "Chronicles" as "the hipster bebop preacher who defied all labels", had his final performance at Theatre 80 when his cabaret card was seized by police from the vice squad and his show closed. Outraged, Buckley went to the local precinct to demand his card's return. Not long thereafter he ended up dead in St. Vincent's Hospital of an apparent stroke. That brought about a movement which eventually ended the Cabaret Card system in New York City.
Not many years later, the legendary play "Hair" was cast at Theatre 80. During the 1970s and 80s it also served as a revival house where one could see vintage films. Among those who attended, often to see their own body of work was Gloria Swanson, Joan Crawford, Myrna Loy, Ruby Keeler and Joan Blondell.
More recently Theatre 80 presented a play by noted poet, playwright, author and racial equality activist, Sonya Sanchez. Fred Hampton Jr. was often seen at the theatre to attend events for famed radical defense attorney, Lynne Stewart, who recently died having been politically persecuted and imprisoned for her life's work.
Actively involved in a wide range of community issues, the theatre, not long ago, along with Patti Smith, sponsored a concert to raise money for the victims of the Second Avenue gas explosion which caused two deaths, injured at least nineteen people… four critically… and completely destroyed four buildings between East 7th Street and St. Marks Place. It has held a number of so-called "truther" forums that explored the events of 9-11… an issue of burning interest to the local community.
Come this Sunday, the panel discussion will proceed in the ideal venue in the perfect community. To be sure, at times, its participants will surely say things that may offend the sensibilities of some in the audience. On occasion, panel members will disagree with one another as the market place of ideas is not a group-speak but rather a challenge to explore diverse and often competing thoughts in the pursuit of truth.
Ideas may sting, they may hurt, and they may challenge us to explore issues that can cause great personal discomfort. That's precisely what they are intended to do. There is no question that while the clash of ideas causes pain; the suppression of ideas causes greater harm… and sometimes pain is the stretch of growing.
Thanks to the refusal of Lorcan Otway, owner of Theatre 80, to surrender to howls of a few, join us this Sunday, April 30 at 5PM in the heart of the ongoing American evolution at Theatre 80, 80 St. Marks Place in the Lower East Side of New York City.]]>
This could, in theory, be one reason AG Marshall is taking to Twitter, Facebook, and Alabama's news media to drum up support for the so-called "Fair Justice Act." He promises the proposed law will speed the state's executions by hacksawing the amount of time already overwhelmed and underfunded death penalty attorneys have to effectively represent their clients.
Vociferous in his support of the "Fair Justice Act" – a bill there's nothing fair about – it's notable and unacceptable that AG Marshall has yet to make any public statement explaining the horrible circumstances of Alabama's last execution – the horrendously botched execution of Ronald Bert Smith on December 8, 2016; Mr. Smith endured a thirteen-minute death-rattle as lethal injection chemicals ravaged his insides – when he was supposed to be unconscious – heaving, coughing, clenching his fists, moving his lips, and opening his left eye.
Smith's grisly torture followed Alabama's January 2016 execution of Christopher Brooks, an execution where questions remain whether, like Smith's patently brutal and violent poisoning, Brooks too was not properly anesthetized and then burned alive from the inside with caustic chemicals. Other than opaque and blanket denials in court filings, AG Marshall has thus far adopted the same officious silence on the possibility Alabama tortured Brooks to death – just as it did Smith.
Conscientious Alabamians can't let AG Marshall get away with it.
Conscientious, justice-loving Alabamians who want to ameliorate Alabama's long, dark history of capital punishment – and its reputation around the world for human and civil rights abuses – must demand AG Marshall investigate and publicly address the circumstances of both Smith and Brooks' deaths.
Conscientious, justice-loving Alabamians should harangue AG Marshall and the Fair Justice Act's legislative sponsor, state senator Cam Ward, to answer: Why are you pushing a poorly drafted, unstudied, confusing new death penalty law to speed up executions? Why are you doing it right now – when all available evidence shows the last two executions in Alabama went horribly wrong?
Moreover, although the current version of the bill under consideration by the House of Representatives provides a meager 365 days (provided for by current law) instead of the disastrous proposal of chopping it to 180 days for the filing of postconviction motions – the shortened time period the bill would impose is still way too short for even the best, most committed, most hard-working lawyers to effectively investigate and litigate motions for death-sentenced clients in Alabama.
That's because of yet another one of the Fair Justice Acts' proposed time-accelerators for the filing of these complex Last Chance Not to Be Executed (Tortured) Despite Your Constitutional Rights Having Been Violated-type motions – motions advancing claims of juror misconduct or that the defense lawyer was a train wreck – not infrequent occurrences in capital cases in Alabama.
This additional cockamamie time-accelerator in The Fair Justice Act was deconstructed at the end of last week in a cogent oped by Birmingham attorney, Lisa Borden. Borden writes how the bill "would require persons convicted of capital offenses to pursue post-conviction legal claims at the same time the direct appeals from their convictions are being considered."
Mincing no words, Borden waves the red flag of warning at all folks who care about the Constitution and preventing injustice in Alabama, opining that this "proposal is neither fair nor just, and [it] will only increase the already substantial likelihood that Alabama will execute a wrongfully convicted person . . . . [It] take[s] a long time to untangle the convoluted mess that is created by Alabama's haphazard rush to send poor people to their deaths."
Conscientious Alabamians concerned that, like Ray Hinton, freed after a hellacious thirty years on Alabama's death row proclaiming his innocence, additional innocents might be unjustly thrust towards terrible and inhumane deaths – without an adequate chance to prove their innocence and/or that their constitutional rights were violated – you need to speak up. You need to speak up now!
Demand that instead of potentially innocent, unfairly convicted poor Alabamians, that it be this unprincipled, unconstitutional, blood-thirsty Fair Justice Act that's killed.
And killed fast.
MSNBC reported in March 2014, "on a vote of 13-9, Murthy's nomination passed through the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. But his path forward to full confirmation is now under assault from the National Rifle Association, which penned a letter strongly opposing Murthy as Surgeon General." The Washington Post noted after he was ultimately confirmed in December 2014, "by far the most vehement opposition to Murthy's confirmation came from the National Rifle Association, which called him a 'serious threat to the rights of gun owners' because of his support of tighter gun control laws."
Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) initially withheld Murthy's vote in the Senate until after the 2014 elections to avoid putting pressure on Democrats in pro-gun states. The New York Times reported that as many as 10 Democrats were considering voting against Dr. Murthy because of his gun comments. Dr. Murthy was narrowly confirmed in a 51-43 vote in December 2014, more than a year after the position had been vacant. Three Democrats, Senator Joe Manchin (D-VA), Senator Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND), and Senator Joe Donnelly (D-IN) voted against Dr. Murthy, while Democrats who lost in the 2014 elections were able to cast votes in his favor before their elected office turned over, pushing Dr. Murthy's nominee through with a simple majority.
"The NRA's position hasn't changed. America's next surgeon general should not be a political operative whose professional inexperience has been a source of bipartisan concern," NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam said in a statement before the vote. Republicans also contested Dr. Murthy's nomination on the Senate floor. Senator Rand Paul wrote a letter to Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) asserting that Dr. Murthy's statements on guns disqualified him for the position.
The NRA ran opposition articles leading up to and following Dr. Murthy's nomination. In an October 2014 article published on its website, the NRA claimed the media and Democrats were exploiting the Ebola virus to push through Dr. Murthy's confirmation as Surgeon General. Preceding the confirmation vote, the NRA renewed calls for their opposition, citing that they believe he would use his position as Surgeon General to pursue a public health agenda on gun violence. "America's public health apparatus has long been seen by gun control advocates as a key element to legitimizing their agenda. Public funding of gun control propaganda, in the form of junk science studies emanating from the Centers for Disease Control and its affiliated entities, is merely one piece of the puzzle," a December 2014 appearing in the NRA website claimed, referring to pushes for the Center for Disease Control and Prevention to conduct a comprehensive study on gun violence, despite it being one of the top causes of death for people under the age of 65 in the United States. In response to Dr. Murthy's successful confirmation as Surgeon General, the NRA noted they would score the vote against the Senators who supported his nomination.
The NRA put a lot of resources and effort in opposing Dr. Murthy's nomination. Given their record and history against the Surgeon General, its unlikely they didn't exert some influence or push for Trump to ask for his resignation. Fox News reported on April 15 that Trump will be the first president since Ronald Reagan to address the NRA's Annual Leadership Forum and he recently hosted NRA Board Member Ted Nugent during a White House visit. Dr. Murthy formally resigned on April 22 in response to Trump's request, and will be temporarily replaced by Rear Adm. Sylvia Trent-Adams until a replacement is confirmed by the Senate.]]>
Thank you all for inviting me. There is no place I'd rather be on earth day. And that includes marching for science at the March for Science in Washington. Although I certainly support marching for honesty, and I'd even march for the cause of getting more scientists to march — and any other group that hasn't yet found the time to bother.
Unless resisting madness becomes mainstream, the madmen will decide our fate.
Thank you also for having started the first chapter of World Beyond War and for having given us the idea to have chapters. We now have people working on starting dozens of chapters in over a dozen countries. And we have staff to help them, and we have people in 151 countries who have signed the pledge that I'll pass around here, pledging to work to end all war. We're trying to get to 175 countries, because that's how many the U.S. military admits to having troops in. So, 24 more to go. If you know anybody in Venezuela, Cuba, Honduras, Mongolia, Algeria, Lithuania, Ethiopia, or Papua New Guinea, please point them to WorldBeyondWar.org.
And thank you for having set up such a terrific program of workshops today, and — I hope — of work that will follow the workshops.
I hope my comments fit into the program, because I'm going to take a round about way of speaking in support of peace and environmentalism by praising garbage incinerators.
In the United States a garbage incinerator is mostly used to get rid of vast quantities of stuff nobody ever needed in the first place — not including, I'm sorry to say, presidential twitter accounts.
And a typical U.S. garbage incinerator produces vast quantities of pollution, horrible smells, dioxin, mercury, nitric oxide, lead, and particulate matter. If you live near such an incinerator, your chances of getting cancer, heart disease, diabetes, asthma, and respiratory problems shoot through the roof.
So, you want to locate such a thing as far as you can get it from any population that puts significant funding into election campaigns.
That's why in recent years the students at Benjamin Franklin High School and Curtis Bay Elementary School in a poor and already heavily polluted section of Baltimore, Maryland, had to organize and — thus far — block the construction near their schools and homes of what would have been the biggest and nastiest incinerator yet. Baltimore is already the leading U.S. city for deaths caused by air pollution. And air pollution, like the stairs in your house, like toddlers who find guns, like unsafe workplaces, like local police forces, and like fast-food meals, is more likely to kill you than is ISIS or Al Qaeda.
The Baltimore incinerator, the construction of which has been stopped thus far, would have burned 4,000 tons of trash per day and emitted 1,240 pounds of lead and mercury per year. That's not the kind of garbage incinerator that I want to praise.
There should be two pictures up on the screen. The one that's not an airplane is an incinerator, or waste-to-power plant, now nearing completion in Copenhagen, Denmark.
If you have to have incinerators, because you have not yet reached zero waste, you might want one like this one. It emits none, zero, not a speck of all those nasty poisons and smells that an American simply assumes an incinerator must produce, as illness must produce health insurance companies, as robberies must produce gun sales, and as cable television must produce Wolf Blitzer.
Because this incinerator is not dangerous to those near it, it can be placed near a city. This will allow it to heat 160,000 homes while providing electricity to 62,000 homes, and generating a byproduct of water while burning something over 1,000 tons of waste a day, or a quarter of what was planned for Baltimore.
And because it's placed safely near a city, this particular power plant has had ski slopes installed on the roof of it, with elevators used to bring skiers to the top. Trees will be planted along the ski slopes, as well as hiking trails, climbing walls, a restaurant and bar, etc. And when the incinerator is no longer needed, you'll still have the ski resort.
None of this means that the incinerator is not still a problem. It still produces carbon dioxide. However, it produces much less of it than do other plants. And the architects' goal is for it to publicly display exactly how much it is releasing in order to encourage reduction. It is supposed to do this by producing smoke rings rather than a stream of smoke. Each ring, if it works, will contain the same known amount of C02.
Donald Trump campaigned for president with something of a mixed message on wars. He named wars he opposed and wars he pretended that he had opposed, even while proposing more war spending, a bigger military, the stealing of oil, and the killing of families. But he campaigned very clearly on infrastructure, promising $1 trillion in new spending on infrastructure — his most popular promise according to Gallup polling. And if you believe that one, I've got a rapidly collapsing bridge I'd like to sell you, with an Amtrak train creeping across it at 10 miles per hour, full of passengers cursing at the internet that doesn't work and the food that could silence a lobbyist.
Trump's budget proposal would invest in only one bit of infrastructure: a wall. And it would move $54 billion from nearly every other government program to the military, boosting military spending to over 60% of the spending that Congress decides how to spend each year. Of the gazillion items to be cut in order to build more weapons, Trump is proposing to cut any tests to verify whether the water at U.S. beaches contains fecal matter. The world we live in is determined by specific human actions. Shit doesn't just happen.
Let's look at the two pictures on the screen again. The one that is not a ski-slope power plant overlooking a harbor you can safely swim in is an F-22, an earlier version of your beloved F-35. The smoke in the picture is not produced by a power plant, or even by war planes defending your way of life by making lots of foreign people want to kill you. Nope, that smoke is produced by a re-enactment of Pearl Harbor, meant to convince you that the most costly military in the history of the world, the military to which belong 97% of the bases not located on the soil of the nation they belong to, a military costing nearly as much as all others — allied and otherwise — combined, a military whose private weapons makers are the leading suppliers to the world with their weapons used on multiple sides of most wars, a military that can drop a single bomb to destroy a 2-mile-diameter area of tunnels that it dug decades earlier, a military that now routinely keeps a half dozen aggressive foreign wars going at once, a military that has killed at least 20 million people since World War II ended, a military that in that time has overthrown 36 governments, interfered in at least 30 foreign elections, attempted to assassinate over 50 foreign leaders, and dropped bombs on people in over 30 countries — this military, with its billion dollar advertising budget and football teams on contract to publicly pretend to revere it — this military, according to that smoke, is an innocent victim reluctantly compelled to defend itself. That message is the purpose of that smoke.
But that smoke represents something else as well. The U.S. military is the top consumer of petroleum we have, the top air polluter, the third greatest polluter of U.S. waterways, the biggest creator of superfund sites, et cetera, and it does as much damage preparing to fight wars over fossil fuels with which to destroy the earth as it does actually fighting those wars.
The F-35, the updated U.S. war plane, is — in some ways — the U.S. version of the ski slope power plant. It's our (or our government's, our society's) dream, our investment, our vision of what the future should look like, the face we present to the rest of the world. And that rest of the world includes Denmark, where a corporation produces a few bits of the F-35, and the government can thus buy a couple dozen of them and, in good U.S. sociopathic form, depict that decision as a job-creation effort. At the same time, Denmark can, of course, please the U.S. State Department which is largely a marketing firm for U.S.-made weapons.
But Denmark spends about a half of one percent of what the U.S. does on war, and about 28% per capita of what the U.S. spends on war. (Denmark has slightly less money than the United States per capita, but a higher median income as a result of having done better in Kindergarten or otherwise somehow having learned how to share.) This means that, while Denmark gets fewer F-35s, it does get to be one of those countries that has fast clean trains, beautiful parks, top quality education preschool through college, healthcare, retirement, parental leave, vacation, higher life expectancy, greater happiness, and other things that Senator Bernie Sanders is far more likely to tell you about than he is to mention the difference in military spending. (And yes, Danish taxes are higher, if we pretend that what we shell out to fund our own healthcare and retirement and education and transportation and childcare and psychiatric therapy doesn't count. If those things count, then Danish taxes are lower. The big difference between U.S. taxes and those in other countries is how much goes into war.)
I'm not going to tell you much about the F-35, because many of you know it better than I do, and you've got some real experts here today. I did help put together a petition opposing it at RootsAction.org that has over 30,000 signatures and can be used in lobbying efforts.
Let's look at the incinerating ski slope and the incinerating airplane from a few different angles. The one that incinerates garbage costs about $670 million or somewhere between three to six F-35s, if you were able to produce so few. If the local airport here hosts 18 F-35s, that's three to six ski slope power plants you could have had instead. A cost estimate for the United States alone for the whole F-35 program, a plane that incinerates human beings when it works and itself when it doesn't, is $1.4 trillion. Let's be generous and assume that either recent reductions in that cost are real or that this will be the first U.S. military project that does not go over budget. You still could have had 2,089 ski slope power plants instead of the F-35s. They could have heated 334 million households, although the United States only has about half that many households, and a growing number of them do not need heating. The same 2,089 ski slope power plants could have provided electricity to 130 million homes — again, more homes than exist in the U.S., though perhaps not if we gave homes to the homeless. Obviously I am not proposing we build that many ski slope power plants. For the majority of them we should substitute solar and wind production and efficiency standards, at likely a lower cost. And we should give such things to the whole world, not just to this one wealthy country. The point is just that you could essentially switch the residential United States over to sustainable energy for the cost of this airplane. And while that cost is spread over many years, the cost of the U.S. military as a whole approaches $1 trillion in a single year, each and every year, over and over again wasting on our most environmentally destructive, not to mention murderous, enterprise a pile of money that dwarfs what the billionaires have hoarded, which could only be taxed away from them once, and a pile of money that could save the world rather than toy with its destruction.
In fairness to the F-35 and its price tag, I should note that you can now get a helmet to wear while piloting an F-35 for a mere $400,000, more of course than the pilot will be paid in a year or anybody he or she is likely to kill would have made in a lifetime.
The ski slope power plant could be built by a defense department. It helps to defend against the real and deadly danger of climate chaos. The F-35 is not defensive. The F-35 is a first-strike stealth weapon designed to penetrate air space undetected. Its weapons can include nuclear bombs. Its likely missions will include massive bombing of poor nations, creating devastation, death, injury, trauma, starvation and homelessness, while endangering the United States through the hostility it generates. The F-35 lacks any capacity to protect against angry airline hijackers, killing sprees in public places, car bombs, nuclear missiles, non-nuclear missiles, cyber attacks, economic sanctions, or climate change.
Ski slope power plants are not only not designed to commit mass murder. They also have no established pattern of blowing up or otherwise harming those around them through the release of poisons or noise. The F-35, on the other hand, is more dangerous than the incinerator proposed for Baltimore. The F-35, as I've learned from Jimmy Leas and many others, has both a high crash risk and high crash consequences which I can perhaps sum up in one word, just one word, are you listening?
When this moronic, murderous monster crashes it sends all kinds of toxic chemicals into the air. And even when it doesn't, it makes levels of noise that it's unsafe to live near. I understand the F-35 requires thousands of people around here to leave their homes without even having to bomb them.
I don't think we should lump ski instruction and training for mass murder into a single amoral category called jobs. But if we do, the ski slope power plant wins. Researchers at the University of Massachusetts report that each billion dollars spent on military preparations costs the United States between 4 and 16 thousand jobs as compared with tax cuts for working people or identical spending on clean energy, healthcare, or education. The F-35 is a job destroyer as well as a life destroyer.
And then there's the democratic comparison. The U.S. public on average wants $41 billion cut from the military, while Trump wants $54 billion added. Trump wants environmental protection cut; the public doesn't. The U.S. public would oppose subsidies for fossil fuels and support moving them to clean energy, if a pollster were to ask that question. The ski slope power plant is not a foreign idea to the U.S. public. The architect works in New York and builds in the U.S. — including having designed a park to protect lower Manhattan from flooding until the flooding gets higher — a park that may or may not be built. The idea is simply foreign to the U.S. government.
The name of today's conference is "Building A World Beyond War: What Will It Take?" Let me try very briefly to sketch the state of war madness today and what I think is needed instead.
We have specific and systemic failures, and they interlock. A key specific failure was foreshadowed when H.L. Mencken wrote these words:
"On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."
I've heard that Donald Trump has bombed people because his daughter asked him to, because he owns stock in Raytheon, because he was eating chocolate cake with the president of China, because the person he most recently spoke with advised him to, because it was the surest way to get the U.S. corporate media to praise him, because half the country wouldn't shut up about its unproven Russia theories until he risked World War III, because he does anything the Pentagon asks, and numerous other possible motivations, all of which have in common being decidedly stupid. I have yet to hear anybody suggest that Trump is bombing and threatening various countries because he has some sort of intelligent plan to solve some problem. The closest I've heard to that has been the Nixonian theory that it's good for foreign relations to make the world's governments believe you are a nuclear armed lunatic. But exactly how that is good has not been explained to my satisfaction.
Of course people did claim that Barack Obama had some sort of intelligent and even benevolent plan while he bombed the same countries. And he didn't. And he created or exacerbated ever worsening crises that landed in Trump's lap. But there was reason to believe that Obama might hesitate to start a nuclear holocaust because of what kind of cake he was eating. And that's gone, whisked off in a hurricane of dumbness and delusion that defies understanding. It shouldn't matter, except that one of the systemic problems we have is that we've allowed presidents greater powers than kings, while Congress seems to believe it's sworn an oath not to protect the Constitution but to refrain from impeaching anyone at all costs.
We also have the systemic problem of the nearly universal acceptance of war. A peace activist organization this week sent out an email with this headline: "Hate has no place in the Army."
The idea was to reject a racist, sexist bigot to lead the U.S. Army, because he might deny some people the opportunity to "serve." Similar thinking drives the Democrats' push to require that 18-year-old women register for the draft like their male counterparts, so as to end the discrimination that denies women the right to be forced against their will to participate in mass slaughter.
But imagine believing, not only that you can have an Army and no wars, but also that you can have an Army without hate. You can't properly condition members of the military to kill without hate. Here's a chant from U.S. military training:
We went to the market where all the hadji shop,
pulled out our machetes and we began to chop,
We went to the playground where all the hadji play,
pulled out our machine guns and we began to spray,
We went to the mosque where all the hadji pray,
threw in a hand grenade and blew them all away.
There are countless more just as hateful. You can, of course, make a military better or worse. You can put solar panels on a humvee or a pleasant face in a high office. And we're only going to get rid of militaries by gradual stages. But we shouldn't keep imagining that our ultimate goal is a better military.
According to Human Rights Watch this week, the United States failed to take "necessary precautions to avoid bombing a mosque." But there is nothing whatsoever legal or moral about bombing a town, and the only precaution you need in order to avoid bombing a mosque is to refrain from bombing.
The Congressional Progressive Caucus budget proposal advocates increased military spending throughout the next decade, only increased at a slower pace than in Trump's proposal.
This is the state of the normalization of war, as numerous wars are escalated and new ones threatened.
Sony, with input from the U.S. government, made a truly moronic movie called The Interview about the CIA murdering the president of North Korea. One of the actors in that movie, Seth Rogen, a proud new member of the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity at the University of Vermont this week tweeted: "I think we did more research for our movie about killing Kim Jong Un than trump is in to actually killing him." Apparently we have standards. You shouldn't murder people without doing research first. I'd love to know what research went into a movie that North Korea called an act of war and viewers called things I won't repeat to a family audience.
I'd have recommended researching the origins of the term "brainwashing."
Did you know that people cannot actually be programed like the Manchurian candidate, which was a work of fiction? There was never the slightest evidence that China or North Korea had done any such thing. And the CIA spent decades trying to do such a thing, and finally gave up.
Do you know what it was that the U.S. government promoted the myth of "brainwashing" to cover up? During the Korean War, the United States bombed virtually all of North Korea and a good bit of the South, killing millions of people. It dropped massive quantities of Napalm. It bombed dams, bridges, villages, houses. This was all-out mass-slaughter. But there was something the U.S. government didn't want known, something deemed unethical in this genocidal killing spree.
It is well documented that the United States dropped on China and North Korea insects and feathers carrying anthrax, cholera, encephalitis, and bubonic plague. This was supposed to be a secret at the time, and the Chinese response of mass vaccinations and insect eradication probably contributed to the project's general failure (hundreds were killed, but not millions). But members of the U.S. military taken prisoner by the Chinese confessed to what they had been a part of, and confessed publicly when they got back to the United States.
Some of them had felt guilty to begin with. Some had been shocked at China's decent treatment of prisoners after U.S. depictions of the Chinese as savages. For whatever reasons, they confessed, and their confessions were highly credible, were borne out by independent scientific reviews, and have stood the test of time.
How to counter reports of the confessions? The answer for the CIA and the U.S. military and their allies in the corporate media was "brainwashing," which conveniently explained away whatever former prisoners said as false narratives implanted in their brains by brainwashers.
Did you know that the Korean war has never officially ended? That the U.S. military has never relinquished wartime command of the South Korean military? That the U.S. military has been building big new bases in South Korea opposed by serious popular protests? That people have been coming from around the world for years now to join those protests? That the U.S. and South Korea annually fly practice missions over North Korea practicing to bomb it? That the U.S. is building what it calls a missile defense system in South Korea that North Korea and China consider offensive and part of an offensive first-strike policy? That South Korean activists are seeking to stop this U.S. military madness and now have a chance following the successful impeachment of their president? Did you know that North Korea has abided by past agreements until the U.S. violated them? That North Korea is the only nuclear nation that supports the creation of a treaty banning nukes? That in testing missiles North Korea violates no law? That the U.S. tests missiles all the time? That in threatening war on North Korea the United States commits a grave violation of the law as well as risking getting us all killed?
Similar missing context can be given for each of several wars and threats we hear bits and snippets about. The United States has been attempting to overthrow Syrian governments since the 1950s, including an effort of at least the past decade, during which the United States has fended off various possibilities for peace. There are three answers we should make when presented with supposed causes for war, in the case of Syria as in any other. Our corporate media fails on the first, and we all fail on the other two.
First, we should seek out verifiable facts. Will the March For Science demand scientific investigations of claims made about chemical weapons attacks in Syria? Or will it demand more funding for military research? Either one is equally scientific, but the two are not morally equivalent.
Second, we should recognize that the first question is the wrong one, that no matter how it is answered, nothing can justify launching a war, not legally, morally, or practically. A crime must be prosecuted, not be followed by another crime.
Third, we should make ourselves aware that the war for which justification is sought has been long underway, and the specific response to the chosen atrocity is a very small piece of it. As Nicolas Davies has been diligently pointing out, during the week after the chemical weapons incident of April 4th, U.S.-led air strikes killed at least 296 civilians in Syria and Iraq, those being identified victims of a fraction of U.S.-led strikes, the actual total likely falling between 1,500 and 6,000 civilians, to which I would add an unknown number of other human beings on whom we don't bestow any value as they are not labeled civilians. That level of killing, Davies points out, drawing on the reporting of the British organization called Airwars, is typical of the past two-and-a-half years. President Obama dropped more bombs than President Bush the Lesser did. Trump seems unlikely to voluntarily leave Obama's record standing.
The idea that killing great numbers of people is all well and good unless it is done with chemical weapons, or that killing someone else's people is practically philanthropic whereas killing your own people is the work of Satan is all rather curious. Saddam Hussein famously killed his own people with chemical weapons. They might not have admitted to being his people. The weapons used may have come in great part from the United States. It doesn't matter. Chemical weapons have been so stigmatized that, even while lethal injections are considered the only progressive way to murder prisoners, chemical weapons are deemed the only unforgivable way to kill in war. Of course, Napalm is alright, and other fire bombs, and white phosphorous, and depleted uranium, and cluster bombs. It's not melting the flesh off children that's immoral, it's using a weapon that the United States has declared uncivilized that is immoral.
During World War I the United States was a big fan of chemical weapons. Winston Churchill is essentially a saint in U.S. war mythology, and he was a huge supporter of chemical weapons, presumably forgiven by those who don't manage to avoid knowing that by the fact that he lived some years back. I point this out because it suggests a certain recognition that time and morality change. In my home town people forgive Thomas Jefferson for enslaving more people even as the Quakers were freeing their enslaved Virginians, because he lived so many years ago.
But Adolf Hitler is not just the character who the White House press secretary thinks was above using chemical weapons or who somehow used them more humanely by locking people in a closed space first. Hitler is also the nearly universal U.S. excuse for the institution of war. Yet he lived in the same era as Churchill. We admit that times have dramatically changed since Churchill. Can we admit that times have dramatically changed since Hitler? That warfare has changed dramatically, that nukes have been invented, that global law has been developed, that colonialism has been in many ways defeated, that evil dictators foreign and domestic do not resemble Hitler, that Hitler himself does not resemble the Hitler threatening to invade the United States in so many nightmares, that the power of nonviolent resistance to tyranny and even occupation has been advanced in major new ways? Can we bring the troops home from Germany and Japan, declare peace, and scale back the permanent war footing?
Of course the top Hitler today, and that's a name that Hillary Clinton called him, is Vladimir Putin. I don't know if the Russia obsession of the past five months is going to go away now that Trump's been persuaded to be properly hostile. That doesn't satisfy the other motivation, of showing that Hillary Clinton would have won the election if not for foreign interference. And that motivation is key to distracting us from the fact that the election system is totally broken, a popular vote winner can lose, the whole thing is bought and paid for, the communications system is unfair, people are blocked from voting by ID rules and by the purging of voter roles, Trump openly intimidated voters and opposed the counting of ballots in the few places they existed, and the Democratic Party is a miserable excuse for a political institution.
The wars, hot and cold, are also a great diversion, not only of resources, but also of attention from domestic devastation and resistance — a purpose war has served for centuries.
What we need instead are structures and habits that avoid and resolve conflicts without war. The architect of the ski slope power plant has designed a series of parks to protect lower Manhattan from some level of storms. Build that. But then make the changes needed actually to minimize the further exacerbation of climate change. Go to the climate march in Washington or locally on April 29. There will be a peace rally as part of it in DC. See peace.peoplesclimate.org
We also need to eliminate nuclear weapons, and to support the 132 nations working on the treaty to ban them. There's a Women's March to Ban the Bomb on June 17 in New York. Bring the scientists. Bring the climate defenders.
We need to organize locally and globally, not just nationally. We need to organize around principled policy demands, not political partisanship. We need to take on the entire institution of war and its replacement with reformed and reworked structures of government, including global government. We need to combine movements for peace, the environment, human rights, economic rights, sustainability, and an end to racism, sexism, mass incarceration, the death penalty, television advertising, and other forms of barbarism.
We need to develop the rule of law, the use of nonviolent civilian peaceworkers in danger zones, and the use of nonviolent activism in every zone. We need to protest Congress members until they quit, as a Congressman from Utah did earlier this week, as long as we can replace them with some that will be better. Congress members are home until the 24th. Make sure they hear from you.
We should go over to Hancock Air Base in New York State and help protest drone murders.
We should bring large numbers here to protest the F-35.
We should build up our fledgling institutions, such as World Beyond War chapters.
And at some point, if it becomes impossible for a state, as a member of the United States, to sever its ties to the military industrial complex or to create single payer healthcare or to invest in human and environmental needs, then that state should dissolve the political bands which have connected it with 49 others and assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of its own and the world's creation entitle it. I think a decent respect to the opinions of humankind renders it entirely unnecessary to declare the causes which impel such a state to the separation. Everybody gets it.
If at first you don't secede, try try again.
Thank you.
I'll take any questions, and then there's time for visiting exhibit tables, and I'll sign books at one of them, and then the workshops will begin.]]>
There had been that issue of the notable phone call, when Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull had been verbally slapped by The Donald over the "dumb" refugee resettlement deal made with the previous Obama administration.
Not to fear. Turnbull and Foreign Minister Julie Bishop came across as caddies willing to do their best for Pence (a US vice president deserves two such officials for this sort of visit). Chuckling, everything seemed to be going accordingly.
That said, Pence did not hide his irritation at a few matters on the meeting agenda, including the refugee agreement made by the Obama administration with Turnbull. "President Trump has made it clear that we'll honour the agreement, but it doesn't mean we admire the agreement." As watchers of the refugee news items know, Australia responds to asylum seekers and refugees like an insecure spouse feeling that his assets might be pinched.
The result is usually a practiced irrationalism, in this instance involving the transfer of up to 1,250 refugees in offshore detention centres on Nauru and Manus Island to the United States, in exchange for refugees from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
Pence did, however, promise Australia a range of treats, one of them being direct benefits arising from President Trump's new tax plan. In true Trump fashion, Pence met with various corporate groups, Westfield, Macquarie Group, Lendlease, and Austral, to promise pie-in-the-sky benefits amounting to $1.5 trillion. (Another figure, another speculation.)
The shower of meaningless rhetoric was heavy. "The truth is that a stronger American economy also means a stronger economy for all our trading partners, including Australia."[1] The tax reform on the table "will make the strongest economy in the world stronger still, and it will benefit the American people, American workers, and it will benefit the economy of Australia."
Such words ring hollow given that the Australian-US Free Trade Agreement has done much to benefit US economic interests disproportionately to Australia's. Despite projections of an economic nirvana by policy wonks in Canberra, the deal has actually deprived and distorted Australian gains.
The economic promises were merely one feature of the utopian cake being dished up by Pence.
Australia remains a convenient base to watch over matters in the Pacific, be it through military or intelligence operations. That very fact makes Australia both accessory and target in any future conflict in the region.
Never deemed a military occupation, let alone having the vestiges of a military base, Australian officials have opened their doors to the Lean Green Killing Machine on a rotational basis, a policy that began in 2011. Whether this is part of Obama's pivot, or Trump's strategic grope, it all amounts to the same thing: this continental military operation is open for business.
Pence's visit coincides with another rotational round for the US marines in Darwin, located in the tropical north of the continent. The group, comprising 1,250 personnel, have been particularly busy on the public relations blower.
The soldiers have been instructed to make small talk with the local press, and fraternising is to be encouraged – within limits. Like anthropologists, they are to observe the local population and note their "customs," though experience tells us that these observations tend to go destructively awry.
Even Facebook hosts a Marine Rotational Force Darwin page to provide decent filtered comments about the US role in shielding Australia from foreign wickedness. Residents await the arrival of the heroes; weather, boring, tedious, endlessly warm weather, is noted. Welcome to the Australian autumn!
What, then, of the wickedness these Green Mighty Men are defending Australia against? It might take the form of Kim Jong-un's vain boast of long range weapons, which goes to show that projecting fear is far better than knowing facts.
Such pop fantasies of nuclear cataclysm doesn't deter the Lowy Institute's direct of International Security, Euan Graham, from suggesting that North Korea would probably be able to construct a ballistic missile that would be able to reach the Australian mainland "within the life of the Trump administration."[2]
Even a threat at shooting blanks by the man child in a boiler suit concerns the Australian ministries in Canberra. As long as they come from "rogues", that is all that matters. Even more stinging was the North Korean leader's rather accurate statement that Australia had been "blindly and zealously toeing the US line".
The Marines in Darwin have been duly briefed, and the officers are insisting that they are ready should Pyongyang misbehave. "Any time a Marine force is forward deployed, we're always on standby for anything. We stand ready to fight and win the night, always," claimed Lt. Col. Brian Middleton, commanding officer of the 3rd Battalion of the 4th Marines. How utterly reassuring that must be.
[1] http://www.afr.com/news/donald-trumps-massive-tax-plan-to-benefit-australia-says-mike-pence-20170423-gvqjcz
[2] http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/grim-warning-on-north-korea-missile-threat-as-julie-bishop-blasts-regime-20170423-gvqo4g.html]]>
After all, nationalist worries over finite resources and talk of 'threats to tradition' have been echoed throughout the history of the green movement.
So, is a far right environmentalism possible? And if so, given climate change is hugely disruptive for any form of traditional nationalist idyll, how long before far right groups join the likes of Greenpeace on the frontlines?
Modern forms of green activism emerged in the 1960s in a context of threats like acid rain or increasing pesticide use which transcended national boundaries. The EU in the early 1970s also began to grapple with environmental problems that could no longer be effectively managed by individual states.
This form of green activism thus showed that the nation state had failed to protect citizens against environmental problems. As such, it drew upon an older tradition that in the 1800s reacted against the perceived attacks on humanity and nature by capitalist interests by calling for a return to the land.
This could give early environmentalism a left-wing flavour, as in the Winter Hill trespass of 1896 when thousands of people in Bolton reclaimed an ancient right of way through private land. But the disruption that modernisation brings also produced a range of responses that could be termed 'green nationalism'.
The far right feels threatened
The far right respond to threats they perceive to custom, culture, identity and locales posed by cosmopolitan elites. They usually have settler value systems that express pessimism and victimhood, emphasise threats rather than opportunities and see conspiracies as explanations for the degradation of their personal and group life-chances and local environment.
This leads to a green nationalism of defensive parochialism in which degradation of local features are opposed because they negatively affect customs – such as tending allotments, or the retention of the village green – threaten the familiar locale, and represent the effects of distrusted outsiders.
How this plays out in practice seems to depend upon which outsiders they distrust. In the US there are Tea Party environmentalists who have been mobilised, for instance, by the impact of polluting energy companies.
However, a tradition of blaming government not business, along with diversionary nationalist propaganda ('Drill here! Drill now!') funded by wealthy oil barons, has meant these same activists are often vehement opponents of better environmental regulation.
In contrast, far right groups in Britain seem simply to ignore the environmental threats posed by extreme energy extraction such as fracking.
Nationalism needs landscape
The landscape is a key element in national identity throughout the world. A defence of that landscape against perceived threats can so become an environmentalism focused on preserving the distinctive characteristics of a nation's land, from the rolling green fields of England to the snow-capped mountains of Switzerland.
This has often been accompanied by other ways of reasserting identity. Myths of a pagan past in harmony with nature have been a feature of green nationalism, from its beginnings through to the Anastasia ecovillages in contemporary Russia where, unlike their equivalent hippy communes found in the West, sustainable living is combined with a 'reactionary eco-nationalism'.
Such myths give identity and meaning to some groups attracted to the far right, such as the skinhead movement that emerged in Britain in the 1960s, while also providing imagined alternatives to the drudgery associated with modern capitalism or the compromises of democracy.
'They come here, use our finite resources …'
The other aspect of the green movement that is appropriated by the far right is the concern about the depletion of key resources by unchecked usage. At its most cynical, this can be a far right equivalent of business 'greenwashing'. However, it also reflects a tendency to see economics and society as a zero-sum game in which every gain for others is a loss for the victimised groups they see themselves as.
Concerns about finite resources therefore align with anxieties about immigration. Far right groups and their media supporters are swift to exploit fears of threats to the local animals allegedly posed by immigrants. Such baseless hostility is then compounded by the widespread and equally erroneous view that England's green and pleasant land has already largely disappeared under concrete.
Green causes are not usually the main motivating factor for those attracted to the far right. This does not mean, however, that their espousal is mere greenwashing.
The far right tends to think of green issues differently from their left-wing counterparts. Their approach focuses on the local, not the global, and reflects the centrality of landscape to national identities. Their defensive parochialism means that these threats are usually seen in cultural terms through the appropriation of victimhood, hence the tendency to focus upon immigration as opposed to the emphases of left-wing environmentalists.
Green issues tend to be seen by the far right through the distinct lenses of cultural identity and the land. That does not necessarily prevent, however, the emergence of a green nationalism.
Peter Paul Catterall is Professor of History and Policy, University of Westminster.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.]]>
You know the names, in part, because there are so few of them around the West that the same operations are continuously written up in the media and promoted by conservation groups-Malpai Borderlands group in Arizona and New Mexico, Lava Lake Land and Livestock Company in Idaho, JBarL in Montana's Centennial Valley, and the Tom Miner Association adjacent to Yellowstone National Park.
The problem is that all these feel-good examples have two problems.
One they are the exceptions, not the rule. In all cases, they are livestock operations owned by wealthy individuals or those who have some connection to wealth. As a result, they can implement management practices that cannot be scaled up across the landscape. The Malpai had the support of the late Drum Hadley, Anheuser-Busch beer heir. Lava Lakes is owned by Brian and Kathleen Bean, who live in San Francisco where Brian is an investment banker. The B Bar Ranch in Tom Miner Basin is owned by Mary Ann Mott of Mott Applesauce fame. And the JBarL is owned by Peggy Dulany, heir to the Rockefeller fortune.
The sad thing about all these ranching operations is that the owners are wealthy enough that they don't need to run livestock at all—likely it is a tax write off. Indeed, if they were truly interested in helping wildlife instead of promoting the cowboy myth, they would volunteer to retire their public lands grazing allotments and contribute their vast fortunes towards retiring other grazing allotments.
Some of their holdings are substantial—the Bean's Lava Lakes ranching operation includes 24,000 acres of private lands and controls over 900,000 acres of public lands allotments. Imagine if they retired their grazing allotments instead of running vast herds of sheep on them.
Instead, these "progressive" ranching operations are fawned upon by conservation organizations and receive numerous accolades and promotions of their livestock products (higher priced "grass fed beef and/or lamb). This includes groups like NRDC, Defenders of Wildlife (DOW), Greater Yellowstone Coalition, Montana Audubon, and the Nature Conservancy, among others.
All the while these conservation groups conveniently ignore and fail to inform their membership and media of the multiple ways that livestock production harms wildlife, and ecosystems, no doubt while receiving big donations for their silence. They are, thus, directly culpable for helping to continue the livestock hegemony and destruction of our public lands.
It would analogous to the American Cancer Society promoting filtered cigarettes arguing that they were slightly healthier than unfiltered smokes, and failing to acknowledge that cigarette smoking was a major cause of cancer.
To give an example of this collusion between ranchers and so-called conservation groups, I recently received an email about a "Range Rider" program at the Anderson Ranch in Tom Miner Basin (link here https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?ui=2&ik=e8f5b5d8e3&view=att&th=15b71e2eda289a5f&attid=0.1&disp=safe&realattid=f_j1jblcbx0&zw).
For a mere $600 you can ride a horse around in the mountains, and for dinner eat grass fed beef of animals you helped to keep out of the mouth of a wolf or grizzly.
You will learn how to harass predators like grizzlies and wolves so the ranchers can continue to run livestock on our public lands with a minimum of losses from predators.
In addition, there is the warm fuzzy feeling you'll get knowing that, according to the ranch website, range riders help the ranch document predator losses so they can obtain more money from the state predator reimbursement program (again why do wealthy people need our tax dollars to maintain their ranching operations).
The people who fall for this gimmick no doubt believe they are saving predators. That is the message that supporting national organizations like NRDC and Defenders of Wildlife try to put forth. Want to save wolves—come help harass public wildlife so that ranchers won't kill them.
Unfortunately, the Anderson Ranch and supporting so called wildlife groups are perpetuating wildlife conflicts, not ultimately eliminating them.
Keep in mind that cattle and/or sheep grazing on public lands are consuming forage that would feed elk and other native wildlife which is the food base for native predators. Funny how TNC, GYC, DOW and NRDC and other groups never mention this as a cost of public lands livestock operations.
The mere presence of livestock socially displaces native wildlife like elk which avoid areas actively being grazed by domestic animals. And therefore, are pushed into less suitable habitat. Again, this harms the natural prey of predators like wolves and grizzlies. Again, no mention of this by the collaborating groups.
Nor do these so-called wildlife groups point out that you as a range rider are there to harass predators so someone's private livestock (like the Anderson Ranch) can profit from public lands, while native predators like wolves and grizzlies are displaced from their natural habitat.
These groups also don't mention the collateral damage from livestock. The spread of weeds. The soil compaction. The pollution of waterways from manure. The destruction of biocrusts. The spread of disease from domestic animals to wildlife. The trampling of riparian areas. The fences that block wildlife migration. The hay fields that require irrigation which drains our rivers and destroys aquatic ecosystems.
And I have yet to see any of these groups drawing the connection between livestock methane production and global warming.
Indeed, I would venture to bet that these so-called "wildlife friendly" ranch operations have these impacts—which overall are far worse for the ecological health of our public lands than the loss of an occasional wolf or bear—regrettable as that may be.
And don't expect these organizations to get into the harm that promoting red meat consumption has for human health.
None of these impacts is mentioned because that would likely make any thinking person question why they are riding around on horses trying to scare predators off the public lands to protect the profit of private ranching operations.
Now I will admit that these ranch owners, and the conservation groups that support them likely believe (read have deluded themselves) that they are demonstrating a way for ranching and wildlife to co-exist, starting with the premise that livestock operations are here to stay, so might as well make it less damaging to the land and wildlife. But they can only do so by ignoring a lot of the collateral damage from their operations.
The fact that our predators are second-rate citizens on the public lands, while private ranchers and their livestock are given priority should outrage any thinking person.
The opposite premise dominates in our national parks. If you were to leave a picnic basket out where a bear or coyote or wolf could find the food, you would receive a fine or at least a stern lecture about the individual responsibility to avoid conflicts by keeping your food away from predators.
Similarly, you are required to avoid hiking or disturbing predators in areas of high use with periodic closures or other tactics designed to minimize altering predator natural use patterns.
Not so for ranchers using our public lands as a feed lot. Instead of giving priority to public wildlife, we allow what are essentially four-legged picnic baskets to roam the land unfettered. If a predator happens to find these moving picnic baskets and consumes one, we kill or move the predator instead of moving the cattle or sheep.
Instead of being incensed by this starting premise and seeking to challenge such assumptions, groups like NRDC in Montana and Defenders in Idaho have, of course, made millions of dollars in donations while they claim to "save" predators like wolves by organizing range rider and wolf harassment programs. But by not questioning grazing privileges on public lands, they reinforce the idea that livestock should have priority on our public lands.
Undoubtedly the ranchers who are inclined to implement livestock management techniques that reduce predator opportunity and the conservation groups that support them will respond that saving a few wolves and grizzlies is better than none. However, in the end, this is a finger in the dike.
These management techniques cannot be replicated across the landscape for a host of reasons, including that most ranchers cannot afford such practices, and furthermore, are not inclined to do anything to promote predators. So, in a sense, when conservation groups promote these ranching operations as a "solution" for ending conflicts and a "win-win" for wildlife, they are selling Kool-Aid.
One wishes that DOW and NRDC instead of harassing public wildlife were using range riders to chase domestic livestock from public lands, not harassing wolves. They could use their big budgets to bail out defenders of wolves.
Of course, the real irony is that if one harassed livestock and chased them off public lands, one would be arrested, but range riders, ranchers, and even wolf supporters can legally harass public wildlife in the name of livestock protection. There is something very wrong with this picture.
No doubt NRDC and DOW will claim that saving a few wolves is better than none—but what they don't admit is that they are ultimately helping to perpetuate continued conflicts on public lands by legitimizing the assumption that privately owned domestic livestock have priority over public wildlife.
It is no different than the groups who opposed abolition organizations and refused to question the legitimacy of slavery and opted to work with slave owners for better housing and work conditions for slaves.
If these groups were truly interested in protecting predators, not enhancing their fund-raising coffers, they would be working to end public lands ranching, not doing everything they can to sustain it. They would be arguing that if there were some conflict between a public lands ranching operation and predators, the cows/sheep should be moved, not the predators. They would be arguing that harassing public wildlife to promote private livestock operations is unethical.
And if they really wanted to end conflicts, they'd use the millions they have raised on the backs of wolves and grizzlies to buy out public lands grazing allotments and end livestock grazing permanently.
There would be no need for range riders—but I guess that is not as romantic as riding a horse around in the mountains to protect someone's cows. And if you are cynical, you might even think these organizations do not want the conflicts to end, because how would they raise funding if wolves and bears were automatically granted priority on our public lands?
Tom Sawyer would be proud of the ranchers who are able to get others to mind their livestock for them and actually pay for the opportunity.]]>
Don't go down in the mine, Dad,
Dreams very often come true;
Daddy, you know it would break my heart
If anything happened to you…
— in honor of 1907 South Wales mining disaster
I've never been down an American coal mine, among the least safest in the world, though have plunged thousands of feet into the dark bowels of British pits in Yorkshire, Wales and Scotland, the world's safest until they were closed by politicians and bean counters.
I have a selfish interest in coal mining since it was English pit men who first opened up their world to me and encouraged my first writing.
Deep down in the hard-to-breath darkness at 2000 feet below the surface miners educated me how they're aseparate culture, with its own taboos and permissions. At the coal face, hand-getting or machine-cutting, I saw them as skilled surgeons, or code breakers using logic to solve life and death problems underground, with super-sensitive ears for the faint early warning crack of a wall collapse or groan in a roof support.
Miners are a special, ancient breed whether in China, Poland or Appalachia; at their union's strongest, which it's not now, militant solidarity is bred in their bones. (See the Battle of Blair Mountain where massed miners shot it out with federal troops and even the US air corps for the right to unionize.)
Gradually I climbed into a social class where "coal" became a dirty word because the getting of the decayed vegetation with its high carbon content became synonymous with earth's destruction and our asthmatic lungs.
You know, shaved mountain tops, poisoned rivers, massive health costs to miners (black lung, silicosis, injuries) and any of us who has to breathe in the fossil-fuel fumes. Not to mention the harm to climate change.
Gas powered electricity (fracking) is allegedly cheaper. Cleaner, more modern, more accessible. Anyway Appalachian coal is giving out, and privately owned coal companies – whose safety records are an obscenity – daily go bankrupt abandoning their workers' health benefits. Right now Wyoming with its open cast strip mining produces more coal than traditional deep pit mines in the eastern mountains.
So what happens to the aging coal miners who voted for Trump on his promise to bring back jobs and restore coal which none of them believed but had hopes he would care for them in a declining industry?
One of the thousands of reasons Hillary lost was going to coal-mining West Virginia which she won in 2008 and telling them, "We're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business" in the drive for clean energy. The voting miners preferred Trump's hopeful lie to Clinton's blunt death sentence. Who wouldn't?
The gods of coal are vengeful. Today, the 80,000 or so remaining miners, out of a 1970 high of 140,000 and a 1920s high of 700,000, are getting royally screwed by Trump's rich Republicans. In a word they're being sent on a fast ride to the cemetery by the people they voted for in such big numbers.
The Republican congress is twisting miners and their families in the wind by refusing, until the very last moment and maybe not then, to honor promised federal health benefits that are used to beef up the much used Medicare and Medicaid. The loss of this government money is literally the difference between life and death for men on oxygen or suffering other coal-related injuries.
A double kick in the face: Trump is also defunding the Appalachian Regional Commission and U.S Economic Development Commission set up specifically to cushion coal's collapse.
An amazing number of people, still traumatized by Hillary's defeat, say Trump's betrayals are only what the miners deserve. Or as one NYT reader wrote from W. Virginia, "I have run out of patience and empathy for these people…They're…ignorant… and generally not interested in anything but being a coal miner, shooting wild animals and each other, getting drunk or high, and qualifying for disability."
Oh, have I run into such soured Democrats! They can't forgive coal miners for voting the wrong way but above all for being the stubborn rednecks they are. Why can't they be more like us, and vote the right way and stop being so damn poor?
The Republican agenda is clear. One by one knock off the most vulnerable then the least unionized then the rest of us, all in good time. The Appalachian miners are not our past but our future.]]>
Since Maidan, fascists and neo-fascists in some parts of Europe, particularly Ukraine, have come out of the closets and woodworks. In Asia, fascism in Japan has bestirred itself and reared its ugly head again after Abe returned to the apex of power as prime minister in 2012. His first term had ended after only one year in 2007, when his party lost control of the upper house for the first time in 52 years.
In February this year, a video of toddlers in an Osaka kindergarten reciting the Imperial Rescript scandalized the entire nation. The Rescript, which behooves Japanese to die for the emperor, was used to promote militarism in the 1930s and 1940s. Young Kamikaze or suicide pilots who crashed their planes into Allied warships in WW2 epitomized such militarism, much like Islamist suicide bombers today.
The Rescript was banned by the American occupation authority after Japan's defeat and surrender in WW2. That the Rescript should re-enter the playrooms in a kindergarten after a 72-year absence, and with Abe's wife looking on approvingly and heaping praises on the toddlers reciting it, has sent alarm bells ringing across Japan. Despite considerable public disquiet over the video, Abe's government still pressed ahead and approved chanting of the Rescript as part of the school curriculum.
Barely two months after the controversy surrounding the Imperial Rescript, another furore erupted. This time, it was the Japanese cabinet's approval of Hitler's Mein Kampf as "appropriate" teaching material in schools. This isn't just politically incorrect; it's sheer defiance of international norms against racial supremacy.
Japanese acquired a sense of superiority as a result of advances in various fields during the Meiji Restoration. They felt it their divine duty to rule over peoples they aconsidered inferior to themselves in East Asia, especially Korea and China. Thus, their propaganda of a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere during WW2 by invading and occupying China and other countries in SE Asia under the guise of chasing off European colonists. Through Mein Kampf, Abe also telegraphs his intention to make Japan the foremost military power in Asia, seeking to achieve what his maternal grandfather had failed to do in WW2, and emulating what Hitler had done after the defeat of Germany in WW1.
Those two incidents are not isolated or pure coincidences. They are parts of the concerted plans by Abe and the radical right-wing group Nippon Kaigi to systematically condition the young so that they are willing to be the cannon fodder in wars of aggression to be waged by a new fascist Japan in future. Such spectres of past Japanese fascism have raised red flags from Bangkok to Beijing.
As Abe forges ahead with inculcating young, innocuous minds with militarism, he had earlier stifled dissenting and incongruent voices from the media. Critics of his policies and move toward militarism were forced off TV shows. A major daily, Asahi Shimbun, came under ferocious government attack for its reporting on sensitive issues. The liberal paper capitulated by cutting back on critical, investigative reporting. The government's arm-twisting and public tongue-lashing have a chilling effect on the media. Many rolled over and now exercises self-censorship to fall in line with the official narrative. Abe's clamp-down on the media seeks to smooth his way to rewriting the Peace Constitution. A big casualty of Abe's War on the Media is a precipitous fall in press freedom, from 11th down to 72nd in just 5 years to 2015, as ranked by the Reporters without Borders.
In 2013, two years before his crusade against the media, Abe's government had bulldozed through the Parliament (aka Diet) a draconian pre-war law criminalizing disclosure and reporting of vaguely defined state secrets. The law gives government officials a carte blanche to block release of information indefinitely and deny the right of the public to know. During WW2, that law was used to arrest and imprison political opponents and dissidents. With disclosure of information vastly restricted and whistle-blowing deterred, the public is kept in the dark and unable to scrutinize the affairs and conduct of the state. The government has a free rein in doing what it wants with little or no regard to public interest. That is a major hallmark of a fascist state.
All these manoeuvres lead to one goal: Rewriting the Peace Constitution imposed by the American occupation force that forbids a standing army and waging of wars. Over the years, the prohibition on having a defense force has been whittled down by a series of Cabinet interpretations such that Japan now has a de facto defense force. Last year, another Cabinet interpretation allows Japan's "Self Defense Force" to come to the defense of an ally even when Japan itself is not under attack. This move was encouraged and urged by America which wants to co-opt Japan in containing China.
Abe isn't satisfied with such piecemeal, constrained moves to get round the Constitution that stops him from warring abroad. He wants a de jure army, and the legal backing to make wars. To amend Article 9 that is an impediment to war-making, he needs to have a two-thirds majority in both the lower and upper Houses of Parliament or Diet, and ratified by a simple majority in a public referendum. His party and coalition partner, Buddhist-backed Komeito, together have more than two thirds of the seats in both the chambers of the Diet. The fly in the ointment is that Komeito is dead set against rewriting the Peace Constitution. So Abe is back to the drawing board.
A de tour Abe has embarked on is to first amend Article 96 of the Constitution which requires that any amendment to the Constitution must be approved by a two-thirds majority vote in both chambers of the Diet. He wants Article 96 to be amended to require a simple majority vote. Both the Opposition and his coalition partner Komeito have stood firm against such revision . Abe's goal remains beyond reach.
Abe's single-minded pursuit of reviving and reinvigorating militarism and fascism in Japan has eroded significantly press freedom and the right of the public to know. He has re-instituted pre-war indoctrination of young children in the ways of militarism. What is standing in the way of his final goal is the requirement for a two-thirds majority vote to amend the Peace Constitution. Question is whether such bulwark against militarism or fascism will continue to withstand Abe's relentless assaults and machinations. Ordinary Japanese, as well as people in East Asia, hope and pray it will, so that a train wreck with Abe as the reckless driver can be averted.]]>
"The Islamic State has essentially moved its so-called capital in Syria… ISIS is now centered in Deir ez-Zur, roughly 90 miles southeast of Raqqa, the officials said."
("ISIS moves its capital in Syria", FOX News )
The move by ISIS corresponds to the secretive massing of US troops and military equipment on the Syria-Jordan border. It creates the perfect pretext for a ground invasion followed by a long-term military occupation in an area that Washington has sought to control for the last 18 months. Here's more on the topic from South Front:
"The US military is reportedly concentrating troops and military equipment at the Syrian-Jordanian border. Local sources said that about 20 US Army armoured vehicles (including battle tanks and artillery pieces) carried on trucks were spotted in Al-Mafraq. US troops were allegedly accompanied with the Jordanian Army's 3rd Division.
The US Special Operation Forces, the UK Special Operation Forces and units from some other countries -have been conducting operations across the Syrian-Jordanian border for a long time. They even had a secret military facility inside Syria where members the so-called New Syrian Army militant group were deployed. However, it was the first time when a notable number of US armoured vehicles was reported there. The US Ro-Ro ship Liberty Passion, loaded with vehicles, had arrived to the Jordanian port of Al-Aqapa few days ago. These moves followed a meeting between the Jordanian King and the US president.
Thus, the US-led coalition could prepare a large-scale military operation in southern Syria. The goal of the operation will likely be to get control over the Syrian-Iraqi border and to reach Deir Ezzor. It will involve militants trained in camps in Jordan and the US-led coalition's forces." ("US Military Deployment at Syrian-Jordanian Border, Military Escalation", Global Research)
Deir Ezzor is a strategically-located city along the Euphrates that the Pentagon needs in order to tighten its grip on the eastern quadrant of the country. Once Deir Ezzor is taken, the US can launch its CIA-backed jihadist militias back into Syria at will putting more pressure on Damascus and eventually forcing regime change. That is the plan at least, whether it works or not is anyone's guess. The deployment of troops on the Jordanian border suggests that Washington's proxy-army, the mainly-Kurdish militia or SDF, is either unwilling to conduct operations as far south as Deir Ezzor or doesn't have the military strength to beat ISIS on its own. In any event, the Pentagon needs fresh troops and equipment to succeed. Here's more from South Front:
"US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis presented a preliminary version of the new plan to defeat ISIS in Syria and Iraq, a Pentagon spokesman, Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, said on February 28th. ….The plan submitted by Mattis also includes a proposal to increase the size of the US military contingent to ISIS in Syria… (Note–There are already 400 Special Forces operating alongside the SDF) Without significant US presence on the ground, the SDF will hardly be able to retake Raqqah from ISIS without incurring unacceptable losses….
As to Deir Ezzor, the US can try to use militants trained in Jordan to launch an attack on Deir Ezzor from the southern direction. However, the total failure of this US-backed group in 2016 leaves little chance that it's able to combat ISIS successfully in 2017. So, the US and its allies will be pushed to deploy special forces units or even ground troops to support the advance there.
The Polish Special Forces have already deployed to Jordan where they will operate alongside their French and British counterparts. According to reports, the US-led block created a joint command center to coordinate efforts of all sides, which will support the advance against ISIS in the area." ("New US Strategy Against ISIS And War In Syria. What To Expect?", South Front)
Here's more from Fox News:
"U.S. military drones have watched hundreds of ISIS "bureaucrats," or administrators, leaving Raqqa in the past two months for the city of al-Mayadin located further down the Euphrates River from Deir el-Zour."
Let me get this straight: US military drones located hundreds of ISIS terrorists traveling across the open dessert, but did nothing to stop them. Why?
Is it because the Pentagon needs ISIS in Deir Ezzor to justify a ground invasion? That's certainly the most plausible explanation.
More from Fox: "Questions remain about the hold force necessary to keep the peace after ISIS is uprooted from Raqqa."
In other words, readers are supposed to believe that the Pentagon doesn't already have a plan in place for occupying the cities when the siege ends. That's baloney. Check out this excerpt from an article by Whitney Webb:
"The Syrian city of Raqqa – the "stronghold" of terror group ISIS – will be governed by a "civilian council" with the support of U.S. troops following its "liberation" from terrorists….
On Tuesday, the U.S.-allied militias …announced that they had formed a "civilian council" to govern Raqqa after its capture from Daesh militants. The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF)… claim to have spent six months setting up the council, with a preparatory committee having met "with the people and important tribal figures of Raqqa city to find out their opinions on how to govern it," Middle East Eye reported.
SDF spokesman Talal Selo stated that some towns near Raqqa had already been turned over to the council following a successful operation to drive out Daesh forces.
The U.S. military had previously hinted that power would be given to rebel groups following Raqqa's "liberation"…("After 'Liberation,' U.S. To Give Control Of Raqqa To Rebels, Not Syrian Government", Information Clearinghouse)
Washington has already chosen a group of puppets who will follow their directives when the fighting finally ends. The leaders will be selected from rebel groups and tribal elders that pledge their allegiance to Washington. The new arrangement will prevent the Syrian government from reclaiming a sizable portion of its sovereign territory or reestablishing control over its borders. A splintered Syria will strengthen US-Israeli regional hegemony and provide the land needed for future US military bases.
But why would Washington opt to occupy another country when previous occupations (like Iraq) have gone so badly?
There's a two word answer to that question: Nadia Schadlow. President Trump's National Security Advisor H R McMaster recently hired Schadlow to join his staff as a deputy assistant to the president for national security strategy. Schadlow recently published a book that "examined 15 cases in which the United States Army intervened abroad, and the service's role in political and economic reconstruction." According to the Wall Street Journal:
(Schadlow's) "War and the Art of Governance" consists of a collection of case studies, beginning with the Mexican-American War and ending in Iraq. Each examines how the U.S. attempted…to translate battlefield victory into a lasting and beneficial political outcome.
Ms. Schadlow's case studies tell an often doleful story of America allowing victories to fall apart, leaving behind a suffering populace that should have been rewarded with a better peace. She asserts convincingly that postconflict governance can only be done well by soldiers….
The Army's Civil Affairs units are the only government entities capable of administering conquered territories, yet Civil Affairs units remain the Army's neglected stepchildren. … the nation must never go to war again until it can definitively answer Gen. Petraeus's question about "how this ends." It ends only when the U.S. Army assumes the mantle of leadership and commits itself to remaining on the field until the lives of the population can be protected, the damage repaired and a political future guaranteed." ("What Happens After Victory", Wall Street Journal)
Get it? The woman is an expert on military occupation!
Now answer this one question for me: Why would McMaster hire an expert on military occupation unless he was planning to militarily occupy another country?
The facts speak for themselves.
1. http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/04/21/isis-moves-its-capital-in-syria.html
2. http://www.globalresearch.ca/breaking-video-us-military-deployment-at-syrian-jordanian-border-military-escalation/5584435
3. https://southfront.org/new-us-strategy-against-isis-and-war-in-syria-what-to-expect/
4. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/46907.htm
5. https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-happens-after-victory-1491520385]]>
"When the prison doors are opened, the real dragon will fly out."
— Ho Chi Minh
"The anti-war left's attachment to the anti-Assad narrative is based in a colonial mentality which presumes that Westerners have the right to determine the destinies of peoples residing in what was formerly known as the Third World. It is the same mentality that drives the criminalization of Black America, reducing mass incarceration and police murder to products of the innate criminality of Black people."
— Danny Haiphong
This is the week that Arkansas began its planned execution of eight death row convicts in eleven days. The urgency for this accelerated schedule has to do with the shelf life of certain chemicals being used in lethal injection. Ironically the makers of these chemicals asked that the state of Arkansas department of corrections cease and desist using their product in ways these corporate manufacturers never intended. Whether this is just optics I have no idea. But there is a palpable glee from the ghouls in the Arkansas correctional community at the opportunity to act as they have always wished they could. And to think the justification is the use-by date of a few gallons of tranquilizers. Trump supreme court appointee Neil Gorsuch immediately lifted stays that allowed the execution of the first man on this abbreviated death orgy. Lendell Lee was pronounced dead at 11:56 pm CT, April 20th, after turning down his last meal to take communion. He had spent over 20 years on the Arkansas death row. Among the other convicts scheduled for execution are a paranoid schizophrenic named Bruce Ward (also having spent twenty years on the Row) and Jason McGee, a brain damaged sufferer of bi-polar disorder who was sniffing gasoline at age three and an alcoholic at age six. A man whose childhood is so horrific that none of us can begin to imagine it. Another, also bi polar, Jack Jones, has severe hallucinations and has committed himself twice before his crimes took place. He was also the victim of repeated and violent sexual abuse as a young boy. Another, Kenneth Williams, has an IQ of 70. That means he can barely tie his shoes. Don Davis, another, was described by a doctor thus: "Don also endured a serious head injury, which, along with his ADHD and low IQ, likely lead to 'double deficits' in cognitive functioning." Don's IQ score was 69. Marcel Williams is another with a long history of sexual abuse (his mother pimped him out at the age of 12). He also suffers severe cognitive impairment. And then there is Stacy Johnson who is probably innocent. We know for certain he did not receive adequate representation as his trial.
One has to step back and look at the culture of the United States today. There are 2902 men and women on death row . There are over two million in custody. The U.S. actively participated in (and continues to do so) in the Saudi assault on Yemen. A military assault that destroyed this poorest country in the Arab world and left mass starvation and famine. The U.S. is covertly (via, primarily, the CIA) funding various jihadists waging a war against the Syrian state and its people. At the same time the U.S. is pretending to fight the Islamic State, and has recently now sent more boots on the ground into Syria. President Assad does not want the U.S. there. The U.S. may have been complicit in some fashion with the alleged sarin gas attack (how many false flags does the U.S. have to carry out before the general public grasps that this is SOP for the agency). The U.S. defense budget is over three billion dollars a day. The U.S. send aid to Israel (in the neighborhood os 38 billion, but it depends on how you count it, and in reality it's actually even more than that figure), a state that is currently carrying out the incremental extermination of the Palestinian people. An openly apartheid state. A state run by fanatics and virulent racists.
The largest amount of military aid (weapons sales and training mostly) goes to Saudi Arabia and the UAE. But also to South Korea, to Australia, Turkey and Taiwan. And of course Israel. What do these countries have in common? Obedience to the U.S. is first. Second is their willingness to serve as sub contractors in the global war on the poor…er….terror. Right, the war on terror. Now in year 16. These countries are all very high on the list of human rights violators. Never mind. They are obedient.
Now, who is the United States targeting next for "humanitarian intervention"? The answer is Syria, North Korea and perhaps even Venezuela. And if the wet dreams of the Pentagon and the neo con policy wonks at the various NGOs in Washington come true, Iran. What do these countries have in common? They are disobedient. Have any of them attacked the U.S.? No. Of course not.
Margaret Kimberley, writing of Obama and Hillary Clinton's assassination of Qadaffi…
"Their deliberate destruction of Libya was a war crime by all standards of international law. That country was just one victim of the American plan to eliminate secular governments in the Middle East. Under the guise of a phony "responsibility to protect" and with cover from organizations such as Human Rights Watch, American propaganda gave an atrocity the appearance of a humanitarian act. Now come reports from media and the International Organization for Migration that African migrants are being openly bought and sold in Libya. This practice would not be taking place if Muammar Gaddafi not been murdered by American backed jihadists in 2011."
The U.S. list of supported fascist dictators is very long. A short list, though, past and present, includes Paul Kagame in Rwanda, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow in Turkmenistan, Rafael Trujillo in the Domincan Republic, Papa and Baby Doc in Haiti, Jorge Ubico in Guatamala (and Rioss Montt), Pinochet in Argentina and Mobutu in Zaire. I mean the list goes on and on and on. In El Salvador in the 80s, the CIA trained the death squads that savaged the country (google El Mozote). Or Indonesia…as Nicholas J.S. Davis wrote…
"In 1965, General Suharto seized effective power from President Sukarno on the pretext of combatting a failed coup and unleashed an orgy of mass murderthat killed at least half a million people. U.S. diplomats later admitted providing lists of 5,000 Communist Party members to be killed. Political officer Robert Martens said, "It really was a big help to the army. They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that's not all bad. There's a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment."
You get the point. The U.S. currently helped put in power the Svoboda Party in Ukraine. The Svoboda Party are ardent admirers of Adolph Hitler. But such stuff should not stand in the way of Imperial ambitions, now should they?
"Svoboda's cause was championed during the Maidan protests by Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who egged on the crowds while standing under banners celebrating Stepan Bandera. McCain's appearance was no accident. Since World War II, the Republican Party has been closely allied with pro-Nazi exile leaders from Eastern Europe. Many of them were recruited and paid by the CIA, and given secret legal exemptions to emigrate to the United States despite their history of war crimes."
Jonathan Marshall
This was the brainchild of Hillary Clinton, then Sec of State and her undersecretary Victoria Nuland. It is worth noting again that America's sympathy with Ukrainian fascism goes back to the end of WW2. Russ Bellant, in a book that is now forty years old, writes:
"During the rise of European fascism after World War I, some Ukrainian nationalist groups tied their hopes to fascism as an ideology, and then collaborated with Hitler and nazism in World War II. One Ukrainian nationalist group was the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) which split into two organizations: a less militant wing, led by Andrew Melnyk and known as OUN-M, and the extremist group of Stepan Bandera, known as OUN-B. The Nazis preferred the radical nationalist OUN-B. During the German military occupation, the Ukraine witnessed terrible atrocities against Jews and other groups targeted by Nazi policies. The OUN-B organized military units that participated in these atrocities. With the collapse of the Third Reich, many Ukrainian collaborationists fled their homeland. After the war, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists-Bandera (OUN-B), a clandestine group financed in part by German intelligence and led by Stetsko, accelerated its work in the West. A secretive group, OUN-B's tracks are difficult to follow. "You have to understand. We are an underground organization. We have spent years quietly penetrating positions of influence," explained an OUN-B member who insisted on anonymity. The positions of influence under discussion were Reagan Administration appointments. All of the OUN-B's key Administration contacts were through an organization called the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA), headquartered in New York City. ( ) The White House had looked favorably on the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, appointing its chairman, Lev Dobriansky, ambassador to the Bahamas in 1983. Dobriansky is a longtime ASC official."
The U.S. employed Croatian fascists (also admirers of Hitler and legatees of Ante Pavelic) during the destruction of Yugoslavia. The tentacles of European fascism also seems to always intersect with the Catholic Church. From Franco to Cardinal Stepinac , to the various Royal houses of Europe, there are always connections with the Church. And the late Pope John Paul, himself an ardent anti communist and CIA asset, was embedded in these various lines of association.
But to stick with Ukraine for a moment,
"In 2004 it rebranded itself as Svoboda and dispensed with its SS imagery. Nonetheless, Svoboda's new leader lauded the OUN and UPA for having resisted "Jews and other scum, who wanted to take away our Ukrainian state." He was decorated by veterans of a Ukrainian Waffen-SS division and championed the cause of Ukrainian death camp guard Ivan Demjanjuk. His ideological adviser organized a think tank called the "Joseph Goebbels Political Research Center" in 2005.
Svoboda became the largest party in Lviv in 2010 and today enjoys strong influence at the national level. It has also extended its influence by allying itself with other far-right and fascist parties in Europe."
— Jonathan Marshall.
Eric Draister wrote in 2014…
"In an attempt to pry Ukraine out of the Russian sphere of influence, the US-EU-NATO alliance has, not for the first time, allied itself with fascists. Of course, for decades, millions in Latin America were disappeared or murdered by fascist paramilitary forces armed and supported by the United States. The mujahideen of Afghanistan, which later transmogrified into Al Qaeda, also extreme ideological reactionaries, were created and financed by the United States for the purposes of destabilizing Russia. And of course, there is the painful reality of Libya and, most recently Syria, where the United States and its allies finance and support extremist jihadis against a government that has refused to align with the US and Israel."
Remember, too, that John McCain and Nuland when they happily visited Ukraine to share photo-ops with the Svoboda leadership were well aware of the Nazi symbols everywhere.
Conn Hallinan ..also in 2014…wrote:
"Three months after the April ceremony, Ukrainians re-enacted the battle of Brody between the Galicia Division and Soviet troops, where the German XIII Army Corps was trying to hold off the Russians commanded by Marshall Ivan Konev. In general, going up against Konev meant a quick trip to Valhalla. In six days of fighting the Galicians lost two-thirds of their division and XIII Corps was sent reeling back to Poland. The Galicia Division survivors were shipped off to fight anti-Nazi partisans in Yugoslavia. In 1945 remnants of the unit surrendered to the Americans in Italy, and in 1947 many of them were allowed to emigrate to Britain and Canada."
It's all linked.
Central American and South American death squads all had (and have) links (every single one of them) to U.S. intelligence, the U.S. military, and the American Security Council. The majority were trained by the United States, in fact.
Back in the 70s in Uruguay, there were torture sessions conducted against homeless men by government and police in order to teach how to apply electro shock properly. All this under the supervision of U.S.Agency for Development — not even the CIA or military.
Alex Henderson writes of Paraguay…
"Gen. Alfredo Stroessner, who was in power from 1954-1989, was a strident anti-communist—and that was enough for the U.S., which pumped millions of dollars into his regime in the 1950s and 1960s and had a close relationship with the Paraguayan military for many years. Torture, kidnappings and other human rights abuses were common under the Stroessner regime, which authorized Pastor Milciades Coronel (who oversaw Stroessner's secret police) to commit numerous atrocities. In 1975, Stroessner even listened on the phone while Miguel Soler, head of the Paraguayan Communist Party, was being dismembered with a chainsaw by Coronel's policía secreta.
More recently, in 2016, our aid to the Philippines coincided with a brutal escalation of death squad violence orchestrated by President B.S. Aquino (a favorite of the U.S.).
The point is that there are clear positions that almost anybody (outside of the John McCains and Hillary Clintons and Donald Trumps of the world) should support. An end to war is first. And from that one arrives at the reality that far far far and away the leading purveyor of violence in the world is the United States. Almost no conflict in the world is not mediated by U.S. power, weapons, and money. Ergo, the basic default position has to be an end to U.S. state violence, both at home on death row in Arkansas (or anywhere) and globally against all other nations. I don't care if people don't like Venezuelian Bolivarism, or don't like the DPRK, or Syria and Assad. It actually doesn't matter. The fact is that the people of these nations support their government. They are not children. They can solve their issues if they have them. Remember, too, that the CIA has fomented more conflict and instability than any intelligence organization in history. To not support Assad against the Imperial war machine that is the U.S. is simply irrational to me. And to conflate or equate Russian involvement with U.S. involvement is politically immature at best. It is mendacious and venal and destructive at worst. When Danny Haiphong calls out Jacobin as the new faux left, he is pointing to this new crypto Imperialism. The same people who applauded the U.S. bombing of Belgrade are applauding the idea of removing Assad. The same propaganda is being employed. If one cannot remember back a decade, let alone forty years of U.S. destruction and war and assassination, then you are purposefully forgetting. Remember Vietnam? Cambodia? The wholesale destruction of Iraq? But Hollywood awards an Oscar to the obviously fraudulent White Helmets. Why? Because that narrative positions the white Western bourgeoisie as paternalistic world saviour. White people as the ultimate decision makers. For white America you are only supported if you give the appearance of abjection.In other words, *we* will help, but only if you recognise and acknowledge the need for our support. Acknowledge your debt. The western bourgeoisie do nothing for free. And moral debt is the best kind for others to owe you. This is the algebra of Imperial power. Resources, and western capital matter, too, of course. But the deeper implications, the *narrative*, is one of white superiority.
Assad asked the Russians for fuck sake. How bad does that make HIM? I mean I ask you. He accused NATO and the US of supporting jihadis and ISIS. No wonder Israel wants him gone, too. It is colonial and it mirrors globally a kind of plantation system. The Arab and Asian world are seen as colonial subjects. The West won't forgive Mao for turning the perception of the Chinese into something that did not fit with Charlie Chan. Chavez upset the stereotype of banana republic *caudillo*. Dignity is not allowed the non white world.
The question is really how has it happened that the very worst most sadistic and venal people come to control so much of American power. How is it that people like Mitch McConnell or Asa Hutchinson or Jeff Sessions or Jared Kushner or Victoria Nuland or Samantha Power, or McCain or Lindsay Graham are in positions that wield actual power? The fact is that most Americans live in near desperation.
"…the 20 percent of Americans who enjoy college educations, have good jobs, and sleep soundly knowing that they have not only enough money to meet life's challenges, but also social networks to bolster their success. ( ) The FTE citizens (that 20%) rarely visit the country where the other 80 percent of Americans live: the low-wage sector. Here, the world of possibility is shrinking, often dramatically. People are burdened with debt and anxious about their insecure jobs if they have a job at all. Many of them are getting sicker and dying younger than they used to. They get around by crumbling public transport and cars they have trouble paying for."
Lynne Parramore
The above quote is from a piece reviewing a new book by economist Peter Temin. The slug line for the article is that for most America is now a third world country. And economically this is true. But its worse, actually. Culturally it is worse. When I've spent time in central America or India or North Africa or Mexico, I find a kind of creative spirit and community even amid the poverty. In the U.S. I don't find that so often. I find the denuded landscape of American suburbia the most depressing on the planet. These are hostile areas of atomized and isolated individuals, with families that seem to hate each other and children already on the way to one or another personality disorder. It is a selfish and hyper competitive place with a populace frighteningly unhealthy and addicted to anti depressants. And yet this competition is for almost nothing. The real affluence is locked up and kept at a safe distance from the working class. And it is a racist culture. A profoundly racist culture. And I don't find that in the same degree other places (with the exception of perhaps Poland).
While Arkansas prepared its death chamber for overtime usage, in the South Pacific there was a gathering of the rich and famous rich, including former president Barak Obama. The three thousand dollar a night resort was also hosting Oprah and Bruce Springsteen, Speilberg and Hanks. And most were staying on jillionaire David Geffan's 135 meter yacht. I mention this because the distance between the life (and death) of Ledell Lee and that of the former President is almost unimaginable. And as I sit back and look at my native country I think, what kind of nation has leaders who frolic in Tahiti while seventeen executions are being carried out in something like a week? Carried out according to judgements made by one of the most racist and irrational penal and criminal justice systems in the world (one in 24 now on death row is innocent). Not a thought for the broken lives of the men sentenced to die an agonizing prolonged death that masquerades as rational. Veterinary pharmaceuticals are often used in a junk science death factory that feigns rationality. Not a word from the political class. Not a peep. These condemned men, all of them, suffered such appalling and bestial lives as children, subjected to such abuse, that most Americans would simply rather not know. There are good guys and bad guys. That's what they say on TV cop shows.
When a populace can so wilfully ignore historical record, so impassively accept the naked propaganda of their own government, then one does wonder how long such a people can survive. Nothing was learned from the Korean war, nothing from Vietnam or Nicaragua, or Panama. Nor from Iraq and Afghanistan. Nothing. I remember millions on the street to protest the invasion of Iraq. Bush and his friends ignored this. But when Obama continued Bush policy the protests stopped. I'm not sure how deeply anti war those protests were, but certainly it is different today. The so called 'voice of the left' is defending the removal of a secular Arab president, a man who won his last election with large majority mandate. A nation whose people have defended their country heroically. And yet the voice of the left know better. Let us help the poor Arab. Let us bomb sense into him. And I am sure there is a cell in the Hague awaiting Assad. Maybe he can have Milosevic' old cell. Then he can sit for a decade as his health deteriorates (as happens with EVERY Hague prisoner) and fade from the collective American memory. Just as the Arkansas death spree will fade from memory. The leaders of the U.S. express their contempt for the working class on a daily basis. Absolute contempt. They blithely steal and plunder what is left of the social welfare system. And few really complain. Certainly not enough. Why that low wage sector seem unable to identify their enemy — why they seem to worship wealth and not hate it, is a complex question for which I have no easy simple answer. Although what I most return to is the legacy of the Puritan founding of a slave owning society. America wants someone in the stocks. America is accustomed to having someone lower than them in the food chain. And this is why communism was so despised by the ruling class. Sure it was bad for business, but perhaps even worse, it granted dignity to the worker. It erased class. And that was too terrifying an idea for the captains of industry.
Obama stands as pivotal in poisoning the last remnants of real anti war resistance. He was a genius bit of casting. Genius. And now the only protests are about Trump's taxes. Not about war, or the creation of famine, or about illegal assassination, or giant bombs dropped into populous areas as a sort of test drive for the new weaponry, or the enthusiastic support for Nazis. No, it's about taxes. Because, you know, there might be a Russian connection, I guess. Whatever that even means. I have no idea. Except that again, America loves to hate its enemies. It's easiest if they are Arab or African or Asian. A bit harder if they are blond. But Putin is Russian and Russia was communist. And communists are even worse than Arabs. This is a very sick and dangerous country. My country, though I no longer can live there. But I am a citizen. Sick and dangerous the way rabid dogs are sick. The way jackels are dangerous. But it has always been so. From day one.]]>
A Tale of Two Cities is historical fiction. Dickens's richly developed plot of complex relationships amongst the characters Charles Darnay, Lucie Manette, and Sydney Carton of redemption, rebirth, love, and violence layers onto a background of the French Revolution, which embodies those same issues on an historical basis, as French peasants fight for freedom from the lingering shackles of feudalism.
Today, America is a tale of two cities as depicted in pre-revolutionary France, especially on a metaphorical basis, as when Marquis Evrémonde runs down a plebian child with his golden carriage. The Marquis, displaying the typical attitude of aristocracy, shows no signs of regret but instead curses the peasantry and hurries home to his chateau.
That one cogent Dickensian scene says it all vis a vis America today, which is two separate economic and political worlds as exquisitely explained by Peter Temin, Professor Emeritus of Economics at MIT in his new book, The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy.
Temin's work depicts a dark reality of America that is not one country any longer; rather, two distinctly separate countries with vastly different resources, contrasting personal expectations, and divergent personal fate. Thereby a frightening sense of doom and gloom overhangs Temin's central premise. America has a remarkable commonality of socio-economic-political similarities to King Louis XVI's France (beheaded at Place de la Concorde, Paris, Jan. 21, 1793).
Lynn Parramore of the Institute for New Economic Thinking reviews Temin's book in an article under her name: "America is Regressing into a Developing Nation for Most People," April 20, 2017.
Parramore readily admits the loss of America's middle class is not new news. After all, Bernie preached all about it. But, "what America is becoming" is Temin's book. He describes two Americas: One America is 20% of the population. These are FTE citizens, meaning finance, technology, and electronics. They enjoy topflight educations, best jobs, social networks that work on their behalf, and plenty of money, lots and lots of money, children tutored, and first class travel. The whole enchilada is at their fingertips, ready to go.
FTE'ers see economic growth all around them and a very bright glowing future. They directly, powerfully influence politics and proudly wear an American flag lapel pin, unless they're trying too hard to be cool.
Rarely do FTE'ers visit the country where 80% of Americans live, i.e., the low wage sector in and around cities, whether suburb or inner city. This totally different world lives in shrinkage, not growth. Its inhabitants wear an anvil of burdensome debt, work insecurity, sickness without decent medical care and dying younger than parents. This 80% of America is stuck with crumbling public transport whilst indebted to cars and plastic. College means heavy debt and little fanfare upon graduation. They do not see a future because today's survival is already too much of a burden.
According to Parramore: "The world in which they reside is very different from the one they were taught to believe in. While members of the first country act, these people are acted upon."
Along those lines, Temin describes two worlds that have entirely distinct financial systems and distinct residential environments and distinct educational opportunities. And, when they get sick, quite different things happen, the same with law. In fact, the 20% and 80% move entirely different and apart from each another, as if they do not exist on the same landscape.
Not only do they live wholly different life styles, there's a lid on advancement by the 80% into the 20%, as the Low-Wagers find the path of upward mobility fraught with obstacles, almost impossible to achieve and getting more difficult with time.
"The richest large economy in the world, says Temin, is coming to have an economic and political structure more like a developing nation. We have entered a phase of regression, and one of the easiest ways to see it is in our infrastructure; our roads and bridges look more like those in Thailand or Venezuela than the Netherlands or Japan. But it goes far deeper than that, which is why Temin uses a famous economic model created to understand developing nations to describe how far inequality had progressed in the United States. The model is the work of West Indian economist W. Arthur Lewis, the only person of African descent to win a Nobel Prize in economics. For the first time, this model is applied with systematic precision to the U. S. The result is profoundly disturbing" (Parramore).
Here are the check points for the low-wage sector or the 80% of America found in Lewis' model of a dual economy: (1) Low Wagers have almost no influence over public policy; (2) High Wagers work at keeping Low Wagers' wages low; (3) Mass incarceration is used to prevent Low Wagers from challenging policy; (4) High Wagers have a primary goal of low taxes; (5) Social and economic mobility for Low Wagers is almost nonexistent. Sound familiar?
Meanwhile, High Wagers skew expenditures for quality education by defunding public schools and establishing policies that layers student debt over certificates of achievement, a stranglehold for decades.
High paying jobs come easily for High Wagers via networks of peers and relatives. However, as for women and blacks, social capital and economic capital are challenged by America's long deeply imbedded history of racism and sexism, obstacles to both kinds of capital and an obstacle to advancement.
What's happened to America? And, why is it similar to Dickens' tale of two cities? Temins says it all started after the '67 Summer of Love, which is a likely starting point because worker productivity started separating from wages in the 1970s, or in short, increasing levels of productivity were not followed by commensurate increases in wages. Politicians were increasingly influenced by FTE'ers and turned from advocacy of public-spirited universalism to free-market individualism, thereby inserting a knife deeply to the heart of worker interests. The Investment Theory of Politics, as explained by Temins, accelerated thereafter, wherein the needs and dreams of Low Wagers increasingly suck dust, forever more, as big time money buys public policy, not democracy.
Interestingly, the majority of Low Wagers are white, but politicians learned to talk the talk as if the low-wage sector is mostly black, explained by Temins: "The desire to preserve the inferior status of blacks has motivated policies against all members of the low-wage sector."
At the end, Temins discusses the 2016 presidential race, which for the first time publicly exposed anger by Low Wagers because of a glaring imbalance of class welfare in America. Beforehand, low-wage whites were largely invisible in public policy, and indeed remain as such, but Bernie's and Trump's campaign messages brought them out of a long slumber, opening their eyes to an America of spectacular wealth in the hands of so few versus everybody else. Ironically, America's tradition of political stumping for the first time opened new vistas to the 80%, but interestingly and tellingly only in the 2016 election cycle, not in previous election cycles.
Still, as stated by Temins: "Unfortunately, present trends are not only continuing, but also accelerating their problems, freezing the dual economy into place."
As a result, a new age in America dawns that is fraught with the unknown amidst credible signs of real serious danger for the first time ever since the American Revolution of 1775-83, which served as the model for the French Revolution of 1789-99.
All of which begs the obvious question of whether history repeats. Metaphorically speaking, is Dickens' scene of Marquis Evrémonde's golden carriage running down a plebian child without showing any regret similar to Donald Trump hoodwinking America's 80%?
Marquis Evrémonde was murdered.]]>
But it is important to note that at no time was this extreme "lunatic left" in a position of political power in the US, or able to exert any significant influence on political-economic policy.
Today, unfortunately, the primary influence on our political-economic policies comes from what I call the "lunatic right". Rather than viewing the market or private sector as a problem, it is the government or public sector that must be extinguished. And what is most significant is that one of the two major parties responsible for governing the nation, in this case the Republican Party, has become a lunatic right party. Similar to the lunatic left, the lunatic right is driven by a rigid theoretical and ideological position which precludes support for a practical and pragmatic approach that combines private ownership of production with a healthy and vibrant governmental public sector.
Imagine the absurdity and unacceptability of a demand that the private sector be reduced to the smallest size possible. But the Republican Party essentially argues the obverse – that government should be reduced to the smallest size possible. Why is the former politically extreme and unacceptable, while the latter is mainstream Republican dogma? There is a very simple answer — the anti-government position, albeit applied selectively (e.g. not for defense contracts), serves the class interests of the corporate elite. It is no coincidence that corporate executives are much more likely to be libertarian than socialist, or that the libertarian think tanks shaping lunatic right policy (Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, American Enterprise Institute) are heavily funded by corporate interests.
While this is not the place to chart the historical evolution of the Republican Party's march toward lunacy, it is only fair to note that the party was not always opposed to a mixed economy. The anti-government dogma is a relatively recent development that began with Reagan, was deepened further during the 1990s by Congressional Republicans, and moved steadily to the right under Tea Party leadership, resulting in the purge from the party of any public official that dares to speak in support of a government program, or suggests compromising with Democrats in order to enact needed legislation.
Many believe that both parties are equally responsible for the political gridlock and paralysis in Washington. They might consult the analysis of mainstream political scientists Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein who, in It's Even Worse Than It Looks, conclude: "The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition."
The source of this dismal state of affairs is the coupling of ideological dogmatism with theological passion yielding the toxic brew appropriately labeled "market fundamentalism" or "neoliberalism" — a faith-based belief in the market as the exclusive sanctified solution to all social and economic problems, despite the accumulated evidence to the contrary.
The resulting Republican lunacy has spawned many schemes, but we can consider one recent and representative manifestation — the effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.
What does it say about a party that has proposed to undermine or repeal the Affordable Care Act at least 30 times that, when they are finally able to achieve their goal, have absolutely nothing to put in its place except empty and vague rhetoric about a "market-based" "patient-centered" system. This was followed by the hastily constructed American Health Care Act (AHCA) that according to all estimates would raise costs, endanger patients, and increase the number of uninsured; that's zero for three on the presumed intended objectives of the repeal and replace. However, the repeal would have accomplished one clearly intended, but better-to-be-left-unspoken, purpose — providing a huge tax cut for the wealthiest Americans and the medical industrial complex.
The reason Republicans were so unprepared, and then developed a plan that takes us backwards, is because the issue for Republicans has never been about developing a comprehensive alternative plan to provide low cost quality health care to all US citizens. Rather it is about taking an ideological stand against any government effort, particularly one advanced by the other party (and thus labeled "Obamacare" for political gain), to address the health care crisis. They do not believe that the government has any responsibility to regulate or subsidize health care regardless of how it might benefit the population. In fact, the only significant Republican dissent to this bill came from the so-called Freedom Coalition, who wanted to move health care reform in an even more extreme right-wing direction, because they found the AHCA insufficiently generous to corporate interests, and insufficiently cruel to the most vulnerable.
The health care reform effort represents the standard operating extremism of the lunatic right.
For exhibit B, we can shift our attention to the Trump cabinet appointments dedicated to furthering the extreme anti-government crusade or, in Bannon-speak, the "deconstruction of the administrative state". In filling positions for that purpose, forget about the quaint notion of merit or any relationship between assigned position and demonstrated knowledge. One can just imagine the following headline in The Onion (the online satirical new organization): "Former governor is appointed to head an agency he wanted to abolish but could not remember the name of"; a beautiful and creative exemplar of ironic absurdity. Unfortunately, the joke is on us. When irony becomes reality you have lunacy. We may now be living in a post-irony world.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. There is the Secretary of Education whose primary credentials involve donating millions to Republicans and making a career out of promoting private, at the expense of public, education. Or a state Attorney General, who has dedicated his legal energies toward suing the Environmental Protection Agency, now appointed to head, and likely dismantle, that very agency. The fertile imagination of The Onion staff would be hard pressed to invent such absurdity.
But make no mistake; this coalition of the unqualified is determined to opportunistically shape and advance a right-wing policy agenda of deregulation and privatization within the cognitive vacuum that is Donald Trump. The Trump administration seems more than willing to advance the Republican Party agenda.
It is unfortunate that a nation claiming to be a democracy offers citizens a choice between lunatic right Republicans and status-quo Democrats – neither party challenging the fundamental tenets of the bankrupt neoliberal model, and both beholden to and captured by corporate interests. Until we have a political system that gives working people some genuine party choices, and that removes money as the primary source of political influence, the United States will be a democracy in name only.]]>
To glance into the rear-view mirror (encompassing just this hemisphere) is to reveal past civilizations with fundamental flaws in their economic systems whose societies remained in complete denial of the day when those flaws might be exposed: where the future always looks good, until it doesn't. We know something about these tomorrows that finally arrive, because archaeologists study them: our long-ago yesterdays, when civilizations were massively disrupted by sudden economic, societal and environmental collapse – so to begin, a jeremiad.
David E. Stuart, an archaeologist in the Southwest, and author of Anasazi America, 2014, suggests that we are now all Chacoans. By this he means that contemporary America resonates with the narrative arc of the Pueblo people who developed a successful society in Chaco Canyon, in what is now New Mexico, but which foundered, almost nine hundred years ago, on excessive attenuation of trade, income inequality and climate change.
The Chacoans devised a diversified economy which combined agriculture and hunting and gathering, which enabled them to prosper in the first millennium despite living in a desert region with less than reliable summer rainfall. Around 1000 C.E., the climatic conditions became more favorable and the Puebloans were emboldened to expand their agricultural base. Stuart writes, "Charcoan society could have used this reprieve to improve the lot of individual farmers and create incremental efficiencies, but it did not. Instead it chose growth and power".
In their new territories they built ever larger great houses of up to four stories tall and sometimes containing more than six hundred rooms, connected to their home canyon by more than four hundred miles of roadway. Their trade network stretched from southern Canada to the Gulf of Mexico; and while the size, complexity and power of the society grew, so too did the disparity of wealth reflected in rates of infant mortality and average adult height, which varied by almost two inches between rich and poor.
Around 1090 C.E., a devastating five year drought led to widespread famine and the abandonment of many outlying farms. The Chacoan elite responded by creating vast new infra-structure projects which temporarily absorbed the un-employed farm laborers but did nothing to solve the underlying problem of agricultural productivity. A second major drought forty years later led to the unraveling of Chacoan society as more and more farmers fled their lands and joined an exodus to the uplands of the east. Stuart notes that within a generation, amidst sporadic warfare and plundering, Chacoan society had ceased to exist.
As Jared Diamond shows in Collapse, 2015, a similar process was at play in the downfall of the Mayan civilization sometime between the eighth and ninth centuries. Again, a prolonged drought, this time exacerbated by the deforestation necessary to the expansion of their agricultural lands, led to the abandonment of population centers in the central lowlands of Yucatan, leaving their cities and ceremonial sites to be swallowed up by the second growth of tropical and sub-tropical broadleaf forests.
The story of Easter Island (Rapa Nui) is almost too well known to bear repeating: suffice it to say that a combination of environmental depredations, notably a deforestation that may or may not have been connected to the transport of their giant ceremonial sculptures or moai, recurring rat plagues and the long term use of the palm forests as fuel, combined with the natural limits of their small island severely stressed the population long before the arrival of the first Europeans in 1722. Indeed, by the late seventeenth century, it is reliably reported that vestiges of a population that once approached fifteen thousand, had been tragically reduced to living in caves, eating rats and sharpening their obsidian pointed spears to ward off fractious neighbors. Whilst not quite the perfect 'Green' parable of a society willfully chopping down the last tree to serve the elite's desire to out compete each other by the erection of ceremonial statuary – and suffering the consequences of soil loss and starvation – the decline of the Rapanui was clearly intimately entwined with the climate and ecology of their tiny bio-sphere.
For all our advanced technologies, it is highly unlikely that we are immune to similar environmental melt-downs: hostage to an economic system that must grow or die and living at a time of inevitable and potentially cataclysmic climate change, the possibilities for major societal disruption are clear. An increasing gap between rich and poor and the geographic segregation between the prosperous and the striving only heightens this potential for collapse. When many of our most promising youth are sold into the debt peonage of a frequently valueless college education, lured by hopes and dreams seeded by the propaganda arm (comprising the government, the media and grade-school education) of a pervasive neoliberal ideology, the outlook looks bleak indeed. But out of this dire societal amalgam there has arisen a cadre of unlikely potential saviors: the hipsters.
Those who write of environmental catastrophism (and it's a rich tradition) and its shadow of economic collapse are limning a dystopian future in order that it might be avoided. Others, in the charming small town that lies eight miles distant from my perch in the urban wildland, and throughout the planet in places inflected with a hipster sensibility, practice, or at least consume, arts, crafts and produce that are informed by a sophisticated awareness of a potentially blighted tomorrow.
They practice under the rubric of rustic modernism: ceramicists, woodworkers and weavers who deliberately eschew the glossy surfaces of high technology and employ primal techniques to shape earthy materials while others play with the detritus of civilization to create art. A friend salvages grain bags from a local craft-brewery which, artfully unraveled, make wall-hangings; and salvages drift wood from Rincon, a notable surf beach a little way up the coast, which she lashes together with sisal to create coyly utilitarian armatures. Still others hand-make soap or candles or practice permaculture. Medieval techniques of brewing, wine and cider making are revived in dank warehouses where once bright futures were imagined in distributing imported plastic consumer goods, electronic gizmos or nutritional supplements.
In these and other similar ways, this community plays out a limited version of the New Age – or the subversion of neoliberalism. Within these creative, craft and agricultural realms there are attempts to find alternatives to a system fated to end in the apocalypse of environmental collapse; but while these artists, craftspeople, cottage-industrialists and market-farmers (and many of their customers) practice alternate economic and social behaviors they do so within a prevailing and constantly enticing economic system that threatens every act that is independent of its sway – and like an on-rushing ocean often obliterates their efforts like footprints on the shore.
But their power of example remains immense: that they have assumed a position in the fashion vanguard of this country is hugely significant. On the one hand they are fully entwined in the meretricious machinations of a malevolent economic system while on the other they play creatively with the tropes of its destruction. Our future may well lie with these legions of the fashion-forward. Out of the rich soil of societal decay, this movement, of whom many are the spawn of society's most prosperous, has arisen to offer ideas for our salvation.]]>
Ward is one of seven men facing execution in Arkansas after the first death sentence in the state since 2005 was carried out on Thursday. "He appears not to understand that he is about to die, believing instead that he is preparing for a 'special mission' as an evangelist," says a report by the Harvard University Fair Punishment Project. A second man scheduled for execution is Jason McGehee who suffers from bipolar disorder and possible brain damage.
The prison systems in the US and UK have replaced psychiatric hospitals as the place where people suffering from severe mental illness are most likely to find themselves. It is a process that has been going on since the 1960s, fuelled by a desire to save money, a belief that medication would replace hospitalisation, and a liberal reaction against what was seen as unnecessary incarceration. Between 1955 and 2016, the number of state hospital beds in the US available to psychiatric patients fell by over 97 per cent from 559,000 to just 38,000. An expert noted despairingly that the biggest de facto psychiatric institutions in the US today are Los Angeles County jail, Chicago's Cook County jail and New York's Riker's Island. Those who are not in prison or hospital "become violent or, more often, the victims of violence. They grow sicker and die. The personal and public costs are incalculable," says a report by the Treatment Advocacy Center in Virginia. Mentally ill people, usually poor and unemployable because of their condition, are sometimes advised that the only way they will get even the crudest treatment is by being sent to prison.
The same process is happening in Britain. One of the justifications for closing down the old asylum system was that they were too much like prisons, but the paradoxical result has been that psychiatric patients are now ending up in real prisons. The number of beds available for mental health patients in the UK has dropped by three quarters since 1986/87 to about 17,000, while the Centre for Mental Health says that 21,000 mentally ill people are imprisoned, making up a quarter of the prison population.
For many mentally ill people, the prospect of incarceration is becoming probable in an unexpected reversion to eighteenth century practice. Some are left to wander the streets but most are looked after by their families who may not have the resources to do so. Deceptively progressive sounding words, like 'deinstitutionalisation' in the US and 'care in the community' in the UK, are used to describe the ending of the vast system that once catered for psychiatric patients.
Some of these institutions were hellholes, and others became unnecessary because medication was available from the 1950s that controlled some of the worst symptoms of mental illness. But the old system did at least provide an asylum in the sense of a place of safety where people who could not look after themselves were cared for. Supposing 'care in the community' had been more than an attractive slogan, it might have provided something of a replacement for the old asylums, but the care it provided was always inadequate.
The reality of the new system was best described by the detective-story writer P.D. James, an administrator in the NHS in London whose husband was a long-term patient in a mental hospital. She wrote that since the 1970s community care "could be described more accurately as the absence of care in a community still largely resentful or frightened of mental illness."
Not much has changed for the better since P.D.James was writing, as was made plain this week by the report of the Sir Thomas Winsor, the Chief Inspector of Constabulary, who complained that the police are increasingly being used as the "first resort" for people with mental health problems. He said that sometimes they ended up spending the night in police cells even though they had committed no crime because no hospital beds were available. He added that the "inadequacy" of mental health provision should "disturb everyone".
Marjorie Wallace, the founder and chief executive of SANE, a mental health charity, explains that governments have every incentive to keep mental patients out of hospital, since "providing a single bed costs the same as 'treating' 44 people in the community." She welcomed Theresa May's intention expressed in a speech earlier this year to do something about "the burning injustice of mental health and inadequate treatment", but says that this will remain a Utopian vision unless there is more ring-fenced money for psychiatric services which are already close to breakdown.
There is more open discussion than there used to be about mental illness, with a campaign against stigmatisation and exhortations for people to seek counseling or simply speak up about their mental troubles before they become chronic and irreversible. Prince Harry spoke movingly about the negative consequences for himself of repressing his grief over the death of his mother when he was twelve years old. Celebrities reveal their anxieties and breakdowns. Such openness is important because it reduces personal isolation and makes people feel that they will not be treated as pariahs if they speak up.
When I first began to write about schizophrenia in 2002, I found that my friends and relatives divided into those who knew nothing about mental illness and those who knew all too much about it. But the latter had often never mentioned previously that they were looking after a sister with schizophrenia or a brother who could not leave his flat without having a breakdown. One friend disclosed a terrible story of a sister-in-law who had poured petrol over herself and set it alight, suffering burns over three quarters of her body from which she took weeks to die in agony.
Openness and discussion are important, but they skirt the heart of the problem, which is that a proportion of people who are mentally ill cannot look after themselves. The severity and incurability of a mental illnesses are often underestimated and there may be exaggerated expectations of preventing their onset by early intervention. The precise causes and nature of mental illness remains very much a mystery so a large number of people are always going to become desperately ill. Schizophrenia, for instance, is to mental illness what cancer is to physical illness. When Prince Harry talked about psychological troubles, debilitating though these may be, they are still not the same as full blown psychosis or, in other words, madness.
The present system has failed and the result is the creeping criminalisation of madness. The only way to reverse this is to build a core of dedicated hospitals that will care for and protect psychiatric patients who cannot do this for themselves and are a potential danger to themselves and others.]]>
The imperial monster behind this agenda is clearly non-partisan. Like the bullfight picadors weakening the bull in preparation for the matador, Bill Clinton had prepared Iraq for easy takedown with eight years of suffocating sanctions that killed an estimated half-million children. Obama/Clinton followed Bush with the wholesale destruction of Libya, a secular, socialist, well-developed nation with the highest human development index in Africa, and using weapons looted from Gaddafi's arsenal, launched the Syrian war in collusion with the Saudis, Qatar, Turkey and Israel, each with its own motives, none of which Americans should support. However rationalized as oil-driven, currency-protecting or strategic moves on the global chessboard, the monumental financial, moral and societal costs of these wars vastly exceed any benefits, real or imagined. Without the regional conflicts long caused by Israel and relentless pressure and political extortion by the Israel lobby, most or all of these terrible debacles might well have been avoided.
But change – perhaps revolutionary change – seems in the air. Israel no longer exerts automatic mastery of her neighbors and the US government. As Gideon Levy titled his 2014 Haaretz article, "The World Is Sick of Israel and Its Insanities."
Israel failed to prevent the Palestinian Authority from filing war crimes evidence with the International Criminal Court. The Israel lobby failed to stampede the US into attacking Syria. It failed to derail the nuclear negotiations with Iran. After an unbroken 44-veto win streak, it failed to strong-arm an American president into vetoing the 2016 UN Security Council resolution condemning settlements. It is desperately fighting a losing battle against the BDS movement despite mounting a full-court press in American universities, ecumenical faith communities, the mainstream media, and the academic and entertainment industries with its familiar, shrill accusations of "anti-Semitism" and dubious claims of indispensability to American "interests" and "shared values." In an April 5, 2017 Portland, Oregon city council hearing to consider divestment from socially irresponsible corporations, a third of citizens testifying cited business practices enabling Israeli abuses of Palestinians as a divestment criterion. And on April 16, the reliably pro-Israel New York Times unexpectedly published an occupation-searing op-ed by Palestinian activist Marwan Barghouti, long-imprisoned in Israel for presumed complicity in three attacks that killed five people during the second intifada.
The Palestinian solidarity movement shows signs of burgeoning life, but with uncertain direction now that President Trump announced departure from 23 years of formal US insistence on the fraudulent two-state solution – "as long as both sides agree." Agreement, of course, is the devil in substance as well as details. Palestinians have the rightful position under international law, but Israel has all the power in the relationship and has never come close to agreeing to anything remotely approaching justice. With Palestinians rendered helpless for 69 years, responsibility for justice falls by default upon "the international community."
World opinion outside the US is not sanguine toward Israel. Not one among the four other permanent and 10 rotating UNSC members ever joined the US in those 44 UNSC votes. Israel is effectively a US protectorate clinging tenuously to its claims upon the American taxpayer to fund its occupation and its assurance of US protection in the UN from international justice, with a loose cannon in the White House inclined to unpredictable reactions when offended.
With pressure building and the impasse shaking loose, several possible developments are in play.
Trump's ambiguity evoked immediate UN and Arab League declarations reaffirming a two-state solution as "the only way to achieve comprehensive and just settlement to the Palestinian cause." But the long-stalled, tentative two-state "Geneva Initiative" blueprint developed through the interminable "peace process" – which largely ignored the refugee and diaspora population's rights – is neither comprehensive nor just.
Israeli Education Minister Naftali Bennett, leader of the pro-settlement Jewish Home Party, is pushing Netanyahu to abandon the idea of a Palestinian state altogether, abandon restraints and annex a settlement of 40,000 population near Jerusalem for starters.
Hamas and Fatah continue to press for an independent state, anticipating that a single state by annexation would merely create "one state, two systems" continuing Israeli control without even a token pretense of PA administration.
J street also opposes this. Annexation would dismantle the myth of democracy Israel projects to the world. J Street president Jeremy Ben-Ami dreads the one-state model as "not a solution but a dissolution" since this would publicly formalize their apartheid system with a Jewish minority ruling over a Palestinian majority. He is right. But alternatively, were Israel to annex the Palestinian territories and provide constitutionally protected equal citizenship rights to all – which the Arab population would demand, supported by international pressure – this would end Israel as a self-definable "Jewish state." The Jewish and Palestinian Arab populations of the combined areas are now approximately equal, and Palestinians exercising their right of return coupled with predictable exodus of Jews unwilling to live as equals with Palestinians will shift the demographic balance decisively.
With its collective identity embattled and its stability threatened by BDS, Israel is becoming increasingly desperate, arresting BDS founder Omar Barghouti, a non-citizen resident of Israel, for allegedly evading taxes on income from a Ramallah-based company for 10 years they hadn't apparently noticed until now, and passing a law banning foreign nationals who support BDS from entry despite significant economic and public image risks. Most troubling to their control obsession, American Jews are no longer reliable Israel supporters. The recent annual AIPAC protest demonstration in Washington was the largest and most vociferous yet, conspicuously amplified by Jewish protesters.
Although this protest was Palestinian-organized with numerous well-known groups and figures, the media spotlight was captured by hundreds of young, spirited American Jews who made themselves newsworthy by blocking entrance to the convention center with a human chain and speaking with passion to the press, demanding freedom, equality, justice and dignity for Palestinians. The stated goal of their main organization, If Not Now, is "to end American Jewish support for the occupation." Without unison on thorny related issues, their proximal focus is simply the intolerable here and now.
Logically and morally, Jewish voices deserve no special privilege. We all have the same duty to protect human rights. And almost all US taxpayers involuntarily supporting Israel are non-Jewish. But politically, American Jewish voices carry special weight in confronting AIPAC, ADL and 336 tax-exempt "Israel affinity organizations" depriving the US Treasury of tax revenues on $5-6 billion annually supplementing Israel's current foreign aid allowance of over $3 billion. Anti-Zionist Jewish voices can dispel conflation of Palestine support with anti-Semitism and confer permission to the non-Jewish 97% to challenge Israel without fear of being so labeled. However imbalanced the media coverage of the protest, the size, energy and unequivocal repudiation of Israel by young American Jews may mark a turning point smoothing the path ahead for others.
However, the 2-edged sword here should not be overlooked. The largest, best-established Jewish organization challenging Israel is Jewish Voice for Peace. At the recent Portland hearing, six of 14 advocating divestment from companies enabling the abuse of Palestinians were JVP members. With annual budgets in the $3 million range, JVP is also the largest, best-financed organization within the Palestine Solidarity Movement, which provides it disproportionate visibility and influence. This influence is not without potential hazards.
JVP has endorsed strong positions including the BDS movement, which includes the right of return among its three bottom-line objectives. The right of return was declared by UN Resolution 194 in 1948, has been re-confirmed annually, and remains a yet-unfulfilled condition of Israel's 1949 admission to the UN. This has been a major roadblock to conflict resolution. A 2009 survey by One Voice, an organization that tries to paper over conflicting goals to discover or manufacture appearances of Israeli/Palestinian agreement, nevertheless found the greatest disagreement on the right of return, with 95% of occupied Palestinians rating this, including compensation, as "essential" to a final resolution, an outcome rated "unacceptable" by 77% of Israelis.
Both JVP and upstart If Not Now are focused on ending the ugly occupation, a deformity on the face of Judaism. But what next? It is the Palestinians who for 69 years have suffered armed robbery, forced exile, political imprisonment, extrajudicial killing, continuous humiliation under apartheid within Israel, suffocating military occupation and blockade in their own land outside Israel, and who, as the oppressed people, have the inalienable right to determine the course and outcomes of their movement. The rights to redress and restitution belong to the victims and cannot as a matter of justice be parsed by the perpetrator or its friends. Full and fair justice for Palestinians will mean significantly restructuring Israel/Palestine. Will JVP be willing to go that far?
It is less a question of principles than of competing loyalties. Can people with personal, familial, cultural and/or financial stakes connected to Israel honestly follow the path to full justice? How many JVP members are potentially compromised by such ties? For example, JVP executive director Rebecca Vilkomerson's husband, Jonathan Lebowitsch, is employed as a "solution architect" for an Israeli company, Check Point Software Technologies, founded by an IDF Intelligence Corps veteran. Imagining itself ever-threatened, Israel relies heavily on surveillance/security technology and would predictably intend to continue such intrusions to undermine Palestinian self-determination under any new political arrangement. What position would JVP take when faced with restoration of proportional Palestinian political power in historic Palestine with its transfiguring on-the-ground implications?
To be in solidarity as allies of an oppressed people, the rest of us including Jewish Americans must provide unequivocal support along whatever paths toward whatever goals of freedom, equality, justice and dignity under international law Palestinians themselves choose to seek, without efforts to steer them in other directions or toward lesser goals.
Whether within two genuinely equal states, a federation, or a unified single state with universal rights, this would not end the right of Jews to live there as their homeland but would end their current supremacy and privilege, just as the US is the homeland for people of many ethnicities and religions living (at least formally) in political equality. Israel could become a normal country rather than, as encouraged by IDF General Moshe Dayan, "like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother." To be honest allies, I believe Jewish supporters of Palestinians must embrace this transformative vision.]]>
The first is record warmth across the country. Denver recorded 80 degrees in mid-November. And 29 states had the warmest December ever recorded. Instead of a white Christmas, it was 70 degrees on Christmas Eve in Vermont!
Such freakish weather might be written off as the normal variation, except that an analysis by NOAA found the last five years were the warmest recorded in the past 122 years.
With the Arctic sea ice melting and glaciers disappearing, along with record high temperatures across the planet, it is getting increasingly difficult to deny that the planet is heating up.
The second paper I read explains part of the reason. Research by Boone Kauffman and colleagues, at Oregon State University and the Center for International Forestry Research, provides part of the answer.
Kauffman and his associates set out to calculate how much CO2 was released when native tropical vegetation was removed to facilitate shrimp and beef production.
But they went further than other researchers to put the answer into something that every person could easily understand.
What they found is that eating one meal of steak and shrimp cocktail releases as much CO2 into the atmosphere as driving a fuel-efficient car from New York to Los Angeles!
The seven-year study looked at the ecological, as well as climatic cost, of conversion of mangroves into shrimp farms and cattle pastures. Conversion of native vegetation to agricultural uses resulted in a land-use carbon footprint of 1,440 pounds of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere to produce every pound of beef, and 1,603 pounds of released carbon dioxide for every pound of shrimp.
Kauffman and his colleagues developed a measure of land-use carbon footprint. First, they measured the amount of carbon in intact mangroves. Then they calculated the GHG emissions that result when these mangrove forests are converted to shrimp farms or cattle pasture. Though only occupying 0.6% of the Earth's tropical forest, the continued removal of these trees accounts for 12% of all carbon emissions resulting from tropical vegetation conversion.
Finally, they measured the amount of shrimp or beef produced from this conversion over the life of the operation to arrive at the land-use carbon footprint.
Though some might suggest the findings do not apply to other ecosystems, the fact is that any number of studies have shown that livestock production is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization found that livestock accounted for 14.5 percent of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, more GHG emissions than all the world's transportation combined.
A World Watch Study that included more associated impacts from animal agriculture estimated that as much as 51% of the GHG emissions resulted from livestock production, primarily beef, and dairy cows, though chickens and pigs were also included in their analysis.
What these studies suggest is consuming beef and dairy products is one of the worse things any individual can do in terms of its global warming effects. And unlike other necessary, but more difficult to implement reductions of our society CO2 emissions through structural changes like better insulation of buildings, fewer cars, and ultimately population reduction, the one thing that most of us can easily do for the planet is reduce our consumption of meat and dairy.
Of course, there are other good reasons to reduce meat and dairy as well. When forests and native grasslands are converted to pasture and/or crops like soybean or corn to feed domestic livestock the loss of wildlife habitat is huge, and it is now a major factor driving many species extinct.
And there are good health reasons to eat less red meat and dairy which have been implicated in many diseases from cancer to heart disease.
All in all, the connection between diet and a warming planet are clear. If one is concerned about the long-term impacts of global warming, the most immediate and easiest change in behavior that all of us can implement immediately is change our diet.]]>
On April 11, Donald Trump, irked by North Korea's continued tests of nuclear weapons and missiles, tweeted that "North Korea is looking for trouble." If China does not "help," then "we will solve the problem without them." North Korean leader Kim Jong Unresponded by announcing that, in the event of a U.S. military attack, his country would not scruple at launching a nuclear strike at U.S. forces. In turn, Trump declared: "We are sending an armada, very powerful. We have submarines, very powerful, far more powerful than the aircraft carrier. We have the best military people on earth."
During the following days, the governments of both nuclear-armed nations escalated their threats. Dispatched to South Korea, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence declared that "the era of strategic patience is over," and warned: "All options are on the table." Not to be outdone, North Korea's deputy representative to the United Nations told a press conference that "thermonuclear war may break out at any moment." Any missile or nuclear strike by the United States would be responded to "in kind." Several days later, the North Korean government warned of a "super-mighty preemptive strike" that would reduce U.S. military forces in South Korea and on the U.S. mainland "to ashes." The United States and its allies, said the official statement, "should not mess with us."
Curiously, this North Korean statement echoed the Trump promise during his presidential campaign that he would build a U.S. military machine "so big, powerful, and strong that no one will mess with us." The fact that both Trump and Kim are being "messed with" despite their possession of very powerful armed forces, including nuclear weapons, seems to have eluded both men, who continue their deadly game of nuclear threat and bluster.
And what is the response of the public to these two erratic government leaders behaving in this reckless fashion and threatening war, including nuclear war? It is remarkably subdued. People read about the situation in newspapers or watch it on the television news, while comedians joke about the madness of it all. Oh, yes, peace and disarmament organizations condemn the escalating military confrontation and outline reasonable diplomatic alternatives. But such organizations are unable to mobilize the vast numbers of people around the world necessary to shake some sense into these overwrought government officials.
The situation was very different in the 1980s, when organizations like the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign (in the United States), the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (in Britain), and similar groups around the world were able to engage millions of people in protest against the nuclear recklessness of the U.S. and Soviet governments―protest that played a key role in curbing the nuclear arms race and preventing nuclear war.
So why is there so little public protest today?
One factor is certainly the public's preoccupation with other important issues, among them climate change, immigration, terrorism, criminal justice, civil liberties, and economic inequality.
Another appears to be a sense of fatalism. Many people believe that Kim and Trump are too irrational to respond to reason and too autocratic to give way to public pressure.
Yet another factor is the belief of Americans and Europeans that their countries are safe from a North Korean attack. Yes, many people will die in a new Korean War, especially one fought with nuclear weapons, but they will be "only" Koreans.
In addition, many people credit the absence of nuclear war since 1945 to nuclear deterrence. Thus, they assume that nuclear-armed nations will not fight a nuclear war among themselves.
Finally–and perhaps most significantly–people are reluctant to think about nuclear war. After all, it means death and destruction at an unbearable level of horror. Therefore, it's much easier to simply forget about it.
Of course, even if these factors explain the public's passivity in the face of a looming nuclear catastrophe, they do not justify it. After all, people can concern themselves with more than one issue at a time, public officials are often more malleable than assumed, accepting the mass slaughter of Koreans is unconscionable, and if nuclear deterrence really worked, the U.S. government would be far less worried about other nations (including North Korea) developing nuclear weapons. Also, problems–including the problem posed by nuclear weapons–do not simply disappear when people ignore them.
It would be a terrible thing if it takes a disastrous nuclear war between the United States and North Korea to convince people that nuclear war is simply unacceptable. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki should already have convinced us of that.]]>
We also have Earth Day, celebrated annually on 22 April. On this day. various events are held across the globe to demonstrate support for environmental protection. Earth Day dates back to 1970.
Given the threats to the environment, these two symbolic days in the calendar promote laudable aims. For instance, consider that a range of species are endangered due to poaching and habitat destruction. The scaly anteater is probably the most trafficked mammal on earth. Over a million of these have been taken from the wild in the past decade alone. The illegal trade in live apes is also rife, and many other species across the planet are being trafficked.
The vast illegal trade in wildlife products is pushing whole species towards extinction, including elephants, rhinos, big cats, gorillas and sea turtles. Driven by a growing demand for illegally sourced wildlife products, the illicit trade has escalated into a global crisis. Thousands of species are internationally traded and used by people in their daily lives.
Former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has called on UN agencies and various partners to provide a co-ordinated response to wildlife crime and spread the message that there should be zero tolerance for poaching. As part of a wider approach, a strategy is being developed to create greater public awareness of the issue at hand, which will hopefully lead to reduced demand for wildlife products.
Palm oil and environmental destruction
As commendable as these aims are, however, on their own they will not be enough to save species or their habitat. That's because the interests of powerful actors must be taken into account and the economic system they perpetuate has to be challenged.
For instance, between 2000 and 2009 Indonesia supplied more than half of the global palm oil market at an annual expense of some 340,000 hectares of Indonesian countryside. Planned expansion could wipe out the remaining natural habitat of several endangered species.
This is a ludicrous situation considering that Brazil and Indonesia spent over 100 times more in subsidies to industries that cause deforestation than they received in international conservation aid from the UN to prevent it. The two countries gave over $40bn in subsidies to the palm oil, timber, soy, beef and biofuels sectors between 2009 and 2012, some 126 times more than the $346m they received to preserve their rain forests.
If we want to see how not to manage the world's wildlife and natural habitats, we need look no further than India, which is the world's leading importer of palm oil, accounting for around 15% of the global supply. India imports over two-thirds of its palm oil from Indonesia.
Until the mid-1990s, India was virtually self-sufficient in edible oils. Under pressure from the WTO, import tariffs were reduced, leading to an influx of cheap (subsidised) edible oil imports that domestic farmers could not compete with. This was a deliberate policy that effectively devastated the home-grown edible oils sector (see this) and served the interests of palm oil growers and US grain and agriculture commodity company Cargill, which helped write international trade rules to secure access to the Indian market on its terms.
Indonesia leads the world in global palm oil production, but palm oil plantations have too often replaced tropical forests, leading to the killing of endangered species and the uprooting of local communities as well as contributing to the release of climate-changing gases (see this analysis). Indonesia emits more greenhouse gases than any country besides China and the US and that's largely due to the production of palm oil.
The issue of palm oil is one example from the many that could be provided to highlight how the drive to facilitate corporate need and profit trumps any notion of environmental protection. Whether it is in Indonesia, Latin America or elsewhere, transnational agribusiness – and the system of industrialised agriculture it promotes – fuels much of the environmental destruction we see today.
Without addressing the impacts and nature of corporate imperialism and a wholly corrupt neoliberal capitalism that privileges corporations and profit ahead of people and conservation, Earth Day or World Environment Day will continue to send out a valuable message but will have minimal impact.
The devastating nature of chemical-intensive industrial farming, its geopolitical role and its massive environmental, social and health costs has been highlighted at length in previous article I've written. There is no need to go over this again here. But one of the guilty parties which perpetuates this model of agriculture is of course Monsanto.
The Monsanto Tribunal
Earth Day came a few days after the legal opinion offered by the five international judges who presided over the Monsanto Tribunal in The Hague. The judges concluded that Monsanto has engaged in practices that have impinged on the basic human right to a healthy environment, the right to food and the right to health. Monsanto's conduct also has had a negative impact on the right of scientists to freely conduct indispensable research.
The judges additionally concluded that a gap remains between the commitments and the reality of environmental protection. The Tribunal concluded that if ecocide were formally recognised as a crime in international criminal law, the activities of Monsanto could possibly constitute a crime of ecocide too.
The Tribunal called for the need to assert the primacy of international human and environmental rights law. However, it was also careful to note that an existing set of legal rules is currently in place to protect investors' rights in the framework of the World Trade Organization and in bilateral investment treaties and in clauses in free-trade agreements.
These provisions undermine the capacity of nations to maintain policies, laws and practices protecting human and environmental rights, not least because key questions of human and environmental rights violations are to be resolved by private tribunals operating entirely outside the United Nations framework and the legal systems of nation states (see 'Clear and Present Danger to Democracy', which highlights the disturbing shift in power as a result of investor trade dispute settlement provisions written into trade and investment agreements).
The Tribunal denounced the severe disparity between the rights of multinational corporations and their obligations.
Capitalism on trial
While the Monsanto Tribunal saw that company being put on trial and being found guilty of human rights violations, including crimes against the environment, in a sense we also witnessed global capitalism on trial.
Monsanto and other powerful corporations can only operate as they do because of a framework designed to allow them to capture governments and regulatory bodies, to use the WTO and bilateral trade deals to lever global influence, to profit on the back of US militarism (Iraq) and destabilisations (Ukraine), to exert undue influence over science and politics and to rake in enormous profits.
The World Bank's 'Enabling the Business of Agriculture' and its ongoing commitment to a wholly corrupt and rigged model of globalisation is a further recipe for plunder, corruption and the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of the few. Whether it involves Monsanto, Cargill or the type of corporate power grab of African agriculture that Bill Gates is helping to spearhead, global capitalism (under the project of 'globalisation') will continue to ensure this happens while hiding behind platitudes about 'free trade' and 'development'.
Brazil and Indonesia are subsidising private corporations to effectively destroy the environment through their practices. Canada and the UK are working with the GMO biotech sector to facilitate its needs. And India is facilitating the destruction of its agrarian base according to World Bank directives for the benefit of the likes of Monsanto, Bayer and Cargill.
"The Indo-US Knowledge Initiative in Agriculture with agribusinesses like Monsanto, WalMart, Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill and ITC in its Board made efforts to turn the direction of agricultural research and policy in such a manner as to cater their demands for profit maximisation. Companies like Monsanto during the Vietnam War produced tonnes and tonnes of "Agent Orange" unmindful of its consequences for Vietnamese people as it raked in super profits and that character remains." Communist Party of India (Marxist)
These powerful corporations increasingly hold sway over a globalised system of food and agriculture from seed to plate. And with major mergers within the agribusiness sector in the pipeline, power will be further monopolised and the situation is likely to worsen. The overall narrative about farming has been shaped to benefit the interests of this handful of wealthy, politically influential corporations whereby commercial interest trumps any notion of the public good.
We require transparency, accountability and a system of decision making that does not take place within the overbearing shadow of commercial influence. However, in capitalism, the state's primary role is to secure the interests of private capital. The institutions of globalised capitalism – from the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO right down to the compliant bureaucracies of national states or supranational unions – facilitate private wealth accumulation that results in the forms of structural inequalities and violence (unemployment, poverty, population displacement, bad food, poor health, environmental destruction, etc.) that have become 'accepted' as necessary (for 'growth') and taken for granted within mainstream media and political narratives.
When referring to Western countries, those narratives like to use the euphemism 'austerity' for deregulation, privatisation and gross inequalities and hardship, while hiding being the mantra 'there is no alternative'. When referring to places like India or Africa, they use the euphemism 'assisting development' for corporate imperialism, while hiding behind the term 'investing in'.
In the cynical world of 'free' market capitalism, an interlocking directorate of corporate interests have for a long time ensured that state institutions and international bodies are shaped and manipulated to facilitate the interests of private capital.
If the current myths about the necessity for perpetuating the stranglehold of capitalism go unchallenged and real alternatives are not offered or supported, we will see accelerated environmental destruction and human rights violations by powerful private interests and a dangerous march towards increasing militarism and possible nuclear conflict as a moribund capitalism approaches its ultimate crisis.]]>
It is the strength of teachers as an irreplaceable mass of workers concentrated in factory-like working conditions that has turned them into a post-modern proletariat. In many cases this flies against their own inclinations, for the teacher is by nature wedded to orderly conditions in the classroom; and prefers creativity over political conflict.
But teachers are now compelled by circumstances to overcome their inhibitions. Their very strength has made them the prime target of the corporate assault on socialized institutions.
And the teacher must feed her family like everyone else. She craves that very same order and predictability in her family life that she strives to build in the classroom. So she cannot turn a blind eye to inflation rates of over 40% when confronted with salary increases of only 19%, as offered today by the Government of Argentina.
That is why in ongoing protests Argentinian teachers are blocking traffic, setting up a free "tent school" in front of the Congress building, and pushing school start dates later. Similarly, in Chile, thousands of teachers also hit the streets in April to condemn the lack of action by President Michelle regarding promised reforms for the country's prohibitively expensive and privatized education system.
In Mexico, teachers are taking action against the "Gasolinazo," an ongoing nationwide hike in gas prices implemented by President Peña Nieto; for in order to work the teacher must travel by car. The National Coordinator of Education Workers (CNTE) was joined by the "normalistas," teacher trainers, in leading mass protests against prices and privatization, such as the temporary hijacking of buses and cars to block traffic in Oaxaca on April 18th.
The Barbados Secondary School Teacher's Union (BSTU), for its part, led a "March for Respect" of hundreds of teachers and their supporters on April 6th. BSTU members argue that newly assigned marking of national standardized tests is not part of their contracts, and thus the ministry is demanding unpaid work from already underpaid teachers.
Early this past month in the United States, Teachers Unions from Seattle to Chicago have held votes on whether or not to hold a 1day strike on May Day in order to, as the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) has put it, "Resist Racism, Rebuild Community". Though the voting went against a strike, the CTU are going ahead with mass action on May Day, and insist on their members rights to "use one of their Personal Business Days or an authorized unpaid '0 Day'", to join the May Day activities.
Meanwhile, here in Canada the struggle continues with the Passage of Bill 92, the School Boards Collective Bargaining Amendment Act, (SBCBA) by the Ontario Legislature. On the one hand, the SBCBA enables passage of favorable deals reached with Ontario teachers in which they gain salary increases of 4% over two years, and compensation for the illegal suppression their right-to-strike in 2012.
On the other hand, this comes at the cost of subtle measures attached to the Bill that undermine union democracy by imposing centralized bargaining, and unreasonable early notification requirements before any strike action can be taken in the future.
Also, the short 2-year time period for the new "extension" contract with Ontario teachers sets them up for a dangerous clash with a newly elected, likely Conservative, government that, so early in its term, will not be inclined to be nearly so generous.
Still, the settlement with Ontario's Teachers, which was ratified by a strong majority of Teachers on April 7th, has raised the ante for the Ontario Government in negotiating with other unions. They must now meet the precedent set by teachers of no-concession bargaining, and an increase of wages that keeps pace with inflation.
Let us hope that teachers, and other workers, in Argentina will be so lucky.
Iraqi Christians moving Church icons to presumed safety near Mosul. Photo: Courtesy of M. Jalloum.
Malloula Village, Syria
"Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? (My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?)" are reputedly among Jesus' last words on the Cross at Calvary. Today Christ's words can be said to apply to all Christians in the Middle East who in this birthplace of Christianity are increasingly facing the most intense persecutions since the Roman Empire and the Bolshevik revolution.
As is widely known, Christians are being targeted in this region and pushed out of Christianity's birth place of 2000 thousand years ago and there is no Richard the Lion Hearted on the horizon to protect them. According to some analysts in approximately twenty years Christians will be virtually extinct in the Middle East.
Today, Christians number fewer than four per cent of the region's more than four hundred million people. They have been subject to vicious murders at the hands of terrorist groups, forced out of their ancestral lands by civil wars, suffered societal intolerance fomented by Islamist ideology, and increasingly the victims of widespread institutional discrimination spreading today in the legal codes and official practices of many Middle Eastern governments.
This Easter, Christians are going through hell in the Middle East. Last year, approximately 100,000 Christians were killed in this region as a result of their beliefs, according to the Center for the Study of World Christianity. Outside the Arab world, persecution is also growing in India and Southeast Asia, according to the Open Doors organization, which has concluded that, in total, 215 million people on the planet suffer "high levels of persecution" simply "for belonging to the flock of Jesus of Nazareth." There are mounting calls to declare the atrocities perpetrated against Christians and other religious minorities in the Middle East as genocide or if this noun is deemed problematical under the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, using the adjective 'genocidal' is becoming commonplace.
The Christian minorities in the Middle East — Copts in Egypt; Assyrians and Chaldeans in Iraq; Melkites and other Christians in parts of Syria; Maronites and Armenians in Lebanon face increasing injustices and are targets of attacks and discrimination while increasingly being relegated to the status of second-class citizens in their own countries. Since their ascendancy in 2014 in Iraq and Syria, various Islamic State militiamen stigmatize Christians and mark their houses and properties with the letter "N" in the Arabic alphabet, for "Nazarene" or allegedly from Nazareth Palestine.
The largest number of killings of Christians are in areas of Iraq and Syria under IS control. The Iraqi Christian clerical leadership is urging those who have not yet fled not to remain in Iraq warning that as ever fewer remain and their numbers even further decline it will mean the end of their ancient communities. The Chaldean Patriarch Louis Sako recently told Agence France-Presse "For the first time in the history of Iraq, Mosul is now empty of Christians."
ISIS may or may not soon be defeated in Iraq or replaced by a more vicious terrorist movement. Meanwhile Christians and other minorities may receive short term protection in Ninewah Province, but many voices of despair from inside the Church are admitting that there is no likely future for Christians in Iraq. Increasingly students of the subject are claiming that it is also likely true of the whole Middle East.
Just like Iraq, Syria hosts an array of Christian confessions, distinguished by the positions their forebears took in church councils of up to 1500 years ago. Some are in communion with Rome, others with Greek and Russian Orthodoxy; still others characterized by subtle doctrinal differences with all attempting to preserve mutual respect and friendship with their co-religionists across Syria. Under Syria's Hafez al-Assad and son Bashar, Christians have been 10 percent of the population and today are protected by the regime in areas it still controls. A majority of Christians remaining in Syria back Assad's government against the terrorists of the Islamic State and al-Qaida, whose victory would likely mean their expulsion or death. Still at least half of Syria's Christians have fled since March 2011. The flight is so pronounced that in 2013, Gregory III, the Melkite Patriarch of Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem, issued an open letter to his flock, urging them: "Despite all your suffering, stay here! Don't emigrate!"
Syria's ancient city of Aleppo, where this observer has visited the past few years and which is the former home of the beauties discussed in Part II of this Report, the number of Christians has declined from approximately from 250,000 to fewer than 15,000 according to church officials and Aleppo University faculty members I have discussed this subject with. This tragic diminution in the number of Christians in Aleppo is greater by far than that of Aleppo's overall population, which has declined from about 2.6 million to fewer than 1 million.
As of Easter Sunday Aleppo is just the latest to join the list of places in the Middle East where Christians have become an endangered species. In major parts of the Old City large numbers of displaced Muslims have now moved in, becoming the majority in the former primarily Christian districts. Meanwhile, jihadist extremism will likely not be buried under the rubble of eastern Aleppo but rather it will migrate and metastasize.
Even more than in Aleppo and Syria, the most Christians in this region forced to flee has been in Iraq, where they have been targeted by escalating sectarian clashes between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, hunted by various Al Qaeda inspired militia and forced to flee by the Islamic State. There were 1.4 million Christians in Iraq in 2003. Today there fewer than 80,000 thousand with hundreds more leaving each month. They are desperate to escape persecution that rivals that of Roman during the Church's infancy.
In Egypt, five percent of the Egyptian population, or about 4 million people are Christian. The Pew Forum's recent report estimated that approximately 95% of Egyptians were Muslims in 2010, 96% in 2015. The Egyptian Parliament recently ratified bigotry when it passed a law imposing major restrictions on the construction and renovation of churches. No such restrictions apply to mosques. There are approximately 2000 churches in Egypt, compared with 120,600 mosques.
On Palm Sunday, 44 Coptic Christians celebrating Christ's triumphal entry into Jerusalem were martyred in terrorist attacks in Egypt and more than 100 were injured. The first bombing was at St. George's Church in Tanta, the second at St. Mark's in Alexandria. Copts make up around 10% of Egypt's population. They date from the first century A.D., when St. Mark, one of the Twelve Apostles, established the first church outside the Holy Land and became bishop of Alexandria.
To its credit, Egyptian police on 4/18/2017 arrested a man wanted for alleged involvement in twin church bombings this month claimed by the Islamic State one of 19 suspects whose names police made public after the Palm Sunday explosions. The Palm Sunday bombings followed an earlier attack by a suicide bomber who detonated his explosives in a packed Cairo church in December, killing 29 people.
The ISIS affiliate in the Sinai Peninsula claimed credit for the attacks of Egyptian Coptic Churches last week and in the past two years, it has carried out a series of gruesome killings of Christians, including the forced march of twenty-one Egyptian workers in Libya, all Coptic Christians, each clad in an orange prison jumpsuit, to a Mediterranean beach, where they were forced to kneel and then beheaded. ISIS threats against Christians have escalated since a suicide bombing on December 11th at St. Mark's Cathedral, in Cairo, killed more than two dozen Egyptians. After a February attack that killed seven Christians on Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, the majority of Copts have fled the Sinai, according to Human Rights Watch.
Unfortunately, no one has ever stood trial for any of the attacks in Egypt against Christians over the past twenty years. In most instances, the police don't care to investigate. They round up a few suspects, but then release them without charges. The Islamic State group has threatened more attacks on Christian's just weeks before a planned visit by Pope Francis, and it prompted the government to declare a three-month state of emergency.
With respect to Afghanistan, which the Bush II administration claimed to have "liberated" in 2001, that worn torn country is listed as the world's third-most hostile nation toward Christians. The punishment for baptism in Afghanistan is death. Since more than a decade ago, a Christian convert had to flee his country or face beheading.
Other vicious attack on Christians occurred not long ago at a retirement home set up by Mother Teresa in the Yemeni port city of Aden. The victims were handcuffed and subsequently shot in the head, an attack Pope Francis described as "diabolical" at the following Sunday's Mass.
The situation in Palestine is unique as longtime advocate for Palestine, Dr. James Zogby instructs us. Both Palestinian Christians and Muslims are suffering under the harsh Israeli occupation. Both have lost land, livelihood, and freedom of movement and for them there exists no equal justice under law. This Holy Week, Christians from Bethlehem, Bir Zeit, Jerusalem, Ramallah and elsewhere confronted many obstacles as these believers attempted to make pilgrimage and walk, as they have done for nearly two thousand years, the Stations of the Cross or to pray at the Holy Church of the Sepulcher. Many Palestinians are able to observe Jerusalem from their homes, but they are blocked from the city by an internationally condemned and challenged 28 feet high wall, imposed and policed by occupation forces who main the adjoining growing number of dehumanized checkpoints.
The expulsion of Christians from the Middle East will have broad and serious implications far beyond this region. If one of the largest and important religious groups in the world continues to be forced out of the Middle East, what are the implications for global pluralism, tolerance, and the ability of all of us to be interlinked and engage with mutual respect with the rest of the world?
As a scholar at the Center for American Progress emailed this observer the other day: "The status of Christians in the Middle East is the barometer of whether or not those of other faiths or no faith at all will be able to live and thrive in this region and beyond."
Most people would probably answer "yes" to that question. However, the state of the world tells us otherwise. Trump has proposed a Pentagon budget increase of $54 billion, which is more than the entire annual military budget of Russia or the UK. The U.S. accounts for about 40 percent of global military expenditures at more than $600 billion per year, maintaining more than 800 foreign military bases, 10 aircraft carrier battle groups, the most sophisticated conventional military hardware ever created, and nearly 7,000 nuclear weapons.
Under President Obama, the U.S. initiated a so-called nuclear "modernization" program, projected to cost at least $1 trillion over the next three decades, to completely upgrade and overhaul the entire U.S. nuclear weapons complex, from weapons laboratories to warheads to the planes, missiles and submarines that deliver them. Predictably, every other nuclear state has followed suit, announcing their own nuclear modernization plans, so this should properly be dubbed The New Arms Race.
Russia has for some time been more, rather than less, dependent on nuclear weapons for its security, and North Korea, sadly but predictably, sees its nuclear arsenal as a deterrent or counter-balance to the overwhelming military, nuclear, economic and political power of the U.S./South Korea/Japan alliance. So it's fair to ask if U.S. nuclear and conventional superiority encourages rather than deters nuclear proliferation, making Americans and the whole world less safe.
It isn't just Russia and North Korea who maddeningly defy U.S. objectives in the world, but also various governments and armed groups in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and many other countries, as a cursory scan of the daily global news headlines shows us. Is adding even more military might supposed to magically change this equation? How will more nukes or submarines help defeat ISIS or al Qaeda?
At the same time as Trump proposes to add to Pentagon bloat — the Pentagon admits to having lost tens of billions of dollars and has never passed an audit — he wants to slash spending on human needs in our communities and of course environmental programs. In the international security realm, he also proposes to gut funding for the State Department, United Nations World Food Programme and U.S. Agency for International Development that provide life saving food and medical supplies to impoverished and war torn countries, thus making the job of the U.S. military more difficult as poverty and climate change drive armed conflict around the world.
Trump, who portrays himself as the ultimate deal-maker, ought to know diplomacy is far cheaper, safer and more effective at resolving conflict than building up and utilizing our considerable military might. While he likes to disparage every program of his predecessor, he has not sought to overturn President Barack Obama's most significant foreign policy successes, the Iran nuclear agreement which closed off Iran's potential path to getting the Bomb, and the opening to Cuba.
Trump should do a deal with North Korea. It's not rocket science, and perhaps he could enlist former President Jimmy Carter, who successfully defused tensions with North Korea twice, as a special envoy. Earlier this year, the administration scuttled unofficial but promising diplomatic talks when it canceled the visas of a North Korean delegation scheduled to come to New York. China has floated the idea of a North Korean nuclear and missile program freeze in exchange for the U.S. canceling its provocative war games with South Korea, an idea Pyongyang had signaled interest in recently.
As the president has admitted, some issues are more complicated than he thought when he took office. In the words of Winston Churchill, jaw jaw is better than war war. Both Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Vice President Mike Pence have stated, "all options are on the table," (which includes using nuclear weapons) regarding North Korea, except the only good one, diplomacy. If Trump wants to live up to his maverick reputation, he should ignore the conventional wisdom that more bombs will make us safer, and invest in smart, tough negotiations instead.]]>
Though few reformers would openly admit it, degraded pensions are a natural and obvious outcome of their policies and political allegiances. From Ohio, Wisconsin, and New Jersey, where Republican governors famously slashed pensions, to such blue states as New York (where I teach), where a newly diminished pension "tier" is introduced every several years, American teachers have seen their pensions rapidly decline in recent years. And reformers have only worked to hasten this process. One way is by advocating charter school proliferation. Charter schools, almost by definition, impose longer working days, weeks, and years than public schools – and usually without tenure protections. Thus, by design, most charter teachers only work for a few years, and their yearly turnover is sky-high. In turn, few charter teachers will ever earn pensions.
Reformers also directly attack existing tenure systems. Once again, from Michigan under Rick Snyder, to Colorado and New York under Democratic governors, weakened tenure systems have become as ubiquitous as weakened pension programs. And reformers have been behind every successful effort to crush tenure. The result is that teachers at public schools, without strong job protections, are less likely to work long enough to earn a pension in the first place, and more likely to earn a degraded pension, than in pre-reform days. Thus, pensions, thanks to reformers and their allies, are necessarily rarer and worth less, at both charters and public schools.
Since reformers weaken pension systems indirectly, by creating charters and weakening tenure, they enjoy a certain plausible deniability. They could claim that they respect pensions, but must begrudgingly weaken them through needed reforms. Remarkably, though, some reformers have abandoned such a politic approach, and declared their hostility to pensions. In 2011, Michelle Rhee famously appeared on Fox News to support Scott Walker in his battle against collective bargaining. She argued that although "unions can collectively bargain over basic things like salaries," they should not be able to bargain over pensions. For Rhee, pensions, unlike salaries, are not "basic," but apparently, extravagant – though she gave no reason whatever for this distinction. What is clear is that in the ideology that Rhee and Walker share, pensions lack the mystical legitimacy that only salaries possess.
Such moments of ill-advised honesty notwithstanding, Rhee and other reformers have consistently claimed that they are true liberals, despite appearances to the contrary. In 2012, Rhee told The Atlantic, "I'm not just a Democrat – – I feel like I'm a pretty lefty Democrat," adding that "Democrats are united about the aspiration of ensuring that every single child gets a decent education and that the investment is there to do that." For Rhee, helping Walker and Chris Christie slash pensions does not disqualify her as a "lefty," apparently because teachers' pensions do not count as educational "investments." It should follow that reformers such as Rhee, as a most idiosyncratic group of far left Democrats who are contemptuous of both tenure and pension systems, must at least favor much higher salaries for teachers – a hypothesis to return to.
Rhee is in good company. In an interview with Tavis Smiley, Waiting For Superman director Davis Guggenheim claimed to believe that teachers' unions should "make sure their workers get paid a lot of money," despite his having advocated an essentially budget-neutral approach to education reform in Superman. He argued to Smiley that unions should not protect all of their members, nor fight against increased working hours, nor "get in the way of" any proposed reforms – especially not the unchecked proliferation of union-hostile charter schools. And despite believing that unions should thereby forfeit most of their essential functions, presumably without extra compensation for their members, Guggenheim still claimed to be a "liberal," risibly adducing his childhood dinner table conversations as proof.
In a controversial speech in 2011, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg voiced a desire to fire half of the city's teachers, while doubling the salaries of the survivors. Many viewed his comment as ill-advised. But it served the myth that corporate-style reform yields increased teachers' salaries; a myth which major media have helped to propel. For also during his mayoralty, 60 Minutes profiled a Manhattan charter school that paid its teachers salaries of $125,000 per year, in exchange for a brutal work schedule and no job security. The underlying message, advanced by interviewee and New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein, was that such schools reflected the mission of education reform generally. No more coddling; only rugged and talented teachers will survive – as long as market forces may be unleashed to lure them with Ivy-League level salaries. To hear Rhee, Guggenheim, Bloomberg, Klein, and our major media – education reform's brightest luminaries, and their mouthpiece – one might believe that higher teacher salaries were the order of the day.
Have they been? Corporate-style reformers have dominated education policy at least since the 2001 signing of No Child Left Behind. And if they had wished to compensate for their ravaging of tenure and pension systems by raising teachers' salaries, they would have done so, and proof of their triumph would be manifest by now. But according to the Economic Policy Institute, American teachers' pay has only fallen, by 2.6%, from 1996 to 2015, and has gone from being 2.3% lower than comparably educated professionals' pay, in 1994, to now being 17% less (as of 2015). And contrary to the myth that charter teachers trade tenure and union protections for higher salaries, charter teachers are paid less than public school teachers in many places, including charter-dense Washington D.C. and Michigan.
There are no excuses left for what corporate reformers have done to teachers' compensation. Reformers may not claim that fiscal conservatives such as Bloomberg, Christie, Walker, and Snyder, thwarted their "lefty liberal" intentions to raise salaries – for they supported these leaders at every turn, especially when they slashed pensions or disempowered unions. They may not claim to misunderstand that if you weaken teachers' bargaining power by degrading their job security, insist that reform can be done cheaply, and praise right-wingers who give to hedge funds what they steal from teachers, it will be difficult to raise teachers' salaries in any states. No, reformers cannot claim to misunderstand basic economics, since expertise in marketizing education, not experience in the classroom, is their very raison d'etre. Reformers may only take credit for purposely degrading all forms of teachers' compensation, and for duping media elites into believing that they wished to do otherwise.]]>
Last year's gossip columns were dripping with prurience at the antics of a person who seemed a shadow of his ruthless father, the same daddy who created World Series Cricket and a casino empire.
Luscious, bouncy Mariah subsequently made an enormous splash by demanding $50 million as compensation for having to move her life from New York to LA, leaving the sores open about his general association with music and Hollywood glitterati. To add some kindling to the fire, Carey threw some meat to the media wolves: "Mariah Carey and James Packer had a fight in Greece. They have not seen each other since."[1] The games the rich and powerful play.
A seasoned gambler prides himself on bountiful resilience, the near elastic ability to absorb the punches of rude fate while being able to challenge the house. Self-control kicks in to prevent a giddy head, keeping extravagance in check. Steady deals are preferred over outrageous ones.
To not follow these steps is to doom the gambler to a Dostoyevskian disaster tale, a slide into atrophy. This can unfold on the roulette table, a point that affects the protagonist, Alexei Ivanovich, but also in other forms, such as running up debts, as does the Russian family he is tutor to in Germany, gambling on the death of the family matriarch and her inheritance. In time, the matriarch, based in Russia, visits her family, and squanders her own assets in the casino. The wheel truly turns.
Packer's venture into the Hollywood empire, typified by the Ratpac experiment, did have the Dostoyevskian element of decay about it, without, admittedly, the dark poetic reflection. It was the greatest hand to play, one that would etch his name in blinding glitz and hideously fun glamour. He wanted a hand in the dream factory, a funding contribution to content and experiment.
To do so entailed cultivating and supporting Hollywood producer, James Ratner. With Ratner, the allure of Ratpac shone, with the company's offices established in a suite on a lot belonging to Universal Studios, one beaming with the historical influence of Frank Sinatra, the original rat packer.:
What ensued in the Ratner-Packer relationship are celluloid moments, snapped glories where Hollywood actors and directors come together, where the attention seeking gambler meets his heroes (Robert De Niro, Martin Scorcese, Brad Pitt), keeping company with his camera pampered icons.
This is candy for the press, fodder for the dream factory. In what amounts to the fascination of a blushing child crush, Packer would claim that they had become his friends, albeit the sort mediated by ample cash.
The Ratpac institution itself has had a range of products of variable success. (The term variable is used advisedly.) These suggest that Packer may not have been entirely up his shallow brown creek without a paddle, though his former partner, Ratner, refuses to reveal too much of the role played by the casino tycoon.
The Ratpac did have a hand in such landscape rich experiments as The Revenant, supplying Leonardo di Caprio with a successful stab at an academic award. Yes, it was the directing flair of Alejandro González Iñárritu who did pull it off, but behind experiments of culture, notably those in the cinematic kingdom, come buccaneering patrons, the willing sponsors, the cash reserve. It had even been suggested that Packer's pockets, deep as they are, were not sufficient for the rapacious death-star that is Hollywood.
The Ratpac, in the tradition of good risk, also managed to fund a set of mind slushy wonders (Storks, Jupiter Ascending, Entourage, to name but a few), showing how the odds in Hollywood are probably worse than they are in the permutation sets of Las Vegas. Poor taste, demand and risk tend, to be a profane triad, operating without mercy.
Unfortunately for Packer, his own casino consortium, which he attempted to co-opt Hollywood into reflecting, attracted the salivating keen attention of Chinese authorities, largely through his association with Lawrence Ho's Melco in Macau.
Eighteen Crown Casino personnel were rounded up in October last year on suspicion of "gambling-related crimes", notably connected with the high rolling end of town.[2] Not only was Packer wishing to get under Hollywood's silk cover; he wished to brave, or at the very least sidestep, various gaming regulations by cultivating sites in Macau, a true money Mecca that dwarfs those on the Vegas strip.
This was another gamble that did not pay off, failing to take into account the murmurs of reform moving through Chinese President Xi Jinping's anti-corruption strategy and focus on capital outflows.
Now, relative humbleness, born from punishment, has returned. Tail tucked between running legs, the Ratpac investor has gone back to his traditional brat roots, watered by Daddy's money, drip-fed broken dreams of vast global ventures of the spirit, flesh and the wallet. Sydney Crown 2020 is keeping him busy. Stabilising investments, and righting the budget, are current preoccupations.
Packer prefers to stay focused on what he knows best, and, arguably, the only thing he has ever known: the soul sucking lure of gambling, and the lingering, caged air security of the casino.
[1] http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/celebrity-life/hook-ups-break-ups/mariah-carey-james-packer-deep-in-settlement-negotiations/news-story/c974a24387cbf5cbdb20b8e6ba906541
[2] http://wilsonassetmanagement.com.au/2017/02/03/outlook-casinos-clouded-china-arrests/]]>
Photo by Blandine Le Cain | CC BY 2.0
The 2017 French Presidential election marks a profound change in European political alignments. There is an ongoing shift from the traditional left-right rivalry to opposition between globalization, in the form of the European Union (EU), and national sovereignty.
Standard media treatment sticks to a simple left-right dualism: "racist" rejection of immigrants is the main issue and that what matters most is to "stop Marine Le Pen!" Going from there to here is like walking through Alice's looking glass. Almost everything is turned around.
On this side of the glass, the left has turned into the right and part of the right is turning into the left.
Fifty years ago, it was "the left" whose most ardent cause was passionate support for Third World national liberation struggles. The left's heroes were Ahmed Ben Bella, Sukarno, Amilcar Cabral, Patrice Lumumba, and above all Ho Chi Minh. What were these leaders fighting for? They were fighting to liberate their countries from Western imperialism. They were fighting for independence, for the right to determine their own way of life, preserve their own customs, decide their own future. They were fighting for national sovereignty, and the left supported that struggle.
Today, it is all turned around. "Sovereignty" has become a bad word in the mainstream left.
National sovereignty is an essentially defensive concept. It is about staying home and minding one's own business. It is the opposite of the aggressive nationalism that inspired fascist Italy and Nazi Germany to conquer other countries, depriving them of their national sovereignty.
The confusion is due to the fact that most of what calls itself "the left" in the West has been totally won over to the current form of imperialism – aka "globalization". It is an imperialism of a new type, centered on the use of military force and "soft" power to enable transnational finance to penetrate every corner of the earth and thus to reshape all societies in the endless quest for profitable return on capital investment. The left has been won over to this new imperialism because it advances under the banner of "human rights" and "antiracism" – abstractions which a whole generation has been indoctrinated to consider the central, if not the only, political issues of our times.
The fact that "sovereignism" is growing in Europe is interpreted by mainstream globalist media as proof that "Europe is moving to the right"– no doubt because Europeans are "racist". This interpretation is biased and dangerous. People in more and more European nations are calling for national sovereignty precisely because they have lost it. They lost it to the European Union, and they want it back.
That is why the British voted to leave the European Union. Not because they are "racist", but primarily because they cherish their historic tradition of self-rule.
The Socialist Party shipwreck
As his five-year presidency drew to its ignominious end, François Hollande was obliged by his drastic unpopularity to let his Parti Socialiste (PS) choose its 2017 presidential candidate by primary. In a surprising upset, the Socialist government's natural candidate, prime minister Manuel Valls, lost to Benoit Hamon, an obscure member of the PS left wing who refused to vote for the unpopular, neo-liberal, anti-labor laws designed by Hollande's economic advisor, Emmanuel Macron.
To escape from the unpopularity of the PS, Macron formed his own movement, "En Marche!" One after another, Valls, Hollande and other prominent PS leaders are tiptoeing away, leaving Hamon at the helm of the sinking ship. As Hamon justifiably protests against their betrayal, the party bigwigs pledge their support to Emmanuel Macron.
Macron ostentatiously hesitates to welcome his shopworn converts into the fold, fearing that their conversion makes it too obvious that his "En Marche!" is a clone of the right wing of the PS, on the way to becoming the French subsidiary of the U.S. Democratic Party in its Clintonian form. Macron proclaims that he is neither left nor right, as discredited politicians from both left and right jump on his bandwagon, to his embarrassment.
Hamon himself appears to be unaware that the basic cause of the Socialist Party's shipwreck is its incompatible devotion to two contrary principles: traditional social democracy, and the European Union (EU). Macron, Hollande and their fellow turncoats at least have made their choice: the European Union.
The Twilight of the Traditional Right
The great advantage of Republican candidate François Fillon is that his policies are clear. Unlike Hollande, who tried to disguise his neoliberal policies as something else, and based his claim to be on the left on "societal" issues (gay marriage), Fillon is an unabashed conservative. His policies are designed to reduce the huge national debt. Whereas previous governments (including his own, when he was President Sarkozy's Prime Minister) beat around the bush, Fillon won the Republican nomination by a program of sharp cutbacks in government spending. Fillon claims that his austerity measures will lead French capitalists to invest in France and thus save the country's economy from being completely taken over by foreign corporations, American retirement funds and Qatar. This is highly doubtful, as there is nothing under EU rules to encourage French investors to invest in France rather than somewhere else.
Fillon departs from EU orthodoxy, however, by proposing a more independent foreign policy, notably by ending the "absurd" sanctions against Russian. He is more concerned about the fate of Middle East Christians than about overthrowing Assad.
The upshot is that Fillon's coherent pro-capitalist policy is not exactly what the dominant globalizing elite prefers. The "center left" is their clear political choice since Tony Blair and Bill Clinton revised the agendas of their respective parties. The center left emphasis on human rights (especially in faraway countries targeted for regime change) and ethnic diversity at home fits the long-term globalist aims of erasing national borders, to allow unrestricted free movement of capital. Traditional patriotic conservatism, represented by Fillon, does not altogether correspond to the international adventurism of globalization.
The Schizophrenic Left
For a generation, the French left has made "the construction of Europe" the center of its world view. In the early 1980s, faced with opposition from what was then the European Community, French President François Mitterrand abandoned the socializing program on which he been elected. Mitterrand nursed the hope that France would politically dominate a united Europe, but the unification of Germany changed all that. So did EU expansion to Eastern Central nations within the German sphere of influence. Economic policy is now made in Germany.
As the traditional left goal of economic equality was abandoned, it was superseded by emphatic allegiance to "human rights", which is now taught in school as a veritable religion. The vague notion of human rights was somehow associated with the "free movement" of everything and everybody. Indeed the official EU dogma is protection of "free movement": free movement of goods, people, labor and (last but certainly not least) capital. These "four freedoms" in practice transform the nation from a political society into a financial market, an investment opportunity, run by a bureaucracy of supposed experts. In this way, the European Union has become the vanguard experiment in transforming the world into a single capitalist market.
The French left bought heavily into this ideal, partly because it deceptively echoed the old leftist ideal of "internationalism" (whereas capital has always been incomparably more "international" than workers), and partly due to the simplistic idea that "nationalism" is the sole cause of wars. More fundamental and complex causes of war are ignored.
For a long time, the left has complained about job loss, declining living standards, delocalization or closure of profitable industries, without recognizing that these unpopular results are caused by EU requirements. EU directives and regulations increasingly undermine the French model of redistribution through public services, and are now threatening to wipe them out altogether – either because "the government is bankrupt" or because of EU competition rules prohibit countries from taking measures to preserve their key industries or their agriculture. Rather than face reality, the left's reaction has mostly been to repeat its worn-out demand for an impossible "Social Europe".
Yet the dream of "social Europe" received what amounted to a fatal blow ten years ago. In 2005, a referendum was called to allow the French to approve a Constitution for united Europe. This led to an extraordinary popular discussion, with countless meetings of citizens examining every aspect of this lengthy document. Unlike normal constitutions, this document froze the member States in a single monetarist economic policy, with no possibility of change.
On May 29, 2005, French voters rejected the treaty by 55% to 45%.
What seemed to be a great victory for responsible democracy turned into its major failure. Essentially the same document, renamed the Lisbon Treaty, was ratified in December 2007, without a referendum. Global governance had put the people in their place. This produced widespread disillusion with politics as millions concluded that their votes didn't matter, that politicians paid no attention to the will of the people.
Even so, Socialist politicians continued to pledge undying allegiance to the EU, always with the prospect that "Social Europe" might somehow be possible.
Meanwhile, it has become more and more obvious that EU monetarist policy based on the common currency, the euro, creates neither growth nor jobs as promised but destroys both. Unable to control its own currency, obliged to borrow from private banks, and to pay them interest, France is more and more in debt, its industry is disappearing and its farmers are committing suicide, on the average of one every other day. The left has ended up in an impossible position: unswervingly loyal to the EU while calling for policies that are impossible under EU rules governing competition, free movement, deregulation, budgetary restraints, and countless other regulations produced by an opaque bureaucracy and ratified by a virtually powerless European Parliament, all under the influence of an army of lobbyists.
Benoit Hamon remains firmly stuck on the horns of the left's fatal dilemma: determination to be "socialist", or rather, social democratic, and passionate loyalty to "Europe". While insisting on social policies that cannot possibly be carried out with the euro as currency and according to EU rules, Hamon still proclaims loyalty to "Europe". He parrots the EU's made-in-Washington foreign policy, demanding that "Assad must go" and ranting against Putin and Russia.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon Grasps the Nettle
Not only is the drab, conformist Hamon abandoned by his party heavies, he is totally upstaged on the left by the flamboyant Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a maverick ready to break the rules. After years as a PS loyalist, Mélenchon broke away in 2005 to oppose the Constitutional Treaty, gaining prominence as a fiery orator. In 2007, he left the Socialist Party and founded the Parti de Gauche (Left Party). Allied with the much weakened Communist Party, he came in fourth in the first round of the 2012 Presidential election with 11% of the vote. This time he is running for President with his own new movement, La France Insoumise, which can be translated in a number of ways, including "the France that does not submit".
Submit to what? Mainly, to the euro and to the antisocial, neoliberal policies of the European Union that are ruining France.
French flags and la Marseillaise have replaced the Internationale at Mélenchon rallies. "The Europe of our dreams is dead," he acknowledges, vowing to "end the nightmare of dictatorship by banks and finance".
Mélenchon calls for outright disobedience by violating EU treaties that are harmful to France. That is his Plan A. His Plan B is to leave the EU, in case Plan A fails to convince Germany (the current boss) and the others to agree to change the treaties. But at best, Plan B is an empty threat to strengthen his hand in theoretical negotiations. France is such a crucial member, he maintains, that a French threat to leave should be enough to force changes.
Threatening to leave the EU is just part of Mélenchon's vast and complicated program which includes calling a national convention to draft a constitution for France's "sixth Republic" as well as major ecological innovation. Completely changing both France and the European Union at the same time would require the nation to be in a revolutionary effervescence that is by no means visible. It would also require a unanimity among the EU's 28 member States that is simply impossible.
But Mélenchon is canny enough to have recognized the basic problem: the enemy of jobs, prosperity and public services is the European Union. Mélenchon is by far the candidate that generates the most excitement. He has rapidly outdistanced Hamon and draws huge enthusiastic crowds to his rallies. His progress has changed the shape of the race: at this moment, he has become one of four front-runners who might get past the first round vote on April 23 into the finals on May 7: Le Pen, Macron, Fillon and himself.
The Opposites are (almost) the Same
A most remarkable feature of this campaign is great similarity between the two candidates said to represent "the far left", Mélenchon, and "the far right", Marine Le Pen. Both speak of leaving the euro. Both vow to negotiate with the EU to get better treaty terms for France. Both advocate social policies to benefit workers and low income people. Both want to normalize relations with Russia. Both want to leave NATO, or at least its military command. Both defend national sovereignty, and can thus be described as "sovereignists".
The only big difference between them is on immigration, an issue that arouses so much emotion that it is hard to discuss sensibly. Those who oppose immigration are accused of "fascism", those who favor immigration are accused of wanting to destroy the nation's identity by flooding it with inassimilable foreigners.
In a country suffering from unemployment, without jobs or housing to accommodate mass immigration, and under the ongoing threat of Islamist terror attacks, the issue cannot be reasonably reduced to "racism" – unless Islamic terrorists constitute a "race", for which there is no evidence. Le Pen insists that all French citizens deserve equal treatment regardless of their origins, race or religion. She is certain to get considerable support from recently nationalized immigrants, just as she now gets a majority of working class votes. If this is "fascism", it has changed a lot in the past seventy years.
What is significant is that despite their differences, the two most charismatic candidates both speak of restoring national sovereignty. Both evoke the possibility of leaving the European Union, although in rather uncertain terms.
The globalist media are already preparing to blame the eventual election of a "sovereignist" candidate on Vladimir Putin. Public opinion in the West is being prepared for massive protests to break out against an undesired winner, and the "antifa" militants are ready to wreak havoc in the streets. Some people who like Marine Le Pen are afraid of voting for her, fearing the "color revolution" sure to be mounted against her. Mélenchon and even Fillon might face similar problems.
As a taste of things to come, on April 20, the EU Observer published an article entitled "Russia-linked fake news floods French social media". Based on something called Bakamo, one of the newly establishment "fact-check" outfits meant to steer readers away from unofficial opinion, the article accused Russian-influenced web sites of favoring Marine Le Pen, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, François Fillon, Francois Asselineau, and Philippe Poutou. (They forgot to mention one of the most "sovereignist" candidates, Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, currently polling in sixth place.) Since a large majority of the eleven candidates, including three of the four front-runners, are strongly critical of the EU and of NATO and want to improve relations with Russia, it would seem that Putin wouldn't have to make a great effort to get a more friendly French government next time around. On the other hand, the EU Observer article is only a small sample of blatant "interference in the French election" on the part of the globalists on behalf of their favorite, Emmanuel Macron, the most enthusiastic Europhile.
The Future of France
Among those listed as alleged Russian favorites, François Asselineau is by far the most thorough critic of the European Union. Systematically ignored by the media since he founded his anti-EU party, the Union Populaire Républicain (UPR), ten years ago, François Asselineau has thousands of ardent supporters who have plastered his poster all over the country. His tireless didactic speeches, reproduced on internet, have driven home several key points:
– there is no way to improve the EU from the inside, because any change would require unanimity among 27 member states who disagree on key issues.
– the only solution for France is to use Article 50 of the EU treaties to withdraw entirely, as the United Kingdom is currently doing.
– only by leaving the EU can France save its public services, its social benefits, its economy and its democracy.
– it is only by restoring its national sovereignty that genuine democratic life, with confrontation between a real "left" and "right", can be possible.
– by leaving the EU, France, which has over 6,000 treaties with other countries, would not be isolated but would be joining the greater world.
Asselineau is a single issue candidate. He vows that as soon as elected, he would invoke Article 50 to leave the EU and immediately apply to Washington to withdraw from NATO. He emphasizes that none of the other critics of the EU propose such a clear exit within the rules.
Other candidates, including the more charismatic Mélenchon and Le Pen, echo some of Asselineau's arguments. But they are not ready to go so far as to advocate a clear immediate break with the EU, if only because they realize that the French population, while increasingly critical of the euro and alienated from the "European dream", is still fearful of actually leaving, due to dire warnings of disaster from the Europeists.
The first round campaign is an opportunity for Asselineau to present his ideas to a wider audience, preparing public opinion for a more coherent "Frexit" policy. By far the most fundamental emerging issue in this campaign is the conflict between the European Union and national sovereignty. It will probably not be settled in this election, but it won't go away. This is the major issue of the future, because it determines whether any genuine political life is possible.]]>
Photo by Jake Cunningham | CC BY 2.0
The Ruling Class Reserve Tag
One of the many irritating things about the dominant United States corporate media is the way it repeatedly discovers anew things that are not remotely novel. Take its recent discovery that Donald Trump isn't really the swamp-draining populist working class champion he pretended to be on the campaign trail.
The evidence for this "news" is solid enough. His cabinet and top advisor circle has been chock full of ruling class swamp creatures like former Goldman Sachs President Gary Cohn (top economic adviser), longtime top Goldman Sachs partner and top executive Steve Mnuchin (Secretary of the Treasury), and billionaire investor Wilbur Ross (Secretary of Commerce). Trump has surrounded himself with super-opulent and planetarily invested financial gatekeepers – the very club he criticized Hillary Clinton for representing.
Trump meets regularly with top corporate and financial CEOs, who have been assured that he will govern in accord with their wishes. He receives applause from business elites for his agenda of significant large scale tax cuts and deregulation for wealthy individuals and for the giant, hyper-parasitic, and largely transnational corporations they milk for obscene profits
Trump's political strategist Steve Bannon is by numerous reports being pushed aside by Cohn and by Trump's hedge-fund financier son-in-law Jared Kushner – a longtime neoliberal Democrat – when it comes to holding the president's ear. Bannon has been reduced to bitterly cursing Kushner as a "globalist cuckservative."
Bannon's white-nationalist "populist" bluster was of great electoral use to Trump on his path to the White House. In the real world of world capitalist power, however, the Beast of Breitbart is a liability. His self-declared nationalism does not jibe with the deeply rooted Open Door policy preferences of an American corporate and financial ruling class that has long been deeply invested across national boundaries in the world capitalist system.
Trump, it turns out, is not the worker-friendly populist he posed as while running for president. He's not the great anti-establishment outsider determined to return "power to the people" he claimed to be in his Inauguration Address. His economic program amounts to neo-liberalism on steroids.
You don't say! Gee, who knew? Anyone who's paid serious attention to American electoral politics and policy over the course of history, that's who. Seventeen years ago, the then still left Christopher Hitchens usefully described the "essence of American politics" as "the manipulation of populism by elitism. That elite is most successful," Hitchens noted:
"which can claim the heartiest allegiance of the fickle crowd; can present itself as most 'in touch' with popular concerns; can anticipate the tides and pulses of public opinion; can, in short, be the least apparently 'elitist.' It is no great distance from Huey Long's robust cry of 'Every man a king' to the insipid 'inclusiveness' of [Bill Clinton's slogan] 'Putting People First,' but the smarter elite managers have learned in the interlude that solid, measurable pledges have to be distinguished by a reserve' tag that earmarks them for the bankrollers and backers."
Democracy Imprisoned by Capitalism
In a recent New York Times Magazine reflection on the chilling extent to which Trump's rise is consistent with dodgy, fascist-like tendencies in the long history of the American right, the prolific liberal historian Rick Perlstein notes that the irony of a "populist" president who has "placed so many bankers and billionaires in his cabinet, and has relentlessly pursued so many 1-percent-friendly policies" is "far from unique." The Orange-Tinted Beast is the latest version of what Perlstein calls "The often-cynical negotiation between populist electioneering and plutocratic governance on the right."
Perlstein is right to note the unoriginality of the phenomenon. But why does Perlstein seem to think the "cynical negotiation" is just a Republican phenomenon? It was no less evident in the presidencies of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama than it was during the Reagan and Bush presidencies and under Trump today. That is no small part of how and why the ugly Republican right that Perlstein understandably fears gets its recurrent trips into national and state-level power.
And just how mysterious is the tension between "populist electioneering and plutocratic governance"? From Karl Marx's time and before to the present day, bourgeois "constitutional" states practicing a strictly limited and deceptive form of "democracy" have been torn by a fundamental contradiction. On one hand, victorious candidates have to win enough popular votes to prevail in elections. They can hardly do that by proclaiming their commitment to the rule of the wealthy capitalist Few. On the other hand, they cannot garner the resources to win elections and govern effectively without the backing and cooperation of the investor/capitalist class, whose control of money and the means of production is critical to political power and policymaking.
Thirty-three years ago, the left political scientist Charles Lindblom penned a convincing take on American power, likening the capitalist marketplace to a prison. Lindblom's analysis is aptly summarized in a recent critique of "deep state" discourse by Anthony DiMaggio:
"U.S. corporations exercised power over communities, much like Kings do over feudal serfs, by exercising ownership over the means of production in the U.S. economy. They command worker loyalty due to their ability to hire and fire Americans and provide basic benefits such as health care or 401k and pension benefits. But corporations also possess the power to destroy people's lives via capital flight. Simply by threatening to leave a community and move factories abroad in pursuit of higher profits and weaker environmental regulations, corporations hold citizens hostage…The marketplace is a prison, Lindblom warned, because these corporations ultimately control the levers of the U.S. economy, and control the life outcomes of American workers."
Beyond the ownership and investment/disinvestment levers, concentrated capital achieves policy, cultural, and societal outcomes it prefers in numerous other ways: the buying of candidates and election through campaign donations; the flooding of government with armies of well-heeled lobbyists; the drafting and dissemination of Big Business-friendly legislation; massive investment in public relations and propaganda to influence the beliefs and values of citizens, politicians, and other "opinion-shapers"; direct "revolving door" capture of key government positions; the offer of private sector positions to public officials who reasonably expect significantly increased compensation once they exit government; the "cognitive [ideological] capture" (every bit as corrupting as bribery) of state officials, politicians, media personnel, educators, nonprofit managers, and other "influential;" the destruction and undermining of organizations (i.e., labor unions) that might offer some countervailing power to that of big business; the granting of jobs, corporate board memberships, internships, and other perks and payments to public officials' family members; the control of education and publishing; the ownership, management, and monitoring of mass media (including "entertainment" as well as public affairs news and commentary).
The American philosopher John Dewey put things very well in 1931. He wrote that "politics is the shadow cast on society by big business" and rightly prophesized that U.S. politics would stay that way as long as power resided in "business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press, press agents, and other means of publicity and propaganda."
Ten years later, the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis made the elementary Aristotelian observation that Americans "must make our choice. We may have democracy," Brandeis wrote, "or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." That was an unwitting call for the abolition of capitalism, which is marked among other things by an inherent tendency towards the upward concentration of wealth and power.
Let the People Be Taught
The fundamental contradiction between bottom-up democratic pretense and top-down class-rule reality is nothing new in American history. The New England clergyman Jeremy Belknap captured the fundamental idea behind the U.S. Founders' curious notion of what they liked to call "popular government." "Let it stand as a principle," Belknap wrote to an associate in the late 1780s, "that government originates from the people, but let the people be taught…that they are unable to govern themselves."
Consistent with Belknap's advice, the U.S. Constitution was structured precisely and quite brilliantly to encode and enforce the impossibility of the Founders' ultimate nightmare: popular sovereignty. American history remains haunted by the darkly democidal enshrinement of the "first new nation's" crippling charter. The document invokes "We the people" and "the general welfare" only to set up a government dedicated to the hegemony of the propertied Few.
A Common Masquerade
Dressing elite class and economic interests in popular garb has always been a core function of the U.S. electoral and party system in its various iterations. Its first assignment was to rally ordinary citizens as voters for different factions of the developing nation's bourgeois class in its recurrent intra-capitalist policy struggles. Across much of the 19th century, some leading U.S. investors sought to advance their interests in the development of the domestic U.S. market and a manufacturing economy by pushing through an "American System" of government-subsidized internal improvements (transportation infrastructure above all), government central banks, and tariffs on imports. These capitalists tended to align with and fund the Whig Party and its anti-slavery successor the Republican Party. More export-, agricultural-, and free trade-oriented investors aligned with the Democratic Party.
These not insignificant differences aside, all these bourgeois parties made feverish electoral appeals to mass constituencies in the name of "the common man" to win votes in a republic with comparatively wide (universal white male across most of the nation by the eve of the Civil War) suffrage. The competing parties needed to "masquerade as commoners" (in the words of the late and great U.S. historian Alfred F. Young) to elected politicians pledged to the "bankrollers and backers" preferred path of capitalist development. The Hitchensian game – the "manipulation of populism by elitism" – first came into own not during the time of Huey Long but a century before in the Andrew Jacksonian so-called "age of the common man."
"No Way to Vote Against Goldman Sachs"….
Policy specifics and party alignments have since shifted more than once in accord with underlying political-economic and demographic factors. Still, the basic manipulative reality captured in Left political scientist Thomas Ferguson's "investment theory of [U.S. two-] party competition" has continued throughout. During the 1930s and 1940s, Ferguson has shown, the labor-allied New Deal (Franklin Roosevelt) Democratic Party rose to power with critical support from highly capital intensive multinational corporations and internationally oriented investment banks who were less concerned about wage bills than the more nationally oriented, anti-union, and protectionist industrial firms that dominated the reigning (Teddy Roosevelt, William McKinley and Howard Taft) Republican Party at the turn of the 20th century.
The end of rapid growth and of the United States' short-lived and near-absolute post-World War II global economic hegemony during the late 1960s produced inflation and growing fiscal and trade deficits, leading to sharply raised interest rates, a strengthened dollar, and an unprecedented flow of surplus capital from industry to finance. The resulting new finance capital explosion transformed the American party system, which stabilized around 1980 with high finance atop the "hegemonic bloc" of political (as well as economic) investors. With the arch-neoliberal Clinton presidency of the 1990s, big finance capital had clearly taken over the Democratic Party as well as the Republicans, along with most of the nation's nonfinancial corporations.
There have been differences in the investor class profiles of the two dominant parties through this century. "Defense" (military) and oil and other Big Carbon firms have tended to tilt towards the Republicans. Silicon Valley and Hollywood lean Democratic. Beneath such differences, the 1% is united in neoliberal consensus across both parties around Wall Street-led globalization and a huge Pentagon System to expand and protect global finance capitalism. Both the Republicans and the Democrats are committed to the neoliberal world-capitalist and imperial order, with big finance calling the shots while unions, the working class, and the poor are relegated to the margins.
The two major parties have different historical, demographic, ethno-cultural, religious, and geographic profiles that matter. Still, they are united at the end of the day in their shared manipulations of carefully calibrated populist rhetoric and voter and partisan identity on behalf of the bipartisan super-rich and their global empire. As the Left author Chris Hedges noted four years ago:
"Both sides of the political spectrum are manipulated by the same forces. If you're some right-wing Christian zealot in Georgia, then it's homosexuals and abortion and all these, you know, wedge issues that are used to whip you up emotionally. If you are a liberal in Manhattan, it's – you know, they'll be teaching creationism in your schools or whatever…Yet in fact it's just a game, because whether it's Bush or whether it's Obama, Goldman Sachs always wins. There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs."
…or (Earlier) J.P. Morgan
The Machiavellian ruling class exploitation of what is today called "identity politics" is also less than novel in the American historical experience. Fierce class conflict fueled by intense class consciousness roiled the industrializing United States across the late 19th and early 20th centuries, creating the most violent labor history in the world during those years. But great working class and farmer rebellions against the emergent new corporate plutocracy never translated into national politics thanks to the prior existence of a constitutionally mandated winner-take-all two party and elections system that channeled ballots into one of two reigning capitalist parties – aptly described by Upton Sinclair in 1904 as "two wings of the same bird of prey" – and in accord with differences of race, ethnicity, religion, and region. State and national politics and "voting behavior" were structured around ethnocultural and related geographic (sectional) factors. It's not for nothing that the Marxist American historian Alan Dawley once referred to the American ballot box as "the coffin of class consciousness." With all due respect to Eugene Debs' high water mark returns in 1912 (a mere 6% of the popular vote), there was little way to meaningfully vote against the interests of J.P. Morgan, Averill Harriman, and John Rockefeller.
No Free Pass
It's become fashionable on both left and right in recent years to think of Wall Street's untouchable power (along with that of Silicon Valley and the military industrial complex) as a reflection of the rule of the permanent "deep state." In its more measured and workable (non-conspiratorial) usage, the term refers to the embedded corporate and financial profit and power sectors that co-exist and merge with entrenched government institutions prominently including but not restricted to the ever-mushrooming national security state (we should include the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve alongside the Pentagon, the CIA, and the FBI) to govern the nation behind the electoral and parliamentary "marionette theater" (Mike Lofgren) of the visible state and its pseudo-democratic election rituals.
But, with all due respect for the chilling expansion of the intertwined military, police, and surveillance states, it is hard not to sense behind the notion of the "deep state" the simple and less-than-secretive persistence of the class rule regime called capitalism. The harsh authoritarian reality of what Noam Chomsky has wryly called "really existing capitalist democracy or RECD, pronounced as 'wrecked'" lives on today as long before. .
American capitalism has an equally evil Siamese twin called imperialism, progenitor of the giant "national security" and "foreign apparatus" that eats up the lion's share of U.S. federal discretionary spending – at no small cost to social and environmental health even as it provides s rich revenue stream for the nation's unelected dictatorship of money. "The costs of empire," Chomsky wrote nearly half a century ago, "are in general distributed over the whole of society, white its profits revert to a few within."
It is long past time for left thinkers to stop giving the American capitalist ruling class a free pass on Donald Trump, hoping for the neoliberal deep state" to bring about his demise from the top down. Yes, the elite financial campaign finance and speech royalty data suggest that Hillary Clinton was Wall Street's preferred candidate last year. Still, Trump was never really an anti-establishment candidate beyond the deceptive rhetoric he cynically employed – consistent with the longstanding fake-populist "essence of American [and bourgeois] politics" – to win enough white working class and rural votes to prevail over dismal, dollar-drenched Hillary Clinton. And you don't have to join the right-wing conspiracy mongers at Zero Hedge to agree with them that "Trump is where the elites want him" and "serves the establishment."
Militarized Accumulation
A recent teleSur English reflection by the brilliant Marxian sociologist William I. Robinson notes that the transnational capitalist class (TCC) has turned to military investment as a solution to its drastic over-accumulation of capital in an increasingly unequal and poverty-ridden world. As Robinson notes:
"Here there is a convergence around the system's political need for social control and its economic need to perpetuate accumulation. Unprecedented global inequalities can only be sustained by ever more repressive and ubiquitous systems of social control and repression. Yet quite apart from political considerations, the TCC has acquired a vested interest in war, conflict, and repression as a means of accumulation. CIT has revolutionized warfare and the modalities of state-organized militarized accumulation, including the military application of vast new technologies and the further fusion of private accumulation with state militarization…."
"…The so-called wars on drugs, terrorism, and immigrants; the construction of border walls, immigrant detention centers, and ever-growing prisons; the installation of mass surveillance systems, and the spread of private security guard and mercenary companies, have all become major sources of profit-making… The class interests of the TCC, geo-politics, and economics come together around militarized accumulation. The more the global economy comes to depend on militarization and conflict the greater the drive to war and the higher the stakes for humanity…after…Trump's….victory, the stock price of Corrections Corporation of America…soared 40 percent, given Trump's promise to deport millions…Raytheon and Lockheed Martin reports spikes each time there is a new flare up in the Middle East…Within an hour of the April 6th Tomahawk missile bombardment of Syria, Raytheon's stock increased by $1 billion. Hundreds of private firms from around the world have put in bids to construct Trump's infamous…border wall."
Trump, his team of politicized generals, and his call for a 10 percent increase in the already hyper-bloated Pentagon budget are a perfect match for the militarized accumulation strategy, with its "built-in war drive."
Waiting for supposedly enlightened and decent elites atop the "deep state" to dump Trump is a fool's game. As Robinson says, "Only a worldwide push back from below, and ultimately a program to redistribute wealth and power downward, can counter the upward spiral of international conflagration."]]>
Photo by Marc Nozell | CC BY 2.0
Based on the evidence of the last few weeks, when it comes to his role as Commander Supremo of "his" military, Donald J. Trump seems to suffer from a kind of attention deficit disorder. Each week there's a new threat emanating from the West Wing, louder than the last one and aimed at a new target. The decibel level of Trump's war shrieks is escalating in rough relation to the downward curve of his poll numbers.
First, Trump ordered the launch of 60 cruise missiles (one took a dive into the Mediterranean) to a largely evacuated Syrian airbase outside Homs. Was this the opening shot in a regime change war to oust Assad from power? Who knows. Trump was already too busy bragging about dropping the hugest non-nuclear bomb in the US arsenal on some cave-dwelling ISIS tunnel rats. Why now? Why here? A signal to the Mullahs of Tehran or, perhaps, Paul Ryan?
Uncharacteristically, Trump didn't even pause for a selfie beside the smoldering crater left by his MOAB bomb in Afghanistan, before he was rattling his sabre at North Korea, boasting about how his giant Armada was steaming toward the Korean peninsula. A few days later this robust pronouncement was obsolete, when it turned out that the mighty fleet was instead retreating 3,000 miles in the opposite direction, south to the coast of Australia. Call it the wrong-way Armada. Meanwhile, Trump had already fast-forwarded to furious denunciations of Iran.
Trump's martial pronouncements are generally too truncated and disarticulated to ever embody something so substantial as a trope or a theme. Indeed, many of these public utterances are so garbled that they defy translation by even the most gifted linguists. They are more like the petulant bleats of an overgrown adolescent testing out a rack of video games, blasting away at one zombie invasion after another until he tires of it and seizes on another scenario. It might be said that he practices the Man-Child theory of foreign relations: belligerent, shallow, easily bored.
Naturally, Trump's arm-chair Janissaries are all fired-up by these weekly flirtations with global catastrophe, but they also must be a little confused. Syria, Yemen, Somalia, North Korea, Mexico, Iran, Canadian dairy farmers? Which of these are the real foe? Where will the next war start? Will it be the big one they've been waiting for?
Of course, what we are really witnessing in Trump's bombastic, if inchoate, perorations is trace evidence for the diminution of American power. Previously, the leader of the Empire never had to publicly threaten punitive action against such minor global players. The severe consequences for imperial disobedience were simply understood. Ironically, Trump's chest-beating is precisely the kind of bellicose over-reaction that Kim Jong-Un was hoping for, since it elevates his status among his own government and immiserated population.
Both Iran and North Korea have digested the core lesson of Libya, which is once you relinquish your most powerful weapons you're dead. Qaddafi submitted to the demands of the West, turned over his aging stockpile of WMDs and promptly lost his country and then his head. Now Libya is the hottest marketplace in the world for the slave trade and Kim Jong-un is racing to install nuclear bombs on ICBMs. Heckuva job, Hillary.
"Strategic patience" has become the new trigger phrase for generating neocon outrage. Trump's inner circle of warmongers utter the phrase with the same acidic contempt that they once reserved for "nuance," as if having the patience to develop a strategy to avoid nuclear annihilation is somehow an indicator of political spinelessness.
This kind of uber-male strutting was on full-display this week when Mike Pence went to the DMZ to stare down the North Koreans checking out the vice president a few dozen yards away. In his stentorian drone, Pence said they'd tried everything to deal with the intransigent North Koreans and were running out of non-military options—everything, it seems, but talking to them.
"The United States of America will always seek peace but under President Trump, the shield stands guard and the sword stands ready," fumed Pence, using empurpled language he seems to have cribbed from the awful remake of Ben-Hur. The tougher Pence talks, the more ridiculous he sounds.
Pence's trip to South Korea also gave rise to speculation over why the vice president took his wife to what has been called the most dangerous strip of land in the world, the DMZ. Was he using Karen as a human shield or did he need to be in her presence in order to have a private consultation with the country's recently ousted president Park Geun-hye?
Trump's historical ignorance leads the president to deploy words like "Armada" with a kind of depraved innocence of their meaning. Recall that the original Spanish Armada, the most fearsome Navy on Earth, was routed at the strait of Dover in 1588 by the rakish pirate-explorer Francis Drake, as Queen Elizabeth anxiously watched the battle from her royal perch on the White Cliffs. Will the past, once again, be prologue to the future?
Everything Trump knows about North Korea he seems to have learned in a 10-minute mini-briefing from the Chinese President over canapés at Mar-a-Lago. If Bannon still had Trump's ear, he might have told the President that the rise of South Korea was fueled by globalization and the offshoring of US factories, while North Korea—isolated, austere, homogenous, intensely nationalistic–serves as a kind of small-scale model for the kind of retro-America that Trump sketched out as his dream state on the campaign trail.
It must be said that Trump is far from being the worst of his kind for the simple reason that most of the time he is unaware of the implications and potential fallout from his vapid blatherings. Usually, he is just improvising, playing it by feral instinct. The practice of realpolitik is not his thing. Not so for the likes of John McCain and his witless sidekick Lindsay Graham. These two uber-hawks have seized on Trump's war talk with a sordid fervor. McCain is so aroused that he seems eager to fly the first bombing runs over Damascus, while Graham is just itching to press the launch button on cruise missiles targeting Pyongyang.
This, of course, is the problem with playing at war. Some people will take you seriously. Usually the wrong kind of people, the killing kind.
Roaming Charges
+ What Generals Talk About When They Talk About Bombs on TV. Lt Col. Rick Francona: "The goal of the bomb was to destroy the tunnels. The people killed were an ancillary benefit."
+ In a breathless story, Reuters claimed to have discovered documents from a Russian think tank outlining a plan to swing the election to Trump. If true, this would be the first time in decades that a white paper from a think tank had the slightest impact on anything, except the recycling markets. Put that team to work on climate change!
+ From Pocatello to Piscataway, Trump raged against the nuclear agreement with Iran, denouncing it as the "worst deal ever" and vowing it "rip it up" on day one. This week his administration quietly certified that Iran was abiding by the pact.
+ Remember Romney's "binders full of women?" They weighed 15.6 pounds, were bound in black and are back in play now that Mitt's contemplating a run for senate in Utah. I wonder how many names were submitted by Roger Ailes and Bill O'Reilly?
+ Even with Bernie Sanders (now the country's most popular politician) out on the trail hyping the party, the Democrats' favorability continues to plummet, especially among liberal/left independents. They are going the way of the Blairite/Labour Party in the UK, and, defying the laws of gravity, may actually hit bottom even sooner…
+ Sanders insisted this week that he is an independent "not a Democrat," even though he talks, acts, votes and recruits just like a Democrat.
+ Democrats are in a state of collective ecstasy over the prospects for taking Georgia's 6th congressional district, Newt's old seat, with a candidate named Jon Ossoff who doesn't live in the district and whose two campaign planks are: 1. cutting federal spending and 2. being tough on National Security. Ossoff's Republican opponent baiting the naive interloper into announcing he supported Trump's cruise missile strike on Syria and his MOAB bombing of Afghan peasants. In the end, the candidate who is a male version of Hillary got about the same share of votes as Hillary did in the same district in 2016. Who needs Republicans when you've got Democrats like this?
+ Here's a vivid example of the Sanders two-step in action. On Friday, Sanders endorsed Ossoff, the hawkish Clintonian Democrat, but washed his hands by refusing to call him a "progressive."
+ Any politician who loudly proclaims over and over again how independent they are is almost certainly trying to conceal a deep complicity with the established order…
+ Why She Lost, Reason 37, Loyalty Scores. From the new book Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes:
"Though she was speaking with a small group made up mostly of intimates, she sounded like she was addressing a roomful of supporters – inhibited by the concern that whatever she said might be leaked to the press."
This traced back to 2008, a failed run that the Clintons had concluded was due to the disloyalty and treachery of staff and other Democrats. After that race, Hillary had aides create "loyalty scores" (from one for most loyal, to seven for most treacherous) for members of Congress. Bill Clinton since 2008 had "campaigned against some of the sevens" to "help knock them out of office," apparently to purify the Dem ranks heading into 2016.
+ Being smeared as a "right winger" is the feeble kind of baiting that the anti-war Left has had to put up with from the They-Deserved-to-Die-As-Long-As-Our-Side-Killed-Them Left since the Wilson Administration…
+ More proof that the NSA functions like the new Panopticon: the FBI is sweeping up NSA data on phone calls, travel itinerary, and web-activity like it was "googling you."
+ So apparently the person Sean Spicer chose to apologize to for his "Holocaust Centers" performance art piece was … Sheldon Adelson, who, I presume, will now spread the word to the rest of the Jewish world, or at least to those staying at one of his mighty-fine casinos in Vegas and Macao. Adelson, it was revealed this week, donated $5 million for Trump's inauguration soiree.
+ More than 6-in-10 Texans oppose the construction of a border wall. Of course, that didn't stop them from voting by a 6-in-10 margin for a man whose main pitch was to build a border wall. That's Texas for you, where you leave consistency of mind and moral purpose at the state line.
+ Gen. John Kelly fumed that congressional critics of his draconian border control policies should either change the law or "shut up." Kelly, of course, has been painted by Democrats as one of the rational members of the Trump Inner Circle. How do you like your blue-eyed general now, boys and girls?
+ A recent survey by The Economist shows, what we all know from talking to people in the checkout line at Safeway, that there's broad support across the political spectrum for a Single-Payer health care system, despite the fact that it is perennially dismissed as "unrealistic" by the mainstream media.
+ Fox News' payout to settle sexual harassment claims: $85 million. Payments to male perpetrators: $65 million; payments to female victims: $20 million.
+ Betsy DeVos picked Candice Jackson to run the Civil Rights Office at the Department of Education, where her assignment is to vigorously investigate allegations of discrimination against minorities, women, gays and transsexuals in the nation's schools. While a student at Stanford, Jackson filed her own civil rights complaint, charging that she had been discriminated against because she is white. Historians of the future will note that the transition from the Age of Post-Truth to the Age of Post-Parody only took a few weeks…
+ Last month, Trump abruptly fired all 46 US attorneys. Thirty days later none of those seats have been filled. Trump should follow up this excellent move by immediately firing all federal prosecutors as well.
+ Trump's lawyers are making the novel claim that Inauguration Day protesters, many of whom were gassed, arrested roughed up by DC police, interfered with the President's free speech rights. We've entered a political dimension where what is said is the opposite of what is meant…
+ Alex Cockburn and I spent years warning the Left (and anyone else who'd listen) about the constitutional dangers of "Hate Crime" laws and how they would inevitably come back to bite them. Now Maryland prosecutors are charging two women who burned Trump lawn signs with a "hate crime" against Trump supporters, who are now viewed as a "protected class."
+ Here's an excerpt from the best novel ever written about American politics, Joseph Heller's Good as Gold, which should be required reading for adolescent, of whatever age, thinking of majoring in political "science" or political journalism. In this scene, Gold is being interviewed for a post in the new presidential Administration…
"What would I have to do?"
"Anything you want, as long as it's everything we tell you to say and do in support of our policies, whether you agree with them or not. You'll have complete freedom."
Gold was confused. He said delicately, "I can't be bought, Ralph."
"We wouldn't want you if you could be, Bruce," Ralph responded. "This President doesn't want yes-men. What we want are independent men of integrity who will agree with all our decisions after we make them."
"Wouldn't I have to know anything?"
"Absolutely not," Ralph answered, and appeared astounded that Gold even should ask. "In government, Bruce, experience doesn't count and knowledge isn't important. If there's one lesson of value to be learned from the past, Bruce, it's to grab what you want when the chance comes to get it."
Gold asked with distress, "Is that good for the world?"
"Nothing's good for the world, Bruce. I thought you knew that."
+ Newly unearthed documents at the UN disclose that the Allies knew for at least two years prior to the D-Day Invasion about the Nazi's extermination program, including the location of many of the death camps and the scope of the genocide taking place. They went to extraordinary lengths to keep these escalating atrocities a tightly held secret. So much for the "Good" War…
+ Easter Day tweet from Paul Ryan, who wants to kick 24 million off of their minimal health care and end all social welfare programs for the poor: "Diverse though we may be, Christians around the world are united in our shared belief that Jesus rose from the dead." But Paul, what if Jesus didn't so much "rise from the dead," as have his bones excavated to make room for another Israeli settlement?
+ Exxon is seeking a special waiver from the Trump administration allowing it to skirt the Russian sanctions so that the company can drill for oil in the Black Sea. I'm surprised they even felt the need to ask.
+ The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere just breached the 410 parts per million barrier for the first time in 3 million years. Perhaps it will hit 420 next year and we can all smoke a bowl of Alaskan Thunder Fuck to celebrate…
+ The home insurance market is breaking down because of coastal flooding from climate change. These are largely rich people's homes, who enjoy plump portfolios fattened by fossil fuel stocks. So there is some karma here as their beachfront dreams submerge…
+ The Arctic Ocean is literally turning upside down and the glacial rivers of the far north are now reversing course and draining into the Pacific. Meanwhile, drill, baby, drill….
+ An estimated 4,000 snow geese died during their winter migration after stopping in the inviting, though highly toxic waters of the Berkeley Pit, one of the world's largest open pit mines in Butte, Montana.
About 20 years ago, those same lethal waters killed hundreds of Tundra Swans, memorialized in a powerful painting by my friend the eco-artist Steve Kelly that was printed on a billboard along the interstate outside of Butte. The white tower on the crest of the mountains is the so-called Madonna of the Rockies, reflected by the dead swans forming a cross in the lethal wastewater. Under Trump, Zinke and Pruitt, the entire Interior West may soon resemble the fatal abyss of the Berkeley Pit…
+ Memo to Uday and Qusay Trump: A recent study of biodiversity in the forests of Amazonia shows that hunting exacts a severe toll on the ecosystem, forcing declines in populations of species that aren't targeted for slaughter. The study estimates that only 17 percent of the original mammal abundance and 42 percent of the birds remain in hunted areas.
+ Benedictine College, a small outpost of learning on the Kansas prairie, banned the practice of yoga on campus citing the breathing routines and body-posturing as a form of "Hindu mysticism." If they really wanted to do some good the Benedictines (who make the best beer of any of the monastic orders) should ban yoga (which in the US has nothing to do with Hinduism) as a statement against New Age Capitalism run amok…Of course, the ban will only make the noisome practice morally alluring.
+ In previews now: "Six Characters in Search of a Conspiracy…" starring Alex Jones.
+ John Schmidt III is a decorated member of a Navy SEAL team, which means he's probably killed and tortured people in distant lands while dressed in tight-fitting Ninja gear. The highly-decorated Schmidt is now under investigation for appearing in 29 porn films–including the instant classic "Strippers Come Home Horny from the Club"– under the sobriquet of "Jay Voom." The Navy is trying to determine whether Schmidt received proper clearance for "outside work." The whole affair gives new meaning to "insertion team."
+ Silver lining Dept. The best rock 'n roll has always been made during times of political lunacy.
+ Where's the great literature of the 21st century? someone asked. Oh, it's out there, but you'll have to file a FOIA with the NSA to find it and hire Susan Rice to unmask the names of the writer and characters…
+ So I got an angry complaint about my "Love at First Strike" column last week that was different from the usual complaints: 1. it's bullshit; 2. it's too long; 3. it's unreadable, et al. This person said that it was incumbent upon me to "link to the definitions of words that they were unfamiliar with," starting with "Electra," as in my description of Ivanka being "our Park Avenue Electra," which this complainant believed to be a kind of car and not a slasher-princess with a daddy complex in the greatest cycle of plays ever written.
+ The Deep Etymology of "Cucks": My exploration of the meaning of the word "cuck" last week generated quite a bit of commentary, most rejecting the Urban Dictionary's theory that "cuck" is "a word used by White Supremacists to solicit sex." Here's an informed note from long-time CounterPuncher Michael Fiorillo:
Hello Jeffrey,
I'm a longtime Counterpunch reader and supporter, and go back to Alex's "Press Clips" days at the Voice in my genealogy as a reader and admirer. I'm also a big fan of "Roaming Charges," which, aside from its informativeness and high protein content, is funny and wise…
Anyway, after all these years as a reader, it's more than funny that I should be contacting you on the issue of cucks, off all things, but such are the times…
So, fwiw, I found the Urban Dictionary definition unsatisfactory, since it made no mention of what (by my admittedly anecdotal, internet-addled sense) is the most interesting/revealing aspect of the term, which is it's being a marker for a virulent re-emergence of white male sexual fear and panic. Again, it's all just my sense of things, but I understand (for example, God forgive me, in the comments section of a site like Zero Hedge, or other sites where the term is thrown around) "Cuck" to mean a white man who let's/ enjoys having his wife be fuckled by Black men, with all the presumed dishonor and disrespect that follows.
To me, that's the significance and interest in the term's current use: cuckolds, in the traditional sense, have always been subjects of scorn, but the current conflation of it with social/labor redundancy, intensifying class and racial conflict, identitarian politics, etc. is fascinating (and disheartening)…
Well, there's my two cents, which was as much as anything a perverse personal introduction and way of saying thanks for all your work.
Michael Fiorillo
In these fraught matters, it's always fruitful to consult Jonathan Green's Dictionary of Slang, whose entry on "cuck" reads as follows:
Cuck n. [abbr.] a cuckold; thus cuckquean, a female cuckhold.
1546 J. HEYWOOD Proverbs II Ch. Vi.: You make her a cuckquean and consume her good. C. 1629 R BROME City Wit II i: Merry to bee made a cuckqueane by such a Coxcombe. 1680 Merry Maid of Islington 17: Fear not that, good Cuckquean. 1705-07 N. Ward Hudibras Redividus I:10 12: Not the Horn-Plague, but something worse, / Had drove from thence.
Booked Up
What I'm reading this week…
The Dilemmas of Lenin by Tariq Ali
Rain: a Natural and Cultural History by Cynthia Barnett
Green: a Field Guide to Marijuana by Dan Michaels
Sound Grammar
What I'm listening to this week…
Damn by Kendrick Lamar
Freedom is Free by Chicano Batman
American Teen by Khalid
Silver / Lead by Wire
Tropicoso by Jungle Fire
A Dimly Perceived, Uncomprehended Fabric
Edward Said: "We live in one global environment with a huge number of ecological, economic, social, and political pressures tearing at its only dimly perceived, basically uninterpreted and uncomprehended fabric. Anyone with even a vague consciousness of this whole is alarmed at how such remorselessly selfish and narrow interests – patriotism, chauvinism, ethnic, religious, and racial hatreds – can in fact lead to mass destructiveness. The world simply cannot afford this many more times."]]>
But thanks to Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, there was more political energy afoot than anyone would have thought possible a few months earlier. Those two "outsiders" weren't just siphoning oxygen off into electoral dead ends; they were also pumping fresh air in.
They were feisty; they seemed uncompromising; they had the common touch. With so many voters appalled and damaged by politics as usual, they both found enthusiastic audiences.
Our politics normally inspires indifference or despair or both. The political polarization of the last several decades only makes the problem worse. Democrats cross the street to avoid Republicans and vice versa.
That there is so much polarization is odd, inasmuch as there is almost no ideological substance behind it.
Talk of a "national interest" is just that – talk. Both parties serve their donors, above all. Their respective donor classes overlap – not entirely, but to a great extent.
The parties also draw votes from different constituencies; there is less overlap there.
These facts on the ground account for the ways in which Democrats and Republicans differ and are alike.
In a deeper sense, though, they are entirely alike. They both unequivocally serve the same master: the capitalist system.
There can be, and currently are, acute disagreements on issues that do not impinge on capitalists' interests. But there is complete accord on matters that bear on the capitalist system itself.
Counter-systemic, even overtly anti-capitalist, views can be freely expressed in the political arena; in theory, anything goes. In practice, however, because our two party system is so deeply entrenched, and because its consequences spill over into nearly all our institutions, it is all but guaranteed that electoral politics in the United States is only good for registering superficial challenges to the existing order.
Sanders, the "democratic socialist," was no exception to that rule; neither, of course, was Trump.
Sanders was, and Trump pretended to be, on the side of the victims of capitalism's neoliberal turn. Sanders meant well, and his campaign did upset some high-flying capitalist muckety-mucks. But their worries were, to say the least, overblown. Had he been elected President, Democrats and Republicans would have hobbled his efforts at serious reform; and even if he could somehow prevail, his socialism was just capitalism with a human – or slightly less inhuman — face. Trump, on the other hand, never gave the "billionaire class," as Sanders called it, the slightest cause for concern. All he did was bluster.
Nevertheless, the people who rallied behind Sanders did push the spectrum to the left, at least partly with Sanders' help.
Trump pushed the spectrum as far to the right as possible while still maintaining a semblance of plausible respectability. Someday we may know whether he hit on this strategy by himself, or whether he glommed onto it opportunistically once he realized how well it was working for him.
The Democratic Party plays a key role in tamping down progressive aspirations. Inadvertently, Sanders tapped into the resulting discontent. Thus he awakened a sleeping giant.
Trump's anti-establishment belligerence had a ready audience too — among the miscreants of the "alt-right," as they are nowadays called. Steve Bannon and his minions didn't conjure that monster into existence; all he and his people did was help Trump lead them on.
Now that Jared and Ivanka seem to be calling the shots, Bannon and the others have suddenly become so last week. But the odor of perniciousness that Bannon exudes remains. Whether or not he continues to be on the outs, the political scene will go on falling ever deeper into the alt-right netherworld.
Sanders advocated a twenty-first century version of New Deal – Great Society politics. Except for his use of the words "socialism" and "revolution," words that became anathema in America in the post-World War II era, no one would have thought his politics unusual, much less radical, half a century ago.
A year ago, however, his politics seemed off the charts. This was a large part of its appeal to voters too young to do more than imagine how much less noxious political life in America had been before Reagan, the Clintons, the Bushes, and Barack Obama.
Trump's appeal was that he had no politics – only a blustery and belligerent attitude and a determination to promote his brand. He was just the man for voters who wanted to flip the bird to the whole rotten system.
But the movement that his candidacy ignited was pure throwback. He breathed new life into an authoritarian and paranoid style of politics that had been in eclipse in the American mainstream at least since the high tide of the McCarthy era.
In this way, he, along with Sanders, added a whiff of ideological contestation to the already polarized political scene. Therefore, to everyone's surprise, the 2016 election took on a more genuinely political cast than any in recent memory.
But because our party system is depoliticizing, and because we have no other institutional means capable of sustaining serious political struggle, we now find ourselves again with two highly polarized but profoundly likeminded parties having at each other. Apolitical politics is back – with a vengeance.
This doesn't help movement-building efforts that actually can change the world for the better. Democrats and Republicans both work hard to assure that nothing like that takes place.
On the left, however, there is movement-building activity going on – in the streets. The Democratic Party would like to coopt every bit of it – not just to gain the votes of people fighting Trump, but also to defuse the threat it poses to their role in the status quo.
If the resistance movement only targets Trump and does not also take on the conditions that make the Trump phenomenon possible – including the Democratic Party – they could succeed, and an historical opportunity will again be lost.
Of course, it is good that, in "red" Georgia, Democrat Jon Ossof nearly won the Congressional seat left vacant by Tom Price, Trump's choice to "deconstruct" the Department of Health and Human Services. It is clear, though, that if he prevails in the runoff, he will have Trump to thank, not the Democratic Party.
Trump was behind Democrat Ron Estes's strong showing in Kansas too; and if Rob Quist wins the special election to be held in May for the Montana Congressional seat vacated by Trump's Secretary of the Interior, Ryan Zinke, thank Trump for that as well.
The fewer Republicans there are in Congress, the less odious Congress becomes; and each "red" district that turns blue is a sty in the eye of Devil Don Trump. But this is not a way to change the world for the better; electing Democrats is useless for that.
With very few exceptions, Democrats are not even lesser evils or at least they wouldn't be if the Republicans they run against were less execrable. This was very evident between 2006 and 2010 when they held power in both the Senate and the House.
How wonderful it would be if the Democratic Party were replaced by a genuinely progressive opposition. That would be eminently possible in other Western democracies. But the rules of the game in the Land of the Free effectively rule that level of (small-d) democracy off the agenda.
Therefore "third" – or shouldn't we say "second" – party building, though admirable in intent, is very likely a non-starter. But the "donors" who call the shots can be made to realize that if they want to hold onto their power, they will have to cede some of it to forces advancing ameliorative or, better still, counter-systemic positions.
That won't happen, however, unless they fear that they might lose all of their power if they fail to accommodate to popular demands for equality and peace and for respect for the dignity of all and the restoration of the rights and liberties Americans have lost since the Bush-Obama-Trump War on Terror began.
It has been a long time since popular insurgencies on American soil showed any promise of developing into truly revolutionary situations. On several occasions, however, "we, the people" have caused enough fear in ruling circles to force the authorities to drop their opposition to popular efforts to civilize the body politic.
The mounting resistance to the Trump phenomenon could put America on that road again.
However, an obstacle has suddenly arisen — again thanks to Trump, inasmuch as where he goes, chaos reigns to such an extent that even the Zeitgeist changes day by day. Thus it appears that, in the aftermath of the turmoil that followed Trump's election victory, resignation is again on the rise. For the moment at least, "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" has become the spirit of the age.
The Sanders campaign was Case Number One.
By running against the Party establishment, Sanders fanned the flames of discontent. This was more consequential than anything he said or how he said it.
The Democratic Party establishment tolerated and even encouraged Sanders at first; they deemed him useful for keeping voters fed up with Clintonian (neoliberal, liberal imperialist) politics within the Democratic fold, and for drawing in voters who are otherwise too fed up with the political scene in general to vote at all.
Everyone who had been paying attention knew, of course, that the election was "rigged"; that the Democratic National Committee and the various state committees were doing all they could to assure that the nomination would go to Hillary Clinton.
Not wanting to alienate Sanders voters unnecessarily, leading Democrats feigned neutrality. But there was no need to see John Podesta's emails to know what was going on. The emails made availably by Wikileaks only confirmed the obvious.
When it became clear that the nomination process would go the way that the party wanted, Sanders capitulated utterly. This ought not to have surprised anyone; nevertheless, it did.
From that point on, he could have made history – by running as a Green or by splitting the party and running independently. Either way, he would have done more good than anything he did in the campaign. But the "independent" Senator wanted to stay in the good graces of the Democratic Party establishment.
At the time, he probably thought, like everybody else, that Clinton had no more than a negligible chance of losing. But, just in case she blew a sure thing, he didn't want to be blamed for Trump the way that, to this day, Ralph Nader is blamed for George W. Bush.
That charge is ludicrous, but it won't go away – because Democrats and their media hacks find it useful.
Thus Sanders let a rare historical opportunity pass. Many of his supporters were reluctant, at first, to follow his lead. In time, though, many of them acquiesced. Why would they not? "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em." If Clinton's victory is inevitable, why not make the best of it? Politics is "the art of the possible," after all.
Why not indeed! The short answer is: because the politics Clinton represents is not only part of the problem; it is what made the Trump phenomenon both necessary and possible.
It could be argued that Republicans were actually the first, this election season, to act on that principle by joining what they could not defeat. They had, after all, made peace with the Tea Party – by adopting its views.
But that was a hostile takeover. Establishment Republicans never quite joined forces with the useful idiots they had recruited. Instead, they let themselves be led grudgingly along.
It serves them right. For decades, establishment Republicans have been pandering shamelessly to populations they despise but whose votes they craved. This was hardly an ennobling project, but it did serve them well.
This changed in 2012, in part because, unlike Ronald Reagan, Mitt Romney wasn't a good enough actor to pull it off. He pandered as shamelessly as the others, but his sheer disingenuousness shined through.
That was the last straw for the yahoos who made the Tea Party what it was. They aren't good for much, but they can smell a phony from a mile off, and their obstinacy is awe-inspiring. They were determined in 2016 to hold their ground, and therefore to hold the field of Republican candidates to account. This made Republicans contending for the nomination easy prey for the Donald.
The Tea Party had been enabled, in part, by malign, self-interested rightwing donors pushing nefarious agendas. However, there was a grassroots component as well. It wasn't until Trump got going that it became clear how little those grassroots Tea Partiers cared about the donors' ideological predilections. They were not exactly opposed to what the donors wanted, but they were mainly acting out their own malaise. Trump realized this instinctively, and was therefore able to sweep Tea Partiers into his domain – for as long as "crooked Hillary," a living embodiment of the causes of that malaise, was available as a foil.
She still is, of course; but she is fast becoming history. When the transformation is complete, Trump had better watch his back.
There is a certain irony in this. The Republican establishment had been working for decades to recruit the votes and loyalty of people in the Tea Party demographic, assuming that they could keep them under control. They recruited too well — by 2016, the inmates had taken over the asylum.
And then Trump stole their thunder. There is an even greater irony in that. Because Trump needed the GOP to win and then to govern, if that is the right word for what he is doing, Tea Party energies were deflected back into the institutional ambit that Tea Party militants opposed.
The "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" spirit didn't quite become manifest in the dark recesses of Republican minds until Trump had all but decimated the Republican Party. It may not now look like that is what he did; it might even seem that he overcame the party's cultural conditions by bringing its base together to elect him. But that impression is incorrect. The degree of unity that sufficed to secure Trump his Electoral College victory was nothing more than a byproduct of Clinton's ineptitude. Had Trump faced a more competent opponent, the GOP would now be in shambles.
But Clinton was Clinton and so, for now, Republicans are making the best of President Trump. Why would they not? How else could they have a chance of getting their agendas through?
Being clueless on governance and having no political organization of his own, Trump needs them as much as Republicans need him.
It is a marriage made in Hell and it won't last because, with the Donald, it all depends on who has his ear – the alt-right epigone Bannon, the callow but well-heeled and loyal Likudnik Jared, the shamelessly mercenary fashionista Ivanka, or whoever's star rises next. These are not Republican establishment types, a fact that is bound to register and become consequential soon.
For now, though, the establishment types, having been among Trump's most ardent critics a few months ago, are now in full "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" mode.
Much the same is happening in corporate media circles, though in more subtle ways. Greedy for ratings, the corporate brass gave Trump free, seemingly limitless, news coverage during the campaign, notwithstanding their obvious preference for the more biddable Hillary. When they, along with everyone else, were sure that the Donald would lose, that seemed like a safe and reliable way to enhance their bottom lines.
They did enhance those bottom lines, and they also enhanced Trump's opportunities to make himself an object of ridicule for comedians and hack Democratic Party pundits. This too enhances some of the same bottom lines – MSNBC's, for example, and CNN's.
Otherwise, the press now seems to be taking Trump and Trumpians seriously, treating them, as best they can, as if theirs is a normal administration. What the corporate wing of America's Fourth Estate is good at is accommodating to power. And so, having not gotten the President they wanted, they are now normalizing Trump – effectively legitimating his rule.
This is especially evident in respectable print media like The New York Times and The Washington Post, on National Public Radio's morning and afternoon news broadcasts. At first, it seemed that every media outlet this side of Fox was too taken aback by Trump's victory to resume their usual regime-serving ways. This is no longer the case.
The main exemplar of the latest, Trump-induced wrinkle in the Zeitgeist is, of course, Trump himself.
In the past week or two he hasn't let up on throwing a few bones to his most "deplorable" supporters. But he has been shedding his populist skin as quickly as he can.
Hillary the person lost, but Hillary the idea –the neoliberal, liberal imperialist, Russophobic warmonger — is therefore now being channeled through the man the Electoral College let loose upon the world.
With the benefit of hindsight, one can see that this was bound to happen; that the "America first" babble, coming from a card carrying member of the billionaire class, was crap. Nevertheless, the speed of the transformation is astonishing.
It is impossible to say how long Trump will stay in his present mode. The best guess is: not long. The man is too corrupt, opportunistic and erratic to hold steadfastly to any position at all.
But, for now, we find ourselves in a situation in which the best hope for the survival of the planet lies with a former General nicknamed "Mad Dog," a National Security Advisor cut from the same cloth, and Trump's thirty-something daughter and son-in-law, a gilded, otherwise undistinguished couple for whom the White House is a cash cow.
For Jared and his family, it's a lubricant for real estate deals; for Ivanka, it's about selling clothes.
There are ostensibly respectable commentators who say that Ivanka is the Great Blonde Hope – a true feminist, dedicated to pursuing an intra-familial mission civilsatrice! If only MSNBC (=DNC) had a Sean Spicer to point out how even Eva Braun never relied upon any man's fondness for her – not her father's, not her lover's, not anyone's — to obtain exclusive patents and licenses to peddle lines of schlock accessories and shoes in the emporia of other axis powers or in lands that the Wehrmacht might overrun.]]>
Photo by Stefan Krasowski | CC BY 2.0
We are fighting in Korea so we won't have to fight in Wichita, or in Chicago, or in New Orleans, or in San Francisco Bay.
— President Harry S Truman, 1952
Why has this tiny nation of 24 million people invested so much of its limited resources in acquiring nuclear weapons? North Korea is universally condemned as a bizarre and failed state, its nuclear posture denounced as irrational.
Yet North Korea's stance cannot be separated out from its turbulent history during the 20th Century, especially its four decade long occupation by Japan, the forced division of the Korean peninsula after World War II, and, of course, the subsequent utterly devastating war with the United States from 1950-1953 that ended in an armistice in which a technical state of war still exists.
Korea is an ancient nation and culture, achieving national unity in 608 CE, and despite its near envelopment by gigantic China it has retained its own unique language and traditions throughout its recorded history. National independence came to an end in 1910 after five years of war when Japan, taking advantage of Chinese weakness, invaded and occupied Korea using impressed labor for the industries Japan created for the benefit of its own economy. As always the case for colonization the Japanese easily found collaborators among the Korean elite Koreans to manage their first colony.
Naturally a nationalist resistance movement emerged rapidly and, given the history of the early 20th Century, it was not long before communists began to play a significant role in Korea's effort to regain its independence. The primary form of resistance came in the form of "peoples' committees" which became deeply rooted throughout the entire peninsula, pointedly in the south as well. It was from these deeply political and nationalistic village and city committees that guerrilla groups engaged the Japanese throughout WWII. The parallels with similar organizations in Vietnam against the Japanese, and later against the French and Americans, are obvious. Another analogous similarity is that Franklin Roosevelt also wanted a Great Power trusteeship for Korea, as for Vietnam. Needless to say both Britain and France objected to this plan.
When Russia entered the war against Japanese in August of 1945 the end of Japanese rule was at hand regardless of the atomic bomb. As events turned out Japan surrendered on 15 August when Soviet troops had occupied much of the northern peninsula. It should be noted that American forces played no role in the liberation of Korea from Japanese rule. However, because the Soviets, as allies of the U.S., wished to remain on friendly terms they agreed to the division of Korea between Soviet and American forces. The young Dean Rusk, later to become Secretary of State under Kennedy and Johnson, arbitrarily drew a line of division across the 38th Parallel because, as he said, that would leave the capital city, Seoul, in the American zone.
Written reports at the time criticized Washington for "allowing" the Red Army into Korea but the fact was it was the other way around. The Soviets could easily have occupied the entirety of Korea but chose not to do so, instead opting for a negotiated settlement with the U.S. over the future of Korea. Theoretically the peninsula would be reunited after some agreement between the two victors at some future date.
However, the U.S. immediately began to favor those Koreans who had collaborated with the Japanese in the exploitation of their own country and its people, largely the landed elites, and Washington began to arm the provisional government it set up to root out the peoples' committees. For their part the Soviets supported the communist nationalist leader, Kim Il-Sung who had led the guerrilla army against Japan at great cost in lives.
In 1947 the United Nations authorized elections in Korea, but the election monitors were all American allies so the Soviets and communist Koreans refused to participate. By then the Cold War was in full swing, the critical alliance between Washington and Moscow that had defeated Nazi Germany had already been sundered. As would later also occur in Vietnam in 1956, the U.S. oversaw elections only in the south of Korea and only those candidates approved by Washington. Syngman Rhee became South Korea's first president protected by the new American armed and trained Army of the Republic of Korea. This ROK was commanded by officers who had served the Japanese occupation including one who had been decorated by Emperor Hirohito himself and who had tried to track down and kill Kim Il Sung for the Japanese.
With Korea thus seemingly divided permanently both Russian and American troops withdrew in 1948 though they left "advisers" behind. On both sides of the new artificial border pressures mounted for a forcible reunification. The fact remained that much of rural southern Korea was still loyal to the peoples committees. This did not necessarily mean that they were committed communists but they were virulent nationalists who recognized the role that Kim's forces had played against the Japanese. Rhee's forces then began to systematically root out Kim's supporters. Meanwhile the American advisers had constantly to keep Rhee's forces from crossing the border to invade the north.
In 1948 guerrilla war broke out against the Rhee regime on the southern island of Cheju, the population of which ultimately rose in wholesale revolt. The suppression of the rebellion was guided by many American agents soon to become part of the Central Intelligence Agency and by military advisers. Eventually the entire population was removed to the coast and kept in guarded compounds and between 20,000 and 30,000 villagers died. Simultaneously elements of the ROK army refused to participate in this war against their own people and this mutiny was brutally suppressed by those ROK soldiers who would obey such orders. Over one thousand of the mutineers escaped to join Kim's guerrillas in the mountains.
Though Washington claimed that these rebellions were fomented by the communists no evidence surfaced that the Soviets provided anything other than moral support. Most of the rebels captured or killed had Japanese or American weapons.
In North Korea the political system had evolved in response to decades of foreign occupation and war. Though it was always assumed to be a Soviet satellite, North Korea more nearly bears comparison to Tito's Yugoslavia. The North Koreans were always able to balance the tensions between the Soviets and the Chinese to their own advantage. During the period when the Comintern exercised most influence over national communist parties not a single Korean communist served in any capacity and the number of Soviet advisers in the north was never high.
Nineteen forty-nine marked a watershed year. The Chinese Communist Revolution, the Soviet Atomic Bomb, the massive reorganization of the National Security State in the U.S. all occurred that year. In 1950 Washington issued its famous National Security Paper-68 (NSC-68) which outlined the agenda for a global anti-communist campaign, requiring the tripling of the American defense budget. Congress balked at this all-encompassing blueprint when in the deathless words of Secretary of State Dean Acheson "Thank God! Korea came along." Only months before Acheson had made a speech in which he pointedly omitted Korea from America's "Defense perimeter."
The Korean War seemed to vindicate everything written and said about the" international communist conspiracy. In popular myth on June 25, 1950 the North Korean Army suddenly attacked without warning, overwhelming surprised ROK defenders. In fact the entire 38th Parallel had been progressively militarized and there had been numerous cross border incursions by both sides going back to 1949. On numerous occasions Syngman Rhee had to be restrained by American advisers from invading the north. The Korean civil war was all but inevitable. Given postwar American plans for access globally to resources, markets and cheaper labor power any form of national liberation, communist or liberal democratic, was to be opposed. Acheson and his second, Dean Rusk, told President Truman that "we must draw the line here!" Truman decided to request authorization for American intervention from the United Nations and bypassed Congress thereby leading to widespread opposition and, later, a return to Republican rule under Dwight Eisenhower..
Among the remaining mysteries of the UN decision to undertake the American led military effort to reject North Korea from the south was the USSR's failure to make use of its veto in the Security Council. The Soviet ambassador was ostensibly boycotting the meetings in protest of the UN's refusal to seat the Chinese communists as China's official delegation. According to Bruce Cumings though, evidence exists that Stalin ordered the Soviet ambassador to abstain. Why? The UN resolution authorizing war could have been prevented. At that moment the Sino-Soviet split was already in evidence and Stalin may have wished to weaken China, something which actually happened as a result of that nation's subsequent entry into the war. Or he may have wished that cloaking the UN mission under the U.S. flag would have revealed the UN to be largely under the control of the United States, which indeed it was. What is known is that Stalin refused to allow Soviet combat troops and reduced shipments of arms to Kim's forces. Later, however Soviet pilots would engage Americans in the air. The Chinese were quick to condemn the UN action as "American imperialism" and warned of dire consequences if China itself were threatened.
The war went badly at first for the U.S. despite numerical advantages in forces. Rout after rout followed with the ROK in full retreat. Meanwhile tens of thousands of southern guerrillas who had originated in peoples' committees fought the Americans and the ROK. At one point the North Koreans were in control of Seoul and seemed about to drive American forces into the sea. At that point the commander- in-chief of all UN forces, General Douglas MacArthur, announced that he saw unique opportunities for the deployment of atomic weapons. This call was taken up by many in Congress.
Truman was loathe to introduce nukes and instead authorized MacArthur to conduct the famous landings at Inchon in September 1950 with few losses by the Marine Corps vaunted 1st Division. This threw North Korean troops into disarray and MacArthur began pushing them back across the 38th Parallel, the mandate imposed by the UN resolution. But the State Department claimed that the border was not recognized under international law and therefore the UN mandate had no real legal bearing. It was this that MacArthur claimed gave him the right to take the war into the north. Though the North Koreans had suffered a resounding defeat in the south, they withdrew into northern mountain redoubts forcing the American forces that followed them into bloody and costly combat, led Americans into a trap.
The Chinese had said from the beginning that any approach of foreign troops toward their border would result in "dire consequences." Fearing an invasion of Manchuria to crush the nascent communist revolution the Chinese foreign minister, Zhou En-Lai declared that China "will not supinely tolerate seeing their neighbors invaded by the imperialists." MacArthur sneered at this warning. "… They have no airforce…if the Chinese tried to get down to Pyongyang there would be a great slaughter…we are the best." He then ordered airstrikes to lay waste thousands of square miles of northern Korea bordering China and ordered infantry divisions ever closer to its border.
It was the terrible devastation of this bombing campaign, worse than anything seen during World War II short of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that to this day dominates North Korea's relations with the United States and drives its determination never to submit to any American diktat.
General Curtis Lemay directed this onslaught. It was he who had firebombed Tokyo in March 1945 saying it was "about time we stopped swatting at flies and gone after the manure pile." It was he who later said that the US "ought to bomb North Vietnam back into the stone age." Remarking about his desire to lay waste to North Korea he said "We burned down every town in North Korea and South Korea too." Lemay was by no means exaggerating.
On November 27, 1950 hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops suddenly crossed the border into North Korea completely overwhelming US forces. Acheson said this was the "worst defeat of American forces since Bull Run." One famous incident was the battle at the Chosin Reservoir, where 50,000 US marines were surrounded. As they escaped their enclosure they said they were "advancing to the rear" but in fact all American forces were being routed.
Panic took hold in Washington. Truman now said use of A-bombs was under "active consideration." MacArthur demanded the bombs… As he put it in his memoirs:
I would have dropped between thirty and fifty atomic bombs…strung across the neck of Manchuria…and spread behind us – from the Sea of Japan to the Yellow Sea- a belt of radioactive cobalt. It has an active life of between 60 and 120 years.
Cobalt it should be noted is at least 100 times more radioactive than uranium.
He also expressed a desire for chemicals and gas.
It is well known that MacArthur was fired for insubordination for publically announcing his desire to use nukes. Actually, Truman himself put the nukes at ready and threatened to use them if China launched air raids against American forces. But he did not want to put them under MacArthur's command because he feared MacArthur would conduct a preemptive strike against China anyway.
By June 1951, one year after the beginning of the war, the communists had pushed UN forces back across the 38th parallel. Chinese ground forces might have been able to push the entire UN force off the peninsula entirely but that would not have negated US naval and air forces, and would have probably resulted in nuclear strikes against the Chinese mainland and that brought the real risk of Soviet entry and all out nuclear exchanges. So from this point on the war became one of attrition, much like the trench warfare of World War I. casualties continued to be high on both sides for the duration of the war which lasted until 1953 when an armistice without reunification was signed.
Of course the victims suffering worst were the civilians. In 1951 the U.S. initiated "Operation Strangle" which officialls estimated killed at least 3 million people on both sides of the 38th parallel, but the figure is probably closer to 4 million. We do not know how many Chinese died – either solders or civilians killed in cross border bombings.
The question of whether the U.S. carried out germ warfare has been raised but has never been fully proved or disproved. The North accused the U.S. of dropping bombs laden with cholera, anthrax, plague, and encephalitis and hemorrhagic fever, all of which turned up among soldiers and civilians in the north. Some American prisoners of war confessed to such war crimes but these were dismissed as evidence of torture by North Korea on Americans. However, none of the U.S. POWs who did confess and were later repatriated were allowed to meet the press. A number of investigations were carried out by scientists from friendly western countries. One of the most prominent concluded the charges were true. At this time the US was engaged in top secret germ-warfare research with captured Nazi and Japanese germ warfare experts, and also experimenting with Sarin, despite its ban by the Geneva Convention. Washington accused the communists of introducing germ warfare.
Napalm was used extensively, completely and utterly destroying the northern capital of Pyongyang. By 1953 American pilots were returning to carriers and bases claiming there were no longer any significant targets in all of North Korea to bomb. In fact a very large percentage of the northern population was by then living in tunnels dug by hand underground. A British journalist wrote that the northern population was living "a troglodyte existence."In the Spring of 1953 US warplanes hit five of the largest dams along the Yalu river completely inundating and killing Pyongyang's harvest of rice. Air Force documents reveal calculated premeditation saying that "Attacks in May will be most effective psychologically because it was the end of the rice-transplanting season before the roots could become completely embedded." Flash floods scooped out hundreds of square miles of vital food producing valleys and killed untold numbers of farmers.
At Nuremberg after WWII, Nazi officers who carried out similar attacks on the dikes of Holland, creating a mass famine in 1944, were tried as criminals and some were executed for their crimes.
So after a horrific war Korea returned to the status quo ante bellum in terms of political boundaries but it was completely devastated, especially the north.
I submit that it is the collective memory of all of what I've described that animates North Korea's policies toward the US today which has nuclear weapons on constant alert and stations almost 30,000 forces at the ready. Remember, a state of war still exists and has since 1953.
While South Korea received heavy American investment in the industries fleeing the United States in search of cheaper labor and new markets it was nevertheless ruled until quite recently by military dictatorships scarcely different than those of the north. For its part the north constructed its economy along five-year plans and collectivized its agriculture. While it never enjoyed the sort of consumer society that now characterizes some of South Korea, its GDP grew substantially until the collapse of communism globally brought about the withdrawal of all foreign aid to north Korea.
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, as some American policymakers took note of the north's growing weakness Secretary of Defense Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz talked openly of using force finally to settle the question of Korean reunification and the claimed threat to international peace posed by North Korea.
In 1993 the Clinton Administration discovered that North Korea was constructing a nuclear processing plant and also developing medium range missiles. The Pentagon desired to destroy these facilities but that would mean wholesale war so the administration fostered an agreement whereby North Korea would stand down in return for the provision of oil and other economic aid. When in 2001, after the events of 9-11, the Bush II neo-conservatives militarized policy and declared North Korea to be an element of the "axis of evil." All bets were now off. In that context North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, reasoning that nuclear weapons were the only way possible to prevent a full scale attack by the US in the future. Given a stark choice between another war with the US and all that would entail this decision seems hardly surprising. Under no circumstances could any westerner reasonably expect, after all the history I've described, that the North Korean regime would simply submit to any ultimatums by the US, by far the worst enemy Korea ever had measured by the damage inflicted on the entirety of the Korean peninsula.
(Acknowledgement to Bruce Cumings and I.F. Stone)]]>
One of the least understood aspects of global warming is entire countries threatened by loss of major rivers, for example, the Lancang River (70% of its headwater glaciers gone), affectionately known as "the Danube of the East" of China and the Andes river system in South America (the World Bank warning that millions threatened by loss of glacial water supplies), and the Lower Colorado River in America, at "the breaking point."
River systems provide recreation, sport, wildlife habitat, agricultural irrigation, and drinking water for the majority of the world's population. The loss of river system integrity and strength of its flow indubitably throws the world into utter chaos, likely leading to worldwide water wars, e.g.: India's numerous clashes and riots over water for example in Bundelkhand (deadly clashes), Bangalore, and Munak (18 people killed and 200 injured); and, Tunisia's "thirst uprisings"; and, 10 deaths over water rights on Iran and Afghanistan border; and, Peru farmers challenging (clashes) a corporation over water rights; and, Syria's repeated fighting over water; and, Somalia where dozens killed over water access; and, Mexico's 100 injured in water clashes; and, Yemen, where 4,000 die every year from water-related violence. Moreover, the list of water wars goes on and on, seemingly evermore.
It is established science that anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming contributes heavily to water stress throughout the world, and in fact, is likely the prime factor behind severe water shortages, as the Great Acceleration, aka the first ever human-directed biosphere, grows in stature and impact.
For example, 14 of the 30 most water stressed countries of the world are in the Middle East and North Africa, where massive migration is out of control. The World Resources Institute claims water shortages in Syria influenced the advent of civil disturbances, on the heels of Syria's worst drought in 900 years.
Meanwhile in America, Trump's hatchet job on ecosystem/biosphere regulations in concert with global warming will destroy rivers. Trump is Mister Double Trouble, wearing two hats: (1) global warming enthusiast and (2) head hatchet man of sensitive environmental rules & regulations. Thus, Trump is in mortal combat with Mother Nature, except for careful grooming of his golf courses.
Global warming's threat to river water systems is one of the least understood aspects of anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change, but it may be the most risky of all the global warming effects.
The rivers of the world are under attack, namely:
The Slims River in Canada flowed for hundreds/thousands of years, but it suddenly vanished within only 4 days. Now, the wind whips up dust storms from Slims' crusty riverbed. The river dried up because of rapid retreat of Kaskawlush Glacier. Global warming hit Kaskawlush Glacier so hard that it retreated beyond headwaters of Slims River (Source: Slims River: Climate Change Causes 'River Piracy' in Canada's Yukon, BBC News, April 18, 2017).
In China, major waterways like Yellow River, Yangtze River, and Lancang River, which becomes Mekong River once it leaves China, are drying up "…because of climate change, says geologist Yang Yong" (Source: Liu Qin, Source of Mekong, Yellow and Yangtze Rivers Drying Up, China Dialogue, March 3, 2017).
Lancang River, affectionately known as "the Danube of the East," is a major commercial waterway. According to Cheng Haining, senior engineer with the provincial survey bureau: "Seventy (70) percent of the glaciers in Lancang River headwaters have disappeared due to the warm weather" (Source: Wang Guanqun, Glaciers on China's Qinghai-Tibet Plateau Melting Fast Due to Global Warming, Xinhuanet, October 21, 2011).
When Lancang River leaves China, it becomes Mekong River, one of the world's most important international waterways. It flows 2,130 kilometres thru China, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam to South China Sea. Global warming has already robbed it of over 70% of its headwater glaciers, which create water flow for millions of people and irrigation for 30%-to-80% of the agriculture along its trek.
Trump at War with America's Rivers
Trump is at war with wildlife enthusiasts, fishing, hunting, farming, towns, and cities all across America by abandoning or cutting back, crucial river protections, including Clean Water Act rules and environmental regulations.
According to Bob Irvin, president of American Rivers Org: "The rivers Americans depend on for drinking water, jobs, food and quality of life are under attack from the Trump administration's rollbacks and proposed budget cuts" (Source: Amy Souers Kober, Announcing America's Most Endangered Rivers of 2017, Americanarivers.org, April 11, 2017).
Critically, Trump's reckless behavior and cockamamie ignorance serves as a major setback to America's Most Endangered River of 2017, the Lower Colorado River.
Here's the issue: The Lower Colorado River provides drinking water to 30 million, irrigates fields that grow 90% of the nation's winter vegetables, and provides water for LA, San Diego, Las Vegas, and Phoenix. "But the water demands of Arizona, Nevada and California are outstripping supply, the impacts of climate change are becoming acute, and the river is at a breaking point… If the deficit is not addressed, the Bureau of Reclamation will be forced to cut water deliveries, with severe economic impacts to farms and cities across Arizona, Nevada and California," Ibid.
"Unfortunately, the Trump Administration's Fiscal Year 2018 Budget proposal threatens to reverse progress made by states, cities and farmers to reduce water consumption across the three states," Ibid.
Sadly for America's southwestern states, at the very moment when the Lower Colorado River is "at a breaking point," Trump is elected as president. Here's the Trump problem: His hatchet men destroy crucial, as well as pivotal, rules and regulations that protect and regulate waterways for millions of Americans. There is no other way to look at his cuts to the EPA and Clean Water Act and removal of critical regulations than the handiwork of hatch men, like the Visigoths slicing and chopping their way across Medieval Europe, actually pre-Europe.
There is no getting around the straightforward fact that Trump has declared war on America's rivers. Trump is an environmental terrorist.
According to America's Rivers Org, here's a sampling of what Trump's cuts mean to the environment:
Cuts to the Department of the Interior and Department of Agriculture could hamstring efforts to find water management solutions to meet the crisis on the Lower Colorado River.
Cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency could undermine regulation of pollution from Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations like those on the Neuse-Cape Fear and the Buffalo National River.
Virtually zeroing out the Land and Water Conservation Fund would eliminate opportunities such as the conservation purchases that have helped protect Washington's Green River.
Cuts to the Department of the Interior likely would foreclose any opportunity to adequately fund the proper planning, management, and protection of the neglected Wild and Scenic Rivers System, including the Buffalo National River and Middle Fork Flathead — a sorry state of affairs as the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act approaches its 50th anniversary in 2018.
According to the Washington Post d/d April 14, 2017: "President Trump signed an executive order on March 28, to obliterate former president Barack Obama's environmental record. The order will instruct federal regulators to rewrite Clean Power Plan rules that curb U.S. carbon emissions, as well as halt other environmental regulations."
Meanwhile, Scott Pruitt, new head of EPA, lied about the Paris climate agreement on Fox & Friends. He claims it's a bad deal for America because China and India have "no obligations under the agreement until 2030" whereas America has to meet obligations much earlier. That is a bold-faced lie as India and China do have 2030 obligations, but even a grade school kid can figure out they cannot achieve the obligations all in one year, or 2030. It takes tons of work several years beforehand. In point of fact, both countries are already installing renewables and taking other initiatives to meet their obligations for 2030.
Without hesitation, it is easy to label Scott Pruitt as the least enlightened head of EPA in American history working for the least enlightened president throughout U.S. history. This toxic cocktail of maladministration and ultra low levels of insight is almost certain to bring to surface brutal water wars, death, and destruction so extreme that its impossible to grasp at this early stage of their hostile actions.
Henceforth, discord supplants science.]]>
Photo by Rasande Tyskar | CC BY 2.0
Turkey is a fundamentally divided society. The vote this weekend over a referendum to give the President additional powers and a longer term, showed the extent of Turkey's divisions. The "Yes" vote, a victory for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was won with 25 million votes, while the "No" campaign fetched almost 24 million votes. But given the nature of electoral democracy, a fractured verdict will nonetheless mean an expansion of the powers of Mr. Erdoğan and of his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). The referendum amends the 1982 Constitution with some significant provisions, such as making the President both the head of state and the head of government, weakening Parliament, the judiciary and the military. Mr. Erdoğan could remain in power — virtually unchallenged — till 2029. Society's divisions will not be reflected in the political sphere.
The AKP, and its far-right ally, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), had hoped to commandeer close to two-thirds of the vote in order to make these changes legitimate. They were not able to get near this margin. Turkey's three largest cities — Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir — voted decisively against the changes. It was rural and small-town Turkey that delivered the votes for the "Yes" campaign. These areas, located in remote parts of Anatolia, have long been neglected by the Istanbul elite and have for the past two decades seen the AKP as their champion. Personal piety is not their only link to the agenda of the AKP, which has pushed against the barriers of Turkey's official secularism. A great deal of pent-up resentment against urban affluence is wrapped up in the support for Mr. Erdoğan, who speaks in the idiom of the small town.
Unleashing repression
But this support base was insufficient during two parliamentary elections in 2015, when Mr. Erdoğan hoped to push these changes through a friendly Parliament. Since the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) — a Kurdish and Left alliance — won over 10% of the vote, it was able to stymie Mr. Erdoğan's plans. What followed after that defeat set the terms for significant political repression. Mr. Erdoğan's government declared that the HDP was linked to terrorism, opened up a war against the largely Kurdish southeast of Turkey with the displacement of over 200,000 people and imposed endless curfews on major towns. Visitors to the Turkish city of Diyarbakir might be tempted to make comparisons with the flattened cities of Syria's Aleppo and Iraq's Fallujah. HDP politicians have been imprisoned, with both their leaders, Selahattin Demirtaş and Figen Yüksekdağ, facing hundreds of years in prison.
A failed coup on July 15, 2016 deepened the repression by the state. It was blamed on the U.S.-based Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen. Almost 100,000 people have been arrested since that coup, and over 100,000 state employees fired from their posts. The purges (tasfiye) have not only denuded Turkish society of trained and capable people but have also chilled the atmosphere in the country. Gloom is the mood amongst large parts of the urban population, which has not experienced this kind of open harassment since the coups d'etat of 1971 and 1980. It was as if this failed coup had an aftermath as anti-democratic as the successful coups of Turkey's past.
Curbing democratic processes
It was apparent during the campaign over this referendum that Mr. Erdoğan would prevail. Society is not united behind him, but the state apparatus came into great use. Opposition leaders were arrested — 122 HDP leaders by their count. Campaigners for the "No" vote were accused of being part of the Gülen plot. In the largely Kurdish province of Sirnak, the provincial governor banned the HDP's song "Say No" on the pretext that it would incite "public hate". The popular cartoonist, Musa Kart, spent a hundred days in jail, while Turkey's most respected constitutional law expert, Ibrahim Kaboğlu, lost his job. With 150 media outlets shut down and almost 200 journalists arrested, press scrutiny of these manoeuvres was minimal. Democracy was already curtailed before the referendum. Critics of Mr. Erdoğan warn that Turkey is under "tek adam" rule — one-man rule.
Turkey's High Electoral Board chief Sadi Güven announced that the referendum had passed despite the numerous complaints of fraud. The Opposition moved the board to reconsider the 1.5 million ballots that raised eyebrows. The margin of victory was only 1.1 million. Intimidation of voters was general. Even supporters of Mr. Erdoğan who had decided to vote "No" — such as editor, Yeni Şafak, and columnist Ali Bayramoğlu — were beaten on polling day. The government dominated the media and prevented the Opposition from making its case against the referendum.
#HayirDahaBitmedi is the new hashtag on social media. "It is not over yet". There is great expectation from half of those who voted that the President must not be allowed to rule as if he has a mandate. No wonder that Mr. Erdoğan's victory speech was uncharacteristically subdued. His Prime Minister, Binali Yildirim, said of the result: "We are one body. We are one nation." But it did not feel like that. Turkey feels more and more socially divided. Mr. Erdoğan will not govern to unify. That is not his style. His policies — like that of other Strong Men in the Age of Anger — will more ferociously tear at the social fabric of this fine country.
This article originally appeared The Hindu (India).]]>
"I'm glad that the Justice Department has found a way to go after Assange. He's gotten a free ride for too long."
— Rep. Peter King (R-New York), Apr 20, 2017
There had been some doubts from initial enthusiasts about WikiLeaks once information from leaks released on its site started puncturing holes in an already worn Democratic campaign in 2016. Accusations of being an agent of Russian interests were being fired by various officials across the Clinton spectrum, though many Republicans, seeing the Clinton ship holed, preferred reticence, and even praise.
No better example is the current director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Mike Pompeo, recently in the front line of exempting WikiLeaks from free speech immunities. "Julian Assange," Pompeo opined emphatically, "has no First Amendment freedoms. He's sitting in an Embassy in London. He's not a US citizen."
The Pompeo of now, his patriotic skin rebadged and dry cleaned from the campaign, claims it "time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is – a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia".
During the presidential campaign, Pompeo was rather thrilled to also avail himself of the trove of documents obtained from hacks of the Democratic National Committee. Tweets followed on the "proof" that the DNC had a strategy of fixing the candidate selection process.
But wearing the fake news hat in a new administration has seen Pompeo retreat from such statements, issuing not so much a clarification as a blanket denial that he ever considered WikiLeaks a credible source.[1] The world of post-truths is an expansive one to hide in.
As for the President himself, WikiLeaks was an exciting boon, a sabre to be rattled and directed at his opponents with searing campaign effect. "WikiLeaks catches Crooked in the act – again," tweeted Donald Trump last October.[2] He also declared his love for the organisation and its exploits, noting in January how Julian Assange had essentially exposed the adolescent standard of cyber security fronted by the Democrats. "Julian Assange said 'a 14 year old could have hacked Podesta' – why was DNC so careless?"[3]
All of this places the latest moves behind the Department of Justice investigation of WikiLeaks and Assange in sharp, if contradictory context. Having assumed the mantle of president, Trump is remaining traditional to old concepts of imperial power. Staying mum about operations against North Korea, for instance, is one such example. His restraint regarding that matter on Twitter was not so much superhuman as abnormally deafening. The open information trove drawn upon with such relish is now proving to be a hazard, a liability to be distanced from.
On Thursday, CNN reported that the investigation against Assange, having gone a touch cold during the latter part of the Obama administration since being started in 2010, had been reignited. The obvious point about the reluctance on the part of President Obama's Attorney General, Eric Holder, was that throwing the prosecutor's book at Assange would also entail targeting more conventional outlets such as the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Assange himself has made the point that WikiLeaks simply advances the agenda of such outlets, supplementing their missions with material in the conventional tradition of leaks, albeit with greater panache.[4] What matters is the material disclosed "irrespective of whether sources came by that truth legally or have the right to release to the media."
This point was certainly alluded to in Chelsea Manning's trial. Of the 22 counts levelled at Manning for disclosing classified material to WikiLeaks, that of "aiding the enemy" was not accepted by the military judge presiding, Colonel Denise Lind.[5] To have done so would have drawn in the news establishment, including mainstream outlets, rendering the fourth estate a confirmed enemy.
Legal counsel for Assange, Barry Pollack, has attempted to dampen the latest spike of interest in WikiLeaks a touch by suggesting that there has been "no communication with the Department of Justice and they have not indicated to me that they have brought any charges against Mr. Assange."
But Pollack is also clear that much of this is to do with the fact that the DOJ has simply refused to engage in any discussions with the organisation, let alone its legal representatives, about where Assange stands at this point of time. It lacks, as yet, a tweeting fiend to give that game away.
Trump's current Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, has been clearer. At a Thursday press conference, Sessions seemed to suggest that the administration had every desire to cast a lasso around the information activist, and those in the "leaking" trade. "We are going to step up our effort and already stepping up our efforts on all leaks. This is a matter that's gone beyond anything I'm aware of."
For Sessions, the security environment has become one of anarchic, dysfunctional gloom, riddled with breaches. Notwithstanding the profiting of the Trump campaign from that every same environment, "We have professionals that have been in the security business of the United States for many years that are shocked by the number of leaks and some of them are quite serious." Serious maybe, but only for the person in power at the time.
A final remark by Trump is apt here, if for no other reason than indicating, rather appropriately, the role of the WikiLeaks information machine. The defence may well choose to cite it should Assange ever be surrendered, or rendered and tried by US authorities: "The dishonest media likes saying I am in Agreement with Julian Assange – wrong. I simply state what he states, it is for the people".[6]
[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/pompeo-slams-wikileaks-but-he-and-trump-tweeted-praise-of-wikileaks-during-campaign/
[2] https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/789487320290430976?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cbsnews.com%2Fnews%2Fpompeo-slams-wikileaks-but-he-and-trump-tweeted-praise-of-wikileaks-during-campaign%2F
[3] https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/816620855958601730?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cbsnews.com%2Fnews%2Fpompeo-slams-wikileaks-but-he-and-trump-tweeted-praise-of-wikileaks-during-campaign%2F
[4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/julian-assange-wikileaks-has-the-same-mission-as-the-post-and-the-times/2017/04/11/23f03dd8-1d4d-11e7-a0a7-8b2a45e3dc84_story.html?utm_term=.6b9883ffc859
[5] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/30/bradley-manning-wikileaks-judge-verdict
[6] https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/816999062562107392?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cbsnews.com%2Fnews%2Fpompeo-slams-wikileaks-but-he-and-trump-tweeted-praise-of-wikileaks-during-campaign%2F]]>
Photo by Jim Mattis | CC BY 2.0
So the President formerly known as Hitler has apparently pulled his head out of his ass and gotten with the global capitalist program. The ruling classes couldn't be more relieved, as it was beginning to look like they were going to have to carry on with their totally ridiculous "Manchurian President" propaganda indefinitely, or deal with Trump in some harsher way, which, given the paranoid mood in the country and the heavily-armed nature of a lot of his supporters, was going to get a little tricky.
Luckily, however, H. R. McMaster, James Mattis, and the rest of the permanent members of the global capitalist war machine (better known as the United States military), as well as his bleeding heart daughter, Ivanka, were able to talk some sense into Trump, and convince him to employ about sixty cruise missiles to pointlessly obliterate a Syrian airstrip, and then drop a $314 million Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb on a few dozen "terrorists" in some caves in Afghanistan. The fact that these air strikes had virtually zero military value was beside the point. The global capitalist ruling classes needed Trump to demonstrate that he is ready and willing to continue the wholesale restructuring of the Middle East that they've been carrying out since the end of the Cold War, and bomb whatever they tell him to bomb, and, basically, do what the fuck he's told when it comes to geopolitical matters. Trump, who was probably tired of losing, and being referred to as Bannon's puppet, and being accused of treason, and so on, and who never really gave two shits about the suckers he conned into voting for him anyway, had one of those Road to Damascus experiences and gave the Pentagon boys carte blanche.
The display of overwhelming force that followed, at 08:40 EST, April 6, 2017, signaled the start of the Trumpian reign. CNN talking head Fareed Zakaria put it this way the following evening, "I think Donald Trump became president of the United States last night … for the first time really as president, he talked about international norms, international rules, about America's role in enforcing justice in the world."
This was approximately 24 hours after CNN and the other totally objective members of the mainstream media had had a chance to calm down a little, and to clean up after the orgy of obsequious cheerleading they had indulged in the previous evening. For most of the spastic talking heads who are paid to repeat whatever some producer whispers into their earpieces around the clock while making weird faces, the footage of those turgid Tomahawk missiles rising angrily out of their silos on their way to violently penetrate the enemy and explode in shuddering spasms of global corporatist power was literally orgasmic. Pent-up editorialists instantly pumped out geysers of overwhelming approval. MSNBC's Brian Williams lost it and started raving on camera about "the beauty of our fearsome armaments," and quoting Leonard Cohen, and so on. The Washington Post immediately brought in Robert Kagan to froth at the mouth about "rebalancing Syria in America's favor." And it wasn't just the US press and the corporate-owned US political establishment. The rest of the global capitalist empire (Germany, France, the United Kingdom, the European Council, Spain, Italy, Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, et al.) were quick to cheer Trump's transformation into a grown-up, moderate, more or less rational, or at least obedient, globalist puppet.
Now, I owe Trump an apology at this point, because his sudden conversion to the Globalist faith proves that he is not the total ass hat I've accused him of being for twenty five years, or at least that he is not suicidal. Prior to his soul-searching talk with Ivanka, and his chat with the generals, and to viewing the photos of those "beautiful babies" gassed by Assad in a last-ditch attempt to force the USA to invade his country and hang him to death, he (i.e., Trump, not Assad) was on the verge of a massive heart attack, or a stroke, or other medical event, or just accidentally getting shot in the head by some mentally unstable, three-named gunman. Or maybe The New York Times' guest loony, the increasingly Strangelovian Louise Mensch, was going to uncover a grainy VHS tape of Trump and Putin in their BDSM-wear signing a pact to destroy America in the urine of a Muscovite prostitute … or whatever.
The point is, Trump was playing with fire, having misunderstood his job description. For a while there it seemed he actually believed he was going to defy the will of all those "global elites" he'd been railing against (and, no, I'm not referring to "the Jews," I'm referring to the global capitalist establishment and the armies they employ to keep them in power). This, of course, was never going to happen. The global capitalist ruling classes can put up with a lot from a US president (who is the most powerful man in the world, after all), but there are a few lines one does not cross, and some fundamental responsibilities they need to know are going to get handled. Playing neo-nationalist grab-ass (or selling the world some Hope and Change crap) is all fine and good when you are out on the hustings, but as Obama noted on his way out of town, "reality has a way of asserting itself." Or, as corporatist puppet Chuck Schumer put it,"you take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you." I don't mean to be overly dramatic, but we're talking about the US military, CIA, NSA, and the rest of the military industrial complex. These are people who have no problem murdering entire families by day and going home and playing with their kids at night. Did anyone really think they were going to allow some word-salad-babbling billionaire to screw around with their long-term objectives because he happened to win a presidential election?
In any event, the danger has passed. Trump, having assumed the mantle of Commander in Chief of Global Capitalism's worldwide arbitrary killing machine (and with Cohn and the usual Goldman Sachs guys making sure he doesn't go nuts and start screwing around with their ongoing efforts to transform the planet into one big happy, neo-feudalist theme park prison), can relax and focus on improving his golf swing. Whatever mess he makes of the country (i.e., the United States of America, the nominally sovereign nation state that most Americans believe they live in) will be tolerated by the global capitalist establishment, as they couldn't care less about actual Americans, or Brits, or Greeks, or Syrians, or whoever. We're all just a bunch of canon fodder, and servants, and deplorables, and losers, to them.
If it's any consolation, at least we'll be able to get back to "normality," finally. Yes, it will likely take a few weeks for liberals to fully recover from the shock of the cancellation of Holocaust Redux and the Imminent Invasion of the Putin-Nazis, but my prediction is, by sometime this Summer, we'll have returned to more or less business as usual. That is, of course, unless Putin the Evil hacks the upcoming French elections … in which case, you know, End of Democracy, and Holocaust II, et cetera, again. Stay tuned to the corporate media for moment-by-moment updates on that.]]>
Photo by Jörn Schubert | CC BY 2.0
Der Speigel, a well-thought-of magazine, ran in February 2017 a cover depicting the newly elected president Donald Trump; standing with one arm upstretched brandishing a bloody knife and the other arm raised flaunting Lady Liberty's severed head, blood dripping from its wound. Lady Liberty is the Statute of Liberty. The cover came after Trump's ban on immigration and refugees to the US from seven Muslim countries. Lady Liberty –at whose base is the line 'Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free'- stands for principles of compassion, welcoming, and openness; values said to those of the 'American Way'. The cover was advising viewers that The Donald –confessed pussy grabber (Mathis-Lilley 2016) – was destroying those values. If Lady Liberty no longer represents the 'American Way', she should be replaced with one that does. One way of deciding what sort of a replacement to build is to examine the dispositions and actions of the Trump-o-crats, because it is they who are busy making Trump-world. So consider The Donald and some of his appointees.
The Donald gave voice to the Ur-Trump disposition when, responding to the presence of a protester at one of his rallies, he enthused, 'I'd like to punch him in the face' (Schreckinger 2016). Speaking about ISIS he proclaimed 'I would bomb the shit out of 'em' (Hains 2015). Advising –presumably while bombing the shit out of them- '… you have to take out their families' (LoBianco 2015). On the campaign trail he had a kind word for torture, confiding 'We should go for waterboarding.' Actually, at a campaign rally in NH he said he 'would bring back a hell of a lot worse' (Keating 2017).
He shared this affection for inflicting hurt with his Secretary of Defense, the ex-Marine General –variously called 'Badass' and/or 'Mad Dog'- James Mattis. Mad Dog is claimed by supporters to be a true military hero. Hero? His combat commands included colonial wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; where the US artfully snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. But Badass sure loves his violence, remarking on one occasion, 'It's a hell of a hoot. It's fun to shoot some people' (Revesz 2016). At another time, he instructed his audience, 'Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet;' warning at another event, '…if you fuck with me I'll kill you all' (Conway 2016).
Trump's CIA Director, Mike Pompeo, a former Army tank officer, who, as a member of the House of Representatives, defended enhanced interrogation techniques (torturer-speak for torture) as constitutional. Actually, torture is illegal due to a provision in US law (18 U.S.C. 2340) that took effect in 1994. He denounced President Obama's 2009 decision to close the CIA's 'black sites'. These are locations where the CIA tortured its victims in secrecy. In 2014, speaking about the personnel manning the black sites, Mike said, 'These men and women are not torturers, they are patriots' (Keith 2016). At his confirmation hearings, Pompeo assured the Senators questioning him that he would respect the law bearing upon torture, though –and this is a sly part- he said he was open to changing the law to make the illegal legal, bringing back enhanced interrogation techniques. At the same time, reports spread of the existence of a draft executive order circulating in the White House to reconstitute black sites, so idle torturers could get back in business.
Contemplate who The Donald appointed as Pompeo's Deputy Head (the CIA's second in command). This is Ms. Gina Haspel, notable for her command in the early 2000s of a dark site in Thailand called Cat's Eye (Rosenberg 2017). Here she tortured and videotaped her victims' suffering, in what appears to have been a quirky S&M pornography. Be clear: Torture is a form of human sacrifice. Victims' lives are sacrificed to torturers' gratifications, and -to be blunt- the torturers' humanity is sacrificed to the monstrosity of their acts. In 2005, when it became clear that bringing back human sacrifice was not so nice, dutiful Gina ordered her videotapes destroyed. So nobody would ever know. However, people found out. But in the Trump-world it didn't matter, just part of 'making America great again'. He rewarded her torturing with the Deputy Directorship of the CIA –way to go Gina!
The Trump-o-crats, then, are disposed to bombing 'the shit out of 'em'; punching opponents 'in the face'; planning 'to kill everybody'; and running dark sites to do dark deeds. What a dream team of action heros. The 'American Way' disposed to cruelty. Of course, action speaks louder than disposition.
Towards the end of February, the new president announced his budget proposal. It projected slashing spending on the environment, education, science, health care, and poverty reduction; while increasing military funding by $54 billion, a 9% increase (Shear and Steinhauer 2017). A month later, The Donald cryptically announced 'total authorization' for his military (Shane 2017). The emphasis on totality was ominous – one interpretation making the rounds was, 'they can do whatever they fucking want'.
What the military appear to have wanted was to increase military action globally. On April 13, 2017 they dropped the MOAB (the 'Mother of All Bombs') a 21,000-pound explosive device in Afghanistan's Nangarhar province. The MOAB is the largest non-nuclear weapon ever used in combat by the Americans. In Yemen, the President began '…rapidly expanding military operations' (Democracy Now 2017). He increased logistical and intelligence support for Saudi Arabia's warring against the Houthi, who are said to be supported by the Iranians; thereby using the Saudi's as proxies to get at Washington's enemy in Tehran. Simultaneously, operations against the Yemeni al Qaeda were increased, with 49 airstrikes in March, more strikes than America has ever undertaken in a year in that country (ibid.; 2017).
Meanwhile, Iraq became a scene of increased US support for the Iraqi government's Mosul offensive against ISIL. Assistance involving use of US and French artillery, helicopters firing Hellfire missiles, drones, and fixed-wing aircraft. Additional US combat personnel were sent ranging from combat engineers to Special Ops commandos (Gordon 2017). Concomitantly, there has been augmented assistance to Kurdish fighters advancing against ISIL in Syria (Cole 2017). Support has involved additional US soldiers providing training, artillery assistance, and airstrikes. A considerable escalation of US Syrian operations was indicated in an April 8th report claiming that the Trump administration was leaving the Incirlik airbase in Turkey and moving to five airfields in Syria, largely in Kurdish territory (Debkafile 2017). The April 4 sarin gas attack in Khan Shaykhun, Syria –hotly disputed as to who executed it- killed in the order of 90 people (BBC 2017). Trump's people insisted President Assad of Syria's military did it, with Russian connivance. Assad's people, backed by the Russians, declared it a black flag operation, of which the US was not innocent. Analysis of a White House report a MIT chemical warfare expert that blamed the Syrians and Russians concluded the White House document was an 'obviously false, misleading and amateurish intelligence report' (Postol 2017). Lost in the blame game, is the actually that The Donald's military killed about 11 times more civilians (i.e. approximately 1000 civilian deaths) in March than were lost in the Khan Shaykhun tragedy (Le Miere 2017).
Africa has not been ignored. Seventy days into his administration, Trump issued a directive permitting U.S. Special Ops to work directly with the Somali military in their operations against Al-Shabaab, a Sunni Muslim militant group linked to Al-Qaeda. The directive classified areas in southern Somalia, as 'war zones' allowing US forces the ability to call in airstrikes without higher-level approval, increasing the potential for civilian casualties.
Russia and China are the two chief impediments to US military dominance. Since the end of the Cold War, Washington has attempted to counter these two countries by following what can be termed a Eurasian Strategy. In the western part of the Eurasian continent, it meant moving NATO forces eastward until they border on Russia. In the eastern region of the Eurasian continent, it involved adoption of an Asian Pivot, strongly advocated by Hillary Clinton (2011), involving the redeployment of US diplomatic and military –largely naval- assets to the Asian Pacific. Russia's response to the Eurasian Strategy, among other reactions, has been hybrid war in Ukraine and re-incorporation of the Crimean peninsula into Russia. China's countering of the strategy has been to fortify certain islands in the South China Sea, in order to thwart US naval activity.
The Trump administration has continued this strategy. Even while speaking of reconciliation with Russia, it put 4000 American troops in early 2017 into Eastern Europe in Operation Atlantic Resolve on, or near, the border with Russia (Gigova 2017). This was the '… biggest deployment of US troops in Europe since the end of the Cold War' (MacAskill 2017). The Donald's moves toward China have been intimidating. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson –he of 'don't look me in the eyes' reputation (Link 2017)- has advocated a US naval blockade of the fortified islands in the South China sea. Blockades are acts of war. North Korea has continued development of its nuclear armament program. The US has threatened North Korea with war if it does not disarm. It has sent an aircraft carrier battle group to Korean waters. Should such a conflict begin, it would directly threaten China, which would enter on the side of the north. Additionally, the US has deployed a THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) anti-ballistic system in South Korea. China worries that THAAD will be employed to counter their missile capabilities. Deployment of THAAD has been argued to be '…part of a network of integrated anti-missile systems designed to facilitate nuclear war with China or Russia' (Symonds 2017). China is rumored to have deployed 150,000 troops to its North Korean border (Hong Soon-do 2017). Russia is reported to have sent S400 anti-aircraft missiles from Vladivostok in the direction of the North Korean border. Actions speak louder than dispositions. Trump-o-crats are disposed to harsh pugnacity. Their actions in the first months of The Donald's rule turn out cruel realizations of their dispositions. But hang on –what is occurring as actually the same old same old!
The Same Old Same Old
The phrase 'the-same-old-same-old' is US slang indicating the something is a re-iteration of an earlier iteration of that something. If your every dinner consists of spaghetti, you might say in anticipation of your next repast 'it'll be the same old same old spaghetti'. The Trump-o-crats military activity is pretty much the same old same old.
Recently I published Deadly Contradictions (2016). It argues that following World War II the US was organized as an informal empire, one intended to have global reach. Like all empires it was designed to achieve, and maintain, domination by both non-military and military means. Military means were to be used when the empire faced contradictions that buffeted it, and when other ways of addressing the contradictions proved ineffective. The years since 1950 have revealed that running an empire is hard going. The US has faced serious economic and political contradictions. These have intensified and coalesced since the 1970, and that this has led the US into a prodigious amount of overt and covert, direct and proxy global warring –i.e., warring in different areas of the world where it intends to achieve some form of control.
What are the dimensions of this warring? The US military does not keep accurate accounts of it military operates. So that accounts of their frequency and lethality should be understood as estimates. John Tures, working with a data set generate, by the Federation of American Scientists, reported the US was involved in 263 interstate military operations between 1945 and 2002; roughly 4.6 operations per year, though he notes that since 1991 there have been on the average 16 operations annually (in Reyna 2016). I have conservatively estimated conservatively that that this warfare killed 9,700,000 people, a high percentage of whom were civilians, since World War II. Other estimates put deaths from US warring much higher at 20 to 30 million persons (Lucas 2007). It is further estimated that this warring has led to 73 million people becoming refugees. The numbers of deaths and refugees provoked by warring serve as indicators of the terror they provoke. The figures for US global warring suggest that US to have been the greatest state terrorist agency since World War II. All of which suggests the The Donald is just the same old same old, a re-iteration of his predecessors. They were, and are, brutal killers servicing a rickety empire, built for global control. So what should be Lady Liberty's replacement?
A De-cloaking Device
Readers might at this point take a trip down memory-lane and recall the television series Star Trek. Occasionally, Captain Kirk found himself up against an enemy starship with a cloaking device that made it invisible. So he did not know his opponent. However, he did have de-cloaking technology that rendered the hidden visible. All the discourse about the American Way might be imagined as a cloaking device. It portrays the US as the bringer of freedom, prosperity, tolerance, and lots and lots of other good stuff. However, make no mistake about it, America is actually a serial perpetrator of state-terrorism, right up there with Nazis.
Then along came The Donald -a crude, pussy grabbing, punch them out, bomb the shit out of them, kill their families sort of guy. Along came his myrmidons -Old Maddog who thinks it is 'fun' to shoot people; Pompeo defender of 'enhanced interrogation techniques'; Ms Haspel performing those techniques secretly in 'dark sites'. They are a walking, talking de-cloaking device, revealing what the American Way is all about –terror in support of empire. Der Speigel's cover had it right. Consequently, out with the old, in with the new. With the new a gigantic statue of The Donald holding aloft a severed head; and carved in its base the line 'Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, and we'll bomb the shit out of them'.
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Soon-do, Hong 2017. China Increasing Troops On North Korean Border. Huffington
Symonds, Peter. 2017. Is the US preparing for war against North Korea? WSWS.Org.]]>
In spite of the right's fondness for military service and such pageantry, it's usually the left or the more accurately, the muddy, authoritarian center that suggest this kind of thing. Progressives worry over wars, but they don't worry enough over the civilian casualties in other countries, or the blowback in America. Sometimes they become overly concerned, insteadn about how poor people join the military, and rich, privileged people don't. Sometimes they even pull up an extra deep argument, dust the dirt off of it, and say, gee, maybe the draft can stop wars! Charlie Rangel spent decades in congress trying to bring back conscription for that very reason.
And then the thought leaders–the columnists who have to waste space in the New York Times or various blogs each week–they need to get in on this brainstorming. America is broken. America is fractured and overly politicised, and we could be on the brink of a God damned civil war. This is dangerous. Also dangerous is the fact that young people aged, say, 18-25, just keep on choosing their own paths in life. Sometimes they get married or do important things that contribute to society's togetherness. But sometimes they just eat exotic food and become polyamorists or or Instagrammers. We have to do something.
Why not bring back the draft? What was once the weight on the back of every young man–the fear that he would have to kill or be killed for a broadly-defined goal of patriotism, nationalism, service, whether he wanted to or not–is now gone. Youths are not grinding themselves down under nationalist knapsacks nearly as much as they did before, in the days that were good.
Sometimes a writer, politician, thinker, considers bringing back a draft without any kind of spit shine on it. Just, make those damn kids join the military the ways their pappies did, so they stop playing video games! Plus, after 58,000 of those kids died in Vietnam–along with about two million Vietnamese–we stopped the war! The draft works!
Most advocates for this tepidly-argued collectivism, however, take a different tact. They want it to be "national service" instead of mean old conscription. They are happy to offer options and choices, provided that engaging in this service is a necessary part of graduation from highschool or college. At best they are the movie theaters who said you were free to defy the Hays Code if you had your own theater, and weren't run out of town by moralists, and didn't want to hire any known American actors, etc. At worse, they are mini dictators who, even if they don't realize it, are simply deeply offended by the fact that American young people are making their own choices and living their own lives. They are central planners not of cities, but of human action and motivation.
Bloomberg View's Noah Smith is one person who has no self-awareness about how many stock writers from Thomas Friedman to David Brooks, to this guy who wrote a letter, and who used to be a columnist, have already suggested national service as a cure for the nation's ills, both real and imagined. Yes, as Smith notes, people in South Korea and Israel and other places are made to join the army. There is also what amounts to mandatory reserves training in places like Switzerland. Though all of those coercive policies are bad, certainly it's a little more of a moral quandary to serve in Israel and be a real, fighting soldier, than it is to be made to do basic training in Switzerland, then come home and go back to your normal life (unless and until Germany invades).
In America, the draft was put to rest in 1973. Men are still made to register with the Selective Service, however. Though the changes of the US bringing back a military draft are not high, thanks to the potential outcry, as well as the technical skills needed for most army recruits in 2017, that registration still hangs over the heads of every young male citizen. Your choices are on loan from the military, it says. You can have your life for now, but if we need it, you will know.
Smith and his ilk are terrified of a polarized nation. At its worst point, yes, screaming cable news divides could transform into real wars. But as scared as we all are of fighting with relatives on Facebook, or being trolled by Twitter Nazis, that kind of unpleasantness is far from a real conflict as you can get, until it actually isn't (and it currently is).
Furthermore, Smith happily suggests that his plan would lead to "national unity." He gives a startlingly shallow nod to the libertarian argument against coercive national service by saying, uh, people could get out of it if they wanted to become high school drop-outs. He doesn't actually counter the Milton Friedman quote he mentions, which dubs drafted soldiers "slaves." Smith simply says, well, libertarians might object to this grand scheme, but they are wrong. Best of all, he pays not even a whisper of lip service to the fact that all of human history teaches us that "national unity" can have some deadly side effects.
More paragraphs could be devoted to flipping Smith's logic over, and then prodding its insides. Unfortunately, he doesn't have enough to bother with. He has the fact that the country is, it seems, at odds. Occasionally, being at odds leads to violence and even wars. And also young people don't work that much, and Smith has a chart to prove that. Ergo, national service it is.
This is a bad piece. It's a weak, lazy spasm towards collectivism to solve the nation's problems (real, imagined, and exaggerated). The draft and national service are blessedly unpopular. Rangel retired from congress without his pet project of bringing it back ever coming close to fruition.
And yet, Smith's piece deserves a response if only because it encapsulates a dangerous, monstrously huge idea–that the individual belongs to the state. More particularly, the young individual of a certain age belongs to the state. With all of our concern over being bogged down in wars, or filling our prisons coming into the public sphere, this notion that we have to suffer or struggle in order to grow up remains. Millennials are the worst, right? They're lazy, and they're entitled. And yet, they're rarely the ones demanding that the younger generation be pressed into servitude.
This attitude has killed. It has killed thousands and thousands of people. It is Teddy Roosevelt worrying about a soft nation that had tamed the West. It is the fear that American manhood would atrophy without natives to shoot, so let's go to the Philippines, to Cuba, anywhere where our young men can grow strong on righteous suffering and contrived acts of bravery. We mustn't let them turn feminine and soft.
Political polarization is a concern. At its peak, it can destroy a country. But forcible national unity destroys individuals, and has hacked its way across the world in conquest and conflicts for centuries. Placing youth into the mouth of the nation for sacrifice is swapping the potential problem of polarization for the definite one of unification–and that's a problem much more likely to lead to tyranny and war.]]>
And the claim that Assad is responsible for every one of the dead rests on the notion that he "started the war". In his case, this means that the arrest and torture – and in one case, reported killing – of a group of schoolchildren who had written anti-regime graffiti on a wall in the southern city of Dera'a, was the ignition switch for the mass opposition rallies and subsequent armed uprising which has devastated Syria. In the case of Dera'a, Assad realised the seriousness of the event – he fired the city governor and sent his deputy foreign minister, Faisal Mekdad to see the families. Too late.
In the age of Arab revolutions, routine torture was no longer excusable. And when large crowds of largely peaceful demonstrators were attacked by armed troops and militias, the Syrian war became unstoppable. But unlike the Tunisian and Egyptian regimes whose autocrats respectively fled to Saudi Arabia and an Egyptian hospital, Assad fought on. He declared war on "terrorism", claiming that his armed enemies were paid and weaponised by the West – which was largely true – and that a plot was underway to overthrow him, which was very definitely true. And then Isis arrived.
The notion has since grown up that Isis was also a product of Assad's war and that he was thus also to blame for their mass murders and throat-cuttings in Syria. This, of course, is nonsense. Isis was a creature born of the Bush-Blair invasion of Iraq. Isis was the direct result of our brutal occupation of Iraq. The blood-curdling activities of Isis are the responsibility of those two deeply Christian gentlemen who decided to illegally invade another sovereign state under false pretences and whose criminal adventure led to the deaths of up to half a million Iraqis – weirdly enough, the same death toll now being credited to Assad by his most ferocious enemies.
But the word "responsibility" introduces another perspective. Who was "responsible" for the Syrian war? The Assad family, whose dictatorship stretched back to 1971, can be accused of creating a state whose intrinsic (and undemocratic) flaws would one day engulf the country in mass violence. Individual acts of repression – the Hama slaughter of 1982, for example – could be defined as war crimes, although the regime's enemies were murdering Syrian officials and their families at the time and the Americans (the saintly Reagan) were then more than happy to allow Hafez el-Assad to polish off his Muslim Brotherhood enemies.
History time. The First World War was triggered, quite literally, by the killing of the Archduke Ferdinand at Sarajevo – but no one claims that Gavrilo Princip was either responsible or "to blame" for the killing of over 17 million people. We can blame the Germans, of course, who invaded Belgium and France, although oddly we never paid as much attention to Kaiser Wilhelm as we did to "Prussian militarism". Perhaps because the Kaiser had a withered hand and was a rather pathetic figure, he never acquired the pariah status of later German monsters.
And then we come to the Second World War – which means a dangerous journey into SpicerWorld. Between 60 and 70 million men, women and children were killed in this worst of all the titanic conflicts in history. And yes, we do blame Hitler and say that, yes, he and his Nazi raptors were actually responsible for the 1939-45 Second World War. And this would be correct. This would probably have to exclude the Chinese who were invaded and occupied by the Japanese Empire, for whom the war began in 1937. And of course, the Soviet Union was only invaded by the Nazis in June 1941 after enjoying almost two years of an outrageous alliance with Hitler. And the US only joined the war when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour in December 1941, after America had enjoyed more than two years of profitable neutrality. But Hitler then declared war on America – not the other way round – thus associating himself with Japan's war crimes.
And Hitler does, I believe, prove to be the undeniable exception. He wanted war and he wanted to kill the Jews – long before he was able to satisfy these truly evil aspirations. His Nazi regime was utterly irredeemable. It had not a single moral feature in its existence. He was to blame. He was culpable. He was responsible. And yes, he was a really wicked man. And he did use chemical weapons on the innocent Jews of Europe. I've just finished re-reading DC Watt's extraordinary account of those last twelve months of peace – How War Came: Immediate Origins of the Second World War, 1938-39 – and I come away exhausted at the sheer villainy of Hitler and his henchmen, not to mention the shame of those democrats who tried to believe in him.
But then we come to individual events. German invasions, the Blitz on Warsaw, Rotterdam, London, Belgrade, Warsaw again… All war crimes. And then we come to the RAF and the USAF which destroyed Dresden, whose mass civilian casualties – along with even greater numbers in the fire-storming of Hamburg – must be laid at the individual hands of Marshal Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris. He knew that if you burn a medieval city, you kill civilians in their tens of thousands. And he went ahead and burned them. During the 1940 Blitz, he said of the Germans – slightly misquoting the Book of Hosea – that "they sowed the wind, and now, they are going to reap the whirlwind". And Harris' whirlwind tore through the Germans cities in a tempest of fire. So does a war crime expunge another war crime? Do Hiroshima and Nagasaki shrug off the criminal cloud because of the vicious imperial regime and its murderers which Japan imposed so cruelly upon its own occupied lands?
So now let's come back, carefully, frighteningly, to the Middle East. When Saddam Hussein, used gas "on his own people" at Halabja, he was, as we all know (but like to forget), killing Kurds who had aligned themselves with the Iranian enemy – with whom Saddam's Iraq was in mortal combat. This cannot justify such wickedness. Trial recordings in Baghdad after Saddam's hanging proved that he knew the physical effects of gas. Saddam wanted the people of Halabja to suffer before death.
The fact that he did not personally drop the gas on the Kurdish town does not absolve him – any more than we were prepared to absolve the war crimes in Kosovo for which Slobodan Milosevic was indicted at The Hague. Because we believe not just in blame but in responsibility. Yet Harris, long dead, would say that while he took responsibility for Dresden, he was not to blame – it was Hitler, who "sowed the wind", who was culpable. And thus we burrow down into the dark world of war crimes trials.
We are told now that Bashar al-Assad should be made amenable for war crimes. And national leaders should indeed be liable before international law. That includes not just regional Arab dictators – I can think of some Saudi princes who might stand in the dock for war crimes in Yemen, though I promise you they are safe from any such outcome – but leaders of much larger, much richer Western countries. And so we come back, naturally enough, to Messrs Bush and Blair. They never used gas. In fact, Blair's constant refrain – that "we" weren't as bad as Saddam – would become his mantra whenever he was accused of committing the crime of aggression. Saddam was to blame. He was responsible.
And now anyone can use that line. Bashar is not as bad as Isis, you may say – although his enemies are getting close to claiming that he is. But no Baathist suicide killers are trying to massacre civilians in Paris, Brussels, London, St Petersburg or in the US. And here we must recall when Amnesty produce details of hanging in Assad's prisons, that only a few years ago Bush and Blair themselves were dispatching civilians to be tortured in these very same prisons (along with their satellite jails in Egypt, Morocco and Libya) during their notorious policy of "rendition" – for Britain, it will be recalled, sent one of Gaddafi's principal opponents off to Tripoli for a dose of prolonged torture and imprisonment. And didn't we all love Saddam when he invaded Iran in 1980, even though we knew he hanged his enemies on mass gallows at the time at the Abu Ghraib prison, an institution to which we later turned our own torturing hands?
Yes, it's a pretty fraught question, this business of blame and culpability and guilt and responsibility. And war crimes. Putin's not in the clear either. Ukraine. Sevastapol. The bombing of Aleppo. But what we need is evidence. Not anonymous officials and unnamed intelligence sources and all the other comedians on the journalistic stage. Nor the dead whose numbers wobble by a difference of 100,000 bodies. Let's remember that the 30,000 dead of the Nazi bombing of Rotterdam turned out at Nuremberg to be nearer to 900 (still terrible, but not quite the same figure).
So why not keep our fingers off the missile triggers for a while, restrain the Hollywood adventures of the "special forces" and those who love the "mother of all bombs"? Why don't we find the lawyers and the judges and the legal clerks and the international police investigators and the judicial institutions which we were gathering long before the Second World War ended? Why not go after evidence?
Who are the killers? Who gave them the orders? And this means not just who gave the orders to the killers of Syria. It also means – do not mention here the kings and prince of the Gulf – that we must discover who is really behind Isis? And that, I suspect, is the question of this decade.]]>
A case in point is the Canadian Environment Minister's second "do over" order issued to Ontario Power Generation regarding the company's waste dump idea. The 15-page order, issued April 5, rejected the company's sophomoric answers to a previous "not good enough" finding by Canada's Minister of Environment and Climate Change, Catherine McKenna.
OPG wants to bury 7 million cubic feet of radioactive waste in a deep hole less than a mile from Lake Huron, on its own property on the Bruce Peninsula, northwest of Toronto. It's there that OPG runs the world's biggest rad' waste production complex — the Bruce Nuclear Station — eight old power reactors in varying states of repair and disrepair.
The company proposes digging 2,231 feet down into part of its 2,300-acre compound on Lake Huron, and burying all sorts of radioactive material (everything except waste fuel rods), including a "significant amount" of carbon-14, a cancer agent with a deadly radioactive "life" of 57,300 years — i.e. ten 5,730-year radioactive half-lives. After two years of public hearings into the question of placing long-lasting poisons next to a major source of drinking water, a federal Joint Review Panel in 2015 recommended approval of the project to Minister McKenna.
McKenna was to make a decision by March 1, 2016, but instead demanded better work from OPG. On Feb. 18, 2016, the Minister ordered the company to produce details about alternate dump sites. OPG submitted shockingly shabby generalizations Dec. 28, 2016, and McKenna's April 5 reply is an understated denunciation of OPG's obfuscations and evasions. Beverly Fernandez, founder of Stop the Great Lakes Nuclear Dump, told Clinton, Michigan's The Voice, "OPG has been given a failing grade on its most recent report regarding burying its radioactive nuclear waste less than a mile from the Great Lakes. OPG has now been issued a strong set of new challenges to answer."
For example, the company has the nerve to that, "All underground facilities (office, tunnel, emplacement room) will be constructed in accordance with the seismic requirements of the latest edition of the National Building Code at the time of the construction." In fact, as the Minister's rejection of OPG's attempted snow-job pointed out, "There are no specific seismic requirements in the National Building Code for underground facilities…. Provide a revised version…"
A public servant doing her job
In requiring a study of alternate potential sites for deep disposal, Minister McKenna ordered OPG to make "specific reference to actual locations." Instead, OPG tried to get away with citing two enormous geological regions that it said might be suitable. As Jennifer Wells and Matthew Cole reported in the Toronto Star, OPG's "actual locations" covered an area of 726,052-square-kilometres — about 75% of the Province of Ontario. This blatant attempt at scamming the government didn't fool McKenna, a public servant who is actually doing her job.
In one of OPG's more garish displays of environmental racism, the company's Dec. 2016 report failed to analyze or even acknowledge the land use Treaty Rights of Indigenous or First Nation peoples. Minister McKenna's April 5 rebuke rightly demands that OPG provide "a description of the land and resource uses for the alternative locations that highlight the unique characteristics of these locations from the perspective of Indigenous peoples.
McKenna's lengthy critique amounts to "strike two" against OPG, and the Minister's refutation was praised by community leaders and watchdogs around the Great Lakes. So far, 187 cities, townships, counties, states and provinces in the Great Lakes Basin have passed resolutions opposing the dump. Columnist Jim Bloch in The Voice asked, "How many swings will the Canadian government give Ontario Power Generation before the firm strikes out in its request to build a nuclear waste dump on the shores of Lake Huron?" The answer may be "no more."
As befits questions of persistent cancer agents and how to package and keep them out of drinking water for thousands of years, McKenna's April 5 rebuke lists 23 complex and technically dumbfounding dilemmas that could doom the Lake Huron dump plan. Professor Erika Simpson at the University of Western Ontario reviewed McKenna's critique and wrote April 7, "It will take OPG perhaps a decade to come up with all the information that is now required … given all the overwhelming problems identified."
Beverly Fernandez summed up the opposition as well as anyone. "Given the overwhelming opposition to this plan and the potential for massive consequences to the Great Lakes, no responsible government would approve a plan that endangers the drinking water of 40 million people, and a $6 trillion Great Lakes economy."]]>
Aligned with Clinton, the elites of the Democratic Party needed to change the subject. Clear assessments of the national ticket's failures were hazardous to the status quo within the party. So were the groundswells of opposition to unfair economic privilege. So were the grassroots pressures for the party to become a genuine force for challenging big banks, Wall Street and overall corporate power.
In short, the Democratic Party's anti-Bernie establishment needed to reframe the discourse in a hurry. And — in tandem with mass media — it did.
The reframing could be summed up in two words: Blame Russia.
By early winter, the public discourse was going sideways — much to the benefit of party elites. The meme of blaming Russia and Vladimir Putin for the election of Donald Trump effectively functioned to let the Wall Street-friendly leadership of the national Democratic Party off the hook. Meanwhile, serious attempts to focus on the ways that wounds to democracy in the United States have been self-inflicted — whether via the campaign finance system or the purging of minorities from voter rolls or any number of other systemic injustices — were largely set aside.
Fading from scrutiny was the establishment that continued to dominate the Democratic Party's superstructure. At the same time, its devotion to economic elites was undiminished. As Bernie told a reporter on the last day of February: "Certainly there are some people in the Democratic Party who want to maintain the status quo. They would rather go down with the Titanic so long as they have first-class seats."
Amid great luxury and looming catastrophe, the party's current hierarchy has invested enormous political capital in depicting Vladimir Putin as an unmitigated arch villain. Relevant history was irrelevant, to be ignored or denied.
With dutiful conformity from most Democrats in Congress, the party elites doubled, tripled and quadrupled down on the emphatic claim that Moscow is the capital of, by any other name, an evil empire. Rather than just calling for what's needed — a truly independent investigation into allegations that the Russian government interfered with the U.S. election — the party line became hyperbolic and unmoored from the available evidence.
Given their vehement political investment in demonizing Russia's President Putin, Democratic leaders are oriented to seeing the potential of detente with Russia as counterproductive in terms of their electoral strategy for 2018 and 2020. It's a calculus that boosts the risks of nuclear annihilation, given the very real dangers of escalating tensions between Washington and Moscow.
Along the way, top party officials seem bent on returning to a kind of pre-Bernie-campaign doldrums. The new chair of the Democratic National Committee, Tom Perez, can't bring himself to say that the power of Wall Street is antithetical to the interests of working people. That reality came to painful light this week during a live appearance on national television.
During a 10-minute joint interview along with Bernie Sanders on Tuesday night, Perez was a font of exactly the kind of trite empty slogans and worn-out platitudes that oiled the engines of the dismal Clinton campaign.
While Sanders was forthright, Perez was evasive. While Sanders talked about systemic injustice, Perez fixated on Trump. While Sanders pointed to a way forward for realistic and far-reaching progressive change, Perez hung onto a rhetorical formula that expressed support for victims of the economic order without acknowledging the existence of victimizers.
In an incisive article published by The Nation magazine, Robert Borosage wrote last week: "For all the urgent pleas for unity in the face of Trump, the party establishment has always made it clear that they mean unity under their banner. That's why they mobilized to keep the leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Representative Keith Ellison, from becoming head of the DNC. It's why the knives are still out for Sanders and those who supported him."
While Bernie is hardly a reliable opponent of U.S. war policies, he is significantly more critical of military intervention than the Democratic Party leaders who often champion it. Borosage noted that the party establishment is locked into militaristic orthodoxies that favor continuing to inflict the kind of disasters that the United States has brought to Iraq, Libya and other countries: "Democrats are in the midst of a major struggle to decide what they stand for and who they represent. Part of that is the debate over a bipartisan interventionist foreign policy that has so abjectly failed."
For the Democratic Party's most hawkish wing — dominant from the top down and allied with Clinton's de facto neocon approach to foreign policy — the U.S. government's April 6 cruise missile attack on a Syrian airfield was an indication of real leverage for more war. That attack on a close ally of Russia showed that incessant Russia-baiting of Trump can get gratifying military results for the Democratic elites who are undaunted in their advocacy of regime change in Syria and elsewhere.
The politically motivated missile attack on Syria showed just how dangerous it is to keep Russia-baiting Trump, giving him political incentive to prove how tough he is on Russia after all. What's at stake includes the imperative of preventing a military clash between the world's two nuclear superpowers. But the corporate hawks at the top of the national Democratic Party have other priorities.